{"id":1684,"date":"2004-09-13T12:34:12","date_gmt":"2004-09-13T16:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=1684"},"modified":"2024-10-27T16:44:19","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T20:44:19","slug":"this-rough-magic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=1684","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;This rough magic&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>The New Yorker<\/i>&#8216;s Adam Gopnik is one of my favorite writers out there.  His latest review, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/critics\/atlarge\/?040913crat_atlarge\">on display here<\/a>, is a perfect example why.  Granted, the topic (Shakespeare) is near and dear to my heart &#8211; but it&#8217;s the WAY he writes, his style, what he reveals, and how he reveals it.<\/p>\n<p>First off &#8211; I have GOT to read the book being reviewed:  Stephen Greenblatt&#8217;s <i>Will in the World<\/i>. It&#8217;s now on my Wish List.  Not that that&#8217;s a hint or anything.<\/p>\n<p>\n<iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=thesheivari-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=039332737X&#038;asins=039332737X&#038;linkId=U7VOWXVWRGQ4AX4L&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I needed to be convinced to want to read this book, basically because I dislike postmodern criticism so much it makes my teeth itch &#8211; so I usually stay away from more recent critics.  Gopnik convinced me.<\/p>\n<p>Gopnik does a great analysis of what is wrong with much criticism these days &#8211; I found myself nodding enthusastically as I read this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The point, as Greenblatt emphatically argues, is \u0093not to strip away the reimagining, as if the life sources were more important than the metamorphoses but, rather, to enhance a sense of wonder at Shakespeare\u0092s creation . . . that took elements from the wasted life of Robert Greene and used them to fashion the greatest comic character in English literature.\u0094 One need not accept the identification to value the discovery. Biographical criticism may be a practice without certainties, but it is not a game without rules. Each time we come closer to Shakespeare\u0092s life, we escape from the aridity of formal criticism or the cheap generalities of social history into a recognizable world of real experience. When A. L. Rowse insists that Emilia Bassano Lanier, the tempestuous, adulterous, musical, poetic wife of a court musician, was the original \u0093Dark Lady\u0094 of the Sonnets, we can buy it or not, as we please. But the very existence of a woman like Emilia demonstrates that the clich\u00e9d images of Elizabethan women, as subservient wives or unruly whores, are too grossly tuned to capture the reality of Shakespeare\u0092s world. Whether she is the Dark Lady or not, Emilia is a dark lady. Good biographical criticism dissolves determinisms, and replaces them not with gossipy puzzle-solution certainties but with glimpses of life as it is lived, and art as it is made. Criticism is always a map of possibilities, roads taken, neglected, and cut fresh, and the map of art is never more vivid than when the possibilities of a period are incarnated as the people in a life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>God.  YES.  &#8220;Good biographical criticism dissolves determinisms&#8221; &#8230; Isn&#8217;t that the truth?<\/p>\n<p>Also:  &#8220;as if the life sources were more important than the metamorphoses&#8221; &#8211; In a nutshell, that&#8217;s most of my problem with current lit crit.  I prefer the &#8220;rough magic&#8221; of the art &#8211; and theories on how the &#8220;metamorphoses&#8221; came about &#8230; rather than the obsessing on the &#8220;life sources&#8221; of the artist.<\/p>\n<p>Sylvia Plath&#8217;s poems have suffered from that kind of too-literal biographical analysis.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t ONLY look at biographical details.  Don&#8217;t just look at the timeline of a person&#8217;s life!  You&#8217;ve got to try to get into their subconscious mind, too!<\/p>\n<p>Gopnik discusses Greenblatt&#8217;s conclusions, in regards to Shakespeare&#8217;s influences, and where certain characters may have come from.  Again: MAY have come from.  Greenblatt&#8217;s guess at the origin of Falstaff is positively thrilling.<\/p>\n<p>One other part of the article which I thoroughly DUG is the section on the soliloquies in <i>Hamlet<\/i> &#8211; what sets them apart from all soliloquies written before, the evolutionary leap taken by the playwright.  Thrilling stuff.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What makes \u0093Hamlet\u0094 different from Shakespeare\u0092s previous work is the way it brings out a complete inner life. Before Hamlet, soliloquy is mostly just exposition of motive. (\u0093Why am I acting this way? Well you may ask. I\u0092m doing it because . . .\u0094\u0097as in \u0093Richard III.\u0094) With Hamlet, as Greenblatt very neatly puts it, we get \u0093an intense representation of inwardness called forth by a new technique of radical excision.\u0094 &#8230; Shakespeare, by compressing the plot into a matter of days, making Hamlet full-grown, and having the murder a secret known only to Hamlet, through the Ghost, makes Hamlet\u0092s show of madness not just superfluous but truly self-destructive\u0097it does nothing but draw suspicious attention to him. In any case, Shakespeare\u0092s Hamlet is half-crazy and suicidal before he even sees the Ghost, and most of his soliloquies, instead of furthering our understanding of the action, are at direct cross-purposes to it. (Hamlet knows very well that a traveller has returned from that bourne from which no traveller returns.) What Hamlet says replaces the clear exposition of motive with a kind of chattering, compulsive, image-chasing interior monologue of dreads and desires.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And the following observation too (which is why I love Gopnik so much):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The questions forced on every screenwriter\u0097where is the character\u0092s motive? what does he \u0093want\u0094?\u0097are exactly the questions Shakespeare ignored. (When Hollywood melodrama does touch the edge of the tragic, it is nearly always through the removal of motive: Why does Michael ruin his own values and dearest hopes by shooting the policeman and Sollozzo? Why does Gittes pursue Noah? All that keeps \u0093Citizen Kane\u0094 from tragedy is Rosebud.) With Shakespeare, the inner life is no longer a condition of narrative but one of existence. They are, therefore they think.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Now criticism like THIS exhilarates me.  I hadn&#8217;t ever thought of it in quite that way &#8211; the &#8220;removal of motive&#8221;, and how effective that can be.  It is why we continue to discuss certain films years after they were made.  We know WHAT Rosebud is, but we still don&#8217;t know WHY.  Etc. etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New Yorker&#8216;s Adam Gopnik is one of my favorite writers out there. His latest review, on display here, is a perfect example why. Granted, the topic (Shakespeare) is near and dear to my heart &#8211; but it&#8217;s the WAY &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=1684\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[218],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1684"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1684"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101866,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1684\/revisions\/101866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}