She notes that in the sad sack Lear/Falstaff jacket photo of Bloom, “we are asked to contemplate Bloom’s wound, as his reciprocal gaze promises access to … the deepest mysteries of what it means to be human, as invented, Bloom will claim, by the Deity Shakespeare.”
But after her critique of Bloom she turns to her academic peers, and addresses some pointed questions about the implications of Bloom’s grand bestseller success with the American public and suggests in a charmingly self-deprecating manner that in some way it “threaten[s] us.”
“I’ll hazard a guess why,” she says. “It’s because he comes from here—he comes from our ranks, has contemptuously risen above them, and has written a bestselling and profitable book, that may be what irks us most—the sheer huge FACT of the BOOK itself and (the gorge rises at it) its success! Where does he get off writing a book about ALL of Shakespeare’s plays? How dare he profess himself the ‘expert’ in Shakespeare while ‘dissing’ the rest of us? Even worse how could he leave us vulnerable to well-meaning family members who say, ‘Who is this Bloom guy? Couldn’t you write a book about Shakespeare that would be a bestseller?’ ”
She has many other wise and funny things to say about her and her peers’ “practice”: “I have to admit most of our criticism wouldn’t convince anyone, academic or not, to see the plays.”
And then citing another critic, Sharon O’Dair, she makes a remarkable statement. O’Dair argues that it’s time to get beyond the “ ‘institutionalized debunking of the bourgeois autonomous or essentialist humanist self.’ I agree,” Charnes says. “The time to make a career beating that horse has passed. For more than twenty years, this has been an important and worthy task in rethinking literary culture and the actual politics behind the Western canon. But is this all that we have to offer as critics? A way of endlessly rehearsing our demystifications of the experiences of the bourgeois individuals?”
Wonderful! She has captured all that makes the work of Theory clones so tedious.
But she doesn’t let up, she doesn’t let the entire Theory generation off the hook:
“Our institutionalist debunking of the bourgeois subject has calcified us into an elite corps of yuppie guerrilla academics. We all avow that we’re speaking for the oppressed voices—of class, of race, of gender, of sexuality, of nation.… We’d better look very carefully not at what [Bloom’s] doing but what we’re doing in the academy.… If Bloom caricatures us and, in my opinion, Shakespeare, we have made it too easy for him. If our admiration of artistic talent, poetic beauty and great intelligence in art is … nothing more than the duping of the interpellated subject tricked out in the Trojan horse of the ‘esthetic’ then Bloom is indeed offering a theory that the public can embrace, and I think wants to embrace now more than ever as cybertechnology virtualizes every social experience and recognizable representations of human character grow scarce” (italics mine).
Love the phrase “an elite corps of yuppie guerrilla academics”! Camille Paglia couldn’t have said it better. And a fascinating conjecture about the source of the public’s longing for someone like Bloom to affirm the human, even if by inventing “the invention of the human.” As Shakespeare (remember him?) wrote of poetry: “the truest poetry is the most feigning.” Bloom’s grand feigning evokes a truth for Linda Charnes: there is a greater enemy than the illusory bourgeois self: digital virtualization of the self. I felt I was witness to something real emerge from Bloom’s invention.
I don’t know how else to put this but: this was big news! Big news for those who care about literary culture and the academy, anyway. For someone at the very heart of postmodern literary academia to say such things is an astonishing breakthrough. And Bloom’s parade float celebrity, his bombastic overstatement, prompted it, because as Ms. Charnes pointed out to her fellow academics, “we lack a compelling alternative model of character and selfhood. Critique it as we may, decenter it to the last instant of recorded time, the post-Enlightenment ‘individual’ is here to stay.”
She’s not completely happy about the persistence of this delusion (note the scare quotes around “individual”). But Bloom’s success is proof of the persistence of the illusion despite all efforts to deconstruct it.
We owe Bloom a debt for prompting in his bombastic way Ms. Charnes’s courageous act of reevaluation. And we owe Ms. Charnes a debt for the acuity and daring it took to make this realization public.
As it turned out when I reported on this paper in the Book Review essay, Ms. Charnes was dismayed that even though I called her essay “brave, witty, rueful and irreverent,” she felt I had characterized it as a recantation of all Theory. She was unwilling to say that she had recanted the deconstruction of the bourgeois self. It was more “been there/done that, nobody cares anymore. We have more important things to think about.” Okay, I’ll grant her that and still be thankful for what she’s done. Shift to “more important things.”
One of those is “the esthetic”: the question of beauty and value and how we define it. She admits as well that her fellow Theorists have “cleared the ground for him by ceding the discussion of the Esthetic to Bloom and his fellow reactionaries.”
Not only does she speak of reconsidering “the esthetic,” but she gives respect to the “love of art” Bloom speaks to.
It was shocking and it probably wouldn’t have happened without Bloom’s wildly inflated, wildly popular overstatements which spoke to a longing Ms. Charnes knows her “practice” doesn’t. “The world doesn’t give a fig for our critiques of humanist ideology.”
Every postmodern academic should read this essay before burdening us with yet another of those critiques.
But if Bloom has done a service to scholarship by prompting this brilliant essay, what about his Falstaff? Has it done a service to Shakespeare?
That was the issue in Bloom’s struggle with Jack O’Brien over Kevin Kline’s Falstaff.
PART 2: “YOU CAN’T HAVE HIM, HAROLD!”
Jack O’Brien wasn’t seeking to puncture Harold Bloom’s balloon so much as recapture, reintegrate Falstaff into the two Henry IV plays, level the playing field you might say between Bloom’s utterly nonironic Pleasure Principle and, well, other principles. The idea of having principles itself. It was not theoretical for O’Brien; with Falstaff, Bloom is the elephant in the room.
O’Brien was an experienced and much admired Shakespearean director, then the artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Company, and was putting on a high-profile conflation of the two Henry IV plays for Lincoln Center. With a top-notch cast led by Kevin Kline. (And featuring a mixture of RSC regulars such as Richard Easton as Henry IV and earnest but not un-talented American aspirants such as Ethan Hawke as Hotspur.)
O’Brien is one of those Shakespearean directors whom I’ve come to think of as scholars on the fly. Like Trevor Nunn, John Barton and the RSC crew; like Brian Kulick, Barry Edelstein, Karen Coonrod and Jeff Horowitz among American directors. Ones who can drop offhand remarks about characters, language and themes that emerge from the practical questions of staging the plays, remarks that can be as illuminating as those of the best and brightest of academics. I found my talks with traditional scholars exhilarating because so exacting. With directors it was often exhilarating and exacting in a different way.
The behind-the-scenes Lincoln Center drama as I reconstruct it consisted of three acts: The Challenge, The Struggle, The (Two) Ending(s).
The Challenge
It emerged during my dinner with O’Brien when we were discussing the relationship between those two icons of pleasure in Shakespeare, Cleopatra and Falstaff—and Bloom entered the picture.
I’d asked O’Brien if he saw similarities between the two embodiments of the pleasure principle.
He saw differences: “Falstaff is as different in his way as Cleopatra is hers. I don’t think her infinite variety is his infinite variety. I think his is almost beyond life.”
I asked him to explain what he meant by “beyond life”; it sounded Bloomi
an. Not quite.
“I mean there’s no category over which he doesn’t spill. I think it’s why Bloom sort of stumbles and falls and gets all gooey and giggly finally about it all. Because you know he’s so over the moon, over the top about Falstaff, you get tired of listening to him.”
O’Brien is just getting going: “Falstaff is reduced to a kind of Silly Putty, and it’s too bad because Bloom is such a wonderful writer and a great mind, and you want to say after a while, ‘Oh, shut up, Harold. Enough already—we get it. You can’t have him! You can’t have him, Harold. You can’t contain him. You can’t nail him. You can’t put him in amber. You can’t define him. You can’t reduce him.’ ”
And one more time, conclusively: “You can’t have him.”
It was a remarkable tirade, one that reminded me a bit of Sir Peter Hall’s table-pounding fury over the delicate pause at the end of the pentameter line. O’Brien never actually pounded the table, but he pounded the point home repeatedly, thumpingly: “You can’t have him, Harold.”
The phrase not only demonstrates how controversial a figure Falstaff can be. The phrase also made explicit that this was a struggle for possession—“You can’t have him.” This is love triangle language. A struggle for possession of Falstaff, a struggle to define Falstaff, for definition of what the most Shakespearean realization of Falstaff might be. And a struggle that replicated the struggle over the love of Prince Hal waged in different ways by Falstaff and King Henry.
In practice it was a struggle for possession, if not for Kevin Kline’s soul, certainly for his role.
As someone with a rare combination of film and stage credibility, a combination of fame and talent, Kline was taking on a role that would define his body of Shakespearean work as much as his Hamlet.
It was not a natural for him; Kevin Kline has been more a lean and hungry-looking type most of his Shakespearean career. Can a relatively compact guy convincingly represent the most renowned fat reprobate in literature? Is it something you can put on with a hundred pounds of theatrical padding around the belly—that whole history of gluttonous self-indulgence? Kline was a decade short of Falstaff’s seventy and maybe 150 pounds lighter than he would look when he encumbered himself with massive body padding to simulate the lard that is the physical congealment of Falstaff’s pleasures of the flesh.
Kline had often consulted Bloom upon Shakespearean roles; they were mutual admirers. So when O’Brien’s “You can’t have him, Harold” challenge became public through something I was to write, Kline faced a real dilemma that would require him to choose publicly the most “Shakespearean” Falstaff from a position between two opposed mentors.
You can’t have him, Harold—there is a rationale for the resistance to all-encompassing Bloominess about Falstaff, especially for those staging the play in the real world, not the “theater of the mind.”
The resistance comes in part from the notion that Shakespeare’s plays aren’t just about “great characters” who like Falstaff have become Dickensian icons of Olde England. That one element of the “Shakespearean” in drama is that of counterpoised characters and the ever-shifting mutual gravitational force they exert on each other.
Characters we see through each other’s eyes as in that great scene in which Hal plays his father and Falstaff plays Hal and then they switch.
The Henry IV plays, written at the peak of Shakespeare’s powers, are Shakespeare at his most symmetrical and complex. A drama of an array of forces acting on—and critiquing—each other, each force embodied by unique characters: Falstaff’s appetite for pleasure, and his love of spirits; Hotspur’s spirited lust for Honor; Owen Glendower’s invocation of a realm of spirits (“I can call spirits from the vasty deep …,” an etherealized version of the alcoholic spirits that repose in the vasty deep of Falstaff’s belly); Henry IV’s dispirited hypocritical Machiavellianism (the principle of being unprincipled); and Prince Hal’s attempt to find his way to principle through unprinciple. And yet each containing, reflecting elements of the other.
All those beautifully composed and counterpoised forces, at least on the page. And it offers some of Shakespeare’s most powerful, highly charged language, often spoken by others than Falstaff. Consider these opening lines from Part 1 spoken by Henry IV:
So shaken as we are, so wan with care,
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant
And breathe short-winded accents of new broils
To be commenc’d in stronds afar remote.
No more the thirsty entrance of this soil
Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood,
Nor more shall trenching war channel her fields,
Nor bruise her fiow’rets with the armed hoofs
Of hostile paces. Those opposed eyes,
Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven,
All of one nature, of one substance bred,
Did lately meet in the intestine shock
And furious close of civil butchery,
Shall now, in mutual well-beseeming ranks,
March all one way and be no more oppos’d
Against acquaintance, kindred, and allies.
The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife,
No more shall cut his master.…
It’s staggering in its power, just as Hotspur’s rhetoric is exalting and exhilarating and Glendower’s mystical and romantic.
But on the stage, Falstaff, for all his literary complexity, is an overwhelming crowd-pleasing rogue charmer with an appetite that goes beyond mutton and sack, and extends to chewing scenery and stealing scenes, indeed stealing entire productions. An appetite that audiences have indulged and actors have loved ever since he stepped on stage in 1596 or 1597, even if you don’t believe the legend that Falstaff so captivated Queen Elizabeth that she commanded Shakespeare to write a story of “Falstaff in Love.” (Which we’re told is how The Merry Wives of Windsor came to be.)
This was the beginning of Bloom’s Falstaff the Beloved, a tradition that has its true apotheosis not in Bloom’s inflated cartoon of a joyful liberator (and creator) of the human spirit, but perhaps in Orson Welles’s melancholy Lear-like Falstaff who pushed sentiment to the very verge of sentimentality, too far for some, unbearably beautiful to me. Welles wasn’t attempting to give us a flawless Falstaff, a superhuman one, but a very human one, whose fall, whose rejection, is all the more affecting.
But for more than a century after Falstaff took the stage, it seems, few had the courage or the caustic intelligence to register dissent from jolly old Saint Falstaff. To say, in effect, “You can’t have him, Harold.”
It was Samuel Johnson in his 1715 Shakespeare edition who established the Other Pole of the Falstaff argument.
It may, in this age of the Bloom-inflated Stay-Puft Falstaff, be hard to believe that there could be a critique of the mischievous but lovable Santa Claus. But consider two things Samuel Johnson said about Falstaff: “The fat knight has never uttered one sentiment of generosity, and for all his power of exciting mirth, has nothing in him that can be esteemed.”
And on Falstaff’s famous charm, Johnson admonished us, “No man is more dangerous than he that with a will to corrupt, hath the power to please.”
Note the striking connection between pleasure and danger. This is not the puritanical critique of someone who dislikes pleasure, but rather of one who knows pleasure and its seductive power all too well.
It is more a critique of the way pleasure can be treacherous and deceptive: yes, Falstaff can “excite mirth,” but there is no generosity in him and “nothing in him that can be esteemed.”
Both/and ambiguity: Johnson registers a complexity beyond Bloom’s one-dimensional simplicity. But that’s an interesting charge: no generosity in him. Falstaff famously is not only witty in himself but “the cause of wit in others.” That could be seen as generous, although “cause” here—that so-often-central Shakespearean word—is, typically, ambiguous. It could mean he is the inadvertent cause of jests
made at his expense, or it could mean that he creates a world congenial to wit and its mutual evocation that causes everyone in it to be endowed with his radiant wit.
But no generosity? Johnson is suggesting selfishness, not selfless congeniality, is hidden beneath Falstaff’s charm. Is Johnson being too harsh, or is he asserting something about Falstaff often lost in the warm and fuzzy “appreciations” of him and Shakespeare? Bloom sees Falstaff as all generosity, generous in making the harsh world more tolerable with laughter even at his own expense. The generosity of a creator. Johnson sees it as an act.
Johnson is often caricatured as a puritanical scold for taking this position, but his remarks are not often read closely enough. He seems divided, in a subtle and interesting way, over Falstaff. He can address him as “Falstaff unimitated, inimitable Falstaff,” almost sounding like Bloom until he asks, “How shall I describe thee—thou compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised but hardly detested.”
Now tell me that isn’t an interesting distinction: “vice which may be despised but hardly detested.” He doesn’t detest vice, he may despise himself for liking it too much and find in Falstaff not quite the self-condemnation he feels he should share.
Those who have rushed to defend Falstaff (before Bloom rushed in and emptied the room) range from the painfully earnest to the complex as well.
In a particularly simpleminded attempt to defend his hero and reply to Johnson, one Maurice Morgann published a 1777 pamphlet in which he tried to exempt Falstaff from the charge of cowardice even though his actions typically bore “the external marks of cowardice” (cravenly hiding from the enemy for instance). Even Falstaff wouldn’t defend himself against a charge of cowardice: instead he’d defend cowardice—on principle. (Bloom praises “Maurice Morgann’s defense of Falstaff’s pragmatic courage [which] resembles that of Socrates, who knew how to retreat intrepidly” (italics mine). I love “pragmatic courage” as a euphemism for cowardice. The man is shameless! Everything Falstaff does reflects Socratic wisdom.)
The Shakespeare Wars Page 54