What do we think of the convenient pairings in Shakespearean comedy. Shakespeare always loves to get more marriages into the end of a comedy than we expect: from The Comedy of Errors, when we find out who the Abbess is, to The Winter's Tale, when Leontes becomes again, at last, the impressario who can join the widowed Paulina to Camillo, Shakespeare aims almost always (and arguably there's no "almost" about it) at giving us more marriages than we're counting on, giving us an extra surprise.
And this isn't true only of his comedies. Such a dynamic may be found, perhaps surprisingly, true of the tragedies as well. There it tends to appear as friendship more than as the romantic love marriage ratifies. But think of the strange friendships that arise at the end of the tragedies, friendships in spite of all: Richard II and Bolingbroke, Hal and Hotspur, Edmund and Edgar, Hamlet and Laertes, Macbeth and Macduff. Macbeth and Macduff, yes, because once you recognize this dynamic you can see how it works in the subtlest and most unexpected contexts.
The tragic friendships and comic loves overlap as well, and it's worth noticing not only Dolabella and Cleopatra, but also Edmund, Regan and Goneril, "married in an instant," Gertrude and Claudius ("Oh--my good lord! What I have seen tonight!") since these unexpected moments of marital tenderness can make us see that Othello's and Desdemona's last scene also combines spousal conversation ("Husband and wife things" as Charlene [Ashley Judd] says in Heat) with the tragic violence that destroys them both. Othello almost misses it, almost blinds himself to it, but it's there in Desdemona's farewell and in Othello's inability to assimilate it to Iago's version of things. A stretch, I know, but that's the point of coming to see these subtle regularities and the subtle variations on a theme that Shakespeare plays throughout his career.
In Much Ado About Nothing Hero gets to marry the dreadful Claudio, after he apologizes: how happy are we about that? In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Helena gets to marry someone who only loves her because his vision is medicated; in Twelfth Night Olivia falls in love with Cesario (Viola), as do we all, but unknowingly marries her double, Sebastian; in As You Like It Phoebe marries Sylvius only because she's promised Ganymede (Rosalind) that she would if "he" were ever to marry a man.
In all these plays there is (for the audience) what in the brilliant vocabulary of the fan fiction universe is called the One True Pair (the OTP); sometimes also what's called the OTT, the One True Threesome. I think that in Shakespeare the odd numbers are what matters. Odd numbers because what's central to us in a romance will often be a single character (Viola, Rosalind, Helena, Hero, Beatrice, Portia, Jessica: in comedies they tend to be female, but one could add Petruchio, I suppose) whom we want to see happy; but sometimes that happiness will take the form of the happiness of those who had been their rivals or misunderstanders, so that the happy threesome, the OTTs in Much Ado are Beatrice, Benedick, and Hero; in Midsummer Night's Dream Hermia, Lysander, and Helena; in Twelfth Night Viola, Orsino, and Olivia: "A sister! You are she!" exclaims Olivia when she finds out that they are to be sisters-in-law happily ever after. (Sir Toby Belch, Maria, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek constitute another true threesome in the play.)
"You blessed winners all," Paulina calls her charges (before the surprise last marriage Leontes commands). So being part of the OTT, or the OT(2n+1), where n is a nonnegative integer) is in a sense what makes it okay for the Olivias, Paulinas, Heros, Helenas, and Phoebes of the plays.
But how is that? Well it's as though they too are part of the general good feeling that they see work out. They belong in part to the events, in part to the set of spectators to which we, the audience, also belong. The general good feeling at the end of a comedy is that we're all liking each other. We're happy that our neighbor in the next seat is happy. We don't need a laugh track: we're all laughing.
So something like a shared sociability is the achievement of comedy, and Shakespeare makes use of that to increase just that good feeling. Phoebe is happy, Olivia is, Nerissa is, and their happiness, like ours, generously assumes that those around them are generously assuming their happiness. Everyone becomes likable. Why not take up with this likable person who likes you too. It's fine. It's okay. It's good. It's the best kind of party.
Friday, June 29, 2012
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Hamlet's messes
I've been watching the Richard Burton DVD of Hamlet (directed by John Gielgud), and so thinking hard about the play again. Of course it's always a fool's errand to try to say something about Hamlet, and about the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, forsooth, la! But maybe also an exercise worth attempting.
Although Burton apparently didn't do the role the same way twice, you can see him doing something that I think it's very hard to do in performance, but that he does extraordinarily well - the same thing that Scott Shephard does in Gatz. It's a mildly metatheatrical thing: you see the actor (or the person you take to be the actor) growing before your eyes. This is a kind of anti-matter version of method acting. Hamlet isn't Hamlet (nor Gatz Gatz) at the start of the play. He's playing a role - no, he is a role, and all the sawing in the air that he does, the fake thoughtfulness, the willful passion: they're fine (as are the gestures of the actresses the narrator mistakes for La Berma when he first goes to see Phédre in Proust), and fine is dandy.
But then as the time in the theater expands, as the Shakespearean intensity of the thing builds up, our sense of the actor changes. The actor is there to act after all. But Shakespeare loves what I once called "the lost point as exile," the extended sense that now nothing will be happening, that the actors are exiled from a plot that would be going somewhere. Resignation is often an inflexion point in a story, at what screen writers sometimes call the lost point.
The orchestration of plot often takes the form of the difference between a decision weight (to use Kahneman and Tversky's terminology) and a probability. We narrate our prospects, to ourselves if to no one else, via decision weights. But we daily experience how they bump up against the "impenetrable arch of probability" (as Raymond Poincaré, cousin of Henri and Prime Minister of France during the Great War, put it when asked why he wasn't afraid he'd be killed by German bombing). Narratives bring us to this point, which is the intrusion of reality into the story. Characters and audiences have to give up our fond hopes, recalculate our decision weights, see the impossibility of what we were pulling for.
And then an efficient narrative will come to the rescue. It stymies us and then it helps us - helps us through its own unlooked for resourcefulness. (Unlooked for, or perhaps looked for but apparently not to be granted.) The end of Three Penny Opera, with Macheath's rescue from the gallows and ennoblement is a gratifying parody of this. The gratification outweighs the parody just as much as decision weights fulfilled outweigh what Truth says when she breaks in with all her realistic unlikelihoods.
But in Shakespeare, resignation lasts a long time. It's the time of resignation which is part of the time in the theater, the sense that we get of now living with these characters, rather than watching them do what they're supposed to do. We live with them in a different mode, though, from what we thought they'd be, from what they thought they'd be. Their lives are suspended, and we now belong to this interstitial time, this "interim" as Hamlet calls it, and which is to be found, variously, in Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice and, perhaps pre-eminently, in The Winter's Tale. Hamlet may be the play that thematizes this time in which time is suspended most overtly. It's a sort of play within a play, in which Hamlet himself comes to terms with the suspension that he is himself responsible for.
This occurs only when he returns from the aborted trip to England, having relinquished any thought of taking revenge on his father. True resignation in Shakespeare, true exile, comes when motives lose all power, that is to say when the ghosts disappear. The laying of ghosts is the most important purgation: Banquo ceases to haunt; Hamlet senior ceases to haunt.
Before that is the Shakespearean mess. It's this mess that his great characters tend to find so intolerable. The mess is the entanglement you can't get out of. It is, in our lives, the mess we've made of our lives: pointless, stupid, avoidable, and yet inevitable. "Just look at the filth you've made, / See what you've done" (John Ashbery, "The Task").
That's just what Burton captures so well. He's all set to play Hamlet! We see him in the court, sneering at the King, superior to his mother, all dressed in black and nobler than the image he works so hard to portray. A method actor would go deep into this opening melancholy, just as he has.
And then, to quote Dashiell Hammett, things happen. It's all a mess. He doesn't know whether the ghost is telling the truth. He doesn't know what to make of Ophelia or his love for her. Horatio is a brick, but then there's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He wants to confuse everyone around him, but he can do that only by being confused himself, by using his confusion as a vortex to draw others in. Why else stage a play where no one knows what's going on, who's feeling how, what emotions belong to whom, and with an added speech? It's all just a royal mess. The players come, and they seem to have some clarity, but it's false clarity - just as he's claimed from the start, actions that a man might play, but not what reality is really like. He runs into Ophelia, reading just as he's been reading for Polonius's benefit. Other people, it turns out, are just as hard to interpret and evaluate as he makes himself to them. Only his three friends, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Horatio are transparent (for good or ill). And they're no help. Now he's going to stage this play, this dream of fiction, as though that could tell him the truth that the truth cannot.
So of course he starts thinking not about seeming any more but about being. The clarity of the question "To be or not to be?" is its point. What is the whole speech's attitude towards life except that it's a mess? Fardels, contumely, wrongs: where and why are they here, and why should we bear them? Being or not being are the only two clear states. And yet even they get confused: being is a mess, but dying may be just as messy, a dream of passion like the player's dream of Hecuba.
Hamlet gets clarity about the need for clarity. Burton recognizes what a mess he's in, and how pointless the mess is. That recognition isn't an achievement, the way it would be in method acting. It's a loss: the loss of motive, the loss of goal, the loss of any ontological orientation. There's nothing to be done about it. That's what the actor comes to feel, what you see Burton coming to feel. All this interaction to get through, and all of it pointless.
Until he returns from his sea change. It's at that point that he no longer wants anything. We can feel it, maybe, as the actor no longer wanting anything either. A fantastic effort has failed, but that's okay too. There is a clarity here. The role's impossible to play and that's the point.
Of course the actor plays it again every night, and that's where I think the fact that Burton played it differently every night is so significant, and (I am wagering) so captured by this specific performance (or mosaic of three performances, rather). Each night he tries to play Hamlet again. Each night the mess becomes intolerable. Each night Burton just lets the play go, lets it go where it takes him. Each night we see the education of an actor, into that place of exile on the empty stage, where everyone finally converges to acknowledge their one final achievement of straightforward truth: that this is what it's led to.
Although Burton apparently didn't do the role the same way twice, you can see him doing something that I think it's very hard to do in performance, but that he does extraordinarily well - the same thing that Scott Shephard does in Gatz. It's a mildly metatheatrical thing: you see the actor (or the person you take to be the actor) growing before your eyes. This is a kind of anti-matter version of method acting. Hamlet isn't Hamlet (nor Gatz Gatz) at the start of the play. He's playing a role - no, he is a role, and all the sawing in the air that he does, the fake thoughtfulness, the willful passion: they're fine (as are the gestures of the actresses the narrator mistakes for La Berma when he first goes to see Phédre in Proust), and fine is dandy.
But then as the time in the theater expands, as the Shakespearean intensity of the thing builds up, our sense of the actor changes. The actor is there to act after all. But Shakespeare loves what I once called "the lost point as exile," the extended sense that now nothing will be happening, that the actors are exiled from a plot that would be going somewhere. Resignation is often an inflexion point in a story, at what screen writers sometimes call the lost point.
The orchestration of plot often takes the form of the difference between a decision weight (to use Kahneman and Tversky's terminology) and a probability. We narrate our prospects, to ourselves if to no one else, via decision weights. But we daily experience how they bump up against the "impenetrable arch of probability" (as Raymond Poincaré, cousin of Henri and Prime Minister of France during the Great War, put it when asked why he wasn't afraid he'd be killed by German bombing). Narratives bring us to this point, which is the intrusion of reality into the story. Characters and audiences have to give up our fond hopes, recalculate our decision weights, see the impossibility of what we were pulling for.
And then an efficient narrative will come to the rescue. It stymies us and then it helps us - helps us through its own unlooked for resourcefulness. (Unlooked for, or perhaps looked for but apparently not to be granted.) The end of Three Penny Opera, with Macheath's rescue from the gallows and ennoblement is a gratifying parody of this. The gratification outweighs the parody just as much as decision weights fulfilled outweigh what Truth says when she breaks in with all her realistic unlikelihoods.
But in Shakespeare, resignation lasts a long time. It's the time of resignation which is part of the time in the theater, the sense that we get of now living with these characters, rather than watching them do what they're supposed to do. We live with them in a different mode, though, from what we thought they'd be, from what they thought they'd be. Their lives are suspended, and we now belong to this interstitial time, this "interim" as Hamlet calls it, and which is to be found, variously, in Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice and, perhaps pre-eminently, in The Winter's Tale. Hamlet may be the play that thematizes this time in which time is suspended most overtly. It's a sort of play within a play, in which Hamlet himself comes to terms with the suspension that he is himself responsible for.
This occurs only when he returns from the aborted trip to England, having relinquished any thought of taking revenge on his father. True resignation in Shakespeare, true exile, comes when motives lose all power, that is to say when the ghosts disappear. The laying of ghosts is the most important purgation: Banquo ceases to haunt; Hamlet senior ceases to haunt.
Before that is the Shakespearean mess. It's this mess that his great characters tend to find so intolerable. The mess is the entanglement you can't get out of. It is, in our lives, the mess we've made of our lives: pointless, stupid, avoidable, and yet inevitable. "Just look at the filth you've made, / See what you've done" (John Ashbery, "The Task").
That's just what Burton captures so well. He's all set to play Hamlet! We see him in the court, sneering at the King, superior to his mother, all dressed in black and nobler than the image he works so hard to portray. A method actor would go deep into this opening melancholy, just as he has.
And then, to quote Dashiell Hammett, things happen. It's all a mess. He doesn't know whether the ghost is telling the truth. He doesn't know what to make of Ophelia or his love for her. Horatio is a brick, but then there's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He wants to confuse everyone around him, but he can do that only by being confused himself, by using his confusion as a vortex to draw others in. Why else stage a play where no one knows what's going on, who's feeling how, what emotions belong to whom, and with an added speech? It's all just a royal mess. The players come, and they seem to have some clarity, but it's false clarity - just as he's claimed from the start, actions that a man might play, but not what reality is really like. He runs into Ophelia, reading just as he's been reading for Polonius's benefit. Other people, it turns out, are just as hard to interpret and evaluate as he makes himself to them. Only his three friends, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Horatio are transparent (for good or ill). And they're no help. Now he's going to stage this play, this dream of fiction, as though that could tell him the truth that the truth cannot.
So of course he starts thinking not about seeming any more but about being. The clarity of the question "To be or not to be?" is its point. What is the whole speech's attitude towards life except that it's a mess? Fardels, contumely, wrongs: where and why are they here, and why should we bear them? Being or not being are the only two clear states. And yet even they get confused: being is a mess, but dying may be just as messy, a dream of passion like the player's dream of Hecuba.
Hamlet gets clarity about the need for clarity. Burton recognizes what a mess he's in, and how pointless the mess is. That recognition isn't an achievement, the way it would be in method acting. It's a loss: the loss of motive, the loss of goal, the loss of any ontological orientation. There's nothing to be done about it. That's what the actor comes to feel, what you see Burton coming to feel. All this interaction to get through, and all of it pointless.
Until he returns from his sea change. It's at that point that he no longer wants anything. We can feel it, maybe, as the actor no longer wanting anything either. A fantastic effort has failed, but that's okay too. There is a clarity here. The role's impossible to play and that's the point.
Of course the actor plays it again every night, and that's where I think the fact that Burton played it differently every night is so significant, and (I am wagering) so captured by this specific performance (or mosaic of three performances, rather). Each night he tries to play Hamlet again. Each night the mess becomes intolerable. Each night Burton just lets the play go, lets it go where it takes him. Each night we see the education of an actor, into that place of exile on the empty stage, where everyone finally converges to acknowledge their one final achievement of straightforward truth: that this is what it's led to.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
THE SURROUND OF THE LIVING
I've just been reading a bunch of Cavell, and I had been thinking about Lem's great novel Solaris ("better than any movie!") and it occurred to me how much the book is an allegory of Cavell's thinking about Cartesian skepticism.
That is, it's obvious that Solaris belongs, more strictly than Dick, to the category of philosophy done as science fiction. What if we could reify characters who existed only on our mind? (Not surprisingly the character so reified is named Rhea, a pun I think on reification as well as an allusion to Heraclitus's "panta rei" (πάντα ῥεῖ) - everything flows: Solaris is an ocean planet.) Or put differently, what if we literalized psychoanalytic fantasy, so that memories came alive, transferential relationships become material and actual? It seems obvious that the book is about such psychoanalytic reifications: hence the glimpses into the circus of the repressed fantasy lives of Kelvin's colleagues.
But if we moved from the psychoanalytic to the philosophical we'd be up against the telescoped skepticism that Descartes considers: the outside world may simply be my projection or dream; other people may be my projection or dream. Then I realized that this would make the planet Solaris itself play the role of the genius in Descartes (he calls it evil, but we could see it, as Lem does, as completely inscrutable), the entity that makes us believe in the false or non-existent outside world that we perceive.
Lem's depiction of the planet brings out the psychoanalytical dimension of this philosophical meditation: like the analyst's the planet's inscrutability is at the heart of the transferential relation. And Rhea's state of being is transitional, again in a completely psychoanalytical way. She is at once a part of the inscrutable mind of the planet, with superhuman powers and strengths, and a lonely, confused, unhappy human who has no connection with the sources of her being. Her bewilderment and vulnerability is essential to the love story, to the story of recovered love. Transference onto the planet being impossible (that might be how to describe the twin goals of analytic neutrality: to elicit transference in its most direct form and to make transference impossible), it finds its target in Rhea instead. Of course what's transferred onto Rhea is not, quite, the love of another being, prior to Rhea. It's love of Rhea herself. (That's why it happens twice.) The short circuits of analytic transference are canceled out when it comes to the planet, and intensified when it comes to Rhea.
Cavell too sees Cartesian skepticism from a psychoanalytic perspective: why do we want to disbelieve in the outside world? Because we want to disbelieve in other minds. Why? Because they threaten us, threaten our own sense of psychic integration and self-protection. How do we know this from Descartes? Because this threatening personage is an evil genius. What must we do? Acknowledge Rhea.
This would make Solaris more or less like Merrill's Book of Ephraim. One telling moment is Ephraim's own moment of confusion and clarification, confusion-as-clarification from 1962:
That is, it's obvious that Solaris belongs, more strictly than Dick, to the category of philosophy done as science fiction. What if we could reify characters who existed only on our mind? (Not surprisingly the character so reified is named Rhea, a pun I think on reification as well as an allusion to Heraclitus's "panta rei" (πάντα ῥεῖ) - everything flows: Solaris is an ocean planet.) Or put differently, what if we literalized psychoanalytic fantasy, so that memories came alive, transferential relationships become material and actual? It seems obvious that the book is about such psychoanalytic reifications: hence the glimpses into the circus of the repressed fantasy lives of Kelvin's colleagues.
But if we moved from the psychoanalytic to the philosophical we'd be up against the telescoped skepticism that Descartes considers: the outside world may simply be my projection or dream; other people may be my projection or dream. Then I realized that this would make the planet Solaris itself play the role of the genius in Descartes (he calls it evil, but we could see it, as Lem does, as completely inscrutable), the entity that makes us believe in the false or non-existent outside world that we perceive.
Lem's depiction of the planet brings out the psychoanalytical dimension of this philosophical meditation: like the analyst's the planet's inscrutability is at the heart of the transferential relation. And Rhea's state of being is transitional, again in a completely psychoanalytical way. She is at once a part of the inscrutable mind of the planet, with superhuman powers and strengths, and a lonely, confused, unhappy human who has no connection with the sources of her being. Her bewilderment and vulnerability is essential to the love story, to the story of recovered love. Transference onto the planet being impossible (that might be how to describe the twin goals of analytic neutrality: to elicit transference in its most direct form and to make transference impossible), it finds its target in Rhea instead. Of course what's transferred onto Rhea is not, quite, the love of another being, prior to Rhea. It's love of Rhea herself. (That's why it happens twice.) The short circuits of analytic transference are canceled out when it comes to the planet, and intensified when it comes to Rhea.
Cavell too sees Cartesian skepticism from a psychoanalytic perspective: why do we want to disbelieve in the outside world? Because we want to disbelieve in other minds. Why? Because they threaten us, threaten our own sense of psychic integration and self-protection. How do we know this from Descartes? Because this threatening personage is an evil genius. What must we do? Acknowledge Rhea.
This would make Solaris more or less like Merrill's Book of Ephraim. One telling moment is Ephraim's own moment of confusion and clarification, confusion-as-clarification from 1962:
AM I IN YR ROOM SO ARE ALL YR DEAD WHO HAVE NOT GONE INTO OTHER BODIES IT IS EASY TO CALL THEM BRING THEM AS FIRES WITHIN SIGHT OF EACH OTHER ON HILLS U & YR GUESTS THESE TIMES WE SPEAK ARE WITHIN SIGHT OF & ALL CONNECTED TO EACH OTHER DEAD OR ALIVE NOW DO U UNDERSTAND WHAT HEAVEN IS IT IS THE SURROUND OF THE LIVING
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)