by Wendy Lesser
You might be tempted to say, well, yes, that’s what happens when an author knows enough to leave his characters alone and lets them develop into credible people, unintruded on by his manipulations, wishes, and commands. But the thing is, Lawrence doesn’t leave his characters alone. He persecutes them, harasses them, invades them. He is forever chivvying them along and nipping at their heels. His animus against Walter Morel (the poor dumb brute of a miner who sires the novel’s main character, the blatantly autobiographical Paul Morel) is so powerful that we end up resisting it. If Lawrence is going to gang up against his own character in this way, we feel morally obliged to take that character’s side. Was Lawrence completely out of control here? Did he hate his own father so much he just couldn’t help himself? But wait—never trust the artist, trust the tale. David Herbert Lawrence the person may have had it in for his father, but the novel Sons and Lovers knows enough to allow for our sympathy for Walter Morel. The book wouldn’t work without it. So even as the author is ostensibly browbeating us with his opinions, he is also giving us the freedom to choose, to believe him or not, to side with whichever character we feel like siding with. That is the true sign of the writer’s authority.
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I have been making so many broad assertions that my readers may well feel their credulity exhausted. So perhaps now would be a good time to introduce a few specific illustrations, a few examples of how authority seems to me to exist in particular passages.
A writer’s own special kind of authority may pervade every sentence in her work, but it is often most noticeable at the very beginning, where we are deciding whether or not to trust that voice, whether or not to enter that world into which we are being invited. If one were to compile a list of persuasive openings, one might start with Pride and Prejudice’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.” But that would be unfair. Jane Austen is beyond competition: she carries so much authority in her quietly confident voice that she can afford to mock even the idea of authority, at least as it might be manifested in “universally acknowledged” truths. So if we want to compare different levels of authority, we’d do best to leave her out of it, just as for the moment we’ll leave out all the rest of the nineteenth-century novelists—for their strength has already been tested by time, and it will be hard to find any who do not seem to write with more authority than our contemporaries.
Let us look instead at a twentieth-century opening that is almost as self-confident as Jane Austen’s, though in place of her apparent straightforwardness and simplicity, it substitutes convolution and opacity. This is not an objection in itself. Many wonderful novelists—Dickens, Melville, Henry James, Marcel Proust, to list just the obvious—can write sentences that go on for half a page, unfurling their clauses and delaying their central points in a positively Germanic fashion. Complexity is not at all the same thing as artificiality or self-promotion, and simplicity of structure or language is not the only form of authority. Here, then, is the opening sentence of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!:
From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.
Faulkner’s prose leaves us breathless—literally so, in the way it forces us to exhale when its largely unpunctuated length is read out loud, and metaphorically too, in the degree to which it impresses without trying to. This single sentence invites us inside a particular place and time, introduces us to a couple of characters, and hints at their history, all the while using language that, if they could write, might have come from the characters themselves. The novel it introduces will clearly be requiring a great deal of us. This confiding, challenging voice presumes that, among other things, we will be able to focus our attention on small visual details, keep track of the complex strands of intertwined stories, recognize the undying effects of the past, both distant and recent, on the present, and appreciate the sound of a nearly musical language. We are deep into Faulkner territory here, that strange place which is an amalgam of external and internal, a community of unspoken thoughts and hidden reservations, a shared history that also belongs to each person alone. No one else has ever written quite like this, but one doesn’t sense that this is because Faulkner is trying to be different. The language just reflects the way his mind works; he is simply (though it is a simplicity filled with difficulty and extenuation) putting down what he sees, what he imagines. The wisdom, if there is wisdom here—and I think there is a great deal—is lightly worn. Its pertinence to the wider world, to our world, is disguised as the minute observation of a particular society that Faulkner knew as well as Jane Austen knew hers.
A novel’s opening lines don’t have to be specific, and they don’t have to be concrete—though if they are, the author will have an easier time winning us over. But an author who is willing to take risks can get away with almost anything, if he has enough intelligence and uses it with serious moral intent. Take this opening of a relatively recent J. M. Coetzee novel, Elizabeth Costello, whose first chapter is titled “Realism”: “There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.” This is a bit like Chaucer’s “Go, litel bok,” or Shakespeare’s imagined actor “boying” Cleopatra in the posture of a whore. Bravely, recklessly, Coetzee is reminding us at the very beginning of his fiction that he is just making everything up, creating a world out of nothing, getting us from our “there” to his “here.” But the fiction in which he does this is a novel about a fiction writer named Elizabeth Costello, so the problem outlined in these initial sentences—the problem of how to bridge the gap from our world to the realistic novel’s world, and make that bridge sustain the weight of our potential disbelief—is both his problem and his main character’s. Are these opening sentences his views, or hers? We are not required to choose.
Right from the start, the authority of the author is being questioned, just as it was in Austen’s opening sally. And yet the effect in Coetzee is one of grave seriousness rather than, or perhaps in addition to, wit. That the seriousness will not weigh us down is signaled by the conversational tone of the abstract discussion: the short, direct clauses and sentences, the reliance on what sounds like common sense (“People solve such problems every day”). Both Coetzee and his Costello are aware that the solutions are not easy, if you are a novelist. They both feel the threat of failure. But they are repeatedly willing to try. And part of what enables them to keep on trying is the sense that other people in their line of work have faced—and solved, and then had to solve all over again, every time anew—the problem of how to get started.
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There is no progress in the world of letters, as there is, say, in science or manufacturing. As the centuries pass, we do not get better or smarter at reading, and the authors among us do not get better at writing. Things come and go, make sense to us or not, depending on our particular state of mind, and we change our minds over the course of a lifetime. The whole culture can change its mind, too, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that a work of literature gets dated forever. On the contrary, a book from 1814 can make sense to someone in 2014 in a way that it did not, perhaps, make sense to that person’s great-grandmother in 1914. It is all a matter of what we believe, what we feel, coming
into contact with the convictions and emotions expressed in the novel or poem or play.
In this respect—in its lack of progress—literature is similar to human life, individually and in the aggregate. In my own reading experience, I’ve found no one who recognized this more clearly than Alexander Herzen. What is encouraging about him is that he was able to hold in his mind two seemingly conflicting ideas: that there is no destined progress in our lives, and that it is nonetheless worth struggling for principles we believe in (such as the innate value of an individual life, or the need for equality and justice, or the importance of art). Here’s how he put it in My Past and Thoughts, in a section where he was criticizing “the idol of progress” and its proponents:
Is it not simpler to grasp that man lives not for the fulfilment of his destiny, not for the incarnation of an idea, not for progress, but solely because he was born; and he was born for (however bad a word that is) … for the present, which does not at all prevent his either receiving a heritage from the past or leaving something in his will. To idealists this seems humiliating and coarse: they will take absolutely no account of the fact that the great significance of us men […] consists in just this: that while we are alive, until the knot held together by us has been resolved into its elements, we are for all that ourselves, and not dolls destined to suffer progress.
And the same is true, it seems to me, of works of literature. They exist in and for themselves, without a purpose, without a destiny, without any intent to build upon each other into something larger. This does not mean that they have no connection to their ancestors and descendants—they do, just as we do, and the web of history holds them all together just as it holds us (at least in retrospect, which is how we generally view history). We can be individuals and still exist in relation to the collective life of our kind, just as books can. For us to be firmly lodged in the present, our own present, doesn’t mean we have no awareness of the past or the future. It’s just that this train of events is not necessarily going anywhere.
There is something liberating in this notion, once you get over the frightening sense of being untethered from certainty and destination. If you resolve to meet each work of literature one-to-one, reaching across from your own perspective to its own perspective, you will find that certain problems, certain dilemmas, simply drop away. There is no question of the present’s superiority to the past, but nor is there any issue of the past’s superiority to us. We are all equals, meeting as if on level ground. If anyone is able to brandish superior knowledge at the other, it is by virtue of having gained it in her own lifetime, in her own way—not because she happens to come from a more knowledgeable time. The knowledge, in any case, is only useful to the extent it is capable of being transmitted, so the reader, as receiver, becomes as important in this transaction as the author who transmits.
We can have many chances to receive: it is not all or nothing with books, as it is with a live performance or an actual event in history. You can go back to the book at different times in your life (as I went back to War and Peace) and receive what it has to offer you at that point, which may be neither more nor less in quantity than what you received before, but will almost certainly be different in kind. This is not progress; it may not even be accumulation, since your earlier impression may be replaced by a later one; but it will nonetheless be a kind of truth. “Truth lives from day to day,” as Lawrence said, and the one you grasp on the fly is the only one there is, as far as literature goes—as far as any art goes. Such truths will not be susceptible to proof, but if there is to be no progress, and if each encounter with a literary work matters purely for its own sake, then the absence of proof doesn’t really matter. The work speaks to you or it does not. That is all you can finally say.
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In the English language, over the past four or five centuries, nobody has spoken to more of us—nobody has, in this sense, possessed more of what I am calling authority—than Shakespeare. He has been vilified by English schoolboys and eminent Russian novelists; he has been bowdlerized and travestied by Victorian theater producers, who sought to replace his tragic endings with more commercially viable happy ones; he has been abused by the Germans (who felt that Schlegel’s translations of Shakespeare were far superior to the originals) and disdained by the French (who found him messy and verbose in comparison to his contemporary, Racine). He has been borrowed by each succeeding ideology to prove that its own perspective is the only correct one, and his work has lent itself to social commentary of all stripes, including the apolitical, purely psychological stripe. And yet he endures, always and only himself, available as freshly as ever to each new generation of readers and viewers.
We know so little about Shakespeare the man that the Lawrentian problem hardly exists in his case. There is no artist, just the tale. But what tale is it? Which performance, when they are all so different, is the definitive one? Can there be a final, perfect version of a Shakespeare play on the stage—and if not, does the literary work only exist in a kind of ghostly form, waiting to be tentatively, imperfectly embodied by each new approach?
I have opinions about these matters, but I do not have the answers. No one does. This is why Shakespeare raises to such an intense degree the question of authority. There are no operating instructions handed down to us by the writer (as there were, say, with T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and James Joyce’s Ulysses), and there are no regulations issued by the estate (as there notoriously have been in Beckett’s case). In terms of productions, anything goes. You can put a piece of toast on the stage and call it The Merchant of Venice, and no one can stop you. We want to be able to say that the piece of toast is not Shakespeare—we know this, even if we cannot prove it. But how far does this knowledge go? Is a Merchant of Venice in modern dress Shakespeare? Is a Merchant of Venice done in blackface or by an all-female cast Shakespeare? Is a Merchant of Venice performed in German and set in a Mercedes Benz factory Shakespeare? (I have actually seen that version, done by the Berliner Ensemble, and it was one of the high points in a lifetime of theater-going.) Different people will get off this coach at different stages, and there is no firm point at which we will all be able to say in unison: Now it has passed beyond the pale. Now it is toast, not Shakespeare.
There is still another bothersome question about Shakespeare’s authority, and that is, how do we hear it? In a play—which by definition has no narrator, and in which the only words are the characters’ lines—there are no sentences we can point to as stemming specifically from the author. (It would be silly in any play to insist that the author’s presence is felt only in the stage directions, and in Shakespeare’s case it is not even an issue, because he used almost no stage directions.) Yet those of us who love Shakespeare love him, in particular, for his authority. He creates a world for us, and that world feels incomparably right, and true. He does not seem capable of setting a foot wrong, not at the line level, where the poetry is perhaps the best ever written, and not at the structural level, where everything coheres into a profound theatrical experience. If there are problems in the plays—the anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice, the stern, cruel justice in Measure for Measure—these are our problems, the result of our not yet having figured out how to cope with the disturbing material. Plays that once seemed equally intractable, such as Othello, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale, have turned out to be audience favorites, now that the sticky patches have been resolved—resolved, I mean, in a way that leaves the underlying darkness and conflict intact. Such problems can only be solved temporarily, for each new generation raises new sensitivities, new concerns. That too is a source of Shakespeare’s continuing authority: his infinite flexibility, his adaptability to the needs and sensibilities of each era.
All this makes him seem like a miracle worker, or even a god. And I do believe, in my thoroughly agnostic way, that Shakespeare’s plays are small miracles. Like the ancient Greek temples left standing on the southern shores of Italy, they seem not to stem from power
s we think of as human. And yet they are human; and unlike the ruined temples, Shakespeare’s plays even feel human in scale. Side by side with the hugeness and the impressiveness of his work is something much smaller, much more graspable, much more easily recognized. If Shakespeare at times comes across as a grand remnant of the oversized past—one of those monumental “bare ruin’d choirs,” to quote his own line—he is also our most intimate mirror, the one in the bathroom perhaps, where we casually catch our own faces morning and night, hardly even aware of what we are seeing.
FIVE
GRANDEUR AND INTIMACY
Consider the emotion we call love. Which category would you put it in? Is it a grand, consuming passion, bigger than anything else we experience on earth? Or is it the very essence of intimacy, the closest we ever approach to another human being? For Shakespeare, it can be both.
Look, for example, at what he does with Antony and Cleopatra. In this complicated drama—at once a love story, a history play, and a tragedy—he gives us two larger-than-life figures whose passion for each other ultimately brings about their deaths. Everything we hear about Cleopatra—from the famous description of her by Antony’s friend Enobarbus (“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety”) to the manner in which Antony himself addresses her (he often calls her “Egypt,” as if to equate her with her whole country)—suggests her outsized personality, her enormous power. Her strength is evident even in retreat, as Antony discovers when he finds himself following her after she flees during a sea battle against Caesar. “O, my lord, my lord, / Forgive my fearful sails! I little thought / You would have followed,” she cries, to which he responds: