I don’t think that I ever was so little convinced of anything theoretical I have written than what I have lately written on history and fiction. That any part of my theory has so little to do with what I think really happens when I am reading. I adjusted it a bit (see below) but this still doesn’t do justice to the complexity of the matter. On the other hand, rereading my last post on “Measure for Measure”, I was rather impressed. Maybe, after what feels like months that were equally dull and stressful, I was just grateful for any kind of auto-stimulation. Especially as I had just “had” my blog “back” after the devastation I already knew the Windows 10 upgrade would wreak on my digital environment … So, when everything unexpectedly worked fine again, I celebrated by reading my last post and - NOT sorry to say this! – was totally fascinated with what I had written. I had dealt with so many issues I could never resolve but had always been struggling with in “Shakespeare” that I suddenly felt closer to the matter not just by a step but by some kind of extended journey. And I couldn’t help feeling that it must have had something to do with seriously trying to bring “history” into it. That I achieved to do this in the right way - the way I am always doing it, dealing with text – and history! – not as something static that is already labelled and packed by historians of literature but as a dynamic process that I can only figure out by bringing myself into it. As the “adventurer” who is riding the vortex towards the centre of the text – without knowing from the beginning where this journey will lead. Bringing “history” into it, I have always been wary of slowing this process down by encumbering it with “rubble” that doesn’t belong or jam it with common prejudice. And I am rather proud to have figured out how to avoid this. I think what I have done right is to instrumentalize “history” for my search for the TEXT CENTRE – and, observing this, I am now finally able to explain why I cling to this notion of a “text centre” – and thereby necessarily to the notion of a “correct” interpretation, or at least a leading idea of what a text is about – knowing that there is no such thing. But without the IDEA of it there can be no vortex movement, and accordingly no ride, no fun, and no adventure. Weirdly, without “interpretation”, reading just becomes predictable and boring. (Which is, strangely, what I always felt to be the only thing deconstructivism has achieved, even though the idea was probably the contrary. Until I found out that I had to take deconstructivism seriously – that is, to do my own thing and “deconstruct” texts as if they were living beings with a heart and a brain and intestines, not just a bunch of semantic relations …) The ideal is always not to nail the MEANING of a text – even though this is always part of the game – but to have the best ride imaginable because this is what the text was written for. I know this sounds mad, but I know exactly what I mean as I remember exactly how I felt reading “The Master and Margarita” where I had the best ride I can remember in a long time - when reading becomes so much like life at its best: the pure joy of being alive, ESPECIALLY in the middle of profound sadness and ultimate catastrophe … Of course, my idea of HISTORIC reading must aspire to this standard. That means, the game doesn’t end when I think I can explain the text historically = determine what it must have meant at the time - as if there was a single representative mindset it has to be brought in line with. It ends when I have found out why THIS SINGULAR TEXT might have MOVED people at the time, and in what way. I don’t seriously believe, by the way, that I am ever going to find this out “for real”, but by trying to I am learning infinitely more about a historic text. In this case, it felt kind of like “Shakespeare 2.0”.
In fact, I hate to be so much “in theory mode” as these bits are always such a pain to write, and I am never satisfied with them. But just now I had an experience that showed me one more time how daring to THINK theoretically – not just adopt the theories of others but to find out what thoughts are at the bottom of my own experience – helps me to a deeper understanding of text, and life, which is the ultimate goal. Especially because it was about a kind of texts I am not good with, as I have neither patience for them nor am I feeling equal to them: Paintings. Usually I cannot be bothered to look at paintings because – as with poems! – it seems too much of an effort. And this really is a shame!
A few weeks ago, I ended up at a small museum dedicated to an unknown but very gifted surrealistic artist, just because my sister invited my niece, her goddaughter, to my mother’s house for a Harry Potter concert which she couldn’t attend herself because of corona regulations, and was looking for somewhere they both could go, her not being vaccinated … As everybody joined them, I went as well, and, arriving there, I must admit my thoughts were: Now I am going to freeze my butt off in this joint without proper heating or a toilet and have to look at a hundred paintings that are all identical … I was right about the first bit. The paintings, as it turned out, were fascinating. Not because they were great. I mean, they were good, but there is hardly any “beauty” in surrealistic paintings. It kind of defeats the purpose. Nonetheless they were amazing exactly because nothing “enthusiastic” or too emotional distracted me from watching myself getting involved with them. And it was good that there were so many, as I didn’t have to stare at a single one, straining to figure out what it might mean. Within a short time I realized that I loved the game, and that I was good at it, and I remembered that surrealistic paintings had been the only kind I had been passionate about a long, long time ago … I didn’t know why, even then, and I may have been a totally different person at the time, but I tend to think that I always had in me what I WANTED to be, and that this led to what I am now. And I came to the conclusion that I had loved them because every single one – be it hilarious, or mysterious, or depressing … - is telling you that the world is not fixed by any rules you have to obey, but that it is changeable in any way you like and that, at any point in time and space, it contains an INFINITY of possibilities. I figure that, for many people, this infinite complexity of the world is a major source of anxiety and depression, whereas for me it is the inexhaustible well of my happiness. This is the innermost reason I look down on most people – even though I know I am just lucky, or probably not quite right in the head because I cannot take the world seriously in the same way they do. But I cannot help to be happy about it and completely agree with “The Divine Comedy” in the respect that “if I had to choose between then and now, I’d choose NOW” – always! Even though I know that I was younger and happier two years ago, and the world was a better place, and I was just going to London to see “Uncle Vanya”, and did see it right before everything was closed down. Now I am happy to go to the cinema without having to be tested and see a mediocre film. (Can somebody tell my why “Belfast” ended up with 7 Oscar nominations? Probably just because there is virtually nothing else!!??) - NOW might be shit, and probably is shit – didn’t we all wonder what Putin was planning, now we know! – but I think we are over most of the virus, and we have a new government (after 16 years!), and I can unstop my ears and listen to NEW bullshit ... So, right in the middle of this shit, I am still happy because HERE AND NOW is the place where I am “grateful to be alive at the same time as you” (Coldplay), and where anything can happen at any moment.
(I suppose the emphasis on “shit” comes from watching “The Wire”, which I have never watched before and of which I need a bite every day, otherwise I am not happy. A lot of it consists of “shit”, “fuck”, “nigger”, and “(yo,) man”, but mostly it is so sophisticated and complex that I still don’t get it. But I am working on it relentlessly because this shit really is amazing. There is a scene that stretches out over a few minutes where two detectives are going over an old crime scene and where the conversation consists of three phrases: “fuck”, “fuck you”, and “motherfucker”. It’s beautiful!)
But – BACK TO MY PURPOSE! This is as good a transition as any because: how should I get back from praising the here and now into “deep history”? It is just what struck me as the most notorious sentence in HOLINSHED’S CHRONICLE. This is what I am just reading, and, even though it is partially a pain to read, I cannot stop reading it. I have downloaded the complete text from Project Gutenberg and couldn’t skip so much as a single paragraph, apart from the endless lists, though I even read through a few of these. I couldn’t stop because I realized that this is exactly what I need for continuing with “Shakespeare 2.0”. For one thing because the amount of information and history that Raphael Holinshed collected is insane. He must have been a bit insane, not just because he did things like sailing the whole coast of Britain to include the isles in his description, but in a good way that corresponds with something very important “in” his time that I kind of knew but never took into account quite enough. Just looking at FICTIONAL texts that are “with one foot” deeply rooted in tradition – and us, the readers, using traditional patterns of thinking to read them! – one can never begin to appreciate what DYNAMIC times these were. (It just strikes me that this might actually be the emotional impetus behind “time” in Shakespeare!) This was when the Middle-ages were ACTUALLY ending – not, as we learned in school, because a German priest nailed his ideas to a church door, but because people IN PRACTICE had given up the idea that God determines everything probably ages ago – even though this was the official doctrine - and had started to make money by means of globalized trade, by printing books or playing theatre, and zealously improving their lives in any way imaginable – all the time still complaining about the hubris and greediness of their contemporaries who were trying to get ahead of God’s plan. (As it turned out, Protestantism became this great enterprise of aligning religion with capitalism, but - quite like we Europeans of the 21st century - people probably didn’t realize that “time” had already passed them by!) And where lots of money had already been made and handed down to the descendants, people suddenly might have found the time to think about sailing the coast of Britain or putting every little shit thing from the brewing of ale to the amount of conies in a certain place to paper and have it printed … There must have been a great acute consciousness of these dynamics in Elizabethan society, though. Lots of minds suddenly getting out from under the weight of traditions and the rigidness of received ideas, all kind of fusing together – amongst them this one guy called William Shakespeare who – even with one foot deeply rooted in literary tradition, as all great writers have to be - came (in my opinion!) to know more about the human soul than Freud ever did, just by digging ruthlessly into it with a quill. I exaggerated a bit and focused on the contradiction on purpose to emphasize the dynamics, but this is the kind of reality reading Holinshed constantly evokes in me. And it strikes me as exactly the right kind for tackling “Shakespeare” historically.
Besides, it was really useful to read some actual history to check my theories about it. Holinshed is a model historian, no doubt. Even by what I suppose to be contemporary standards, as to his endeavour to know and critically evaluate his sources, exactness, and even scientific reasoning, he is top-notch. Depending on their subject, contemporary historians just have more reliable sources or methods of evaluation at their disposal. Some ways of explaining things may appear weird to us, and some explanations are objectively false, but the way of explaining everything scientifically without once recurring on outdated notions like “God’s will” or “plan” far exceeds what I would have expected. And he is an absolute stickler for detail, what, I suppose, is required in a good historian. But – a thing not quite unknown to me! – he has serious issues about stopping himself. Like myself, he is compulsive about explanations and loves adding still one more example to prove his point. And, quite like a modern social scientist, he tries to add every statistic he can get his hands on. This was quite an eye-opener because I wasn’t aware that this EMPIRICISM started so much earlier than the 19th century! As a rule, this should make his compilation unreadable for non-historians, and it is sorely trying my patience and time budget, but it also enabled me to nail what I already knew to be the most important thing about history. Of course it is not “just” stories but this inexhaustible DATABASE of knowledge about a certain period in time – inexhaustible because there can always be more knowledge discovered and added at any time, either by me – for my own personal use – or in general, by historians. Such a database exists in me as well as outside of me, and even the part that is in me is already kind of infinite and mostly inaccessible because the biggest part of it is just a huge, disorganized heap of PASSIVE knowledge. And I can only guess at how big it must be by how appalling I am at quizzes in general and how great I am at multiple choice. And this is where the bit about story-telling comes in which I have already written about and was dissatisfied with. As reading Holinshed proved, history-writing as such is not, or not mainly, story-telling but collecting information about what existed and trying to explain how we came from point A to point B. (For Holinshed himself, though, the big “database part” of his chronicle was not history but a minute description of Britain at present. For us it becomes a part of the historic “knowledge base”.) As in fact quite often, the etymology got it exactly right by identifying “history” with “knowledge”. Statistics about conies are not stories, but they are meaningless unless context is added. Conies were a “commodity” at the time, not a pest, a “natural resource”, and why were they? This is where the story-telling begins because this strange fact of never leaving out the conies sparked my imagination about how people might have lived in these rural places, and from there it is only a small step towards rudimentary stories that are – especially for somebody like me who was greedy for stories from the time I began to think and speak – the best means to draw the adherent facts out of the database. There is a reason why I automatically came to equate history with story-telling.
