Ron Rosenbaum the Plays the Thign Again

August half dozen, 2000

The Play's the Affair, Again

By RON ROSENBAUM

f it could be said that there is a tide in the affairs of literary studies, information technology might now be ventured that there are indications -- hints, clues, suggestions -- that the overflowing tide of theory in the academy has begun to ebb and questions of value and aesthetics have begun to creep dorsum in.

In fact I feel I may take been a witness to the moment when the tide could be seen to turn -- a remarkable moment in which a difficult-cadre theory partisan delivered an eloquent, witty and rueful critique of the reign of theory. The occasion was the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, at a seminar on the cultural and commercial phenomenon of Harold Flower'southward best-selling volume ''Shakespeare: The Invention of the Man.'' Shakespeare, of form, has been a focus of the theory wars from the beginning: for those who believe in ''the expiry of the author,'' he is the author whose dissolution into autonomous ''discourses'' was most devoutly to be wished.

My sense of that seminar as a turning point comes from three decades of observing Shakespeare studies, always since witnessing the Terminal Corking Transition at footing zippo in the Yale graduate English department, when the theorists began to supersede the ''close readers'' of the New Criticism. What followed was an unabridged generation of the best and brightest graduate students earning tenure past turning Shakespeare's works into exemplars of diverse Continental theorists ranging from Jacques Derrida and deconstruction to Michel Foucault and the new historicism, Theodor Adorno and postmodern Marxism to Jacques Lacan and postmodern Freudianism. It was a time when theorizing Shakespeare replaced reading, seeing or enacting Shakespeare for academics specializing in ''early on modern'' literature, to apply the term favored to replace ''Renaissance'' literature (which implies that the rebirth of Western civilisation was a good thing).

The theorizing tendency -- which argues that the artistic value of what Shakespeare wrote is not but overrated but irrelevant, as are all questions of value -- could be seen, in the start at least, as a salutary response to ''Bardolatry,'' the uncritical celebration of Shakespearean genius. And yet the theorists came to share with the Bardolaters a certain overheated obsession with perfection: If the Bardolaters regard Shakespeare as the Perfect Master and the chore of a scholar to further reveal his perfection, the theorists, in result, regard Shakespeare as a Perfect Slave -- a slave to the power relations of his moment in history, ''the hegemony'' whose forces his piece of work perfectly represents.

Simply at the Shakespeare scholars' convention this spring in Montreal, in that location were signs that theory's partisans were having second thoughts most their own hegemony. Consider the first ''paper session,'' at which three scholars delivered related talks, in a forum entitled ''Before Theory.'' All were surprisingly respectful appreciations of Shakespearean commentaries past three pretheoretical literary figures: T. Southward. Eliot, Oscar Wilde and William Empson, a New Critic and an avatar of close reading. These are figures who had long been relegated by the postmodernists to the dustbin of history every bit woefully ''undertheorized.''

And consider as well ''Shakespeare Later Theory,'' a new book by a presenter at a subsequent paper session, David Scott Kastan of Columbia University, who is a general editor of the Arden Shakespeare, a leading scholarly edition of the plays. Whatever its achievements, ''theory's day has passed,'' Kastan argues in his book. He cites as evidence ''the Modern Language Clan chore listings from which theory jobs, after a proliferation in the early 1980's, have now virtually disappeared.'' (In function that's because and then many theorists accept filled up the tenured positions, of class.) Kastan believes that we are entering a mail-theory age ''not considering theory has been discredited; on the contrary . . . in explaining the mystifications that accept dominated our categories of literary assay, theory has now brought united states to the signal where we must begin to respond . . . non by producing more theory but more facts'' -- facts about ''the actual historical circumstances of literary product and reception.'' Facts are not as seductive as theory, not every bit sexy as the power-centered new historicism, Kastan conceded in his talk. In a expert-natured way, he even calls his fact-based investigations into the collaboration amid printers, booksellers and theatrical managers in the making of Shakespeare ''the new colorlessness.''

If Before Theory and Later Theory were hot topics at the Shakespeare Association convention, what to do During Theory had clearly been ''problematized,'' as theorists like to say. Lately, for case, at that place has been more than excitement in two other areas of Shakespeare scholarship: textual studies, which in the past two decades has produced a challenging if still controversial new film of Shakespeare as a recurrent reviser of his work, and performance studies, which focuses on directors and actors (and increasingly filmmakers) as what you might call the working theorists of Shakespeare.

What was shocking nearly the seminar on Harold Bloom's book was the candor with which one of theory's ain, ane of the brightest adepts, delivered a call for self-criticism that amounted to a ''farewell to all that'' valedictory to theory. Her proper noun is Linda Charnes; she is a professor of English at Indiana Academy and the author of a Harvard University Press book called ''Notorious Identity: Materializing the Discipline in Shakespeare.'' Just to get a feel for the customary texture of her prose style when she'due south ''doing theory,'' consider this excerpt from her recent essay called ''Nosotros Were Never Early Modern,'' ostensibly on ''Hamlet'':

''Mass culture is being increasingly 'quilted,' to use Lacan's term, by the points de capiton of what I would call the 'apparitional historical.' Information technology is therefore no accident that 'Hamlet' is the play to which contemporary civilisation most frequently returns. Hamlet-the-prince has come to correspond the dilemma of historicity itself. . . . But the subject area of melancholia fourth dimension is incommensurable with the society, and the nature, of events. This was 1 of Lacan'due south greatest insights, and one of his advances over Freud: his assertion that the true subject field of the 'incommunicable real' isn't constituted past her narrative reconstruction of her 'story' simply rather by the failure of that story to 'include' its affective consequence-horizon -- its epistemological starting- and end-signal. Equally Joan Copjec has recently written about the Lacanian gaze. . . .''

Some might see this as an example of what Frank Kermode, the noted British Shakespearean, complains near when he speaks of those who profess to be concerned with Shakespeare while actually using Shakespeare to write about more fashionable concerns. Merely something has happened to cause Charnes to question her ''exercise'' (as theorists like to call their work) in terms almost as critical as Kermode. I wondered if it might take to do with a seminar she led at last twelvemonth'south Shakespeare Association convention, which I too audited, on '' 'Hamlet,' 'Troilus,' 'Measure for Measure' and the Estimation of Time,'' a seminar that constitute itself hopelessly entangled in a prolonged and comically futile effort to reach understanding on the nature or existence of ''inwardness.''

But in the year since the inwardness debacle, something else had happened that caused Charnes to expect outward: the Harold Bloom miracle. As Charnes wryly observed, addressing the seminar on Bloom, he is ''someone who comes from our ranks and has contemptuously risen above them and has written a all-time-selling and profitable book. . . . How cartel he make us vulnerable to well-significant family members who say, 'Who is this Bloom guy? You should write a book on Shakespeare that could make the New York Times all-time-seller list.' ''

Bloom is a ''tempting target,'' she suggested to her fellow theorists sitting around the seminar table and to the 25 or and so auditors like myself seated around the perimeter of the room. Merely the public's embrace of such theoretically unfashionable concepts in Flower's book as ''poetic genius, peachy intelligence in art, terms that postmodernists dismiss,'' argues that ''we'd improve wait very carefully not at what Flower's doing, merely what we're doing in the university.''

She then proceeded to take on the jargon of the theorists. ''We all avow we speak for oppressed voices of form, race, gender, nationality; we don't 'translate,' we 'arbitrate,' we don't 'clarify,' we 'interrogate.' . . . For the concluding 20 years this has been important, but is this all we have to offering equally critics?'' We don't have to accept Bloom'south Bardolatry, she said, the way Flower puffs upwardly the importance of a few Shakespearean characters to the point where ''Hamlet and Falstaff, inflated like the Sta-Puff Marshmallow Man in 'Ghostbusters,' stalk through our towns and cities.'' Merely, she insisted, ''it's fourth dimension to become beyond the institutionalized debunking of the bourgeois autonomous or essentialist humanist self. The time to make a career chirapsia that horse has passed.''

In that location was a mixture of tickled and nervous chuckles of appreciation around the room equally her astonishingly frank self-critical monologue rose to a climax: ''Our institutionalized solidarity in bashing the 'bourgeois discipline' has to some extent calcified us into an elite corps of yuppie guerrilla academics. . . . It'south turned united states into social moralists who increasingly prescribe right and incorrect ways of agreement our objects of research. If Bloom's right about annihilation it'due south this: the earth doesn't give a fig for our critiques of its epistemology. Post-humanism may be in the academy but it won't be found in the hearts and minds of the volume-ownership public. For at least in Bloom'south zesty earth there's some humor, some poignancy and some openly avowed love of art.''

The honey of art! Astonishing for a theorist to even utter such a retrograde formulation. Simply Charnes boldly wants to reclaim the love of fine art for a generation of theorists who she says have ''cleared the ground for Bloom by ceding the word of the aesthetic to him and his fellow reactionaries.'' Postmodern theorists take tended to demonize ''the artful'' -- whatever discussion of beauty in art -- equally a lure, a snare, a Trojan horse of the power structure to proceed the oppressed distracted and deluded while the hierarchies of ability in art like Shakespeare's educate them, turn them into slaves of the dread hegemony. In calling for a render to a concern for judgment, and for a focus on beauty and feeling, Charnes may, in fact, detect common ground with Frank Kermode, who does something remarkable in his new book, ''Shakespeare's Language'': he finds a 3rd way, the manner of imperfection you might call it, that transcends the gulf between the Perfect Master of the Bardolaters and the Perfect Slave of the theorists.

The distinctiveness of Kermode's approach, in fact the genesis of his new book, he told me in a phone interview from his office at Cambridge University, was his willingness to argue that some of Shakespeare, particularly some of the later, deeply knotted, compacted verse, simply failed to make sense. ''At that place'south lots of what has to be called bad writing,'' Kermode said.

Effectually 1600, in works like ''Village'' and ''Measure for Measure,'' Kermode believes Shakespeare found a new way of representing the mind in the process of thinking. (This is not the same as Bloom'south neat claim that Shakespeare ''invented the human'' or created self-consciousness -- Kermode told me he regards such claims by Bloom every bit ''incense burning.'') But Kermode also believes that by 1608, offset with ''Coriolanus,'' Shakespeare's linguistic communication often becomes likewise fraught, also overwrought to behave the weight of the meaning he wants to load into information technology: ''He doesn't have the time to make information technology piece of work.''

The response of the idolaters to the knotted afterwards verse has been to say that information technology's our fault, we are only non deep enough to penetrate into the mysteries that Shakespeare is trying to express. The response of the theorists is to say information technology'due south the fault of language itself. Kermode has the courage to advise that it might exist Shakespeare'southward fault.

This, in fact, is an immensely liberating perspective because it licenses the render of aesthetic considerations Linda Charnes called for. A render to questions of value: How good is this passage or play, how do we judge it better or worse than something else in Shakespeare or in the work of other dramatists? How did Shakespeare achieve what he did at his all-time? It calls for the render of aesthetic judgments without incense burning, for a willingness to question why nosotros think what is adept is good. This might sound former-fashioned but, in fact, the convergence of Charnes'due south courageous critique of theory and Kermode's courageous critique of Shakespeare suggests this third manner might be the future. Non a quaint return of the by, but something new: the postal service-postmodern, perhaps.

---

Ron Rosenbaum, the author of ''The Cloak-and-dagger Parts of Fortune,'' a new drove of nonfiction, is working on a volume about Shakespeare scholars and directors.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/08/06/reviews/000806.06rosenbt.html

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