And even though he’d been jettisoning theoretical baggage in his recent work, the fact that Greenblatt was willing to address an ideal, an ideal as eternally contentious as Beauty, was almost shocking.
And in fact there was something even more shocking in the very last sentence of his talk. For most of his forty minutes Greenblatt delivered what I thought was a modest, impressively well-illustrated (many slides of architectural façades) talk about the Renaissance conception of beauty. The conception of beauty prevalent in the culture that was the historical context for Shakespeare, yes, but then he ended up describing the way Shakespeare’s concept of beauty differed—resisted historicist determinism—to achieve and celebrate a different kind of beauty from that which might be dictated by the zeitgeist.
He argued that the ideal of beauty as it was commonly described and produced in the Renaissance involved a kind of “featurelessness,” an abstractedness from individuality, a proportionality, a harmony that subsisted in the relationship of perfectly formed, virtually interchangeable parts rather than in the particular features themselves.
And that for Shakespeare, beauty involved something different: singularity.
He chose to illustrate this with a single image: the “cinque-spotted mole” in Cymbeline.
You might recall in that play that the malicious schemer Iachimo has wagered he can seduce Posthumus’s wife Innogen while they’re apart. (Innogen was long spelled “Imogen” but most scholars now believe it was the former.) Iachimo hides himself in Innogen’s bedroom and gets a glimpse of her body while she sleeps unawares. And then tells Posthumus that he has proof of his success at seduction. The “evidence” Iachimo gives to bolster the lie is “On her left breast/A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops/I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip.”
“It is something deeply individuated,” Greenblatt pointed out at the Beauty Plenary. “Imogen is beautiful, but she is not a featureless beauty. Her mole is not a part of any total perfection, but it is also not an adornment [like the artificial beauty marks women affixed to their cheeks at the time], or if it is a mark, it is a mark of all that Shakespeare found indelibly beautiful in singularity. And a mark of all that we find indelibly beautiful in his work.” End of talk.
But did you catch that? It was in a quiet way a sensational moment. Greenblatt, the avatar of a historicism that rejected “essentialist” concepts, ideals like “beauty,” had spoken of what we find “indelibly beautiful” in Shakespeare.
The phrase “sea change” has been so often misused as if it were an overnight transformation, mistakenly used as if it were merely a synonym for “a big change,” when in fact in the context of the beautiful “full fathom five” song in The Tempest, one of the indubitable if not indelible beauties of Shakespeare, it refers to the redemptiveness of slow evolutionary epochal-scaled change in transforming death into beauty:
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
So a sea change is a very slow process, bones being made into coral through a long, long process of being transubstantiated from remains of the dead to emblems of undersea life, infiltrated by, then transformed to, living coral.
But nonetheless one could almost say that, in terms of scholarly theory-epochs, which proceed somewhat faster than coralization of bones, Stephen Greenblatt had shown evidence of having undergone, yes, a sea change.
And, one wondered if it might signal a process that had been going on throughout “the profession” of Shakespeare scholarship, the dry bones of Theory infused with new intellectual life. An inevitable consequence of immersion in the ocean of Shakespearean language? All the attempts to escape the effects of immersion in vain before the richness and strangeness of the spell cast by Beauty and Pleasure?
I was struck in particular by the way Greenblatt chose to evoke his vision of beauty and individuality in Shakespeare.
That Greenblatt chose a phrase—“mole cinque-spotted”—that seemed to conjure up (for me at least) the five-spotted, cinque-stressed syllables of the pentameter line, made it seem as if he had hit upon an image of Shakespearean self-disclosure, each line a blossom founded upon five inky marks, spotting the syllabic petals, so to speak, a fully fathomed five, you might say.
Also not without interest (to me, anyway): he chose a phrase as the virtual signature of Shakespearean beauty that contains “bottom” within it. The “bottom of a cowslip.” And with bottom in Shakespeare there is always the suggestion of bottomlessness. Beauty and identity, the five spots, like the five fathoms, mark the threshold of bottomlessness.
“All that we find indelibly beautiful in his work.” Those not all too closely familiar with trends in lit-crit theory may not appreciate the courage it took to utter that phrase in that setting. Not just “beautiful,” but “indelibly beautiful.”
“Beautiful” alone suggests the possibility of subjectivity. “Indelibly beautiful,” yes, it’s something “we find,” but there is the suggestion of an absolute here. Beauty that is indelible is not beauty that can be reduced, contextualized, subjectivized, historicized, conceptually erased.
And beauty whose signature is “individuation” does not sound like the “beauty” “produced,” as the cultural materialists like to say, by the “hegemonic discourse,” but the product of an individual author, not some mouthpiece for the zeitgeist.
I thought this, in a certain sense, was news! Greenblatt had challenged “the profession” to accept or reject the idea that Shakespeare offered timeless beauties. Not beauty as beauty was seen in a particular socio-historical context, but “indelible” beauties that would by definition transcend history’s erasure.
It remains to be seen how many if any will take up the challenge of further examining what we talk about when we talk about beauty in Shakespeare. I’d merely like to look a little more closely at “indelible.”
It seemed to me to be a carefully chosen word. I mean if you were at the apex of the academic study of Shakespeare and were contemplating a single word to describe the “beauty” of Shakespeare, when the very word “beauty” had been virtual anathema to much of your profession, what word, what adjective would you modify beauty with?
Indelible: it suggests, in non-Shakespearean contexts, ink that cannot be erased. In a Shakespearean context it conjures up the recurrent image in the Sonnets of inked “lines”—lines of verse written in ink—lines giving an immortality to perishable human beauty by capturing it in lines on the page ineradicably and everlastingly. Indelibly.
“The indelible beauties of Shakespeare”: Greenblatt was going further than I’d ever heard him go, further than I imagined he ever would, further, even, than I’d be willing to go, in the absolutism of his phrase. Because isn’t “indelible” a way of saying both “immortal” and “absolute”? “Indelible” doesn’t say these beauties are going to be with us a long time. It says these beauties will never disappear; their future is bottomless. I applaud the daring but lack the confidence, I guess, to say anything will last forever. I’m not opposed to it lasting forever. But for another millennium? Perhaps, like Homer, in translation, but is that the same?
I’m just grateful this beauty has been legible long enough for me to take pleasure in it, indelible or not.
Still it’s interesting, it’s not easy when you challenge yourself to come up with a better way to describe the “beauties” of Shakespeare in a single word or phrase. I would actually go with “rich and strange” if I had to choose three words or less. If I had to choose one word: Bottomless? Unbearable?
And is “beauty” itself the right word, or the most important word, to use when describing Shakespeare? When we say the tragedies are “beautiful,” do we mean because they are executed with great beauty, meaning with great art or artfulness, despite the horror that is b
eing executed?
I’d accept the idea that Lear’s fifth-act nevers are or can be made to be something of great beauty, however devastating each successive restatement of negation: “Never, never, never, never, never.” And by the way, are those five “nevers” of the Folio version 67 percent more beautiful than the three nevers of the Quarto? Would another “never” make it 20 percent more beautiful? There is alas a reductio ad absurdum in making beauty an absolute.
But has Greenblatt committed himself to the idea that one can confidently and absolutely claim to define beauty objectively and assign it to Shakespeare without any cavil, caveats, or “I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it” type concessions to subjectivity?
“The indelible beauties of Shakespeare.” It seemed a bit of a shame that he ended his talk with that line, since, in a way, it’s where a number of fascinating discussions might begin. Does the indelibility of Shakespeare’s beauties have something to do with this “individuation” that Greenblatt ascribes to him? Do other great writers offer beauties as indelible or individuated, or is Shakespeare alone capable of it? Is he, then, not on the same continuum as other great writers, but capable of beauties singularly indelible? Is this an “exceptionalist” argument: Shakespeare indelible, others, well, “delible”?
If not, how many other indelibly beautiful writers are there, and how does one distinguish the indelible from the non-indelible from the limited perspective of the present? Does everything indelible, like everything that rises, converge? To a single summit of impossible-to-surpass-or-erase singularity of beauty? With his final words Greenblatt had in a way almost given permission to his listeners to throw off the shackles of Theory and consider such questions again. I wonder if they will.
At the very least what we may have been witnessing was Greenblatt himself at last casting off his own shackles, finally able to declare a love, a love that transcends historicizing, for that indelible beauty.
TERROR AT THE PLEASURE SEMINAR
The Pleasure Seminar took place on the afternoon of the day following the Beauty Plenary. And it took the obverse approach from Greenblatt’s embrace of Beauty. It took the form in many instances of wrestling with the pleasure not within Shakespeare but the corresponding pleasure Shakespeare arouses within ourselves. This is not as self-involved as it sounds at first; it goes to the heart of the question of why we value what we value in literature. It is, as well, Stephen Booth’s territory.
It was only in his extremely provocative final sentence that Greenblatt had addressed the question of the beauty of Shakespeare, and its uniqueness. Most of the talk had been about what was defined as beauty in Shakespeare.
By contrast almost all the scholarly discussants in the seminar officially titled “The Pleasure Principle” focused their attention less on the conception of pleasure in Shakespeare (as in the debate over Falstaff), more on the pleasure of Shakespeare. How pleasure affected readers, spectators. What is regarded, defined as pleasure.
I’d been to such seminars before and this was one of the better ones. There was something venturesome about the discussion on this, again, long-dismissed or deconstructed “ideal” (Pleasure) and the way Shakespearean experiences translate themselves into physical, emotional, intellectual and even sexual pleasure.
Well, a verbal simulacrum of sexual pleasure, according to one of the participants, who—sounding as if he were basing his speculation on personal experience—made a remarkable conjecture about the most intense and visionary representation of an orgasm in Shakespeare.
It took me a while to absorb the significance of this conjecture which I will explore further in the context of the other pleasure papers, but first I feel it is incumbent upon me to issue a warning.
I must suggest that this section is not for the faint of heart. Raise your terror alert level, because we are about to talk about pleasure and you know of course how dangerous that is.
If you don’t, you haven’t been reading the lit-crit “discourse on pleasure” and noticed the way that it has been entwined with the discourse of terror, of “the abyss,” of the disintegration of the self, the loss of identity. Pleasure in academic discourse is strong stuff, threatening, you’re taking your life, or your self, into your hands.
And not five minutes had passed in the Bermuda Pleasure Seminar before the word “terror” entered into the discussion. Let me set the scene: a smaller hotel conference room than for the Beauty Plenary, a room with a view of those rain-whipped palms outside. (The trees of pleasure being lashed with a fury, and even seeming to bend in terror, or, who knows, pleasure. This is what’s known as “the pathetic fallacy,” reading one’s own pathos in the tempestuous state of the world or the weather outside.)
Anyway in the middle of the room there was a long seminar table for the fifteen or so discussants who had exchanged papers on aspects of pleasure over the past few months and were now about to spend three hours trying to engage in productive discussion of pleasure. And along the periphery of the room there were folding chairs for auditors such as myself.
It was not five minutes into the pleasure discussion that the word “terror” was uttered. One discussant, perhaps reacting to Greenblatt’s “indelible beauty,” raised the notion of “the terror of beauty.” An analogue to what I’ve been calling the sometimes “unbearable pleasure” of Shakespeare.
Nor was it long before another seductive but threatening word, popularized by Roland Barthes, was invoked: jouissance, a word Frank Kermode renders as “a response [to pleasure] so intense that it shatters identity.”
Evidence of the way that terror, or fear of jouissance, has become central to the discussion of pleasure could be found outside that seminar room, of course. Take for example another kind of pleasure seminar. A slim volume of essays I’d discovered shortly before the Bermuda conference. A book called Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon.
It consisted of Frank Kermode’s 2001 Tanner Lecture at Berkeley and an introductory essay by noted literary scholar Robert Alter followed by commentaries and responses by other equally prominent esthetic theorists: Geoffrey Hartman, John Guillory and Carey Perloff, all of which were followed by a response to their responses by Kermode. It’s fascinating testimony to the pervasive linkage of terror and pleasure.
Before we are ten pages into Pleasure and Change Robert Alter tells us that “Geoffrey Hartman worries that the term and concept of pleasure ‘glides over the abyss.’ ”
He suggests Hartman’s “horror of the abyss that is opened up through the concept of pleasure” may be “reacting to a discussion by Kermode of Roland Barthes’ notions of ‘jouissance’ with a suggestion of a response so intense that it shatters identity.”
Kermode himself goes on to explain that “Barthes distinguished between the pleasures of reading and what he called ‘jouissance,’ a term associated in French with, among other things, orgasm, and connoting an experience not simply pleasant but mixed with something perhaps best described as dismay.”
And then after Kermode finishes linking pleasure and dismay, Hartman makes things sound even worse: “the word, pleasure, is problematic—I am tempted to say ‘abysmal’—for several reasons.” One being the derivation of “abysmal” from abyss. And it is here that he tells us pleasure “glides over the abyss.” Which abyss he doesn’t specify. But it makes me feel he’s thinking of the abyss of bottomlessness. The fear of the endless fall into soul-dissolving pleasure.
And then a warning from Hartman: although Kermode has evoked orgasm, “any sexualization of pleasure runs a double danger. The first is the danger of making it appear as if the pleasure linked to art were the byproduct of a repression, a successful repression, Freud surmised, but still a sublimated or cerebral derivative.” The second “danger” is that Ol’ Devil jouissance. Disintegration from too much or rather too intense a pleasure. Jouissance represents the “destructive rather than constructive side of Eros,” Hartman tells us, and thus “jouissance jeopardizes … all i
dentity constructs.”
Hartman then goes further than Kermode’s rather mild (in comparison) linkage of jouissance with “dismay,” which has connotations of tristesse, post-coital or noncoital. Hartman is talking not about sadness or dismay but about self-destruction.
In other words, abandon all hope ye who seek pleasure from pleasure. You can’t handle the destabilizing truth of beauty. The price is too high, the abyss too terrifyingly bottomless.
Kermode’s response to Hartman and the other responders contains one of the driest, wittiest remarks I’ve seen in recent critical literature, and it relates to what I’ve talked about as the kind of “scaffolding” that Theory has erected to distance us from the dangers of pleasure:
“Neutralizing pleasure,” Kermode says, “is a task that may be carried on in various ways, but it seems odd to regard it as a good thing.”
Odd to regard it as a good thing! How perfectly stated.
Still the rhetoric of pleasure among Kermode’s discussants was terrifying, “gliding over the abyss” and all that. It made me look upon the efforts of the Pleasure Principle seminar I attended in Bermuda with respect: they were braving dangerous territory, this realm of “abysmal,” “destructive” pleasure and terror and shattered identity.
But all kidding aside, I was struck by how daring, and provocative, some of the Pleasure Principle papers were.
WHO WAS IT FOR YOU, DEAR?
I’m looking over my notes and tapes and some of the papers and paper summaries from the Pleasure Seminar. And in addition to “the terrors of beauty” two high points stand out: the orgasm and “accidence” arguments. The orgasm conjecture was presented by Alexander Leggatt, whose exegesis of the last words of Lear I’ve spoken of. At the Pleasure Seminar he offered a novel orgasmic interpretation of a famous passage in Romeo and Juliet. It emerged from a contention about what distinguishes Shakespearean from non-Shakespearean language:
The Shakespeare Wars Page 66
