Who
would have thought that “The Tempest” would cause so much commotion? In fact,
the most unexpected and unlikely thing has happened. My friend read the posts
and wrote me an e-mail, stating that her reading had been completely different,
and delivering a comprehensive opinion about the play as she saw it. And this
is something that happened for the first time – in my life! – and a lot of
thoughts and conclusions were triggered by it which I will probably have
leisure to unravel here.
(There
appears to be nothing great to be expected or to be hoped for in the
foreseeable future anyway. Except maybe from the sixth series of “Doctor Who”,
as the fifth, which I had been worried about, was even particularly good. I
wouldn’t have thought that there might be a benefit in “losing” David Tennant,
but there was because the Tardis lost a great deal of “baggage” alongside him. And
Matt Smith is so creepy-looking that “we” just believe him to be an alien
without him doing a great deal of acting – but he is a really special actor on
top of that. And then I am just about to discover Christopher Eccleston, who
has “been around” far too long for not taking proper notice of him. But so, I
know, are many great British actors … Maybe “Sherlock” – I just looked, it’s
already out on dvd, but I am not even that keen on seeing it. Though, only a
few days ago, I realized that I missed Martin Freeman. Maybe “Sherlock” is next,
but there won’t be anything to write about. AND there will be a new series of
“House of Cards” sometime this year. At least for me. “Everybody else” has already
seen it, I suppose. I still don’t see anything that isn’t in the cinema or on
dvd. I KNOW that there is already a ninth series of “Doctor Who”! Probably even
a tenth somewhere “out there”…? It is not just that I will never find a place
where I want to be, so I can stay put because it doesn’t matter anyway. Instead
I am constantly travelling in time. I am apparently aiming at never being where
I am “supposed” to be. And, right now, it kind of worries me … But I suppose I
am doing most of this just to pass the time, waiting for extraordinary things
to happen. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to wait eight years – if this is
what it takes. At the moment, I cannot imagine anything at all …)
Meanwhile I have the time
to clear up a few issues that I came to think about as a result of reading the
e-mail. As great as this is – to receive a comprehensive opinion about the play
AS AN ANSWER to my posts – our ways of looking at things are not compatible.
Or, I should rather say, WHAT I DO is not compatible with the “usual” way of
looking at texts. And this is because determining the meaning of a text is NOT
what I do. It happens, of course, all the time, as a “byproduct” of reading,
but it is not what I am interested in. What I do is looking for what HAPPENS
when I am reading something – and probably speculating a great deal about what
happened when other people were reading it. I would never have written a word
in my blog about “The Tempest” if this inexplicable and exciting thing hadn’t happened
that I tried to describe. It was as if Simon Russell Beale, with a single
stroke, had activated the current of meaning running through the play, and the
vortex just began to work. The complete text, that had been impregnable to me,
suddenly made sense. THAT this happened is the only thing I am certain of. It
is what I tried to describe because I don’t want to forget it – ever! What I
determined as the OUTCOME of the vortex working - as well as what I supplanted
as the reasons for Simon Russell Beale to do what he did! - is basically just
speculation. So, determining meaning, for me, is not an entirely sensible or
serious way of dealing with texts, even though it is an inevitable part of the
process, especially when people have to come to an agreement about, for
example, the play they are rehearsing. But, I think, even there, understanding
is at least overrated. The most remarkable thing about Dover Wilson was probably
that he realized that it was much more important to figure out what HAPPENS in
“Hamlet” to get the play on a stage than, at any point, nail its meaning.
Nonetheless,
understanding is the only part of the process that is usually taken seriously
and which we are supposed to talk about. But it is not the serious and, so to
speak, REAL LIFE part of a text. It is not what fiction is for. And the reason I
know this is THE WAY everything changes when something like this moment in “The
Tempest” actually happens. And I always feel disproportionally gratified when
somebody identifies the impact the text had on THEM, this act of communication
and encounter with the text, as the really important and gratifying part of
working with it. It happens very seldom, but can happen, for example in
interviews with actors. Which doesn’t mean that this kind of communication happens
seldom – it is just that people aren’t fully conscious of it, or don’t feel
“safe” talking about it. “Interpretation”, for me, is not determining the meaning
of a text but creating a vortex in us, or by something we do, that will bring
the text to life.
Looking
into this, I can “activate” a lot of text-memories of this kind. Where
groundbreaking changes actually happened. And one of the “sound” reasons for
writing this blog has been to retrieve these moments and, by writing about
them, getting better at actually “having” and identifying them.
I still
remember this moment, about 27 years ago, in the middle of “Anton Reiser” - an
autobiographical novel from the 18th century about nothing but the
sheer horror of an unprotected life and the thwarted attempt of becoming an
actor, really nothing I would think of reading anymore! - where this guy
actually walks out through the gate of his town, where he has lived all his
life, FOR THE FIRST TIME, looking at the place from a distance. I’ll never
forget that moment, and how I understood something I would never have been able
to understand “in my life” because it doesn’t happen to us anymore. From the
time we are little we constantly move in and out of places, take the car, the
plane to wherever we fancy to go. Not infrequently without even having any
“business” to be there … For Anton Reiser there was never any inducement to
leave his little town, NO-THING for him outside it. I was thrilled, and, I
think, I was dead scared. I don’t know why, but I always had this thing about
places. My most frequent dreams are about scary places I have never seen, like
a huge attic with dark floors and no furniture at all but water running all the
way through the rooms instead …
And I
remember the moment when I “met” the dwarves for the first time, in the
Silmarillion, actually just looking at their backs as they were carrying their
dead king off the battlefield, singing a dirge!, after the “Battle of the
Unnumbered Tears”. It was a very sad moment, but a great one too because I
think it was the first time I understood the beautiful sadness which, in my
opinion, is such a hallmark of Tolkien, and probably the reason why I stayed in
Middle-earth so long. Why I am probably still staying …
And I
will never forget how I discovered “Kötluholt” when I travelled in Iceland. I
don’t even know what really happened at that moment. I remember it like few
single moments in my live – with the sunbeams slanting across the meadow,
reviving the green. And, somehow, getting it that this completely nondescript
place, just because it was still on the map and through this woman, Katla,
connected to the saga, must have been a real place, where real people lived. I
might as well have been wrong about this because people might have remembered
the place BECAUSE of the saga. But I didn’t think so … This was probably “just”
a great moment – though a tad scary as well, realizing that something like time-travelling
(in space) actually happens, even if it is just for a moment. I think now that
the moment was really about what made the sagas so fascinating for me that I am
still reading them, even though they have lost most of their gloss. This dynamic,
kind of singularly determined process of converting “real life” into text,
which, undergoing many stages, from being told and memorized to being written
centuries later, and being read between seven and eight hundred years later
still, ending up as something completely different and, basically,
impenetrable, like a very thick wall. And then, in the blink of an eye, through
an incredibly tiny crack in the wall, I could actually LOOK at one of the places
where it all began …
And –
yes! I just remembered EXACTLY what happened when I saw “The Crucible” in 2015.
I went to the cinema because I wanted to see Richard Armitage. I didn’t even
really remember the film until I began to look for that sentence. I don’t even
remember the sentence word for word, but I obviously started to remember the
film, looking for that sentence, and suddenly all my memories were back. And
that was when things started to become really interesting. It must have been a
great sentence, otherwise it wouldn’t have been the only quote I remembered from
the film. But it also “lashed out” and struck me at the time, and something
happened. It created meaning by creating an injury which grew into a scar. And,
twenty years later, the scar was STILL there … Reading “The Tempest”, one of
the most interesting things was how difficult it was for me to take the play
seriously – even when I saw it performed. With something like this happening it
became “serious” in no time at all. And I am still not keen to retrieve that
sentence - nor the other one I remember explicitly to have “struck” me, seeing
the play in 2015.
It is
strange, by the way, that I appear to remember the painful, sad, creepy, or
horrible moments in this way. In real life I tend to forget these as fast as I
can and remember the good things. Especially right now I appear to be on the
hunt for “dark things”. And, for no reason I know of, easily tainted by
depression. I watched “Desperate Romantics” once all the way through because it
was good, and I had to know where this was going, but then tried to “get rid of
it” as fast as I could. Too late, of course. Definitely left a bruise. I don’t
actually know why it was so great, seeing “The Crucible”, to find the old scar.
I even know people are in love with their scars, but why??? Maybe because they
carry the proof on their skin that something actually happened, even though it
was disagreeable …
And one
very creepy thing of this kind just happened when I read Austen again. There is
a new BBC film, “Love & Friendship”, based on “Lady Susan” which hasn’t
been adapted for the screen yet, as far as I know. I didn’t like the novel but
came to like the film, at least after having got used to what they are doing.
And the adaptation was especially interesting because, being played and “freed”
from the moral corset of the text, almost all the characters appeared to obtain
a different “value” in the text than they had when I read it. Without any blatant
inconsistencies between them and the characters in the book. It is interesting
because, in the book, there is a strong tendency to be led in a certain
direction, an inducement to judge people, and this is probably kind of
comforting, to know where we stand, but it is as well dull. Actually seeing
these characters – played “nontrivially”, as usually in BBC productions (the
only sad exception, in this case, being Lady Susan herself), was disturbing. It
automatically triggered a notion that things are not what they seem – or rather
that there are as many points of view on what happens as there are people
involved in the story. I particularly noticed the character of Manwaring – who
doesn’t even really “appear” in the book, except as this ominous but somehow
influential presence in the background. And Lochlann o’Mearáin (will I really
have to remember that name?) plays EXACTLY this – which I would have thought to
be impossible to play. As in the book, he doesn’t have a single line to say but
somehow makes his presence more portentous, and “telling”, and kind of erotically
promising than he might have done talking all the time. I probably always
noticed that fettered sexuality is a powerful “drive” in “Austen”. And it is
also, as fettered and maimed sexuality tends to be, a sharp indication WHERE
things are going wrong the way “society” handles them. The famous moment when
Colin Firth is taking off his shirt in “Pride & Prejudice” isn’t even my
favourite “taking off their shirt” moment of all times, but it is SO
LIBERATING! Somehow, “the BBC” finally seemed to get it that, to make what
Austen wrote work, it has to be the MEN who are attractive. In “Lady Susan”
Manwering doesn’t even have to take off anything. He just has to stand there,
smiling upon the fray with detached irony, looking attractive and KNOWING IT …
I don’t really want to know what would have happened if they had found someone
“matching” for Lady Susan …? Even as it was, the whole thing was kind of
“flipped over” in my mind, and the meaning the book “suggests” completely
uprooted, or undermined. And I like to think that Jane Austen would have liked
this. There are writers “we” will still underestimate as long as we read them.
And I relish the thought that she might have underestimated herself, or rather her text, “inadvertendly” cooking up something that finally became too hot to
handle …
And this
is exactly the kind of thing I love about texts, and what I am constantly
looking for. Determining meaning is a very small thing in comparison. I even partly
dislike it because it tends to stop things happening. We just stop the process
by determining where it ends. But we never know where it ends.
There is of course a contradiction involved
because I was so delighted to have acquired a “complete” UNDERSTANDING of a
Shakespeare play. That was naïve, of course, it wasn’t complete. Such a thing
as a complete understanding of one of Shakespeare’s plays cannot even exist.
I’ll always be wrong, as long as I read, this is the only thing that is
certain! And that I am wrong quite often, and kind of like it, at least when there is a chance of finding out why. Nonetheless this
notion of a complete understanding exists, and even makes sense. It appears to
be time for a quick think about “interpretation”, and this will probably be my
next post. How to separate the “rubbish” from the “hard facts”, and what might be the benefit of doing it.
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