In Our Time - Shakespeare and Literary Criticism

Episode Date: March 4, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the enduring popular and academic appeal of Shakespeare. Did he invent the human personality as we inhabit it now? Professor Harold Bloom claims:“Shakespeare is universal. Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. One has to ask the biblical question “Where shall wisdom be found? And I suppose for me the answer is: wisdom is to be found in Shakespeare provided you get at it in the right way.”But why does Shakespeare still hold the popular and indeed academic imagination in the twentieth century? Should we read him above all others as Harold Bloom suggests in the way he suggests? And what does this say about the state of literary criticism today? With Harold Bloom, literary critic, Professor of Humanities, Yale University and Berg Professor of English, New York University; Jacqueline Rose, literary critic and Professor of English, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, he's been voted by Radio 4 listeners as the man of the millennium. And the American literary critic Harold Bloom claims, quote, Shakespeare is universal.

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. One has to ask the biblical question, where shall wisdom be found? And I suppose for me the answer is, wisdom is to be found in Shakespeare, provided you get at it in the right way, unquote. But why should we read Shakespeare above all others, as Harold Bloom suggests, and in the way he suggests,

and what does this say about the state of literature criticism today? Harold Bloom has been described as the most read, most controversial, and quite probably the most influential literary critic of the latter half of the 20th century. Currently, a professor of humanities at Yale University, and Berg, Professor of English at New York University, he's the author of more than 20 books, including the best-selling Western Canon

and the anxiety of influence. In his latest book, Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human, he claims that Shakespeare essentially invented human personality as we continue to know and value it, and furthermore was the inventor of Freudian psychology. Jacqueline Rose is Professor of English at the University of London. She's one of this country's leading literary critics, known for her pioneering, psychoanalytic and feminist interpretations of literature.

Like Bloom, she's passionate. about reading, but claims there's no one right way of reading. Professor Bloom, you say that Shakespeare invented human personality. In fact, you go on to say, I do not know whether God created Shakespeare, but I do know that Shakespeare created us. And of Hamlet, whom you write about with awe and passion throughout the book, you write, we cannot think of ourselves as separate without thinking about Hamlet. Could we talk about this?

insofar as we are all of us victimized by the perpetually growing inner self, the ravening inner self, which cannot be stopped, cannot be curbed insofar as that interiority increasingly threatens to swallow us up. Perhaps as our only defense against the tyranny of the visual, the tyranny of an age which is becoming increasingly too multiplex for us to absorb,

then we are very much in Hamlet's mode, yes. You must understand, or is indeed the term that I would use. I don't necessarily think that I would use the term affection. Hamlet will not accept our love. He does not want our love, and he certainly does not love us. I don't think he loves anyone. I doubt deeply the notion of a great Oedipal attachment to Gertrude when his closing words to the dying queen are wretched queen adieu,

which is not exactly something charged with affect. In fact, what I find most mysterious about this, as he finally is, all but magnificent nihilist, is that he has great concern for his wounded name and on that basis alone urges Horatio who loves him to Fabir the sweet felicity of suicide and thus joining the prince in death that is mysterious and needs much labor of thought

but then the prince is endlessly I will not say necessarily self-contradictory but more even than Emerson's disciple Whitman, one can say of Hamlet, he is large, he contains multitudes. Yes. Can I put this to Jacqueline Rose? What's your take on this? What's your view of this?

Well, I find myself agreeing with Professor Bloom on the basic premise, which is that in some sense, Shakespeare invented a certain concept of the human, which has been enormously influential and is the one in which we still recognize ourselves. and I would go further along the lines of this partial beginning agreement by saying that I think he develops a certain notion of interiority or inwardness, as you describe in your book, and that that way of experiencing oneself is central to the psychology of what one might want to call by way of short-hand Western man.

But for me, that's where the problems begin. If we take your paradigm, your favorite play, can I call it your favorite play, Hamlet, I think, is your. your favorite play. It gets the most mileage in the book. And you say, never as ambivalent and divided a consciousness walks the stage. I certainly agree with you. But that, for me, is the moment when all the questions begin. Like, for example, what is the relationship between that tortured inwardness of Hamlet as a man and the utter revulsion on his part towards the women who walk the stage? Then the next word we have to look at is this hour, you see.

Now there's a wonderful line in your chapter on Hamlet where you say he has become nearly all to all men and to some women. I loved that moment because it was as if you were suddenly having to pause because you couldn't. Even you, I don't think, could possibly say he's become all things to all men and all women. No, I should certainly.

A gentleman, an age of gentleman who has as many brilliant women students as I have had for the last 47 years and who continue to surround me is in no position to say that. Well, then doesn't that throw into question the notion of the universal slightly? If you have to say all men and some women, or if you say

our Western culture will only survive its present period of self-hatred, I think you say something like this, if it becomes more Hamlet-like, well, I think you'll find a lot of these women students you're talking about saying, well, actually, we're not sure

that's a self-recognition we want to go down the path of. Jacqueline, are you actually saying, are you agreeing with the, the premise, which is a massive one, about the invention of the human. It's a big claim. It's made very forcefully and held to very strongly.

And so we're saying that Homer and Virgil and Chaucer and the people who read the Bible did not do this. And Hamlet was a significant and different shift. That's what you're saying. And the interiority and the questioning and the divisions and confusions and contradictions

there are something inventing a different sort of understanding of personality. in which we have lived ever since. I want to agree with it in the sense that I think Professor Bloom is right, that there is a strong, passionate line running from Shakespeare to Freud and that insofar as we think of ourselves

as subjects of an unconscious, and insofar as we think, or some of us think, that historical forces can be contained inside a mind's ability to ruminate on them, that Shakespeare was seminal in the invention of that concept as a human. I am much more Brechtian than Harold Bloom and I would agree with the critiques that have been made of that as a way, as a form of hubris

and as a way of thinking, indeed, that the problems of history can be contained and resolved inside a single mind, however tortured and however self-punishing that mind might be. Another way of putting it would be to say that Shakespeare created the bourgeois individual. I mean, that would be the Marxist critique of this. There's a wonderful book by Robert Wyman

called Shakespeare and the popular tradition in the theatre, where he celebrates Shakespeare, something along the lines that are being discussed today, but he also says there was a burgeoning, contradictory, conflictual, irreverent culture, which that integration that Shakespeare carried out on it has been an enormous price to pay. It was an act of social repression.

But isn't it curious when you're talking about how Shakespeare leaving to Freud, that Freud, in his seminal views, went pre-Shakespeare, didn't he, for his inspiration, it were. Well, he did, yes. He hoped he was going pre-Shakespeare. I think he perhaps deceived himself. You think the Edible Complex wasn't, didn't really refer to Edipus? I think it referred to Hamlets. Really? Can you prove that? Well, I try to in a book called the Western Canon. It would take a while to resume the arguments, but essentially what Freud has to say about the Oedipo Complex makes it much likely that it should have been

called the Hamlet complex. You see, Freud would partially agree with that, but then again I wouldn't draw the same conclusions from it, which is that Freud did say that Shakespeare represented the secular advance of repression in the life of mankind, which is that whereas Edipus was for Freud, the only man who never had an Oedipus complex, because he performed it,

Hamlet is the man who, because he has an unconscious, cannot act. That's the Freudian reading of Hamlet. So to that extent, Hamlet was key for Freud's understanding of what had happened to Oedipus. It had gone inside. It had become a form of self-torture. But I agree with Melvin that there's a risk here. And I think for me the risk is not whether Shakespeare developed a certain kind of interiority,

which is still enormously influential. But what our attitude towards that should be? And I think where the disagreement between us would be is that you believe the attitude towards that should be one of reverence and all words that you use. Whereas I see a lot of my task in the seminar room with students is to include, encourage them to a very different way of thinking about these things and to certainly give them the right to feel they can be as irreverent as they choose and to question the identifications that the plays offer them so powerfully. I mean, it seems to me one of the most exciting things

that has happened to literary studies in the last 10 or 15 years is that it has involved itself in a systematic skepticism about spurious forms of unity and about the way in which literature encourages identifications which we might have a right to be skeptical of. And for feminists, the first spurious unity is the unity of sexual harmony and which represses the more difficult intractable aspects of sexual difference and conflict. If you're a Freudian, which I know you are, Professor Bloom, then there's the spurious psychic unity which makes people parade around with their egos, and I think that's what we suffer from, not in witness, at the expense of the problems that

that might be concealing. And the other one, which is crucial and must be mentioned here, is the unity of culture. The implication that we all speak the same language. I mean, if we can just move aside from Shakespeare for a moment to another book, which I know you love dearly, which is George Eliot's Middlemarch, which has had huge cultural coverage in Great Britain

in the last few years. The first line of that book, Miss Brooke had the kind of beauty that is thrown into relief by poor dress. You give that to a group of students, in the east end of London and asked them to think about it. And I will never forget, a student from Poplar

who'd been working in a dress shop for five years and came to the university because she was determined that she wasn't going to be like the other woman in the shop who'd been there for 10 years and I said, what do you think of this sentence? She said, she's not talking to me. And it seems to me terribly important to credit and respect that response

as a way of beginning. And to spend time on the kind of beauty that's thrown into relief by poor dress. Well, how does George Elyleit managed to make us all believe we know what that kind of beauty is. How does she manage to make us believe that poverty can be an aesthetic attribute of beauty? And I think those are the kinds of questions we need to ask

when we're looking at literature, as well as the forms of pleasure and enjoyment that you describe. So I want people to be more skeptical and certainly be asked who is contained in the we of as authoritative a voice, says George Elliott, or the we of a literary critical voice as authoritative as your own. Harold Bloom, what's your response to this particular sort of question? I think the differences between Professor Rose and myself

are really more pragmatic than that. I suspect having read her on Hamlet, having read her elsewhere, that aesthetically we are not so different as she perhaps regards us as being. We both of us believe that either a literary work has very strong, aesthetic and cognitive value, or it need not engage us. So there's no fundamental or pragmatic argument between us, though obviously there is what she would assert is an ideological difference. Far more than a Freudian, far more indeed than any kind of orthodox figure. I think I'm essentially at heart what I've always been, a Jewish Gnostic, a Kabbalist, someone,

who fundamentally believes that our predicament is primordial, as I think it is shown to be in King Lear and in Macbeth, that is to say that the creation and the fall were one ghastly simultaneous event. For me, the heart of Hamlet is when he manifests so strongly that he will not, as he says, like a whore, unpack his heart with words. I used as an epigraph. But whores don't do that.

I mean, hauls don't unpack their hearts with words. You know, I mean, that's exactly where a feminist criticism would move in and say, can we please unpack the language. Yes, but the criticism, forgive me, my dear, would not be of me, but of Hamlet's. Yes, but you don't criticize Hamlet and you say, we all have to forgive him. And again, one wants to say, well, if you stop at that line, you might think, well, let's just look at the language that's circulating here. I don't believe I stop at the line. I want to use the line. I want you to stop at the line. Can I just turn to the notion of character as a reading?

You are very emphatic, and you bring all your... enormous powers of reading and writing and editing and teaching for many years to bear on characters. And just three of the characters you celebrate with awe. Your words are Hamlet, Rosalind and Falstaff. Now, Jacqueline Rose, how do you respond to this concentration, this focus on character as the,

seems to me, the key to the reading, to the understanding, to the takeover, which is what we're talking about in this book of Shakespeare? I think to concentrate on character at the expense of historical determinisms and social pressures is a problem for me. But then if we could stay inside the terms of character for a moment, I think you have to look very, very carefully at what values you're promoting in the promotion of character. So I can't help but notice, for example, that Hamlet is his ambivalent and divided consciousness, as could possibly appear on the stage.

But Rosalind, for example, is normative. She is normative, beautifully harmonious. and totally sane. Well, it seems to me there's a bit of a sexual division going on here in terms of what men and women are being required to be.

And when you say of Rosalind, for example, that she is free of malice, free of resentment, never turns her aggressivity towards herself or other, but is wonderfully curious and exuberant in her desire, my alarm bells start ringing

because that sounds to me, I retranslate that she's never crossed, she's never stroppy, she doesn't ask any difficult questions, and she still desires men, so she's perfect. And it seems to me that one of the things

we should be doing if we're concentrating on character is ask what we are asking of those characters. The other thing I would want to say, and this is, I think, a more direct reply to your question, Melvin, is that the identification with character is very, very powerful. For me, a turning point in literature was when

I realized I did not have to. Or I realized, for example, in a more struggling relationship with the literary text, take Dorothy A Brooke from Middlemarch, for example, that I had spent a lot of my time till my early 20s thinking, should be as much like Dorothy at Brooke as possible.

And the moment of liberation came, when I sort of looked at that line, she stood looking out of the window, that vast, palpitating life and could no longer hide her head in selfish complaining. And I thought, what am I doing, identifying with this? I mean, what's in it for me? So it seems to me that character is crucial,

but you have to ask, not just what you can learn for these characters, but what do they want from you? And then, behind that, what does the book need me to be as a reader for me to take its values on board and perhaps I should be difficult and stroppy and even a little bit aggressive with this text as well as all the other things that you describe.

And that I think is a more capacious form of criticism. Would that response come into what you call the School of Resentment? It's an extremely distinguished instance of that school, yes. So for listeners who are just starting here, could you tell us that score at its most exquisite? For listeners who were just starting here, could you tell them what the School of Resentment is? how this might fit in?

Well, I'm sure that Professor Rose would not much like the phrase. I would say that the Anglo-American academic world, as I've seen in my now 50 years of a teaching career, has largely fallen onto the sway of a group who are highly active, who would include critics who call themselves feminists, some of the male, various disciples of

French mystagogues, including Foucault and Lacan and Derridaal, so-called cultural materialists or ostensible Marxists, people who advocate one in one of my

perhaps less amiable moments I describe as French Shakespeare. In other words, you've got not much time this lot? And you put them in a baggage as this lot, really, the School of Resentment? Many to most

of my most distinguished former students, some of whom I retain obviously great respect and great affection, are very much part of that school. The distinguished and handsome lady opposite me is I think very much part of that school.

Not have much time for... What do you give them? You swipe them pretty hard. I do believe... Call them covens, actually, at all the Yes, covens. Do you feel good. Covens and gender freaks, I think, is your other expression. I assume you are trying to provoke here.

But first of all, the categorization of all these different schools of thoughts in one bag, which simply seems to mean different from what you do or not agreeing with what you do, seems to be very, very problematic. Secondly, to classify as resentment politicizing of literary studies, and to classify as resentment of feminist critique of the images on offer that a whole general, generation of women students were encouraged to take on board on critically, is to answer a question in advance, because it has been, I think, one of the most important things that's happened in literary studies

to legitimate that form of questioning. And to put together that and then not notice the ways in which that form of criticism enabled another generation of critics, often actually contemporary with those, but with another set of questions, often asked to feminism, of the ways in which this Western canon which you promote has excluded literatures in English which do not rise to the status of your conception of aesthetic values from non-white cultures, for example,

seems to me very, very problematic. Indeed, I mean, there's a wonderful article by the critic Gowatry Spivak called three women's texts and a critique of imperialism where she just says, why is it that the emancipation of Jane Eyre requires the Creole woman to throw herself, in a gesture of burning self-immolation off the balcony of Rochester's house.

And why is it that for so many women's students, that is a moment that they experience as the triumphant liberation of the white woman character on her journey to freedom? And shouldn't one of the questions we be asking, like the relationship between Hamlet and his revulsion against femininity, the relationship between Jane's apotheosis and that burning figure off the balcony?

and that's where you bring in the question of race, as well as the question of gender. And I don't know what it would mean to want to put the clock back on that. It seems to me crucial to continue with those questions. I think it's very much a pragmatic issue of time.

If all of us were going to have, not the biblical three score and ten, but 140 years, say, which is not going to be, then there would never need rise any questions whatsoever about the canon. There would be time to read everything, and even more important to reread everything.

But one must choose. And I see already that some of the pragmatic consequences of the developments that Professor Rose favors have led in Anglo-American University, and colleges to the disappearance of a great many, very crucial authors. I cannot know how many universities I have encountered now in the United States, and I suspect also here in Britain, in which Blake, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth are set aside or looked at only briefly in favor of Letitia Landon, Felicia Heemans, Shores, Shaw.

that Armstrong Mary Teague, or 17th century studies in which Milton and Marvel, poets who indeed need much mediation, are set aside in favor of the Duchess of Newcastle or Lady Mary Chudley, I understand very well what Professor Rose is saying. She feels that there are issues of development and of what the real needs of students are, if they ought to. know themselves truly, and realize themselves, and she indeed understands full well that the argument ultimately is against what she would regard as the fiction of a universal, and I would regard as a common universal. But I do see very unhappy consequences at work, so much so that I have advocated very strongly, though I know that I am merely a voice in the wilderness on this, and it's purely quixotic on my part, that we should in fact break up all of these large departments, say, of English or comparative literature across the United States and Britain, into quite large divisions or departments of cultural studies, and on the model of

classics departments, small departments of Greek and Latin, have small departments of literature. Let us divorce one another, because I feel that deeply, well, it's not going to have and the whole world of deans and deaneries are against it. But I feel that increasingly we do have different values. Not perhaps in the end, aesthetic and cognitive values, profoundly different. But the question of what literary study is for and what literary study can be for and what it can achieve. I suspect that for me in the end, it can only most profoundly, teach anyone, whether that person be rich or poor, female or male, black or white, the mind's

dialogue with itself. It cannot really teach us how to talk to others or to be with others. It must first teach us how to talk to ourselves. Can I bring Jacqueline Rosen here? My dear, do I. I just think what you're promoting as a solution would be a disaster. It was not going to happen, my dear. Well, then we're both pleased. But it seems to me that what is crucial is to have students read Chaucer and Shagsborough.

I'm not going to plug my college, Queen Mary Westfield, where that is what they do in the first year. And then also to read some of the other writers that you think are less worthy of their attention, but which we would claim are different. You want a literary syllabus that teaches students the canon and teaches them what the canon has had to exclude. We need the concept of the outsider to make its way into the heart of literary studies. But it mustn't oust the dominant because then the conversation isn't there. Then the understanding of the difference isn't there. So I think the last thing we want is little pockets of literary studies

and little pockets of cultural studies. We have to go on having this argument, however difficult it is. Can I finally go towards an ending in this discussion? The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton said that there may come a time, implying that there will come a time when Shakespeare will be no more relevant than graffiti. Do you think there will ever come a time when Shakespeare will be less central, as you see it,

to Western culture and he is now? And so far as we are, perhaps, a kind of literary culture, in spite of the coming on of all the visual media, this is inescapable. This is the heart of our culture. There is room, as Professor Rose would indicate, for immense dispute as to what is worth knowing

and how it should be known and how this knowledge should be used. I suspect that Professor Rose would agree more with me than with Miss Eagleton on this. Well, I've been queued in here, But I don't think that's one of Terry Eagleton's best statements, simply because, I mean, how can he know? And it seems to me we're in the process of creating the next stage of our cultural future,

and we do not know what it's going to be. And insofar as, problematically enough, Anglo-American culture continues to define itself as Western, even if that is done dialectically, critically and violently, then Shakespeare is going to have his place. The question is how we read him and what we do with that. Well, how we do with that is obviously very complex and something we can return to again.

I actually hope we do. I wouldn't mind talking to both of you again, rummaging over that for many hours. But thank you very much, Professor Harold Bloom, Professor Jacqueline Rose, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.uk, forward slash radio 4.