More obtuse and obvious stuff.

In another post I remarked on the curious self-satisfied smile often seen on the face of bourgeois Shakespeare spectators, most notably at the ‘New Globe’. ‘Benign reassurance’ I called it.

Whether it’s Hamlet saying it will cost Ophelia a groaning to take off his edge or Timon’s despair, suicide, sexual disgust, extreme violence - all are robbed of their appropriate affect and replaced by this smile of cultural self-satisfaction and self-congratulation. This, needless to say, has nothing to do with responding to a ‘literary effect’. It is as though the plays endlessly emit ‘Shakespeare’s Genius’, to which these spectators are peculiarly attuned. This ‘attunement’ is one insignia of the taste-culture to which they belong.
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B_ has no interest in literature or philosophy at all. She’s happy watching the soaps and reading various magazines. But occasionally, as a gesture, she suggests I read her something. So I once read her Hamlet’s famous mortal coil soliloquy. When I got to the bit about “in that sleep of death what dreams may come” she’d had enough. It wasn’t that she thought it boring and unintelligible. She was disturbed by the idea of death as an endless dream-troubled sleep. It activated a memory from when she was much younger. This, then, was not one of the recognised modes of ‘literary response’. It was not ‘appreciation’ (that distanced and slightly playful relation to things which is the mark of legitimate culture). Instead, what happens in such cases is that some content cuts directly into one’s flesh and into one’s experience, short-circuiting the ‘literary effect’. From a certain point of view, it was a kind of category error. And yet..
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'The influence exerted on the Irish people by Parnell defies critical analysis. He had a speech defect and a delicate physique; he was ignorant of the history of his native land; his short and fragmentary speeches lacked eloquence, poetry and humour; his cold and formal bearing separated him from his own colleagues; he was a Protestant, a descendant of an aristocratic family, and, as a crowning disgrace, he spoke with a distinct English accent.'

This is from 'The Shade of Parnell' by James Joyce. What difference would it make, in terms of our reading, in terms of the kind of things we get from the text, if there was no Parnell, if this text lacked a historical referent, if this was not an essay but part of a fiction? In some ways, perhaps not a great deal (Joyce shows how identification works not inspite of a leader's 'defects' but precisely because of them..). In other ways, the subtraction of the 'shem' of truth would automatically re-orientate our reading. Try it, try it with other texts - remove the shem from its mouth and enjoy the fiction of reading it as fiction.