In past posts I have argued that literature should best be
understood as a kind of rhetoric, that a literary text is an argument in favour
of a particular proposition or set of propositions. In this instalment, I
thought I would back up my views by going back to Shakespeare - but before I
adduce some of Shakespeare’s plays in support of my theory, I thought I would
say something about the world in which we live. This is necessary, I believe,
because it is impossible to give a good account of fiction without also giving
an account of reality.
Most of what we know about our social environment is based
on hearsay. Theories of mind, of personality, of society, of science and of
politics, we learn from textbooks, from TV, from conversations with others,
from schooling, from novels and poetry and plays. A person’s ethical system, in particular, is taught to him
by the people around him. There is no way to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ –
although some have tried (John Searle has made a good attempt, as has Ayn Rand).
We cannot learn our moral principles from direct observation of the physical
world because the real world, the natural world, is inherently amoral; rather
we absorb the ethical lessons underlying the books we read and movies we watch.
Stories do not principally provide us with information about the actual world;
rather they teach us how we properly ought to think and behave in certain
situations. One of the great myths, for instance, that virtually all fictions
espouse, is that the good are rewarded and that the wicked are chastened. In
Shakespeare’s stories, anyone who kills another is doomed to die himself during
the duration of the play. One is forced to wonder, though, if this notion of a
necessary, causal relationship between good deed and reward, between crime and
punishment, is not a massive con foisted on the general public. Josef Stalin
died at the age of seventy-five still leader of the Soviet Union; Mao Zedong
was still Chairman of the People’s Republic of China at his death at the age of
eighty-three. Did these monsters deserve their success? Atrocities during the
Second World War and in Cambodia during the late ‘Seventies, for instance,
offer ironclad evidence on the other hand that sometimes bad things happen to good people. Our
faith in moral acts having appropriate, condign consequences for the agents
concerned is based not on reality but on the fictions we embrace. And fiction
is far removed from reality.
The tenet that moral acts (and all acts are moral) have
their consequences in this life or the next plays a central role in all major
religions. Christians and Muslims believe in a heaven and a hell; Buddhists and
Hindus believe in karma. The common feature of these religious systems is that
if a person does not receive his proper requital in this life, he or she should
expect it in the one after. Mainstream religions do not claim that the
consequences of a moral action inevitably occur in this life; that particular
idea is left to the poets, playwrights and authors. In a way the world’s
storytellers are participating in a global conspiracy, a conspiracy to convince
the public that if you do right you will inevitably benefit and if you do wrong
you will suffer. It is a kind of conspiracy because this proposition is
arguably frequently untrue; it is a benevolent conspiracy because, arguably,
the world is a better place for this maxim being believed. The notion that the
good inevitably prosper and that the wicked inevitably pay for their crimes is
a kind of necessary fiction. It is a
fiction because it is often untrue; it is necessary because society needs its
constituents to believe it true for society to continue to operate. It is not
the only necessary fiction: other examples of necessary fictions include the
idea of an eternal unchanging soul and the idea of True Love. These necessary
fictions help us navigate through life and one of the principal functions of
literature, perhaps the most important one, is to create and sustain these
beneficial illusions.
This idea that moral actions rebound on their authors is
not, of course, the only proposition that fiction can propose. According to
Lajos Egri, the premise of Othello is
“Jealousy destroys the thing it loves”. The whole play, he proposes, operates
as an argument in favour of this premise. I would like to suggest that the
thesis of the play is far simpler: “Jealousy can be unfounded” – Egri’s premise
is in fact the antithesis. It is of the nature of tragedy that the antithesis
reaches its catastrophe before the thesis can assert itself.
Hamlet is a more
complicated play and harder to interpret. The central conflict of the story
concerns Hamlet’s indecision, his reluctance to carry out the wishes of his
father’s ghost and take bloody revenge on his stepfather. The occasions when
Hamlet kills, when he stabs or poisons Polonius, Laertes and Claudius, he kills
out of passion or by accident, rather than from premeditation. The exact reason
Hamlet hesitates so long, finds it so difficult to avenge his father, continues
to mystify but, perhaps, a part of it is that to follow his father’s demand is
to bring about his own death. The paradox of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy is
that private (rather than public) retribution is simultaneously morally
justified and a mortal sin that must inevitably also erase the avenger. Hamlet
is mad, not only in seeming but in actuality, and it is surely true that his
madness is because his father has trapped him in a double-bind. I may perhaps
have to do some research on Hamlet and write about it again…
Macbeth also concerns
the spiritual consequences of murder. The great complex soliloquy that Macbeth
delivers at the beginning of Act 1 scene 7 about his intention to kill Duncan
fundamentally deals with issues of moral causality. I quote the first part of
the soliloquy:
If
it were done, when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well
It
were done quickly: if th’ assassination
Could
trammel up the consequence, and catch,
With
his surcease, success; that but this blow
Might
be the be-all and end- all… here,
But
here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’ld
jump the life to come. But in these cases
We
still have judgment here – that we but teach
Bloody
instructions, which being taught return
To
plague th’inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends
th’ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To
our own lips.
Macbeth begins with the hope that the murder might be free
of consequences – aside from the obvious effect of granting him the crown. He
goes on to briefly consider the notion of an afterlife but decides kingship in
this life worth the risk of eternal damnation in the next – or perhaps decides
to simply ignore its possibility. He goes on to consider the act’s worldly
consequences, that he might teach others to do to him the same violence that he
intends to do to Duncan.
In the next part of the soliloquy he considers Duncan’s virtues, virtues that
Will
plead like angels, trumpet tongued, against
The
deep damnation of his taking-off;
And
pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding
the blast, or Heaven’s cherubin, horsed
Upon
the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall
blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.
The soliloquy, taken as a whole, conveys an almost religious
feeling, an almost supernatural intimation, that great moral crimes have
profound magical effects on the world. Macbeth is a towering figure because his
ambition, his criminal desire for power, is almost completely balanced by a
powerful, instinctive (perhaps even subconscious) and almost mystical sense of
good and evil. The consequence of the murder that Macbeth does not consider in
the soliloquy is that his own conscience may plunge him into hell while he is
still alive. This is the maxim of the story, its message, that when a person
commits a great crime, he damns himself to hell even before he dies. Of course, this is a
falsehood or, as I have said, a necessary fiction, but it is a fiction that
most of us non-sociopathic ordinary folk find reassuring…
This particular post is, by the way, not the best I have
written. Sometimes one begins a post not particularly sure of what one wants to
say. For those interested in my better attempts at interpretation, I recommend
the interpretations I did of Donnie Darko
or “The Dead” by Joyce. My next post should be on A Beautiful Mind. I hope
it will be a good one.
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