The Big Question, part one

I had planned to start my post investigating how and why exactly reading interpretations might be of use to deal with real people and real life issues but, again, something amazing has happened. Apparently, thinking about in what way exactly these activities might be connected brought me back to these basic questions about reading that I probably thought I had answered a few times already. At least I had thought more often than once that my blog would come to an end because there would be nothing to write about anymore. And each time I have been wrong. Like this time when I unexpectedly answered my two “biggest” questions about reading. When I couldn’t take my bike to work because of the rain and walked all the way I puzzled them out all at one go. (Should do this more often …) So, this has to come first.

One thing that puzzled me for a long time is about WHICH KIND of fictional texts I love and get excited about, and which kind I find invariably boring and irrelevant. And what I found out applies likewise to other “text-producing” activities, especially acting. There are certainly a lot of great actors – more than there have ever been before at the same time, I dare say - and I usually can see and appreciate when somebody has done especially well. But it is not before they have done THAT THING that I kind of fall in love with them. And then, potentially, I want to see everything they have done – though I never manage to do that, of course. I am just about to do it with Christopher Eccleston, even though I can see that it will be impossible. But that doesn’t matter, he already proved to be a gold mine as to the load of relevant “text” I have collected checking him out. It was his “Doctor” who got me hooked, and I began to look for more, and found out that I already had him on dvd. As Norfolk in “Elizabeth”, which I hadn’t liked in spite of Cate Blanchett. But I remembered instantly that I had been thrilled by Geoffrey Rush as Walsingham and by that guy who played Norfolk and whose name meant nothing to me about … ten(?) years ago. (Well, he is a wee bit different in period knickerbockers and with a beard – and (almost) without his beautiful Northern accent!) This was even exactly the same thing that happened with Richard Armitage after I had seen him in “The Hobbit” – as my favourite dwarf of all times – and then noticed that I had seen him in “North and South” about five years before that but hadn’t bought the dvd because I didn’t really like the story. (And it took even more time for me to notice that because he was A GREAT DEAL different with a beard, “weird” hair, and THAT VOICE …) And I had just a funny and endearing sort of proof of having fallen in love permanently when I saw Simon Russell Beale in “My cousin Rachel” playing a lawyer of some sort, and I was so disproportionally pleased that I decided to like the film on the spot - even though I had to admit that he has NOTHING AT ALL to do with its success. This may appear ridiculous but I liked it nonetheless. In his case it wasn’t that kind of “lightning” thing as with Richard Armitage, when he came through that door and said: “So, this is the Hobbit!” in THAT VOICE! It only happened when I began to write about “The Tempest” and began to NOTICE my ongoing relationship with him. Though, in fact, there was this moment as Lear - when he stopped in the middle of the stage, raised his eyes to the sky and whispered: “Not mad! (Pleeease!!!)” So, in his case, I even know when AND why – which is, of course, great! In the case of Richard Armitage I began to make up reasons afterwards, I think, though they were by no means hard to find. As to Christopher Eccleston I remembered, seeing “Elizabeth” again, that I had fallen in love with him. But then I had forgotten about it because I never saw him again until I finally watched “Doctor Who”. And it happened at least one other time recently, with Lucian Msamati, when I saw him as Iago in the RSC’s “Othello”. I finally got it on dvd this year, and then I wasn’t as pleased as I had been seeing it on the big screen. But I am glad that I had another go at “Othello”, even memorized long scenes with Iago because I know that this is the best way to analyze them and “get into” their beautiful logic. And, watching it after I had done this, I could see again why I had loved his Iago so much. And there are a lot more old and recent examples, as for Kate Winslet in “Revolutionary Road”, or Rosamund Pike in “Women in Love” where she did this thing I thought would be impossible: to “nail” Gudrun Brangwen. Or Patrick Stewart, who already swept me off my feet as Claudius when I was a teenager, and keeps doing it, I think, by the sheer force of his “acting personality”. Or Cate Blanchett, of course, for the same reason. I know, I get carried away, and could go on for a while, but I know that it isn’t just riding my hobby-horse. It is that I know this kind of thing happens for lots of totally different reasons. I think I even love these British actors mainly for being so different – because of the multitude of possibilities to make, respectively see, something special. But what all these actors have in common – and what makes the difference between them and the many other great actors I am pleased to see every time I see them – is that I have SEEN them do THAT THING I want to see. And know that I can expect them to do it again, and that I want to see it. I probably still don’t really know what it is and maybe never will because I know that acting is something I will never come to understand. (Like reading, it is, of course, DOING IT that makes us understand it!) But, I think, making this detour about what I understand, I have, at last, come a big step closer.

The question which films and series (or actors) to watch and which books to read has become especially relevant during the last few years – on the one hand because I began to understand that there isn’t an unlimited store of time. (“I wasted time, and now does time waste me”, “Richard II” and a big favourite!) On the other hand I never go to the cinema anymore because I haven’t gone for some time, or watch or read something because I think I SHOULD have seen or read it, or because I haven’t anything to read. When I am reading something, or pay money to see something, I know exactly why I am doing it. And this is what has changed during the last few years – basically since I came back to “Shakespeare” – and why it makes sense for me to write this blog. I know that EVERYTHING got changed KNOWING WHAT IT IS that I want and need. I suddenly knew the difference, but I couldn’t say exactly what it was. I think I can now.

What always puzzled me most about my relationships with texts is that, from childhood, I have preferred text that would most aptly be called “naturalistic”. Which means being based on the “real” world and appearing “believable” or, in the case of acting, what I consider to be psychologically convincing. But recently I have preferred stuff like “Hannibal”, or “Doctor Who”, or, of course, fantasy stuff like “The Hobbit”. And I am even watching “Harry Potter”, mainly, as I like to think, for catching up with great actors, but I genuinely enjoy it. And this is the kind of stuff I frequently labeled “bullshit” in my blog. I even have noticed over and over again that I have become bored with the “naturalistic” stuff I always thought I liked to watch. On the other hand, I just rediscovered “The Lakes” and “Sparkhouse”, and kind of found out why I like them – and am deep into “Our Friends in the North” right now. (****!) There is a blatant contradiction somewhere in there. At the same time I know that I basically prefer all these texts FOR THE SAME REASON. And that it has to do with another big issue that already puzzled me at uni where I didn’t come a step closer to answer the questions about how to define “naturalism”, or what exactly fictional texts have to do with the real world. I think I came so far as to concede that to be “believable” (and to be taken seriously) has nothing to do with the text being linked to the real world IN THE FIRST PLACE. There are lots of people who might find “Middle-earth” more believable than Zola or Dostojewski, that is, closer to their own experience and to how they see the world. Of course it has SOMETHING to do with it, but it is infinitely more complicated than that. And, as I was looking for answers in the wrong place - that is, somewhere “in” the text instead of looking into what happens between me and the text - I had no chance to answer this kind of questions anyway. And I kind of knew this …

For some time now I cannot get rid of the creepy feeling that, unnoticed by myself, I have finally begun to write the doctoral thesis I was never going to write. And that means this will probably get even more “reader-unfriendly” than it already is … But I must say that I am extremely pleased that I would have begun it with the statement that, in my experience, reading is an equivalent to having sex! And the reason that there is no big smiley face here is not that I still don’t know how to make a smiley face so that it shows in my blog. It is that this is NOT a joke. Not really. I KNEW that I had to wait with the doctoral thesis until I would have found a way of dealing with these matters in a SERIOUS way. More truth, less bullshit. I knew what finally beat me at uni was that it is almost impossible to tell them apart when it comes to literary criticism.  

I think I came closest to an answer about the question what a RELEVANT fictional text is for me when I wrote one post after another analyzing “Hannibal” - which I labeled “bullshit”, mostly, I think to keep the text at arm’s length scrutinizing it. And I noticed that the outworn terms “art” and  “beauty” kept popping up. In this case, “bullshit” didn’t mean that the text “was” bullshit, rather that “believable” wasn’t an issue. At least I worked under the assumption that nothing in “Hannibal” IS MEANT to be believable - which might be a weird way of looking at it. But it was possible to watch it like that, and enjoy it. And I still hate horror that is supposed to be believable. The believable – and truly horrible – content, in my opinion, in “Hannibal” isn’t to be found “on the surface”. (It isn’t a series for hard-core horror fans but rather for weird intellectuals, like myself?, who revel in beautiful and strange things, and all kinds of “bad” irony. Well, I might be wrong and just kept misunderstanding, which, I think, happens.) The real horror unfolds on a deeper level THROUGH OUR INTERACTION with the text. When we come to confront questions about our own sanity, or ethics, and have to decide how far we’ll go “following” Hannibal, answer the question if we are in fact going to “participate” … I don’t think I answered any of these questions, but I came to USE these outworn concepts again. “Outworn” because I probably thought I was through with them, taking it that the kind of text that IS SUPPOSED to be art is also the kind of text that I am bored with. And actually using them made me see them in a new light.

Instead of “art” I might rather have said “poetry”, but I obviously stopped saying that even more definitely than art. To avoid confusion, even in my own head, I should say that, strictly speaking, neither “art” nor “poetry” are terms that can be applied to texts like “recreational” novels, theatre productions, or, least of all, “bullshit” science fiction or horror series. In fact I started to use them as some kind of comprehensive metaphor, like, for example, I may speak of the “poetry of life”. This kind of use of a term may be highly questionable, especially because a potential reader has to “get into” the experience as well to understand what I mean. But this is the only thing I know to do when my experience doesn’t FIT the frame of ready-made concepts available to describe it. An example might help – or make it even more confusing. I just retrieved one from my last post where I described “The Crucible” in terms of an art form which I called “Greek tragedy”. Of course this is a metaphor as well – one that helped me to analyze what I “read”. This made me remember that Richard Armitage spoke of the play as “opera” – which is also a metaphor, of course, that I put down as interesting and telling without really analyzing what it meant. I just took it to mean the same thing that I meant, but of course it doesn’t. Though, as far as I know, opera might even be what “survived” of Greek tragedy because, I think, on the Greek stage at least the chorus actually SANG their part(? To be checked out …) Anyway, the two metaphors are linked because opera is an ART FORM that usually processes TRAGIC content by transforming it into sublime beauty. So it might rather be some kind of emphatic concept about HOW to do these things the best way. I might even call it a WORKING METAPHOR, containing instructions how to act, something like: “If I am able to do this LIKE an opera singer, holding this tone, or phrase, or inner movement, until the very end of beauty and perfection, I am doing this right.”

So, dealing with a text AS IF it was art - or, in fact, ANYTHING ELSE than it “says” it is! - is what, in my experience, makes texts “poetic” – which is almost the same thing as to say that it makes them genuinely work. And it is, by the way, exactly what Schiller meant by “playing” – if we cut out the idealist bullshit. What he described is A CERTAIN FORM of poetry, and exactly what applies here: subjecting the content “we” are passionate about to the RULES of an art form, transforming it into “beauty”, or anything that goes “deeper”, shifting things inside us. WITHOUT this poetic activity the shifting will not happen. We will stay unmoved and unchanged. And when I notice that THIS happens is the exact moment the text begins to work for me, and I begin to enjoy the reading. It doesn’t depend on the content. I can get interested in all kinds of bullshit – and real-life stuff! – when I can see and appreciate the PLAYING with it. It might just become especially interesting when it is something like horror, blood, and fear, or some “real-life” stuff I can relate to. And there don’t have to be SPECIFIC rules, as there are for opera, but the rules can be made up as we go. What makes the text poetic in this case is that WE, as the audience, are beginning to figure out the rules and play with them. This is even the kind of poetic activity that I prefer (see “Hannibal”!). And, even though it is usually less obvious, it can happen in so-called “naturalistic” films or series – or not, same as it does or doesn’t in science fiction or fantasy. I even said once that I don’t care for “naturalistic” stuff, and I was right in this respect that I don’t care in the least for texts that are just trying to reproduce something in the real world, without any attempt at telling a story of their own or establishing their own aesthetic rules. In this case, the acting might be brilliant, and I won’t notice. (Though I use to think that, in these cases, there isn’t any “genuine” acting involved.) And I judge that Tolkien’s books - or even the one’s by Karl May, which I label “fantasy” as well - are “poetic” because they are genuinely playful. Whereas, for me, “Narnia” or “Game of Thrones” (the series!) are boring because they are just put together from ready-made bits that fail to get “fused” through playing and to come to life. (But this might be quite the reverse for other people, of course, because they might like to play different games with different things.)

And of course I don’t think that this is in any way news – not even for me! But, probably because I had “buried” poetry, I couldn’t make this connection and use the idea of playing as a TOOL to say which texts – or feats of acting – are relevant and worth reading or watching. In fact, it was the question I was trying to answer writing my master thesis and knew I didn’t. Nobody could, just looking at the text, because, as I wrote, the text is just the text, and we can argue about its relevance and worth using all kinds of reasons and concepts without ever getting anywhere. In fact, “we” don’t have to argue, we KNOW. I suppose Richard Armitage knew exactly what he was saying. He KNOWS what happens when he is standing on a stage singing beautifully because he has done it. And Simon Russell Beale does “that thing” on the stage OBVIOUSLY IN ORDER to get this human response out of us. Of course, seeing poetry as playing – which is a metaphor as well, by the way! - the stage must be the most poetic place in the world, but of course it happens anywhere when we are reading. On the stage it is often laid open, for one thing because it is the only place where the fourth wall is real. I just thought of Lucian Msamati standing there WATCHING the audience, in fact playing cat and mouse with us, taunting us to grant that he is just doing the same thing with us that he is doing with all these other people he is manipulating. Kind of TRYING OUT if we, as well, can be manipulated. (Of course we can! As a faithful follower of Frank Underwood I knew that anyway …) There is a world of meaning that can be created on a stage just by doing a little thing like this.

And this makes a beautiful connection to the other big question I think I answered. Basically, it is a short and simple question – the question that stood right at the beginning of my blog: Why “Shakespeare”? (To be continued, of course …)

Got a gift

I know I am not supposed to write this, but when I just reread my last post which I wrote before my summer holidays (where I apparently lost my brains somewhere in the woods hunting plastic animals with a bow, or swimming in cold river water and toasting marshmallows on the beach) I was amazed. Of course I always think I have never written something as good as the last thing I have written, but this time it might actually be true. I have always been very fond of generating concepts and distinctions of my own that really WORK, but this time I actually did. I just couldn’t believe how much “fell out" of this distinction I made between personal and transcendental guilt. In my estimation, I went so much further and deeper into an area I was interested in than I ever would have thought possible. And this is just the kind of thing I like. The kind of thing I am writing for. And there is no way this would ever have happened without writing the blog.

And this is not even all. This time I actually got confirmation that it doesn’t just work for me. I know very well that most of what I am writing is probably bullshit JUST BECAUSE nobody will ever understand what it means. Which means that I will never get any CONFIRMATION that it even makes sense, but in this case I did. My friend read the blog and wrote to me that she thought the distinction I made between personal and transcendental guilt was great. (I deliberately stay very close to what she actually wrote because I found that the exact wording became important.) She said that she now understood why I had been so taken with “The Crucible”. I fully realize just now that we both saw and liked the production, but for totally different reasons ( - except one!). So we never talked about something we both really understood – which kind of supports my theory that the play is so good, and works for so many people, because it has these three, very strong storylines that are intertwined. If you don’t actually “read” one or two of them they are still there as background. But now my post brought our views closer together as she found the distinction I made HELPFUL. And, better still, would like to watch the “Macbeth” film with Michael Fassbender again with this in mind because she suspected it might be the reason she didn’t like it that much either. I had had the impression she liked it much better than I did but, USING THIS DISTINCTION, we discovered that we might have the same kind of reservations about it. And – accordingly - the same kind of understanding of what the play means. How cool is that?

(And I shouldn’t forget either that I found the distinction with her help, analyzing the nature of Prospero’s guilt, because her insistence pointed me to the big issue I didn’t yet understand.)

But this isn’t even all I got. My thoughts about interpretation obviously triggered an amazing statement about this issue which I still don’t understand. Nonetheless, I consider it to be very important, first of all because she wrote that it came to her as an “epiphany” – which is always something we know to be very important but difficult to understand for others because it concerns OUR OWN world. In her experience, reading (different) INTERPRETATIONS of a text is important to her because they are part of her technique of dealing with the world and other people. As everybody is a universe of their own, to get on in the world and be able to deal with other people, she has to find out how they think and feel. If this doesn’t work she might be in deep shit, much worse than if she knows that she will never get on with the other person, or find any common ground at all. And she enjoys reading (different) interpretations (of one text) because they explain the MANY FACETS of a fictional world, in analogy to the many facets of real people and real life issues.

At first I thought I understood what she meant – until I reread my post and managed to get my wits together again after the holidays. Then I became aware that I didn’t understand it AT ALL. And became thrilled. At first I was just thrilled to have got something complex and deep like this as an answer to my post. Then I became more and more thrilled because I realized that I didn’t understand it and, at the same time, became increasingly aware of its importance. This is an obvious contradiction which will require a lot of explaining. There is even so much to explain and analyze that I am quite unable to make up my mind where to begin, so I’ll begin with something that seems to be entirely beside the point.

The best gift I got in my life was a tiny bit of an interview by Richard Armitage on playing Thorin Oakenshield in “The Hobbit”. I think of it as a gift, though it was in fact nothing but a coincidence, something striking me at the exact moment when I needed it and could make the most of it. Without it, nothing that appears to me important about the last few years would have happened. I wouldn’t have written this blog, and I would never have got anywhere I wanted to be ( - though, in fact, I am still sitting in my quiet little corner, peering out at the world where things really happen …) Writing my blog, I am still kind of working off this debt of gratitude. And I have begun to collect these “gifts” carefully, but I don’t think I ever actually recollected this one. It is the most precious thing I ever found, though, written down, it appears trivial:

HC: What has the experience of playing Thorin meant to you?

RA: I think it’s really made me reengage with what I want from my career. It’s not fame and fortune certainly. It’s the ability to investigate a character in this way …

What it means to me is probably more than half of what my blog is about, and I don’t even begin to explain. What strikes me about it in THIS context is the genius of the interviewing person to know what question to ask. Which is strange because it appears to be an obvious question to ask an actor, but in fact this kind of question is seldom asked. And I suspect people might draw a blank in most instances of asking something like this. At least nobody would expect to get an honest and thoughtful answer to it that might actually be too good to be published in - or on - something called “Hero Complex”. Not least because it contains a GENUINE personal experience. And it just struck me that I might have done (and retrieved) something similar. Which is the most obvious reason for me to be thrilled: To get an ANSWER to a question I WOULD HAVE WANTED to ask and didn’t know how to ask. Or didn’t bother to ask, as I always have my own theories already about WHY people are doing things that really matter to them. But I always consider them to be JUST theories and was genuinely pleased to hit on a better one.

And there are at least three more reasons for me to be thrilled. First, I was strangely pleased to discover that I didn’t really understand what she meant – though I can understand the meaning of the statement, of course. But, taking the pain to look at it closely, I began to suspect that it is a very PRECISE statement. And, being kind of a personal “epiphany”, something very obvious to the person who had it, but for an outsider it might take a bit of work to reconstruct the missing steps that might have led to this epiphany. Well, I never mind work when I think it will be worth it. And I will undertake the analysis in my next post because I already know that it will become much longer than I think.

The second, and most obvious, reason for being pleased is that I collected a PERSONAL experience about an issue that has to do with reading and texts. And one that actually is comprehensive enough to be taken as a DESCRIPTION of what is HAPPENING when somebody is reading interpretations. And which even contains an explanation WHY people might do such a strange thing, and ENJOY doing it. There is a lot to work on there for me, I suspect, in my next post, or posts.

Last but not least: what I was most thrilled about, I think, was the HARSHNESS of the statement. I deliberately used the word “enjoy” talking about activities like reading, acting, and comparing interpretations. I personally don’t enjoy reading interpretations – as I have found, for various reasons that I will probably look into further as well in my next posts. I have already collected at least four of them, the most obvious probably that I consider it to be really hard work. But I used the word “enjoy” because it is closely related to the concept of “playing” which I expect to become very important again as well. And I am convinced that “we” often enjoy the kind of things that are really hard work as well as the kind of things we really NEED to do to achieve something important. Not in every case, of course, but quite often we COME to enjoy them, and being successful makes us become better at them and enjoy them more. So, what the “existential” harshness of the statement suggests, and what makes it so compelling, is that it indicates that there is a genuine NEED for something like reading interpretations. And this is exactly the kind of thing I am after.

And I also took the harshness of the statement to be a personal challenge of my way of looking at things. I think I took up this challenge subconsciously - which might have been made subconsciously as well but, I think, was “meant” as a challenge nonetheless. In any case, it was one of the reasons I became thrilled. I think the challenge can be boiled down to the suggestion that my view on the world and on texts is so narrow and limited, not least because, while pretending to know a lot of things, in fact I don’t actually know anything at all because I have no real-life experience. I know that this is what other people think of me, though they might put it differently, not least because it is absolutely true. Now I am about to write the second thing I am not supposed to write, and it is worse, but I found it to be too important to be hidden behind the curtain of decency that I know – and even believe in – not to draw. But, on the other hand, I know that there wouldn’t be any “decent” writing, or reading, or acting, or any activity of this kind, if it was never drawn. It is just a question of when and where and how, and so on. And I have a strong suspicion anyway that there are a lot more people than I think who know what I am talking about.

For me, reading, and dealing with text in my head, has always been not a substitute for but an EQUIVALENT of having sex – even before I knew what sex was. Only when we discover sex we begin to think that it is kind of the answer to everything, but it certainly isn’t. I suspect again that there are a lot more people than I would think who know what I mean because there are probably a lot more people who don’t get nearly as much sex as they want than people who do. I think we just tend to forget that the people we are LOOKING AT are not the norm but the exception. And, basically, what “we” ultimately want is not sex but to be completely satisfied and completely connected with ourselves BEING CONNECTED WITH SOMETHING ELSE AT THE SAME TIME. Which, for a very brief moment, actually happens when we have an orgasm. But I suspect as well that many more people than I would think know better ways to have and extend this experience than actually having sex. And, by the way, have known them a long time before they had their first orgasm!

Basically, reading is this kind of experience because it has this aspect of very intimate communication as well as these peaks where we suddenly feel connected to ourselves, or completely understood and accepted, and where our most secret needs are unexpectedly met. I suspect that there are a lot more people who feel like this about reading than would actually admit it. And a lot of people who would deliberately distance themselves from this experience – amongst other things by putting themselves above the text, writing interpretations. I have never done this – though I have written interpretations, of course, and enjoyed it, much more than reading them. But I have never suffered anyone or anything to separate me from my text. I even know I would never have written fiction in my life if I had let the adults prevail and stopped masturbating as a child because writing fiction, from this perspective, is just a practice to create these peaks and make these needs and dreams materialize. So, to me, it is quite obvious why I am reading the way I am reading, fetishizing the text and putting it above everything else. But this doesn’t mean that it is the ONLY use “we” make – or should make – of texts, or the only “decent” way of dealing with them. When all’s done, the text is JUST the text.

THE TEXT IS THE TEXT, nothing more and, as such, at the same time impenetrable and available for all kinds of uses and activities. Even as a fetish it is not used as something that has a value in itself. (Maybe it isn’t a good metaphor because a fetish is a MEANINGLESS thing which makes a libidinous connection with ourselves possible, whereas a text is a tool to create meaning.) But I don’t think that the text as such is something that has to be treated with respect. Of course we can pretend doing this but, in the end, it always becomes a means of doing what we really want to do, even what appears useful or necessary. The text as such is never meaningful, it is the PLAYING with it that creates meaning. The playing is what makes the text IMPORTANT and USEFUL to us. And there are lots of different ways of playing with it, as fetishizing it and getting connected to hidden areas in ourselves, or using it to create new texts, or trying to figure out what the text means – finding out WHY somebody might have written it and, by this, getting into other people’s minds. Or widen the perspective even more and get into more people’s minds by comparing what they think about the text, and which views of the world materialize in their different ways of looking at it. And even though I hold on to the naturalistic belief that there certainly is SOMETHING I want to screw, and even that it matters what this is - in fact I KNOW that it matters! - I also know that it is just my single-minded way of looking at things. And it probably won’t hurt to widen my perspective a bit. At least I take up the suggestion gratefully, not yet knowing if anything will come of it.

And, by the way, my own scraps of interpretation of “The Tempest”, “The Crucible”, and “Macbeth” became part of the playing. I got analyzed, so to speak, and probably got assigned a place in the extensive library of human thoughts and feelings, no doubt somewhere in the section "There's nowt so queer as folk”, if this section exists. How cool is that, then … !? Whatever – the main point is anyway that there is a lot “in here” still to be explored …