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.