Why raise a tempest? – about tragedy and the hard fact of “transcendental” guilt

The interesting thing about my reading “The Tempest” was that I was obviously looking for tragedy from the beginning and couldn’t find it. It is almost as if, reading Shakespeare, I am always looking for tragedy, and I think this is true. It is most obvious when I am reading comedy because I am never really pleased until I have dug up the tragic bits, and only then I feel as if the whole thing BEGINS to make sense. Reading “The Tempest” the same thing happened but I somehow started barking up the wrong tree. This is really interesting as well as it happened because I followed Simon Russell Beale too closely. Even more interesting because I KNEW that I was doing it and should be wary, which is documented in my first “Tempest” post when I remarked on directors trusting actors, which, I think, is essential but might go wrong as often as not. And, where the audience is concerned, it is exactly the same. Not trusting lead actors isn’t really an option because they have to make the text THEIR OWN to be successful, and we’ll just fall out of the text if we don’t follow them. In this case, it WAS Simon Russell Beale who made me become genuinely interested in the play. But it is also dangerous to take over their point of view.

In this case it wasn’t that Simon Russell Beale did anything “wrong”, as far as I can judge. It is of course impossible to get “everything” out of any of the lead characters in “Shakespeare”, like Hamlet, or Lear, or Prospero, not just because they are so complex but because there are contradictions involved that cannot be “solved” by acting. As I wrote already, I experienced the comparatively “relaxed” approach that Simon Russell Beale found for Prospero as adequate and revealing. At the same time it was important to him to show Prospero as a limited, fallible human being, instead of the great magician in charge of everything. There was also something in his interview to the purpose, so I should have got this right. But this is also the limit of what he, as an actor, could do to approach tragedy. (I think one of the reasons I like him so much is that I have the same distrust of tragedy being approached “head on” – though this can be great when it works! – and valued his attempts to find it in the alley-ways, surprising “us” with his find.) WITHIN the play, tragedy doesn’t happen to Prospero, it is rather about him undoing the tragic setting of his past – successfully! So he gets lucky and ultimately escapes the fate of becoming a tragic hero who is FORCED to look into the abyss of “transcendental” guilt. But this doesn’t mean that there isn’t any.

I think that what my friend did first was to nail the tragic impact of the play, stating Prospero’s guilt, which appears to be the most direct and efficient approach to understand what is really going on here. Why Prospero is doing all this. I didn’t do it, which left me forever in the dark chasing for clues. Of course I like doing this, adopting my favourite attitude of “I know that I don’t know”. But in this case it was a bit ridiculous as it is exactly what I have been doing so often, searching for tragedy. There appears to have been a benefit in making it difficult, though. I realized that, thinking so hard about it, I finally found the CONCEPT that did the trick. Trying to define the exact nature of Prospero’s guilt, I found the adjective “TRANSCENDENTAL” to distinguish it from the layer of PERSONAL guilt I had already discovered and analyzed. And it turned out to be one of these magic words that began to move things in my head about so that they could finally fall into place. I found that, finally, I had got as close to tragedy as I probably can –  but first I have to state the exact nature of Prospero’s guilt.

In fact, it is something quite obvious in “Shakespeare” which I identified many times, especially reading my favourites, the histories. But I was blind to it reading “The Tempest”, following closely the “little” human being on the stage, and pursuing guilt only on a personal level. Of course this is also an important matter in the play: that Prospero destroyed his own future, and the future of his daughter!, by burying himself in his books, letting his villainous brother take over the business of the state which puts him in a position to depose Prospero. And I even think it is safe to assume that Prospero feels guilty about this, but that he has suppressed this feeling and focuses on the business at hand: his revenge, and the reversion of the situation he has caused. Because this is what “we” all do with personal guilt. And, I think, Simon Russell Beale really hit the point by insisting that Prospero is EXACTLY LIKE US. But, first of all, he was the Duke of Milan, and that means his failure and guilt cannot be reduced to a personal level. It is, of course, what “we”, as people of the 21^st century, always do. (I noticed this again, quite recently, finally having bought “Macbeth” with Michael Fassbender on dvd.) But, in “Shakespeare”, this is not just plot. It is one of the structural bits that hold the universe together. The ruler who fails to do a proper job is not just guilty of his own downfall. He, as the representative of god’s justice on earth, the executor of god’s “business”, has upset the balance of god’s plans. And this is “transcendental” guilt – something that is beyond the reach of human forgiveness. It is the part of guilt which people get crucified or hanged for, that cannot be “undone”, and requires the blood of the “sacrificial ram” of tragedy to scour its traces off the face of the earth. This kind of guilt can only be “managed” by tragedy, that is, as many deaths as possible, since sacrificial rams are no longer available. Even though I feel that blood on the stage is kind of not good, for some reason I imagine LOTS of blood when it comes to “Macbeth”. There is rarely another option in “Shakespeare” – which is one of the reasons that makes “The Tempest” such an interesting and singular play. But to “undo” what is done requires at least extraordinary measures. I am pleased to notice that my initial question: WHY RAISE A TEMPEST? was EXACTLY the right one. Of course it is a great challenge - and great fun! - for producers to get all these special effects on the stage. But, at least in the theatre, there has to be a REAL reason “behind” all this. And the really strange thing about it is that “we” kind of still understand it, though we MIGHT be on the brink of finally getting rid of tragedy.

Simon Russell Beale approaching tragedy tentatively – as something no longer to be taken for granted! – is a good example. As well as myself pursuing the angle of guilt and revenge, and forgiveness, exclusively on a personal level to worm my way into the play. And this after “The Crucible” provided me with the surprising EXPERIENCE that tragedy still works … But it remains difficult to “believe” in it, and probably should be. And my stellar example has always been “Macbeth”, especially the fact that this play doesn’t seem to “work” anymore as I think it is supposed to. Because “Macbeth” is the “purest” tragedy I know, being almost a hundred percent about transcendental guilt. There might be a lot to be said against this, especially from an actor’s perspective, but in this case I hold firm to the belief that transcendental guilt is AT THE CENTRE of the play and affects everything that happens. But in a world where transcendental guilt basically doesn’t make any sense anymore there should be a problem.

This is the reason I’ll bring up the recent “Macbeth” film with Michael Fassbender once more. I went to see it in the cinema twice because I couldn’t make up my mind about it. I still couldn’t, in the end, but I apparently didn’t like it that much that I instantly bought it when it was available on dvd. I finally did, feeling “guilty” that I hadn’t. After all, it was “Macbeth”, and it was Michael Fassbender, and I at least had appreciated it very much that they didn’t make a sleek “mainstream” version of the story but kind of turned it into a big, brutal lump that was difficult to swallow. I remember how I didn’t get it that anybody would recommend it to the “Game of Thrones” crowd. Maybe I just got “Game of Thrones” completely wrong (???) but it struck me as quite “smooth” and artificial, whereas, in “Macbeth”, they tried to wrangle Shakespeare “down to earth” as much as they possibly could. I am glad that I bought it and watched it on my very small screen because there the effect of being overwhelmed by great landscapes and powerful battle sequences was reduced, and I was better able to analyze what they actually did. Maybe that way it was even more of a brutal lump, with all the important sentences cruelly wrenched out of context. But I understood as well that it is necessary to do something like this – or at least something quite extreme - to get the play on screen in a contemporary version. If this was entirely successful is probably not for me to judge. But the acting made more sense as well, at least where Michael Fassbender is concerned. I was a bit suspicious - of me! - when the acting was so generally appreciated by critics, and I couldn’t see it. Now I finally could – though it made only partially sense, and I didn’t really enjoy it. But, if I had absolutely to decide – which I am glad I haven’t! – I would chose Michael Fassbender as the best actor I have ever seen. Just because I like to see acting as the art of the impossible, and he appears to find a convincing or surprising solution for EVERYTHING. He really has the most uncanny imagination and somehow never falls back onto the commonplace. The only total fuck-up I have seen – and there HAS to be something, considering how much he has played in the last years – was in “Jane Eyre” where he basically did NOTHING. But I suppose this was some stupid director TELLING him what to do, and he probably did EXACTLY that.

The reason for bringing up the film is that it is such a brilliant example of what happens when transcendental guilt is completely “taken out” of the text. They were really careful to eliminate EVERYTHING that relates to it by “destroying” the context or creating a new one. (I am afraid I still missed a lot of the new context because I didn’t find their way of doing it very persuading.) This I already noticed seeing it in the cinema, but now I could see it even better. And kind of appreciated it because it supports my theory about why “Macbeth” is so difficult if it isn’t performed as the usual kind of “action thriller” that it is AS WELL. To eliminate transcendental guilt would be much harder to do on a stage than in a film, where there is more freedom to change the context, but to really take it seriously may also get us into deep shit. At least I don’t have any convincing solution, not surprisingly, because it is a problem for actors to solve. (Maybe Michael Fassbender would crack it, playing Macbeth on a stage …)

Which brings me back to Arthur Miller and “The Crucible” which is, I think, where all of this began. First of all, he really is one of the sharpest, most analytical writers I know, and he is kind of my last advocate for tragedy, and should have the last word in this discussion. This will become difficult and daring, especially because I don’t “have” the text. So my argument hinges almost exclusively on what happened to me when I watched it.

I think I began to understand tragedy BEING AFFECTED BY IT, unlike when I read Shakespeare where I took it for granted. And I think Arthur Miller did a really smart and amazing thing. He knew that he WANTED tragedy because he meant to achieve what only tragedy could do. First of all, tragedy is a means of HIGHLIGHTING a story, or any content that might actually have happened, to publicly mark it down as a scandal. I already wrote somewhere that the play is complex because it has at least three storylines which are intertwined. The general, “political” story of events about the seventeenth century witch-hunt in Salem, the story of a marriage, and the story of John Proctor’s guilt and “redemption”. And the REASON why Arthur Miller wanted to tell this story is to condemn the persecution of the intelligentsia under McCarthy as a witch-hunt and an absolute scandal. So he felt that he needed kind of the strongest tool he could forge to work on the minds of the audience. And this, apparently, was, and probably still is, TRAGEDY.

And, somehow, he still “knew” that tragedy hinges on guilt, and not just ANY guilt but some kind of transcendental guilt to make it work, because, without it, there would be just what is often called “tragedy” nowadays but would more aptly be called “catastrophe”. Catastrophe is of course very important as well, plot-wise, but it is somehow not enough to carry the message. It might be because catastrophe is just random. It could happen to anyone, whereas transcendental guilt is less random and works stronger on our moral and emotional setting, forging some kind of necessary link between guilt and “punishment”.

This is one of the features that I think makes “The Crucible” not just a great play but a work of genius. Of course Arthur Miller didn’t “believe” in transcendental guilt – not anymore than his audience did. The crucial thing for him was to bring his tragic hero as close to the audience as he could, so he locates the concept of transcendental guilt entirely “outside” of John Proctor’s consciousness. I doubt that he even has an “honest” notion of his own guilt, even though he acts guilty towards his wife because he knows exactly what he stands accused of. It is probably quite pointless to speculate about this, but it makes the whole story so much more attractive, as his conviction that he hasn’t really DONE anything enhances the ABSURDITY of the whole situation. (At least it struck me about that first encounter between Abigail and John Proctor that he didn’t ACT guilty, and I felt this to be one of the things they had done right, unlike I remembered it from the film …) In any case, it is quite obvious that he wouldn’t have anything to do with TRANSCENDENTAL guilt, even if he had the time to dwell on it. Like other tragic heroes he has both hands full holding catastrophe at bay. Macbeth, for example, clearly confronts transcendental guilt immediately after the murder of Duncan. But this is just a moment of “weakness” – afterwards he just has to act. Of course Macbeth has murdered his king and upset the divine order of things, and he knows it. John Proctor might not have done anything “bad” at all – depending on our point of view. (There were at least three I could think of taking, none of them my own …) Still, Arthur Miller needed him “as” a tragic hero, he needed him to be “pinned down” by transcendental guilt. And the really clever thing he did is to hold onto transcendental guilt but locate it “outside” of John Proctor. In my opinion it plays a crucial role in the relationship between John Proctor and his wife, and at one of the turning points in the play. Because Elizabeth Proctor thinks of what her husband has done IN TERMS OF transcendental guilt. In her opinion he has threatened the order of things. (And he might have threatened her life for all we know! And for all she knows because the only thing SHE knows is that she cannot trust him anymore.) Here transcendental guilt became really important for me to understand the play, even as the last piece still missing to solve my personal puzzle (– though I am quite sure “we” can understand it without falling back on transcendental guilt at all!). To understand that it isn’t just spite, but that there is A REASON why THERE IS NO WAY she will ever forgive her husband, seeing HER OWN LIFE as a failure if her marriage fails. Basically, it’s the same as in “Shakespeare”: if we fail in a “transcendental” way, EVERYTHING fails. More important, in my opinion this is her reason for lying about what John Proctor has done. Seeing what he did as transcendental guilt – the kind of guilt people get “crucified” for – she cannot bring herself to publicly pin that on him. But this becomes fatal for him because his defense depends on his conviction that she would never lie. Transcendental guilt combined with “plot-irony” – a deadly concoction! (And absolute genius, of course!) To bring all this “down” entirely to a personal level kind of takes the spike out of it – as it does in “The Tempest”.

The “spike” actually is a good metaphor – or maybe rather something like a “thorn in the flesh”. It brings me back to the point: why I don’t really “believe” in interpretation (anymore). I like to think about what I am doing in terms of reading. (Not least to indicate that it is NOT interpretation!) But I am very well aware that what I am doing is not JUST reading. I might be misusing reading as a substitute for writing because, if I cannot DO anything with texts, I am not happy. And what I did when I was writing fiction was to analyze what makes a text WORK. Basically, I started to write something, and then I got back to it, trying to assess if it works, and why, because I needed this assessment to know how to get on with it. If there is something in the text that works it will go on working, and the text will begin to write itself. For example, at one time I never had anything to write about, and I would invariably write love stories because a love story, if it is any good, never fails to engender a text and make it go forward. I suppose this is why we have to deal with so many totally pointless love stories in fiction: apart from holding the reader’s attention (as the reader, basically, is female!) it automatically keeps the story running. (Of course, I never judged mine to be pointless, but this judgment might have been limited to myself.) And tragedy is certainly the same, in this respect: We always know where it is going, and the AWARENESS of what is going on is certainly enhanced by the pain the transcendental “spike” threatens to inflict.

So, even though I cannot say that I really understand it, I am pretty sure that the greatest strength of tragedy is its power of ANALYSIS. I often notice this when there is “tragic” irony, for example in Shakespeare’s comedies: I am suddenly convinced that things HAVE to be that way, and can explain WHY. So, ominously, tragedy appears to be one of the most efficient tools to make us “discover” the truth - not least about ourselves. When I saw “The Crucible” in 2015 I was convinced that what I discovered about myself was some kind of truth – as opposed to the ideas I fabricated to somehow “patch up” my stupid and pointless life. But this is why we might “need” tragedy, and why it worked in this way, making me feel like shit for days to show me that there was something I HAD to deal with. I am fully aware that my life is basically stupid, and pointless, and a lie, as are the lives of virtually all the people I know. But I always tell myself that I have no right to think so, where other people are concerned, and of course I don’t WANT to think so about myself. But I still do. And, as I know EXACTLY what is missing in my life that would make it meaningful, IF I can bring myself to consider it, there is no point in lying anyway.

Maybe the best proof I have had as yet is the “Macbeth” film I mentioned because there we can see what happens when we “take out” tragedy. Basically, the potential of analysis is gone. Everything becomes random, and the text tends to become this “lump” where even the beautiful and interesting moments I could see didn’t really “yield” anything because they weren’t related to anything I could read. And it is really important that “analysis”, in this context, isn’t a detached activity of the brain, but rather a brutal, visceral way of moving really big chunks of our emotional setting and deeply rooted convictions about so that they start to make more sense. I am constantly taken by surprise about the potential of “Shakespeare” to make this happen, but I have to WORK on it. And part of this work is searching for tragedy, as tragedy appears to do this “moving about” more efficiently than most other forms of writing - which might be why “we” still need it. In a way, impending tragedy CHARGES the text in a way nothing else can.

I think this is what happened to me watching “The Crucible” when I was looking for that sentence (from the film) in the first encounter of John Proctor and Abigail Williams. (And it happened in a particularly personal and single-minded way which, of course, threatens interpretation.) This was the moment when something of me “got” into the text, and I was not just outside anymore, admiring and analyzing, but inside, “participating”, EXPECTING something to happen. Kind of wishing that it might happen (again.) Then it didn’t, and I could not fail to analyze THAT. Of course the sentence was there, I even remember hearing it. It is a sentence Abigail says, and which I had originally mistook for an indication that a moment of real intimacy had happened between them. Of course I had singled out that sentence because there had been some matching content “in me” about how I had felt about love relationships, and I discovered that this content was STILL there. (Which means I kind of “believed” in it still, and I think I was really ashamed of it, but as well pleased.) Then the way this scene was played (see above!) made it so obvious that I had been WRONG that I didn’t even waste time with being disappointed but ACTIVELY “threw out” this content AT THAT MOMENT. And, I think, losing this “key moment”, I kind of lifted a screen of illusions and personal bullshit, and got very directly and very deeply into the heart of the matter. And, approaching the end, hit on another sentence that struck me forcefully. I don’t “have” this sentence either, and am probably glad about it. It was Elizabeth Proctor explaining WHY she hadn’t been able to love her husband properly. And this one, I think, created a new scar – one that I came to like much better than the old one. Not right away, of course, but after about three very disagreeable days I “confronted” it again, and, recovering from the shock, was able to analyze it. It must have been one of these absolutely beautiful, “scalpel-like” sentences as well, by the way …

So, there is certainly always a measure of interpretation on board when we go on these journeys, especially as a starting point, but powerful text – and, in these cases, powerful acting – always achieves to toss this kind of personal content about, overthrow it, or make it come to the surface. And, in the end, we might even come on shore in an entirely different place than the one we thought we were headed for.

Why raise a tempest? – about the ontological difference between hard facts and rubbish, and why hard facts actually ARE important

As I wrote already, I usually don’t do “interpretation” but of course it comes into it all the time when I am reading. Nonetheless I stick to it that it is NOT THE SAME THING as reading but only a comparatively small part of it. Which means that, describing my reading, I am NOT automatically producing an interpretation of a text, even though it must appear so to somebody who is reading my posts because, naturally, they would be more interested in my conclusions, not in how and why I got there, which is all I am interested in. For this reason it is important to state that my posts are NOT what I would be satisfied with IN TERMS OF INTERPRETATION. I am basically just describing what actually happened, what the text “did” with me. And a still much bigger and tremendously important part of reading – which is also difficult to turn into text – is of course HAVING FUN. Having actually written about Schiller I can now conveniently use his notion of “serious playing” for what I think “we” are doing when we are reading “relevant” fictional texts. Which suggests that we partake in a dynamic, ongoing activity, ENJOYING it. Interpretation is just determining what a text means, an activity which basically consists of two areas which should be clearly separated but never are: HARD FACTS and RUBBISH. And in between these two areas of description there lies the uncertain and slippery ground of “serious” interpretation. As everything to do with fiction, it is a dynamic and fleeting PROCESS as well, potentially unfinished in any case and very difficult to control – and I would never have written a word about it if I hadn’t been “provoked” by the e-mail I got as an answer to my “Tempest” posts. And, thinking about it, hit on something important where my reading of the play went wrong.

Interpretation, as a combination of hard facts and rubbish, is not limited to fiction. It appears in almost any area of life, science, and wherever we are supposed to produce opinions. To give a graphic example: When anthropologists dig up any new human bones the hard facts are the scientific description of these bones and of all the other bones they have ever found which can, by serious scientific criteria, be linked to them. The conclusions they draw from the find - where they put it within the system of conclusions they have already drawn - are more or less rubbish, at least all the conclusions anybody who is not an anthropologist might ever want to know anything about. And somewhere “in between” the description of hard facts and the rubbish that gets published in “New Scientist” lies the narrow and uncertain ground of serious interpretation. Anthropologists will certainly disagree, but they are such a textbook example because almost all the hard facts concerning human evolution are destroyed, or still lie somewhere buried in the ground where nobody will ever find them. So, every time they dig up something relevant, most of their past conclusions are just blown to bits. And it is my favourite example to explain (to myself!) why I don’t bother with interpretation. TAKEN STRICTLY SERIOUSLY it yields very little of interest, all we ever do is to make all these big and small “leaps of faith”, just JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS. Everybody does it where fiction is concerned, and I was probably one of the very few students who even developed a conscience about it, thinking that interpretation was what I SHOULD be doing. Studying philosophy and theory of science as well as literature, I was uncomfortably aware of the ontological difference between knowledge and opinions, hard facts and rubbish.

Another activity I cannot be bothered with – or can be less and less the older I become – is BELIEVING. Nonetheless TRUTH is such an important notion to me, and so should interpretation be because it is supposed to be the realm of truth. And I think this has always been really important to me. I just didn’t really get it then that fiction is NOT SUPPOSED to produce truth in the same way, and of the same kind, as science or philosophy. I also always had this uncanny feeling that the really important things of life are what nobody ever tells you. And, actually, the truth we find reading is not the kind of “boring” and reassuring truth we find elsewhere. Where people are better qualified than we are ourselves to explain the world to us. It is where we find OUR OWN TRUTH. It is – which I never became aware of before – in fact the realm where good, beauty and truth are THE SAME THING because things are only HAPPENING there when they are relevant TO US. And, even though this realm is as “subjective” as can be, hard facts are EVEN MORE CRUCIAL than in many other areas.

This is a hell of a big bite at a time. Of course I exaggerated to “prove” to myself HOW MUCH I believe this. But I actually got scared of it myself, so I’ll try examples again to explain (to myself) what I mean.

This conviction of what I think is good and beautiful and true is of course the reason why I always prefer BBC adaptations of books to any others. Not just because they are beautiful but because they are “true” in the sense that the people who made them were more interested in the “hard facts” of the text than in the bits that might sell the films to an audience – which is usually all people making adaptations for the cinema are interested in. And, even though I myself had a very different opinion, I could always understand people who declared the Tolkien films to be rubbish, because they are, in fact, as what we actually SEE is about ninety per cent common action film rubbish, IF you cannot see Middle-earth “behind” all of this. To see Middle-earth you have yourself to have a notion of what Middle-earth is, and the more you know about it, the more your notion is based on Tolkien’s books, the better the films become. I think the roundabout reason why I love the films so much is that I started to understand quite early on HOW INCREDIBLY CLOSELY everybody was looking at the books. This applies to every area of filmmaking, especially visually. Looking incessantly at the “facts” – even though Tolkien quite often doesn’t give us any! – desperately searching for facts, even kind of “inventing” them, using the books - explains that such creatures as Smaug, or Tree-Beard, or different kinds of orcs – or Gollum, of course! - turned out so unique. That even being a hobbit is far from trivial is, I believe, the eternal contribution to world literature that Martin Freeman delivered. Before him there were a lot of hobbits, quite like everybody might understand them superficially, but what BEING A HOBBIT might mean was basically left for him to define. And, having already fabricated wild speculations about the fact that they basically employed BRITISH actors to make these films, I suddenly realize that the connection between my two examples is NOT entirely random. Apart from the convenience of them already speaking “proper” English, they are just the people who, having been employed in all these BBC productions, having been “raised” with them, know how to handle these things. Just, for a start, being used to the notion that there is ALWAYS ANYTHING ANYWHERE IN THE TEXT that is more important and valuable than what is in our own head. Or that might trigger the “non-trivial” thoughts and conclusions in our own head. Of course I was impressed and delighted by Richard Armitage reading former versions of “The Hobbit” looking for the changes Tolkien made concerning his character. There is a big, fat lot about hobbits and Bilbo Baggins, just sitting there waiting for the right actor to come and use it, whereas about dwarves there is comparatively little – especially in “The Hobbit”, and especially about Thorin Oakenshield there is JUST NOT ENOUGH they could and would use. So, looking for “facts” becomes kind of existential. The facts, as such, might not even be much to look at, but WHERE THERE ARE FACTS, any kind of firm ground, a serious “leap of faith” becomes possible. If we BELIEVE in the facts we have already begun to build a structure of our own, to create a “vortex”, and enough of beautiful “rubbish” will automatically follow …

So, basically, where interpretation is concerned, I am more impressed with somebodies digging up hard facts and very little impressed with – or actually suspicious of – any daring conclusions. I think that was why I stayed with Dover Wilson all those hundreds of pages: because he actually was after the hard facts and displayed such a thorough and efficient method of digging. So, at first, I put my friend’s opinions to one side, as they just appeared to be the usual “rubbish”, though I became interested in looking for contradictions. Looking for these contradictions probably triggered my interest in interpretation that appeared to have been fast asleep for about twenty-five years. All I ever wanted to do was to GET CLOSER to fictional texts, by writing and reading them, and I obviously had discarded interpretation as inefficient and unsatisfactory. But, as in other cases of throwing out things, I was of course partially wrong.

At first, starting to compare and to actually separate hard facts from rubbish, I was more than a bit pissed off to find how thin the layer of hard facts was on which the rubbish I had produced grew thick like a rainforest studded with exotic flowers. But, looking into it, it became more and more interesting to use the DISTINCTION. For example, I had to concede that the “theatre angle” – which was one of the first things I “dug up” – isn’t really based on facts. I was intrigued by the allusions to the wardrobe, and of course wondering about the amount of “pageant” going on. But Shakespeare is always playing with “theatre stuff”, and the main reason for having spirits perform is probably to amaze and entertain the audience. There is nothing wrong with speculating about it, especially if there is other rubbish “playing into it”, but basically there are no HARD facts to support it that I could find. And the theatre angle was one of the pivotal parts of my interpretation – if I could be bothered to call it that.

At least there are more facts to base the “Freud angle” on – and I used it myself, trying to dodge Freud at the same time. I used it when I suggested that Ariel is what Prospero considers to be perfect and beautiful and sublime. (I might not even be right about this because he takes him for granted!) And, as I think being actually based on facts, observed that Prospero genuinely FEARS Caliban. So, even though I personally hate it, employing the superego and the subconscious to “get rid” of Ariel and Caliban is okay – as long as we are aware of the fact that Freud didn’t DISCOVER the superego and the subconscious but INVENTED them to be able to tackle some very tangible problems of mental illness that nobody was able to deal with. That they basically are a METAPHOR. And I consciously scattered it, trying to demonstrate that Ariel and Caliban are much too “alive” to do this to them. But these are just different ways of looking at it. That I HAD to deal with it, that “we” will forever look at them in a Freudian way is NOT in any way COINCIDENTAL because it is just the most efficient contemporary metaphor for something Shakespeare stated about the human condition by using his method of “participating observation” applied with “scientific” precision. And there I arrived at the first bit of hard evidence I could actually dig up in the process, though it is probably not something that couldn’t be contested.

But there is very little else, if anything, of the kind of hard facts that cannot be contested apart from a faithful description of the text as in Dover Wilson, with very few “leaps”. And this, as such, doesn’t get us anywhere. But there are hard facts that don’t come out of the text itself but out of COMPARING it with other texts. And I think I am not the only person who incessantly uses other texts to make sense of texts. Usually texts that have nothing to do with the text I am reading. As I am doing this automatically there is nothing I can do about it, and I am only becoming aware of it when I am getting “results”. It is just something “we” do when we are reading. But in terms of determining meaning it might be a bad move because the connection is random. It is not, though, when the connection between the two texts is not random, similar to my example about human bones and context. To compare a play to other Shakespeare plays makes of course sense and can yield the kind of hard facts I am looking for. And there is no other play I know where any character is put into such a central position as Prospero, managing everything, with every aspect and character in the play defined in relation to him. I used this observation, as my friend did, I think, and I believe that we basically came to the same conclusion - using the knowledge that it was the last play Shakespeare wrote “on his own” to back it up - namely that there is a BIOGRAPHICAL ANGLE. That Shakespeare somehow wrote himself “into” the play, identifying with Prospero more than with any character we know about. (Deducing this from the fact that it was the last play he wrote on his own, by the way, would be conjecture! But it is one of these bits of knowledge that can back up facts that actually come from a faithful description of the text. And ONLY THEN can they be of any interest for a serious interpretation.)

I think we basically drew the same conclusion from this fact, but the rubbish we deduced was quite different. And this, in my opinion, is very interesting as well because one of the reasons why interpretation always gets “tripped up” at some point is the fact that texts, and reading, are such an infinitely complex and dynamic matter. My friend made a much more efficient use of this single relevant observation by actually defining all the meaning any other character “gives off” in relation to Prospero. In terms of criticism and efficiency this is a great interpretation because, at least if my assumption where it is all deduced from is correct, it makes COMPLETE sense. But I obviously didn’t want to do this, probably because I assumed it wouldn’t make any sense on the stage. Even if we have decided that Ariel is Prospero’s superego we will still want to know what he is like in this production we are going to see. At least I suppose “we” are still CURIOUS about him. Otherwise, what would be the point of going to the theatre? One of the fundamental observations I have made out of my very limited experience is that Shakespeare’s plays make most sense when ALL the single characters are played as complex human beings IN THEIR OWN RIGHT. So, the most serious setback of interpretation, in my opinion, is that it CAN be used to just STOP the text working. I “used” the biographical angle differently, focusing on Prospero and what happens to him. I might not be a good critic – in fact, I AM NOT! – but probably more of a participating observer, like Shakespeare was.

But - notwithstanding that I dislike it when interpretation is used to stop the text working – it is as well the most powerful part of reading that gets the text going because, WHEN WE HIT THE POINT, a lot of facts are just “drawn” to it, and the whole thing begins to make sense. I consciously observed this process recently, seeing the National Theatre’s “Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (in the cinema). I had seen the play only once, ages ago, and I didn’t really remember what it was “about”. In the beginning it was just great fun to observe Imelda Staunton gathering momentum in a hell of an American accent, and to speculate if she would still have a voice when the play would be done and not really be able to believe it. I just love it when actors are suddenly so different that I wouldn’t have recognized them from anything else I saw them play! And there was even a lot more in her still than I could have imagined … It was entertaining but, for quite a while, I didn’t make any conjectures about what was the point of all this ranting until, quite suddenly, a “theory” formed in my head what the two of them might be about. I remember this moment distinctly, though I forgot what exactly brought it on. But, from this moment, I enjoyed it a lot more because I suddenly knew “where” I was. I wasn’t “lost” anymore, and (almost) everything that was happening made sense. I think if I hadn’t hit the point – and this is something that happens quite often when I am not really interested in the story, as I wasn’t! – even with these great actors I would have got lost in the noise, and the performance would have gone on “without” me. (What is also important is that it was only partly a thought or a conclusion, that it didn’t happen “intellectually”, or rather that the reason for forming a theory was being MOVED by something, somehow being convinced that these people are not just horrible, but “real” human beings who DESERVE to be taken seriously and their predicaments worth looking into. There it was Conleth Hill as George who gets most of the credit. I just couldn’t believe it how much human depth he gave to this character, and how much “impact” he had on everything that was happening on that stage.)

Going over this again I noticed that the “almost” in “ALMOST everything … made sense” is quite important. In fact there was A LOT that didn’t make sense – even a lot MORE than what MADE sense but it doesn’t appear so when we are reading because what makes sense automatically takes precedence. One of the most important things about reading, which defies interpretation, is that I NOTICE and kind of relish it that is doesn’t go smoothly. Of course, in real life, I like things to go smoothly, and, even though they do at the moment, I notice it almost every time and consider it to be a miracle. It is somehow not how I think it “should” be, how things “really” work. I always fear that there must be something wrong with it. Dealing with texts, I need some kind of theory to get the whole thing going, but I notice and like the “grinding” at the same time. It is how I assess that the text is “real”, respectively: has a life of its own. If it always was what I “meant” it to be, I don’t think I would even want to bother with it. I’d probably be reduced to watching stupid ball games like “everybody” else.

I don’t think I entirely missed the point where “The Tempest” was concerned because looking out for tragedy in “Shakespeare”, as I did, is bound to yield something of significance. But I didn’t hit the point squarely as, I think, my friend did because she INSISTED that Prospero himself is GUILTY. I think I even recognized that as a fact but used it only as “background information”. In fact, it is one of the crucial bits, and without being able to determine the EXACT meaning of guilt in this case I wasn’t able to go ALL THE WAY to where I knew I was going. So, my next post will be about the hard fact of “transcendental” guilt, and about what has somehow become one of my favourite subjects right now: TRAGEDY. (And I think I have now finally “found out” what exactly happened when I saw “The Crucible”, I’ll just have to work up the courage to admit it …)