I've long wondered why I love Shakespeare's works so thoroughly. I tried to encapsulate that in some of the essays I've written, looking at some of his works as a study in what a writer can convey. For the last couple of weeks, I've been studying King Lear (again) and thinking about what it's trying to say…and that led me to conclude that part of what Shakespeare does so well is he seems keenly and intimately acquainted with being human.
I can't say that my thought is really too profound. After all, Harold Bloom wrote an entire book called Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. While his work is easy to mischaracterize--particularly since it's a tricky concept that Bloom is working with--there's a lot of worth to the way that Bloom considers a text. And for him, Shakespeare encapsulates in his writing (which, for Bloom, is crucial, since he's a Bardolator of the page more than the stage) the pieces of humanity that are most core and comprehensive. But this universality of the Bard isn't even what Lear was showing me this time around: The events of the play are quite specific and beyond easy identification--few people have had a kingdom, and fewer still have bequeathed it on younger strengths whilst they "crawl[ed] toward death", only to have the ingratitude and selfishness of their children turn around and spurn them into madness. In other words, it isn't what happens in the plays that matter, it's what matters in the plays that happens to us. This comes from the fact that Shakespeare's "point" isn't ever really there. Laurie Maguire's book Where There's A Will There's A Way does this. And though it's not necessarily a bad reading--Shakespeare's flexibility makes him endlessly rereadable--I get a touch antsy when she says things like "Shakespeare's advice? Do X, Y, and Z." It's not that clear cut, not that delineated. Within the shadows of the words we intuit more than we see, and Shakespeare's power is that the shadows can be teased out and solidified. Nevertheless, we run a risk of pursuing a point in the text when, in reality, the point is what we bring to the text. The fact that this happens with all great literature--maybe the way to define what great literature is, in part, is to rely on it not making a point but allowing a point to be seen--is also important to note; Shakespeare isn't the only game in town. But I keep returning to the Sweet Swan of Avon in large part because he always has something to say and will never need to step out and say it. He's never pedantic, because the points that he's making grown organically out of the way his characters perceive the world. His writing isn't utterly flawless--there are digressions and jokes that no longer hold up, inside jokes about sixteenth-century theater that only dramaturgs and English professors understand (or care to understand)--but he's always helping us (me?) to "see better", as Maguire points out in her introduction. When it comes to my own writing, I think about the way that I force my characters to behave a certain way, to go with the plot. Shakespeare has this issue, too--why else would storm-separated twins manage to find their way to the same town so often? But once the plot is moving forward, the characters have a chance to grow and flow and change and make observations of the world that are endlessly fulfilling. There's a Shakespearean difference to what he writes, something so intimately human, adorned and enhanced by the heightened language, that I can't help but relish returning to his words again and again. Sorry--I got distracted. I meant to put this idea onto my own writings, and I wonder if the reason that I don't feel that my books and characters matter as much in the fantasy/sci-fi stories I write is because I don't let them be fully human. I get so caught up in the fantastical world and the exciting adventure that I don't let them be (or not to be). I don't know how to fix this feeling (regardless of if it's a real malady of my stories or not). The genre demands a greater pacing--more action, more adventure, more danger--and using more words, while it would help approach a solution to this problem, leads into issues with too many words. In fact, I kind of tried doing that with my book Writ in Blood, and its pacing was laborious and too prone to lengthy introspections. It wasn't a particularly exciting book, I would argue. So what do I do with this? I'm not really sure, at this juncture, what I ought to do. I have my "mainstream fiction" book that I'm always picking at. If I strip away the fantasy and science fiction elements to my stories, will I have a stronger emotional core? Will my characters feel more vibrant and realistic? Will there be a point to their existence on the page? And would I want to write that story? I'm still such a kid in my interests that I am almost angry with myself that I haven't managed to write a book about dinosaurs yet. Can I be happy writing a story with smaller stakes, smaller implications, smaller roles? Shakespeare often focused on large movers-and-shakers: Julius Caesar and Brutus; Richards II (the usurped) and III (the usurper); lords and ladies of courts and kingdoms; and gentlemen and -women who had the options of being leisurely rich and interested in how to appropriately marry. The concerns were large, yes, but Shakespeare managed to make their goals large and compelling enough. Can I do the same? I suppose measuring myself against the greatest writer of history may not be a fair metric. But if I'm not learning from Lear or any of the other creatures of his capacious mind, why should I read him at all? Comments are closed.
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