Life and art in The Winter’s Tale

Last night I was lucky enough to hear Professor Richard Strier, head of the School of English and Divinity at the University of Chicago, give a public lecture on The Winter's Tale. He started off by telling us that literary value was something real and demonstrable, which was tremendously refreshing after years of being told by critics that it wasn't. He went on, in his wry and erudite manner, to make a case for the great literary value of this unusual play at the tale end (sorry) of Shakespeare's career, based on its substantiation of the thought that life (contra Renaissance in general) is better than art.

A strange mix of tragedy, comedy and romance, the play has a view of nature as benign and of natural, biological life as something to be celebrated. Against this is the warping proclivity of the human mind which unravels when it breaks its tether to real things in nature. To wit King Leontes, maddened by jealousy, convinced of an imaginary affair between his wife Hermione and his friend, recoils from nature, particularly its components of play and sexuality, and assigns pathology to its rhythms and workings, rather than to his own deluded state of mind. His “diseased opinion” threatens to destroy everything around him, including wife, friend, son and baby daughter. They are saved by the resistance of one Camillo, a usually faithful retainer, and by the redemption in the second half of the play, mostly by his now grown daughter Perdita, of the things he has maligned: nature, sex, play, affection, fancy.

The extraordinary and ambiguous scene at the play's close, where a statue of Hermione (looking mysteriously older) comes to life, brings to its climax the rivalry between art and life that runs through all the earlier scenes. Her living person is worthy of the love and worship her statue, as art or as icon, was patently not, and her resurrection confirms the irrepressible and beautiful fact of biological life. After sixteen years of living with the loss he inflicted upon himself, Leontes has wife and daughter restored along with his mental health, which, in this play, constitutes a correlation between what's in his mind and what's outside it. We are left with the question of whether Shakespeare intended to exalt life above art, or whether, by doing so artfully, he really intended the opposite. Professor Strier thought (in contradistinction to many other critics) that Shakespeare in fact wanted to affirm life above art, and art was simply his medium for doing so. To privilege art, he concluded, was idolatrous, and in general artists are much less idolatrous than critics.

Intimations of mortality

I confess to returning Brenda Walker’s Reading by Moonlight to the library unfinished. It’s an intimate, meandering meditation on how books helped her survive breast cancer and its treatment, at points very lyrical. Adrift in dark waters, her lights are works of imaginative literature and what others have written about death, love, family, and loss. I read the first few chapters and found myself a tearful mess. I resolved not to finish it, but still there followed one of the most piteous and unshakeable moods of gloom I’ve had this many a day; a realisation that though nothing’s wrong yet, by getting married I’ve knowingly signed up for eventual wrenching loss; combined with a generalised regret at the lot of humans who must all bid a bittersweet goodbye - for me never far from the surface.  Dawkins or Hitchens or somebody like that wonders why Christians don’t look eagerly for death. At one level he’s right, and we do, but at another, we could hardly be human if we didn’t feel the pathos of this ultimate severance. John Ames, the hero of Gilead, is sure of his salvation, but nonetheless filled with sadness at the ending of his long loved life.  In Gethsemane, Jesus is ‘overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,’ a state which must have comprehended more than the simple fear of pain or loss of friends. I believe in the resurrection – the remedy for mortality – but that belief has never made my heart hard to the thought of going. Like Walker, I find that literature helps. My gloom was dissipated by a good sleep, a kind spouse, and a dose of poetry. This is that skylark Hopkins (a better guide than Hitchens or Dawkins) and his poem “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection.”

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indignation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief's gasping, joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

Paradise Lost?

Growing up in a house with lots of books, our trips to the public library were occasional. Post-school, I always had access to university libraries which seemed much more plentiful than the public libraries in the kinds of things I wanted to read. But now, with more limited access to the university, I’ve turned to the public ones and found them lovely. There are queues, but I don’t have to stand in them; I simply watch my progress in them via my personalised online account, and when I get to the top, I stroll over to my library of choice in my lunch hour, pick up my books, flash my card and I’m on my way. 

It seems I’m not the only one to have discovered public libraries. So, apparently, has David Cameron, who plans to close 350 of them in the UK (“Do you mean we're actually paying for people to read?” he might have spluttered) as part of a broader program of slashing the legs off society in order to make it bigger. To the economic rationalist libraries are sitting ducks. Their only source of revenue is the twenty cent fines they are so reluctant to impose (one Canberra library offers patrons the choice of a fine or a donation to the Salvos) and their services, attractive spaces and expansive collections are provided free to their users, with no apparent dividend except unmeasurable (if not immeasurable) enjoyment. If, as Borges imagined, paradise will be a kind of library, libraries are, in their way, a kind of paradise.

The thing about economic rationalists is that they rarely take the long view, or the deep view; that old line about the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Philip Pullman has recently risen to impassioned defense of the public libraries, citing not only what they do but what they represent as compelling reasons to keep them open. He’s right: as well as preserving the knowledge and wisdom of the ages, libraries provide democratic access to them, fostering community and civility and many other things that a ‘big society’ might be thought to comprehend. And if one were still looking for a dividend, what about the potential of a society with free and unfettered access to learning? A view both long and deep, but not without some precedent. Before shooting these sitting ducks, Cameron should have checked for golden eggs.

Beyond the pale cast of thought

Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions might better have been called That Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, or even When, as he doesn’t really explain How, much less Why. The book is a pleasing rant with some delicious verbiage that sets out to give short shrift to anything that falls on the wrong side of rational. For Wheen, this line is a sharp divide, drawn in roughly 1750, that casts into an intellectual wilderness a quite bewildering array of human history: free market fundamentalism, Islamism, creationism, new ageism, managerialism,  leftism, self-helpism, Tony Blairism…the list goes on.

And it is simply a list, though an entertaining one. Wheen makes no attempt to connect these rebellions or retreats, (except that they all somehow offer an affront to the Enlightenment thinkers he admires), or to account for the persistent hungers that drive the embrace of irrationality, conspiracy, spirituality, alterity across such a dispersed range of human life.  Even within these groups, divisions or diversions don’t show up in Wheen’s view of them over the fence. He tends to expose inconsistent behaviour in groups too broad to be consistent; for example ‘the left’ does this or that, thinks this or that, apparently as one.  And he naturally has no room for difference (certainly not for differance!) within the thought or acts of one person, so his world is one of goodies and baddies. Most of the last three decades (the decline of reason beginning precisely in 1979) are peopled by baddies.

He offers no acknowledgement of whence the cultural revolutions of the last fifty years sprung and what they achieved, sourcing any good or compassionate impulses in the enlightened thinkers of two hundred and fifty years ago.  His purpose is ‘to show how the humane values of the Enlightenment have been abandoned or betrayed, and why it matters.’ With the egregious exceptions of suicide bombers and Enron, he doesn’t really show ‘why it matters’ except that it annoys him. He allows no gains to proceed from irrational foundations, and does not begin to imagine what, if his rationalist agenda were rigorously pursued, might be lost.

Thanks to Wheen’s gift for insult the book is amusing; the sheer quantity of synonyms for ‘nonsense’ is impressive.  But it is a product of journalistic ire, rather than sustained thought or analysis. And for all its rationalist bluster, the book falls readily into idealism, in particular an idealism about America that his own evidence would seem to discredit. He writes as though America began in 1776, as an idea founded on principles, instead of a culture that grew from a chaotic melange of nations, religions, ideologies, and pathologies.  He writes about the enlightenment with the reverence of a true believer, and about its prophets with a blind faith in their enduring soundness. A prophet himself, rebuking an apostate modernity, he sounds in the end like the voice of one crying in the wilderness.

Free at last

In the month since Gabby Giffords was shot in the head, and six others were shot dead around her, much has been said about speech: the power of it, the civility of it, the freedom of it. How strong is the thread between words and deeds? Can a culture of incivility really breed a spree of killing? Can a rhetoric of arms and insurrection really take no responsibility for violent deaths?

The conversation this event provoked was as heated and noisy as the one that preceded it, yielding an even more aggressive defense of the first amendment (the right to free speech) and the second (the right to bear arms), a defense that seemed at times to confuse the two. One Republican said that “those bearing firearms at Congressional town hall meetings and Obama events were no different from anti-Bush demonstrators ‘waving placards.’” Surely the difference is the same one America prizes between its own polity and that of, say, Iran. (I might also add, placards don't kill people, guns kill people.)

That story is told in this article on the Constitution, which points out among other things a discrepancy between a surge in interest and a plunge in knowledge about this fraying parchment. ‘Originalists’ insist, as one imagines Ben Franklin or James Madison would not, on an undeviating and literal interpretation of this founding document, while at the same time surveys reveal many of Americans’ most cherished Constitutional phrases don’t occur in the document at all.

When this new zeal for the Constitution led to a reading of ‘the whole thing’ at the opening of the 112^th Congress in January, several of the Constitutional nasties – like the disenfranchisement of women, and the dehumanising of black people – were left out, silently expunged from the record, without exciting as much commentary as the replacement, in a new edition of Huckleberry Finn, of the word ‘nigger’ with the word ‘slave.’

For all kinds of reasons, these elisions and incisions in the written records are dangerous. On the surface they may seem both correct and caring. Yet changing the past to suit the present is (historically anyway) a diabolical thing to do. Is this what President Obama meant when, in his inaugural address, he urged Americans to ‘choose our better history’?

I don’t think so. I think he wanted Americans to choose the best examples to follow, to fulfill the best promises of the founders, of the fighters, of the freed. I think he wanted America, as he said in his speech at Tucson last month, to be as good as they imagined it.

Unfortunately, Obama’s words are often drowned. Torrential, irrational, mendacious rhetoric floods the thousand channels of communication in contemporary America; swelling when any moderate voice attempts to curb it. After all, “what king so strong / Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?” We might say of Obama, as Measure for Measure’s Duke says in soliloquy:

…millions of false eyes
Are stuck upon thee: volumes of report
Run with these false and most contrarious quests
Upon thy doings: thousand escapes of wit
Make thee the father of their idle dreams
And rack thee in their fancies.

This is what freedom of speech, and its armed defence, have come to mean. Speech free from obligation, free from restraint, free from liability. In the land of free speech, the double-tongued man is king.