Writing as Performance (September-October 2007)

Harvard Magazine

September-October 2007

Bricks & Politics

Cambridge 02138

The Vernacular

Space Invaders

But I am certainly not afraid of the personal voice and not averse to personal anecdotes, provided that they are good and that I can make good on them in constructing a piece of literary analysis. Here, for example, is how I begin a recent essay on the ethics of authority in Shakespeare. You will see that I combine my old trick of the date with what seems like a casual story. Only then, once the story is told, do I write the kind of introductory sentences that I just ridiculed:

In 1998, a friend of mine, Robert Pinsky, who at the time was serving as the Poet Laureate of the United States, invited me to a poetry evening at the Clinton White House, one of a series of black-tie events organized to mark the coming millennium. On this occasion the president gave an amusing introductory speech in which he recalled that his first encounter with poetry came in junior high school when his teacher made him memorize certain passages from Macbeth. This was, Clinton remarked wryly, not the most auspicious beginning for a life in politics.

After the speeches, I joined the line waiting to shake the president’s hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me that I cannot adequately explain and certainly cannot justify. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque national circus that it soon became. “Mr. President,” I said, sticking out my hand, “Don’t you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?” Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, “I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.”

I was astonished by the aptness, as well as the quickness, of this comment, so perceptively in touch with Macbeth’s anguished brooding about the impulses that are driving him to seize power by murdering Scotland’s legitimate ruler. When I recovered my equilibrium, I asked the president if he still remembered the lines he had memorized years before. Of course, he replied, and then, with the rest of the guests still patiently waiting to shake his hand, he began to recite one of Macbeth’s great soliloquies:

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly. If th’ assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success: that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all, here,
But here upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor.

There the most powerful man in the world—as we are fond of calling our leader—broke off with a laugh, leaving me to conjure up the rest of the speech that ends with Macbeth’s own bafflement over the fact that his immense ambition has “an ethically inadequate object”:

I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself
And falls on the other [side].

I left the White House that evening with the thought that Bill Clinton had missed his true vocation, which was, of course, to be an English professor, and therefore I feel drawn to put some pressure on this brief but resonant exchange. Specifically, I want to consider whether it is possible in Shakespeare to discover an “ethically adequate object” for human ambition and for the actions that one might take in the service of this ambition.

In the course of the essay I can keep coming back to the concept of ethical adequacy, teasing out its implications for interpretation of Macbeth or King Lear, drawing upon the energy that the initial anecdote generates. Could I make my crucial points without the anecdote? Yes—all the more so because, if I am right, in Shakespeare there is no position outside the world or outside history from which his characters can authenticate their actions or secure an ethically adequate object for their ambitions. The president’s comment, fascinating as it is, does not in fact work as an overarching interpretive insight for Shakespeare; it belongs instead to a much later world, the world of Immanuel Kant or John Rawls, not the world of Machiavelli and Montaigne.

All the same, the anecdote served my purposes, and not only as a device to make the reader sit up and take notice. First, because some avenues that turn out in the end to be blocked serve, along the way, to provide fresh perspectives. And second, because the invocation of Clinton enables me to tap into a sense that literary questions have a peculiarly intense relation to the real world. This sense sets up the close of my essay, many pages later, in which I consider whether the goal of saving the state itself served for Shakespeare as an ethically adequate object for human ambition. My answer, based on a close reading of a scene in King Lear, is no. In the wake of Lear’s abdication, the Duke of Cornwall is the legitimate, formally sanctioned ruler of half the kingdom, and we see him acting to save the state. Yet the play stages and clearly justifies his assassination. The attack comes suddenly and without warning when he is going about the business of statecraft: specifically, he is attempting, by any means necessary, to extract from the Earl of Gloucester certain information vital for national security, information about a French army set upon invasion of the realm.

This is not the occasion to rehearse my argument. My point is that the opening anecdote, though it may at first seem merely decorative or entertaining, serves to situate and greatly to intensify the phrases “by any means necessary” and “information vital for national security.” It enables me to stay entirely within the text of King Lear, patiently explicating its horrific representation of torture, and at the same time, without any explicit reference, to evoke that text’s uncanny relevance to the current national and world crisis.

I want to close this talk with a few reflections on the issue of contemporary relevance. I do not at all think that everything one writes should have an immediate bearing on the present. On the contrary, one of the crucial achievements in a liberal education is the understanding of worlds far removed from our own. That understanding is never complete, any more than one can escape entirely from one’s own body or one’s own culture. But the ability to suspend the craving for immediate relevance and to project oneself at least part way into difference and otherness is an invaluable resource. But that projection depends not upon neutrality or indifference but rather upon carrying one’s passionate energies into an alien world. That is, you should write about the other as if your life depended on it. My indirect invocation of the current crisis—specifically, of the debate about the legitimacy of torture—is intended at least as much to illuminate King Lear as it is intended to bring Shakespeare’s wisdom to bear on our own dilemmas.

I am not suggesting that you keep the television news on constantly when you are writing your papers. I am suggesting only that you should try to write well—and that means bringing to the table all of your alertness, your fears, and your desires. And every once in a while—say, every third paper—tell yourself that you will take a risk.

I am currently writing three lectures on Shakespeare for an academic occasion in Germany. [The lectures were delivered in Frankfurt on November 27-29, 2006.] They are called the Adorno Lectures—after the important twentieth-century philosopher Theodor Adorno—and are a source of some anxiety to me, for German academic audiences tend to be extremely demanding, and even scholarly lectures have an unnerving way of being reported in detail in the national newspapers. Two of the three lectures as I drafted them began very cautiously. Here is the opening of the first, a lecture on the status in Shakespeare of the concept of aesthetic autonomy:

“Aesthetic autonomy,” that will-o’-the-wisp that haunt ed Theodor Adorno, was not a phrase that Shakespeare, who had a passion for rare expressions, could possibly have encountered. If the Oxford English Dictionary is to be believed, “aesthetic”—which, as the term for a science or philosophy of taste, first emerged with Baumgarten’s Aesthetica in the mid-eighteenth century—did not appear in English until the nineteenth century, and then only with many reservations. “There has lately grown into use in the arts,” wrote the English architect Joseph Gwilt in 1842, “a silly pedantic term under the name of Æsthetics.” It is, Gwilt added, “one of the metaphysical and useless additions to nomenclature in the arts in which the German writers abound.”

I thought it would serve my purposes to start by introducing a central concept and marking out with gentle irony some distance between my subject, Shakespeare, and Adorno, so that the listener would not expect an easy fit. (I also want to point out to you the fantastic usefulness, in writing virtually anything, of the Oxford English Dictionary, which as a Harvard student you can consult on line. This is an historical dictionary which tracks the evolving meanings of words and provides key examples of the first known written use of each of these meanings. You can in effect watch the moment when every word, and hence every concept, in our language emerged into the light of public discourse, and you can ask yourself why then, and not a hundred years earlier or later.)

My second Adorno lecture, on the status in Shakespeare of normative Renaissance concepts of beauty, also begins cautiously:

Beauty, the great Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti writes in an influential passage of the Art of Building, “is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse.” The cunning of this definition is its programmatic refusal of specificity. It is not this or that particular feature that makes something beautiful; rather it is an interrelation of all the parts in a whole. The key qualities are harmony, inherence, economy, and completeness. There is nothing superfluous and nothing wanting. As in Alberti’s fa çade for S. Maria No vella in Florence, which dates from the 1450s, the pleasure derives from the sense of symmetry, balance, and the elegant ratio of the constitutive elements.

Once again I want to get a clear, memorable defi nition of terms out in front, so my audience will know what I am talking about and follow me while I gradually reveal Shakespeare’s profound departure from an aesthetic ideal he officially endorses. I move from Alberti’s abstract definition of beauty to a spe cific instance of what, as an architect, he created, so that I can draw upon my astonishment, many years ago, when I stepped for the first time out of the train station in Florence and saw before me the marble façade of Santa Maria Novella. Ten minutes in the Widener library took me to a translation of Alberti’s tract on architecture and 15 minutes more turned up the quotation that I needed. And because Alberti’s vision of beauty had actually reached me, I knew it was not merely a straw man that I would have Shakespeare easily overturn, but a magnificent and coherent achievement in itself. I could use it, in short, to get at something weird and uncanny about Shakespeare’s alternative vision, one that led to the dark lady, to Cleopatra “wrinkled deep in time,” and to the wild structure of plays like Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale.

Still, as you have seen, there is something defensive about both of these opening gambits: you do not step onto the lecture platform in Frankfurt with your shirt sticking out of your pants. But on the principle I have already articulated, I am going to try in my third lecture, on the topic of negation in Shakespeare, to take a risk. This is how I propose to begin:

Here is the situation. We have, living in our midst, an alien population who hate us, as the saying goes, with a vengeance. To hate us with a vengeance means that, despite the fact that we tolerate their presence here and allow them the benefits of our civic order, these aliens feel that they have been injured by us, and this feeling of injury justifies any hostile measures that they might choose to take. Since we are fully at home here and are stronger than they are—we embody the dominant values, embrace the dominant beliefs, and control the dom inant institutions—the hostile measures to which their hatred of us drives them will almost invariably be sly and covert. When they see us, they bow obsequiously, as if they were courting our friendship, but the pretense is almost comically unconvincing.

I go on in this vein for several long, unnerving pages. Only after I have fully mimed a voice of fear and hatred, do I turn in the direction that some of you may have anticipated. For, as you may have noticed, I have already begun to conjure up the situation of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. I have tried to do so in a way that enables me to suggest the play’s uneasy contemporary relevance, a sense at once fascinating and disagreeable that it is playing with fire. All my life I thought of the combustible material as anti-Semitism—or, to put the matter more carefully, Christianity’s Jewish problem. But the queasiness of Western cities no longer centers on the synagogue. It takes only a small substitution for the word “synagogue” to tap into current fears: “Go, Tubal, and meet me at our mosque. Go, good Tubal; at our mosque, Tubal.”

To learn how my argument comes out, I’m afraid you will have to read the lectures when they are published (and to do so, since they will be published in translation, you will have to learn German). But I hope I have done enough to suggest that you approach your writing not only as if it were a performance but also as if it constituted, for the moment, an ethically adequate object for your deepest ambition. It does not finally constitute such an object—a few, though mercifully not many, of the best writers in the world have been moral monsters—but it is a promising start.

Cogan University Professor of the humanities Stephen Greenblatt is the author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (see “The Mysterious Mr. Shakespeare,” September-October 2004, page 56), and the general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature.

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