Then and Now

I've lost count of how many times students have asked, "Can we just watch the movie?" I knew times had really changed when I was about to show a video of King Lear, and a student asked, "Do we have to watch the whole movie?"

Dwight MacDonald's essay "Updating the Bible," in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain reminds me yet again of just how much the study of literature has changed in the last twenty years.

No one reads; no one has time; no one has patience for anything complex. Which is exactly one of MacDonald's complaints about the felt need to revise the King James Version (KJV - 1611) of the Bible and replace it with the Revised Standard Version (RSV - 1952).

The words, phrasing, imagery that had been etched into the minds of most English speakers for nearly 350 years needed updating to better reflect the culture, character, and education of mid-century Americans. According to MacDonald, the whole enterprise was pretty much a dismal failure, replacing the reverberating "Thou Shalt Nots" with the more modern, but mundane, "You Shall Nots"  (by far not the worst of many sins).

MacDonald wrote about the failure to appreciate the KJV in 1959. What he said then applies to the study of literature now.

Speaking of what he claims is the exaggerated difficulty of the KJV:

Almost all of it is perfectly understandable to anyone who will give a little thought and effort to it, plus some of that overvalued modern commodity: time. Those who don't can hardly claim a serious interest in the Bible either as literature or religion. (172)

Which is exactly the criticism I have of contemporary students ( and just as often, their professors).


We err by making the "study" of literature today a study only of theory, of graphic novels, television, and tattoos. In doing so, "what is now simply a blunder...will become a catastrophe. Bland, flavourless mediocrity will have replaced the pungency of genius" (172).

But genius itself is suspect; canonical literature is a pale copy of theory, and the whole of the academy  is bent on catering only to what is relevant to and fun for eighteen-year-olds.

When "lol" and "bff" are one's linguistic currency, how fun can the "strange, wild, romantic, complex turns of style"(170) of Elizabethan English be?  - whether in the KJV or Shakespeare?

We will have lost something of great value when all we have is a cartoon version of the synopsis of King Lear with characters "txting."

And still someone will ask, "Do we have to watch the whole movie?"

Art is the Thing

Our scientific understanding of sound frequencies, musical instruments, and analog and digital technologies for conveying sound waves does not ever fully explain a Mozart piano concerto, nor does our understanding of music theory.

Neuroscience does not explain the piano concerto, and it does not ever fully explain the writings of Shakespeare. But because neuroscience is the newest kid on the block and has a trendy cachet, some believe it can explain Hamlet and all other art in ways that will fundamentally alter our understanding.

But I don't believe it.

Morgan Meis's article "This Is Your Brain on Art," in The Smart Set (March 17/11) discusses these issues in his review of V.S. Ramachandran's book The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for what Makes Us Human. The article is well written and a balanced discussion, although Meis at least somewhat believes that the findings of neuroscience will deeply shift our relationship with art.

In his review, Meis points out that Ramachandran does not claim to explain the ultimate meaning of art, just that "making art and appreciating art seems [sic] to be universal in the human species"  :

Neuroscience is not meant to replace other standpoints from which we appreciate and analyze art. Ramachandran thinks, in general, that neuroscience can make significant contributions to aesthetics without otherwise encroaching on the humanities. Our love of Shakespeare, he argues, is not diminished by our understanding of universal grammar.

Ramachandran gets it because he understands the science and understands its limits, but so many non-scientists want to base every field of study and area of human endeavour on neuroscience. So we have brain-based Shakespeare, brain-based leadership, brain-based art history, brain-based relationships, etc., etc., etc....

Individually, it is a personal choice to base one's life on misunderstood science written about in popular culture, but we shouldn't rush to re-write social policy and whole academic disciplines based on it. (I've written about this in literary studies; there is a trend towards neuroscience as full explanation of literature.)

I believe that our relationship with art is not most importantly about hard-wiring and synapses, that is about the material. The importance of our relationship with art is existential and beyond science.

Some of Ramachandran's research (which I discussed in Mirror, Mirror) is about phantom limb pain and how the brain responds to a mirror image in place of a missing leg. Shakespeare, in Hamlet, presents the play within his play to hold up a kind of mirror image to Claudius, an image that contains Claudius's missing guilt.

The more things change, the more they stay the same! The mechanism in both images - the Renaissance understanding of the psyche and twenty-first century understanding of the brain -  is that the viewer will respond as if the missing element is indeed present and act accordingly.

Ramachandran's mirror image and neuroscience, generally, contribute to our understanding of humanity and art. But, like Shakespeare's play within the play, it is only part of a much larger, complex, and maybe inexplicable whole.

Meis writes: "We are going to go forward into the unknown in the quest to make art fully knowable and we'll deal with the consequences when we've arrived, joyful in our accomplishments and sad, too, at the inevitable loss of all that has been left behind."

Loss? I don't believe it.

Soiree's Past Week

At My Soiree Jan 11 - 17

In case you missed one. Enjoy!

10 Things I Know About Losing Weight -January 11

Archaeology for English Majors - January 12

My Short Unsuccessful Acting Career - January 13

Help Haiti! - January 14

Fighting the Grammar Police - January 15

Weird, Wild, Wonderful 4 -Jan 10-16 - January 16

My Short, Unsuccessful Acting Career

Some things were never meant to be. My career as a Thespian is one of them.

Every year, our high school put on a big musical and a Shakespearean play, the musical in the auditorium and the play in a room with what is called a thrust stage (see diagram), the surface of which was about 15 inches off the floor (bear with me, the design and height of the stage are critical to the demise of my acting career, as is the position of the X in the diagram!).

I was not a gutsy kid in high school and had never auditioned for one of the productions. The season of my acting career was no different.

My best friend had a bit part in that year's production - King Lear. She had a non-speaking part as a rowdy serving wench in Act 1 Scene 4, on stage as one of the hangers-on to the party of Lear's 100 rambunctious knights, about which Goneril bitterly complains.

The director had thought to demonstrate for the audience just how rowdy the "insolent retinue" indeed was by having some "not-to-be-endured riots" right on stage ( thereby including more students in the production.)

They needed one more rowdy serving wench.

My friend assured me that the gig would be easy - no audition, no speaking - just sit on the stage in a long, flowing wench-appropriate-censored-for-high-school dress and drop grapes into a knight's mouth and "exeunt" with the others, laughing, shouting, and otherwise making a big commotion.

How hard could that be? And ALL the cast and crew got to go to the party at the end!

Our opening was spot on, full with parents, friends and the local drama critic. Our riotous antics were loud and disruptive; the grapes went where they were supposed to go. Only the boisterous exit to get through, and my part, at least, would be a stunning success.

The problem with the thrust stage is that the audience is right there beside the actors, in our case with moveable chairs. I sat on the stage (where the X is in the diagram) with my knight's head in my lap, ready to leap up at the end of the scene and run off the stage.

The problem when I leapt up was that the chair leg of the fellow closest to me was on my dress and yanked me back with a resounding thud and odd snap of the head.

Everyone ran off the stage while I tried to tug at the dress to no avail. Finally, I had to tap the guy on the leg, point to the problem and wait while he clued in and moved his chair. Of course by then, everyone else was gone, and I couldn't very well have a rambunctious riot by myself.

I ran off, right into the director who was quite furious that I hadn't been paying attention to the cues. He chalked it up to inexperience when I told him what happened and was no longer angry at me, but still angry that the scene had been ruined - and a pretty important one at that.

As all actors do, we waited for the next day's paper to see what the drama critic would say. He praised the performance -  the acting was good, the directing quite inspired.

But there near the end of the review were the words I dreaded. One of the actors had seriously missed a cue and had broken character by engaging with a member of the audience.  Of course, you can't explain after the fact - hey! it wasn't my fault.

The cast party was fun, and none of my fellow students seemed upset with me. My best friend suggested that we try out for bit parts in the upcoming musical, West Side Story. It sounded okay. Then she mentioned the scaffolding we would all be perched on, and I couldn't help but think of all things that could go wrong with that arrangement. I declined, still smarting from my bad press.

And that was the end of my short, unsuccessful acting career.

(maiden photo credit)