Why Read? by Mark Edmundson

Author:Mark Edmundson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

But Shakespeare?

DOES THE WORK contain live options? Does it offer paths one might take, modes of seeing and saying and doing that we can put into action in the world? How, in other words, does the vision at hand, the author's vision, intersect with—or combat—your own vision of experience, your own Final Narrative?

Do you want to second Wordsworth's natural religion? It's not a far-fetched question at a moment when many consider ecological issues to be the ultimate issues on the world's horizon. Is it true, what Wordsworth suggests in "Tintern Abbey" about the healing powers of Nature and memory? Can they fight off depression? Not an empty question in an age when antidepresant drugs have become unbearably common. Is Milton's Satan the shape that evil now most often takes—flamboyant, grand, and self-regarding? Or is Blake's Satan—a supreme administrator, mild, bureaucratic, efficient, and congenial, an early exemplar of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil"—a better emblem? Or, to strike to the center of the tensions that often exist between secular and religious writing, who is the better guide to life: the Jesus of the Gospels, or the Prometheus of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who learned so much from Christ, but rejected so much as well—in particular Jesus' life of celibacy?

All right, one might say, but those are Romantic writers, polemicists, authors with a program. Even Henry James might be considered part of this tradition, albeit as an ambivalent anti-Romantic. What about other writers? What about, for instance, the famous poet of negative capability, who seems to affirm nothing, William Shakespeare? The most accomplished academic scholars of Shakespeare generally concur: they cannot tell what Shakespeare believed about any consequential issue. How can you employ Shakespeare in a way of teaching that seeks to answer Schopenhauer's question "What is life?" And if you can make nothing of Shakespeare, greatest of writers, then what value could this approach to literature, this democratic humanism as we might call it, possibly have?

If Sigmund Freud drew on any author for his vision of human nature—right or wrong as that vision may be—it was Shakespeare. The Oedipus complex, to cite just one instance of Freud's Shakespearean extractions, might just as well be called the Hamlet complex, as Harold Bloom has remarked. From Shakespeare, Freud might also have gathered or confirmed his theories of sibling rivalry; of the tragic antipathy between civilization and the drives; of bisexuality; of patriarchal presumption; of male jealousy; of all love as inevitably being the love of authority; of humor as an assault on the superego; and a dozen more psychoanalytical hypotheses. Shakespeare may not have affirmed these ideas out and out—he is not, it's true, a polemicist in the way that Blake is. But the question remains: Does Shakespeare/Freud work? Does their collaboration, if it is fair to call it that, illuminate experience, put one in a profitable relation to life, help you live rightly and enjoy your being in the world?

Readers of Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego will recall the daunting image of the leader Freud develops there.

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