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 …)