My Shakespeare is shrinking!

Well, shame on me, first off, for delaying last weekend's post until the middle of this week. I should know better.

I've kept busy, if perhaps not on the things I should be busy with. Girlfriend (a while ago, actually) got it into her head to produce Romeo and Juliet with her middle school, and I consequently got it into my head to go through the script and cut it down into a middle-school-manageable size. It turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected, and I've spent a good bit of the last few days reading, cutting, and splicing the first three acts. Not rewriting--she was vehemently opposed, and it is probably for the best. Just presuming to cut the play in half is intoxicating enough in its boldness.

It's been a while since I had read Romeo and Juliet (I won't say how long) and it is better than I had remembered--not that I remembered it badly. It seems fashionable to knock R&J, perhaps precisely because it is the preeminently popular Shakespeare play of this generation, but I think it deserves its laurels. Re-reading it, and needing to really get a sense of the scenes and the lines, is forcing me to appreciate it.

On one hand, we have those who take R&J as a great love story. On the other hand we have the scoffers (not scoffing at the text, but at the people on the first hand) who take it as a deconstruction, pointing out that Romeo and Juliet are stupid teenagers who get entirely carried away and die in a hormonal conflagration that takes four other people with them.

I think the beauty of the play is that it's all of those things. I have insisted and will continue to insist that Romeo and Juliet's romance is a good and beautiful thing--or at least that it would be if the context for the romance weren't a murderous powder keg. The play also deconstructs romance, but without denying its potential beauty. Romeo and Juliet's love is simultaneously poetic and chemical, profound and superficial, innocent and lustful, redemptive and annihilative. The play is both a cautionary tale and a celebration.

It's actually misleading to say that Romeo and Juliet get carried away by their emotions. They do--oh, they definitely do--but so does everyone else. To dismiss Romeo and Juliet (or Juliet and Romeo, for the sake of variety) as overemotional teenagers misses the point. The play seems to say that they get carried away, not because they are adolescents, but because they are humans. That is the tragedy of humanity, and the tragedy of the play only comes about because so many major players act on their emotions at exactly the wrong time.

Juliet and Romeo's emotional vices are love, which has the potential to be a good thing, and despair, which--given their ultimate situation--is understandable. The emotions that rule their elders--spite, rage, and cowardice--are less forgivable.

Let's take a moment to consider how almost everyone who should be helping Juliet and Romeo screws the play up by being emotional.

First and most obviously, the anger driving the Capulet-Montague feud seems to touch everyone except Benvolio. Tybalt is supposed to be Juliet's friend, but he's a ball of hate from curtain-up to curtain-down. Mercutio is not much better. His anger on Romeo's behalf provokes him to escalate Tybalt's insults into violence, and where Mercutio draws a sword in Romeo's cause is where things actually start going downhill.

The next unforced error by a grownup goes to Lord Capulet. The problem isn't that he is so tone-deaf as to arrange Juliet's marriage on the afternoon of her cousin's death. The problem is that when Juliet objects he becomes enraged. His anger takes everyone else in the scene aback. His plan to lift his daughter's spirits becomes an ultimatum: obey utterly or be disowned. For fear of his anger, Lady Capulet will not even discuss delaying the wedding. Thus Juliet has to replace her original plan with haste.

And Friar Laurence--oh, Friar Laurence. Here's a man who knows what he's about, for the most part. In the safety of his cell he can lay a pretty good plan--heck, his plan for Juliet works just fine in Much Ado About Nothing. Maybe there's nothing he could have done to save Romeo's life, but he is there in the crypt when Juliet wakes up. He should be protecting her--she could survive. In fact, Laurence previously stopped Romeo from stabbing himself--maybe he could do the same service for poor Juliet?* But no--in Juliet's moment of extreme need he hears people coming and flees. His betrayal is so sudden and banal it must come from sheer terror. We never saw this weakness in him before because we never saw him in immediate personal danger. In the end he can give good advice, but the pressure of a do-or-die moment breaks him, and the flight reflex overwhelms all his well-intentioned schemes.

With these people around them, it really would have taken more than a cold shower to save Romeo or Juliet. A bucket of cold water in the face of Mercutio, Lord Capulet, or Friar Laurence at a critical moment could have saved their lives.

* He does exactly this in Act 4--which I had forgotten, having only gotten through the first three acts as of writing yesterday... I don't think Friar Laurence's official policy on this is "Everybody gets one."

On villainy

Last night I watched the 1996 movie version of The Crucible, which prompted me to read parts of the play. Girlfriend's edition of The Crucible has something that I think was missing from whatever edition I (think I) read back in high school: long digressions by Arthur Miller on the characters and his research. While my reading of plays is admittedly limited, I don't know of anything to parallel The Crucible for the length, depth, or digressiveness of its character descriptions. When Reverend Hale comes on the scene, for example, Miller dispatches the character's physical description in one sentence, his history and personality in four more, and then goes on for three additional pages about the idea of the Devil as a political tool.

But in the spirit of such digressions, I'm using this as an excuse to talk about something else. The very first character description in The Crucible set me thinking in this particular direction: it was the description of Reverend Parris, that "In history he cut a villainous path, and there is very little good to be said for him." (On the subject of that "very little good," the text is silent; we learn instead about the bad rest of him.) It got me thinking about the construction of good villains.

Parris isn't the villain of The Crucible, but he doesn't come off well, and Miller makes no effort to soften the blow. It is a problem, I think; I believe I am against the portrayal of evil people with no good at all in them. This isn't to say that a work of art should contort itself to show a glimmer of goodness in every evil character, but to look behind the curtain and see that Miller saw nothing positive in him gives me the sense that his conception of the character was lacking.

Oh, yes, pick a fight with Arthur Miller, why don't I?

Well it's not really about him, but this mostly reminded me that there has been something good, or at the very least pitiably human, in every villain who has really affected me. Sometimes it is a very small thing, but it creates depth--I would go so far as to say that it allows horror.

As is often the case, I go to movies for my examples. I first noticed this effect in the 2007 version of 3:10 to Yuma, in the character of Charlie Prince; he was violent, sadistic, thoroughly amoral, and loyal with a purity that touched on innocence. I thought at the time that it was the ability to be hurt that made him stick in my mind, and that was part of it, but not all.

As I said, it allows horror. A villain who is merely a force is immune to judgment, like a natural disaster. We need the glimmer of good in order to register that it is a human doing the villainous deeds in a story.

A good villain is both evil and imposing (with regard to the protagonists). The necessary opposite faces of these elements are good and pathos. Without them a villain is hollow from behind.

Hence we have Darth Vader's paternal impulses and physical disfigurement. Hence we have Heath Ledger's Joker unconsciously tonguing his scars. (I search my memory for some sign of good in him, and can only think of his rationalizations. He claims to be seeking after some sort of truth; contrast with Bane in the following movie, who accomplishes similar kinds of terror but with explicitly sadistic intent.)

"What about Iago?" a certain sort of person might challenge. "He is evil without good or pathos, and considered to be the greatest villain ever set down."

"I disagree," I would say to this imaginary person who I created for the sole purpose of disagreeing with him. I would patiently explain how it is the mystery of Iago's motivation, not its absence, that seizes the imagination. Iago has values, he has a grievance, and he has a motivation. We are interested in him because we know these things; if we discovered that he wasn't, in fact, human, I suspect that we as an audience would lose interest.

(Meanwhile, as I write this, the Superbowl has apparently stopped because the lights went out. Speaking of losing interest.)

A last point on the subject is that I don't think the ideas of "good" and "evil" are very useful in creating compelling characters. Not to say that I prefer a grey-and-grey moral universe to a black-and-white one (not least because the greys tend to darken until the morality is black-and-black). But perhaps it is better to regard characters as "virtuous" and "vicious." The question of virtue and vice shouldn't be wholly detached from what side of the story the character falls on, but it represents a whole lot of continuums.

Fatuousity

I like words a lot. It feels a bit pretentious to just assert that, but it is the case (and maybe it's also the case that I'm pretentious). I appreciate the ways words express our thoughts, obviously, but I also like the way words carry ideas with them. I can take two words without any preconceived image (walrus, gargle) and when I put them together (walrus gargle) they create an image, or several. Now I'm imagining someone distilling arctic wildlife into a hygienic mouthwash. I didn't seek out the words for that particular effect; it just happened.

There's a dark side and a danger to this. Words carry meaning, and they can combine to create new meaning, but this isn't the same as creating truth. I suspect those of us who live especially on words are particularly susceptible to forgetting this. Obviously, just because I recently envisioned a pinniped-flavored mouthwash does not mean such a thing does, could, or should exist. Most people get that. But if the words I string together at random are abstractions, it gets more dangerous.

Suppose I said, "Shame is the resort of cowards." Its provenance is the same as walrus gargle. I can make a sort of sense of it, and I think it's baloney (or bologna?), but if I insinuated it into a book of quotations, a certain sort of person could confuse it for a profundity.

If you're not careful, you can pull this on yourself, and convince yourself of all sorts of ridiculous things.

So what set me off on this ramble? Well, in my wanderings on the internet I encountered this article on Slate. (I confess I encountered an article mocking it before I read the article itself.) The article, by literature professor Andrew Piper, is headlined: "Out of Touch: E-reading isn't reading," and is excerpted from his book, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. It's actually an interesting read, in its own way--at least to someone who does not regularly read this sort of academic spun-nonsense confection.

I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and suppose that an editor came up with the flatly declamatory headline. It was probably meant to attract traffic by irritating people like me and getting us to blog about it. But the damage is done. And the rest of the article is an amazing irony engine: it argues the inadequacy of the experience of e-reading (since it lacks the physicality of dead-tree books), but there isn't a shred of substance in all the words he strings together.

He says, "The significance of the tactility of reading could begin with St. Augustine." Okay. It could. That's not actually a chronological assertion, I guess, just an erudite way of saying "Here comes a quote from St. Augustine." He relates Augustine's conversion, in which he picked up a nearby Bible, read part of Romans 13, and converted. Piper finds significance, I guess, in the fact that Augustine picked up a hardcover Bible instead of just reading the passage on his iPhone--it's not really clear. "No other passage has more profoundly captured the meaning of the book than this one," he says, and that's that.

He continues in this vein: words, words, words. Touchscreens are worse than turning pages because "kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement, overrides the book’s synesthesia, its unique art of conjoining touch, sight, and thought into a unified experience."

At his most cogent, Piper's argument echoes the ancient scribes who scoffed at the idea of putting spaces between words. Having to figure out for yourself where one word ended and another began enforced deeper thought about the text, they would say. And, says Piper, "Swiping has the effect of making everything on the page cognitively lighter, less resistant." But at its most entertaining, the article spins its semantic wheels with hardly any friction at all. The closing paragraphs are an intensive course of eyebrow calisthenics, starting with the assertion that "Perhaps the patron saint of reading should be Dr. Faustus," and concluding, "the meaning of reading lies in the oscillatory rhythms of the opening and closing hand."

Look, I love books too. I can't count the books I can see without turning my head here in this chair in my living room. I do appreciate the flutter of a softcover book. Sometimes it's even useful to be able to write in the margins. But a book is its contents, not its shape.

It's harmless, really, and I don't want to be too mean. I probably wouldn't even be writing about it if I hadn't also learned this week about the bizarre "Allocutions on the Wall of the Harvard University Library," a collection of quotes that are apparently quite popular in China, and spuriously claimed to be written on the wall of... you get the idea. The inscriptions are emphatically disavowed by Harvard's actual university librarian, but a lot of Chinese people allegedly take them seriously.

The sayings themselves are exhortations to work harder, like "Happiness may not be ranked, but success will at the top," and, "Enjoy the unavoidable suffering."

This is something worse than silliness, because it shapes people's thinking. And these are just words conjured in a syntactic imitation of wisdom. With an appeal to the authority of the wise and diligent vandals of Harvard University, they assumed the illusion of history, weight, and veracity.

Words have power, and they can come out of nothing. There's something rightly frightening about that.

Arguing with fortune cookies

My first day back from vacation nobody, understandably, wanted to cook. Consequently I'm still working through fortune cookies, and I have to say that this last batch has been a bit odd. The old tricks don't work so well. (You know the ones I mean; "Do not hesitate to look for help, an extra hand should always be welcomed... in bed.")*

That's the sort of thing you expect. Of course there was the one time my grandma got "Pass the check to the person on your left," but that would make less sense if it came with take-out. But the one I got the other day, and really wish I could find now, said, "Evil as a force cannot exist to the healthy mind."

Does that mean to you what it means to me? Because my reading of that is that only crazy people could believe in the Devil. I think my cookie was trying to pick a theological fight with me.

I don't even believe in evil as a personal force, but I know people who I think do. It's not a conversation I've had recently. It's not that I'm personally insulted, but... pretty cheeky for a cookie, don't you think?

The next day I had a fortune cookie with (or maybe for) breakfast, which said, "Today is probably a huge improvement over yesterday."

Why, yes, cookie, at least so far... in the realm of cookie fortunes.

* Before you judge me, I swear that that, minus the coda, was the first fortune I saw on fortunecookiemessage.com when I went looking for a "normal" fortune.

Fishing for controversy - Spoilers and scholars

Eminent scholar and literary critic Stanley Fish said something dumb on Monday, and the great thing about eminent scholars and literary critics is what good exercise disagreeing with them can be. In this case, Dr. Fish mounted a defense of his column from two weeks ago, in which he gave away a plot point of the Hunger Games trilogy.* In response to a flurry of frustrated comments, he made the following claims:

1. We actually enjoy stories more after they’ve been spoiled.

2. The only books that can truly be “spoiled” are ones whose only value is suspense, i.e. inferior ones.

Tacit corollary: If you have a problem with knowing the ending of a book in advance, you’re either reading the wrong books or you’re reading the books wrong.

If you know me you might be surprised that I’m staking out my opposition to spoilers. Wasn’t it I who casually read about the ending of The Usual Suspects** mere days before the culmination of my friend’s years-long quest to find a copy to show to me? Did I not come to fantasy by paging through a companion encyclopedia to The Lord of the Rings, pausing with particular enjoyment at the entry for Gollum, which described his character arc in full? Well, yes. But we shouldn't always do unto others as we do unto ourselves.

Fish argues that the pleasure of rereading is greater than the pleasure of reading something the first time. I don’t disagree with this point. Many times has it been said that the difference between serious readers and the rest of humanity is that serious readers will read the same book more than once. I may not, as Girlfriend does, reread The Lord of the Rings ever year, but I know the pleasure of coming back to something and reading it more deeply, with more knowledge.*** If nothing else, we get better at understanding a story with each pass. But because one pleasure is greater is no reason not to have both, says I.

Fish even brings Science! to bear in defense of his first point, which in a literary argument is a little like bringing a shotgun gun to a knife fight. But, like a consummate knife-fighter holding a shotgun, he’s more assailable here than he ought to be. One preexisting opinion and one study do not combine to form a fact, or even a consensus, and it’s beyond ambition to suppose that modern psychology is able to comparatively measure two disparate kinds of enjoyment.

Are they disparate? Fish admits as much, but he dismisses the entire value of a spoiler-free read as “suspense,” and he argues that suspense can be recaptured on subsequent readings. What he is describing, though, is one form of tension, and not the whole pleasure of experiencing a story for the first time.

With foreknowledge, we can enjoy dramatic irony in knowing from the beginning, say, that our hero is really a tomato. We appreciate the double-meanings and ambiguities that allow this fact to exist in the story alongside an impression that the hero is a human being. We may even wish, caught up in the emotional tide of the story, that it were not so that the hero was a tomato. But having been told in advance, perhaps by an eminent scholar and literary critic, that the hero is a tomato, we will never—not once—wonder as the tension mounts if the hero is really a pineapple, or an automobile. We cannot have uncertainty.

I was only recently introduced as an adult to serious mystery writing—Dorothy Sayers’ novels—and I found that a great deal of the pleasure came from trying to outguess the novel. Often I was wrong, or only partly right (never completely right), but the novels were rich with possibilities in that first reading. For a moment, everyone could be the killer, in every possible way, and not in a winking “or so it seems but we know better” sense.

Having had and enjoyed that experience, I can go back and read the books again. Knowing the truth of the story I can enjoy hints and ironies and depths that I hadn’t seen before, and that is in no way diminished by my having read the book once before in ignorance.

There's been argument about the authority of the author and the reader's freedom to interpret, but nowhere do those two factors coexist in such perfection as before the story is finished. The million possibilities the reader brings, and the winnowing of those possibilities by the author into the complete text, are a part of any story. For Fish, though, it seems the story might as well be over before it's begun.

You can’t write an academic paper about how you had the wrong idea about what was going on in a book, at least not if you hope to be an eminent scholar and literary critic. However I would feel sorry for anyone who had become so good at rereading that they had forgotten how to read a book for the first time. I would resent someone who casually damaged someone else’s ability to enjoy what they no longer could. I would lose respect for anyone who purported to be a scholar of reading and displayed such ignorance of—or contempt for—the way most people experience most stories.

It’s been observed that writing is like sex: first you do it by yourself, then you do it with a few close friends, and finally you do it for money. I would say that reading is as well: the first time you do it wrong, then you get better with experience, but it would be sad to skip the first time.

* Full disclosure: I have not read the article in which he does this, because I have not read The Hunger Games, and, as you will see, I take the issue of spoilers more seriously than Fish does.

** On a forum thread called “The Ultimate Spoiler Thread,” where each new post spoiled a different book or movie.

*** Tangent: Watch Arrested Development twice. It’s ridiculous.