Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot...

[fajrdrako]

The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates. - T.S. Eliot.

Interestingly true. In some ways. Does this explain Shakespeare?

When I woke up this morning, CBC radio had an item about Shakespeare. Someone whose name I was too sleepy to catch is teaching Shakespeare to young men in street gangs to pull them away from crime. Now, I would consider this one of those ideas doomed to failure, but the man spearheading this made a good case. He himself was a young man in a gang in London, England. While in prison he started to perform in Shakespeare's plays and that changed his life. He thinks it can change the lives of others, and is setting out to prove it.

In principle, I see the validity. If they find something more interesting and creative to do than shooting each other (or innocent bystanders, as seems to be what's happening in Toronto these days), then they don't need to shoot each other. And the man argues that Shakespeare is universal -one clip had him teaching it through rhythm, like rap. Of course, the ideas in Shakespeare are universal too, though I'm not sure whether performing Titus Andronicus would make a person less violent. The radio clip had them performing (or listening to) parts of A Midsummer Night's Dream, probably a better idea.

When we did Shakespeare in high school, most of the people in my class were glazed over in boredom. Me, I was at the front of the class, challenging the poor teacher with questions he couldn't answer. I was passionate about Shakespeare.... Huh. I guess not much has changed. I'm older and less thin but I have all the same obsessions.

I know a lot of it is in the presentation. If one of those high school teachers had been a talented actor, or even a line-reader, they might have caught the imagination of other students, and brought across the feelings the plays ought to generate.

But not all teachers can act, and not all students can understand. Seems to me that for every troubled sixteen-year-old male in a gang who can get caught up in Shakespeare, there must be another who is tone-deaf and oblivious. Or who will just lose interest when the good teacher/actor goes away and the gang leaders call him back, and he can't afford to go to real plays, and doesn't fit in at the local community theatre where the middle-aged middle-class folk are having such fun doing Neil Simon again.

On the other hand, I wish there was more of this sort of thing going on. I wish there was more attention paid to kids who need it. I wish there was more Shakespeare around, period, especially in Ottawa. Kudos to the Company of Fools, boos to the National Arts Centre.

Comments

[meret.livejournal.com]

I don't know about gang members, but I taught Romeo and Juliet to high school freshman. I had a student who I would guess read on the third grade level. Before we started the play he would rather have detention than have to read aloud in class. After we got into it, he was eagerly volunteering to read a part in class. I had to help him with a lot of the words, but he was getting it and enjoying it. This school had a 50% drop out rate. Shakespeare didn't interest all of them by any means, but it got more than a few students interested in English class for the first time.

I know a lot of it is in the presentation. If one of those high school teachers had been a talented actor, or even a line-reader, they might have caught the imagination of other students, and brought across the feelings the plays ought to generate.

Absolutely! I minored in drama as an undergrad and approached it as a play.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

After we got into it, he was eagerly volunteering to read a part in class.

What a wonderful story! I guess if even a proportion of a group catches the spirit, you've made great strides. I suppose it might be enough to get a person thinking, not to concentrate exclusively on the gang culture. And I suspect there will always be a proportion who will "get it", at whatever level it appears. I hope so.

I wish I'd had a few more English teachers who'd studied drama before trying to teach plays or poetry. It makes such a difference. Novels and short stories are meant to be taken as words on a page, but plays ought to be brought alive by performance - they should be done out loud by someone who knows how. It doesn't have to be a production, it just needs some skill, training and enthusiasm on the part of the teacher.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

"The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." - T.S. Eliot.
Interestingly true. In some ways.

Not necessarily. There are some in whom the life and work are completely separate, others less so. Some writers mine their own lives and experiences for their material, and it doesn't necessarily mean they are 'less perfect' in artistry.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I think there is no generalization you can hear about writers that is necessarily true of more than one of them. They each approach their work in different ways, in terms of the work itself, and the technique of writing, and most of all in the psychology of writing.

And some people write their best works in the heat of passion.

But for a lot of writers, personal considerations - suffering - get in the way of the work, and unbalance it. In other cases, the suffering is both cathartic for them and energizing for the work.

Perfect artistry is a tricky thing to pin down, anyway.

I would conclude that when he said this, T.S. Eliot was thinking about himself and his own work. I think it would be fair to say that his best work was that he was most objective about - that is, his very best work was intellectual, not emotional. Or... he approached emotion through intellect, rather than the other way around. A kind of 'pure thought', where other writers would worth through pure (expressed) emotion.

A lot of writers use their own lives for inspiration - sometimes overtly. More often it creeps in, in their viewpoints and their judgement. So - an a writer use his/her own life as material, and still be objective, or separate himself from the work? I suspect not.

What I like in the Eliot quote is that there is an implied division between the author and the act of writing - that the writer in order to write can be separate from his own feelings and thoughts in order to present them clearly. It seems to have worked for Eliot. I can't think of many other authors it works for, but I'm not sure if we can judge from the tone of the works.

I think Hemingway may have approached his work similarly, though his actual writing is more emotive than intellectual. He has a way of presenting understated heat under the surface.

Perhaps it was an early twentieth-century thing?

Because of the juxtaposition of the Eliot excerpt and the radio item on Shakespeare this morning, Shakespeare was the first thing I thought of when I read the quotation. Nobody knows how Shakespeare wrote or what he felt about it, except insofar as he expresses it in the plays - and even there, I think he has more about acting than he has about writing. The impression I get is that he was able to be objective about the strong passions he writes about because he was able to write about them so fluidly - with understanding, but with clarity. This is probably an illusion; no doubt life experience had something to do with it all too. But he gives the impression of being able to put himself in the other man's place all of the time - an overview of human feeling that is not only remarkable (and maybe unique in its success) but which implies self-transcendence just because he was able to do it.

So does self-transcendence imply dispassion? I'm not sure, but I think it's the sort of thing Eliot was getting at.

My, I do run on, don't I?

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

I think the problem with the quote is that Eliot is trying to make a general assertion on something about which to make such a general assertion is impossible!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yup, he was. But is isn't the usually stated view, which is why I found it interesting. Most people (including myself, at least partially) believe that "write from the heart" and "write from experience" is the way to go - and neither piece of advice encourages objectivity.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

But is isn't the usually stated view

If so, that's probably the fault of the Romantics. I generally find the head a more useful organ than the heart in writing (I am very, very suspicious of the downgrading of reason, and its subordination to 'feeling', in so much modern discourse - all the 'sensibility" crap has been recycled as so-called "emotional intelligence". Let's see more intelligent intelligence!).

And "write from experience" is not helpful if one's experiences have been fairly limited; it also demands that readers learn to put up with acres of authorial ego and self-indulgence! Some people can pull it off without being self-indulgent; others can't. The much-hyped Plath only ever made me want to turn up the oven... ;-D

maybe of some interest

[wijsgeer.livejournal.com]

a very intellectualised "turn around" of the conscious and the subconscious in writing.
I just happened to stumble upon it on Youtube (of all places)

It is a short clip of Derrida http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoKnzsiR6Ss

Re: maybe of some interest

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Fascinating link! Thank you.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Head and heart are both useful to me in writing.... I don't seem to be able to engage one without the other, and the best results come from a balance where each enchances the other. That being said, I don't know where an ability to create comes from. If I did, maybe I'd be able to turn it on more easily.

Interesting thought: I find that writing from the subconscious is generally more rational and lucid that when I try to write from the intellect. But the intellect and the knowledge of what I am writing about has to be there ahead of time, for the subconscious to come into play. Then reason can take a back seat to - what? not emotion. Instinct, perhaps. Whatever that means.

"Write from experience" is only really good advice, in my opinion, for people who want to write but don't have much imagination, despite the fact that I advocate it to a certain extent. "Write about what is important to you" is much better advice. Write from the courage of your convictions.

[monsieureden.livejournal.com]

I love it when you run on! It's better than I could do. :)

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you enjoyed it. Just ignore me if I get boring.

[dargie.livejournal.com]

Check out "Shakespeare Behind Bars" a wonderful documentary about how Shakespeare's plays are changing the lives of men in a maximum security prison.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip - pretty much exactly what this item was about, since the instigator of the programme was behind bars when he discovered Shakespeare. I wonder if I can download it?

[dargie.livejournal.com]

I have no idea. I rented it.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I'll find out if I can do that too.