Pater Familias

DO I HAVE A FIXED SELF? I posted here on Colin McGinn’s proposition that Shakespeare argues that “our personality (or many personalities) is analogous to the character an actor plays on the stage.” The conclusion is that “We construct our personalities using an actor’s skills.” I can accept the view that I am always playing a part as an actor does. Indeed, I have recently come to realize that much of what I say in conversation is said for effect. But Colin McGinn also raised an additional issue. He cited Hume and Montaigne in support of the proposition that a person does not have a fixed self. Hume and Montaigne base their position on their own experience of themselves. I don’t have the same experience. I think of myself as being the same person that I was fifty years ago.

MONEYBALL AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS. What does MONEYBALL have to do with the financial crisis? The connection is that Michael Lewis, the author of MONEYBALL (which describes how sabermatricians brought statistical analysis to baseball) has written a long, amusing, and scary article about some of the few people in the financial world who foresaw what would happen (link via TwoBlowhards). They not only foresaw what would happen, they made great efforts to publicize what they foresaw. And they made lots of money selling short. But, as the article explains, the short selling only fed the mania. One scary item: the process that got us here depended on the rating agencies giving certain mortgage-based securities a rating of AAA (the highest rating). To quote from the article: “[One of the short sellers called a rating agency] and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at [the rating agency] couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number.” In other words, because their model was based on history, and prices had always gone up, there was no possibility they could go down.

GETTING HOLD OF THE BEANS BEFORE VALUING THEM. It has been observed that some of the mistakes that were made that led to the current crisis were intellectual mistakes made by brilliant people. In fact some of the mistakes occurred because brilliant people did not notice boring problems. It was intellectually interesting to construct and value fiendishly complicated instruments. Keeping track of them was boring, the kind of thing that clerks and bean counters do. I posted some two weeks after Lehman declared bankruptcy that hedge funds were still trying to determine what their exposure to Lehman was. An article in the Financial Times for October 27 reported that now, six weeks after the bankruptcy, the man in charge of administering (cleaning up) the London-based operations of Lehman says that they are still trying to get information about what securities around the world are being held for Lehman or its clients. He says, “…[W]e don’t know for certain what is out there in terms of assets. After six weeks you would expect that we’d have that information, but we haven’t.” All this is preliminary to tracing the lending and relending of rights in these assets, which is expected to take years to resolve. I wonder whether the intellectual debate over whether to use “market prices” (”marking to market”) to value these instruments didn’t divert attention from important back office issues.

MANDY PATINKIN’S PROSPERO. Hilton Als is right that Mandy Patinkin’s Prospero does not relate to the other actors on stage, but not for the reasons I expected. Patinkin portrays Prospero as an angry and all-powerful wizard, in complete command of his island world. A Prospero this powerful cannot have human contact. Prospero’s isolation results from the choices Patinkin makes and not from any limitations on his acting ability. Is this a valid interpretation? Of course. Prospero is after all in complete command of everything that happens in the play so that a consistent view of THE TEMPEST flows easily from Patinkin’s interpretation.

IS THERE AN HOMAGE TO FORGIVENESS IN THE TEMPEST? (AUDEN’S VIEW). I think the review by Hilton Als of THE TEMPEST is quite wonderful, and agree with many of his judgments, and yet I want to note another disagreement with him. He says that if all the actors had interacted, the production might have been “a kind of homage to forgiveness.” I think THE TEMPEST can be said to be about the difficulty of forgiveness. Auden in his LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE (which Als cites) says: “THE TEMPEST ends, like the other plays in Shakespeare’s last period, in reconciliation and forgiveness. But the ending in THE TEMPEST is grimmer….[Antonio and Sebastian are] … spared punishment, but they can’t be said to be forgiven because they don’t want to be, and Prospero’s forgiveness of them means only that he does not take revenge upon them.” At the moment of forgiveness in the current production, Mandy Patinkin gives Antonio a kiss that is charged with ambiguity.

ANTONIO’S LONELINESS (AUDEN’S VIEW). The second chapter of “The Sea and the Mirror” consists of songs for the characters in the play (with the exception of Caliban, who is given all of the third chapter in a long prose speech modeled on Henry James). The songs are separated by a series of five line refrains by the villain of the play, Antonio. Each refrain is addressed to his brother Prospero and each concludes with the word “alone.” The first refrain is:

“Your all is partial, Prospero;
My will is all my own:
Your need to love shall never know
Me. I am I, Antonio,
By choice myself alone.”

PROSPERO’S LONELINESS (AUDEN’S VIEW). In chapter one of “The Sea and the Mirror”, which is addressed by Prospero to Ariel, Prospero says, “Now, Ariel, I am that I am, your late and lonely master …”

MIRANDA’S LONELINESS (AUDEN’S VIEW). Miranda does disavow loneliness. Miranda’s Song in “The Sea and the Mirror” begins: “My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely….” Because the song is a villanelle, the line appears three times in the song.

DOES THE TEMPEST DISAVOW LONELINESS? (AUDEN’S VIEW). I was very pleased to see that Hilton Als interprets THE TEMPEST in the light of what he rightly calls “Auden’s astonishing poem based on the play, ‘The Sea and the Mirror’.” Als says that “Ultimately ….Shakespeare was writing about the disavowal of loneliness, a theme that Auden took up….” However, I don’t agree completely with Als. I think loneliness is a major theme of “The Sea and the Mirror”, but I don’t think there is a disavowal of loneliness in either THE TEMPEST or “The Sea and the Mirror.”

PROSPERO’S LONELINESS. The New Yorker summary of the current production of THE TEMPEST says: “In this production, Patinkin doesn’t seem to connect with the other actors or with the text; he is isolated in the part. One suspects that he less an actor than a monologuist, interested mostly in his song of the self.” The summary is based on an interesting review by Hilton Als. I have always thought of Prospero as a lonely man, because his obsession with magical learning (scholarship) has led him to turn away from society and because he has been isolated with his daughter on a desert island. Other than his daughter, whom he loses to her lover Ferdinand, Prospero’s only companion is not a human—it is the sprite Ariel. I went to see Mandy Patinkin’s Prospero with the expectation of seeing an isolated figure.