Pater Familias

WHAT IS THE UNITY OF THIS WORK? Kids, the T.S. Eliot essay I linked to reflects one of the principles for analyzing literature that I was taught fifty years ago. A basic question was always: what is the unity of this work? It was taken for granted that a work of literature should be unified. Thus, Eliot criticizes HAMLET because it has “superfluous and inconsistent scenes” and because the versification is inconsistent. It is a flaw for Eliot that some of the verse in HAMLET is like early Shakespeare and some of it is in Shakespeare’s mature style. Eliot was not the first to celebrate unity as a literary value. Henry James in a preface to an edition of his works referred to novels that were not unified as “…large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary….” He specified THE THREE MUSKETEERS and WAR AND PEACE as examples of “large loose baggy monsters.” About his own work, he said:”A story was a story, a picture a picture, and I had a mortal horror of two stories, two pictures, in one.” I enjoyed the way that Henry James gave THE AMBASSADORS an hourglass shape, but I have always liked large loose baggy monsters.

PROTECTING PEOPLE FROM BAD LITERATURE (COMMENT). I always resisted criticism (such as T.S. Eliot’s) that condemned HAMLET or PARADISE LOST, and I my feelings have gotten stronger with time. In this post, I extended Bentham’s statement that “the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry” to the proposition that bad art is of equal value with good art if people like it as much. Annalisa commented here that: “I have a theory that you become fond of things that the majority of people underappreciate or outright dislike.” I think that some of what Annalisa is getting at is my belief that “bad art” needs to be defended if there are those who love it (and apparently I am on occasion one of those who loves it).

WAS IT A MISTAKE TO WRITE HAMLET? T.S. Eliot’s rules for literature lead him to some unusual judgments. For example, he concludes that: “CORIOLANUS may be not as “interesting” as HAMLET, but it is, with ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success.” Eliot winds up by implying that Shakespeare should not have written HAMLET. Not only shouldn’t he have written it, but Eliot finds it baffling that he even tried to attempt it: “We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle….” Kids, Eliot’s judgmental approach was not unusual when I was studying literature some fifty years ago. Of the several critics whose essays we were assigned on Milton, all but one (the great C.S. Lewis) thought it was a great mistake for Milton to have written PARADISE LOST.

WAS THERE ADEQUATE MOTIVATION FOR HAMLET? Hamlet’s father is murdered by his own brother, his mother hastily marries the murderer, and the murderer rather than Hamlet seizes the throne. Tom Stoppard has a lot of fun in ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD with the notion that anybody is puzzled by Hamlet’s behaving strangely under the circumstances. Yet, kids, one of the most influential critics of the last century claimed that Hamlet’s emotions were excessive. In this famous essay, T.S. Eliot said that: “Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.” Eliot used the essay as a vehicle for explaining his concept of the “objective correlative”, which was used as a tool of literary analysis for at least the next fifty years. His famous definition was: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” For Eliot, HAMLET was a flawed play, and the lack of an “objective correlative” was the flaw that explained HAMLET’s failure: “The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet.”

WHAT SHAKESPEARE PLAY WOULD YOU ASSIGN? Mary Jane had a long, interesting e mail exchange with a friend last week about which Shakespeare play the friend should assign to her eighth graders. (They read MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM in 7th grade and ROMEO AND JULIET in 9th grade). I put in my two cents worth and recommended HAMLET on the basis that at that age, they would not understand some things in a Shakespeare play, but they would certainly understand revenge, especially because revenge is important in so many of today’s movies and television shows. My friend wrote back that indeed her students understand revenge very well and that for that reason she was considering choosing THE TEMPEST. Upon reflection, I realize that I don’t think of THE TEMPEST as a revenge play, but of course it is.

CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS—ANOTHER NAME FOR DANDELIONS. The last lines of this stanza of a song from Cymbeline are often thought to refer to dandelions:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the furious winters’ rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Patrick Kurp in this post points out that A.D.Nuttall says that he hopes that the lines don’t refer to dandelions. I looked up Nuttall and found that he thinks of dandelions as golden flowers. Kurp gives what I think is the explanation, telling the story of a countryman in Warwickshire “blowing the grey head off a dandelion [and saying]: `We call these golden boy chimney-sweepers when they go to seed.’”

DID SHAKESPEARE GIVE US AMBIGUITY? In an interview in the May 15 Financial Times, the director Richard Eyre tells Sarah Hemming: “I think that’s one of the gifts of the happy accident of having had Shakespeare…. That we put equivocation and ambiguity at the heart of the art form. I absolutely love it because it’s truer to our experience of life. Absolutely nothing in life is without ambiguity. I like the fact that theatre can represent that.” I accept that Shakespeare made ambiguity central in the English theater. One could say that he made it central in English literature with the exception that Chaucer in THE CANTERBURY TALES was there before him.