I agree that Ishiguro had that rare, Lear-like courage to look unblinkingly into the never, never, never, never, never, never Abyss Beneath the Abyss and not pull back. Secondly, a common sentiment -- "I am personally sick to death of hearing the constant refrain of “Holocaust” and “anti-Semitism” in response to even the mildest perceived criticism of Israeli...
more I agree that Ishiguro had that rare, Lear-like courage to look unblinkingly into the never, never, never, never, never, never Abyss Beneath the Abyss and not pull back. Secondly, a common sentiment -- "I am personally sick to death of hearing the constant refrain of “Holocaust” and “anti-Semitism” in response to even the mildest perceived criticism of Israeli policy." The fatal flaw with this feeling is that the anti-Semitism that fueled the Holocaust IS behind too much of the world's criticism of Israel. Our urge to "put the Holocaust behind us" -- especially in terms of coming to grips with our own anti-Semitism and culpability -- is not new. I recommend Cynthia Ozick's amazing essay "Who Owns Anne Frank" in which she chronicles the attempts to take the "Hebrew element" and any criticism of Germans out of both the publication of Frank's diary and the ensuing play in the 1950's -- a play written by non-Jews to emphasize the universality and "happy playfulness" of Anne Frank at the expense of all reality. "I certainly have no wish to inflict depression on the audience," said the producer Garson Kanin. "I don't consider that a legitimate theatrical end." (so much for HAMLET and KING LEAR.) When asked why the play substituted jolly jingles during the one Jewish ceremony shown in it -- a Hanukkah ceremony celebrated in the annex -- when the Frank family actually had sung "Rock of Ages," Kanin replied "Hebrew would simply alienate the audience." Those crude sexual inuendo and countless political connections and profoundly disturbing elements -- say the unrelieved, unprecedented, never-equaled nihilism of King Lear -- are there for a reason. As you've all probably noticed, the Fool in King Lear is never on stage at the same time as Cordelia. Theatrical tradition often has the same actor (or actress now) play both, even though they are separate "people" in the play. You're reading a man who just re-read THE TRAGEDY OF KING LEAR last night. (For about the 300th time.) Now THAT is despair. Nihilism at it's most brilliant. Staggering artistic courage to stare down into the Big Gulp beneath the Absolute Abyss without blinking or flinching. Accepting a universe where the only law and commandment is "never, never, never, never, never." He uses all the techniques (and flags and promises) of comedy to produce his most unassailable tragedies -- up through Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra to the ultimate nihilistic statements of King Lear and Othello. And the same, of course, can be said of his best comedies -- everywhere they skate on the very thin ice of tragedy. Even as we laugh, there is a sense of real and imminent danger of things swerving, as they did in King Lear, into inconsolable loss (not just of another loved one, but of dignity, reason, a sense that there is any order in the universe.) Anyway, in terms of revision, it appears that "Hamlet," one of two truly boundless masterpieces the Bard created (the other being "King Lear"), was the one he worked on and revised the most, whatever the template's origins, perhaps rewriting it from scratch over and over for ten years or more. Late last night I was happily re-reading a light Shakespearean comedy (King Lear) when suddenly I rose from bed, went downstairs to my library, and pulled the 1989 Vintage Paperback of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day off a shelf and spent a few hours re-reading it (instead of the yuk-fest Lear.) Perhaps some of the events of the long day had subconsciously prompted this re-reading. Personally, I've always heard Shakespeare's private sense of being trapped in such a time in the cry from Edgar in King Lear when Edgar has been forced to assume a disguise and flee for his life (as so many former teachers, friends, and acquaintances of Shakespeare had been forced to.) "I heard myself proclaimed," the banished and outlawed Edgar cries:
And by the happy hollow of a tree
Escaped the hunt. No port is free; no place,
That guard, and most unusual vigilance,
Does not attend my taking. Whiles I may 'scape,
I will preserve myself . . . .
(II.iii.1-6) I would suggest that this disjuncture between language and action, the tension and rancidness that lay just under the surface of a comedy ("Love's Labours Lost") and a history-tragedy ("Julius Caesar") -- not to mention every other work of Shakespeare's up to and including "Hamlet" and "King Lear," -- is an even greater problem when it comes to poor and disfunctional rhetoric in the life of our nation. Someone said that the true test of art -- as opposed to just entertainment -- in art, literature, movie, film, or any creative medium, is that you can view, read, watch, or listen to a work of art many times over and each time you discover something new in it. It keeps opening up before you the deeper you move into it. It's what makes "Hamlet" and "King Lear" so incomparable. The operative word in "Keep It Simple, Stupid" is after the comma . . . "Stupid." The phrase is addressing you as "Stupid." Writers shouldn't do that. Condescending towards one's readership is sometimes a recipe for bestsellerdom, but is also, invariably, a recipe for literary disaster (in terms of how short-lived and shallow your work is destined to be.) Sometimes writers' styles are simple. Sometimes that simplicity is part of a complex plan. More often it is just a matter of being childish, poorly educated, and extremely limited in one's craft. The partially educated writing for the preliterate. Using "simple words" all the time proves nothing. Newspapers in America do that because they've decided that their average reader can't handle any vocabulary over that approved for sixth-graders (11-yr-olds, for our foreign visitors). And even then they rarely choose the right word. (KATRINA DECIMATES GULF COAST!) In "The Tragedy of King Lear," Shakespeare included more than a hundred and fifty new words -- new to the English language! -- that were probably unfamiliar to his mixed-class, mixed-education audience, but which he trusted them to figure out from Latin roots and their context. A hundred of those newly coined words had come from Montaigne's essays, which Shakespeare had just read in translation. Thank God he never adopted the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" algorithm. Nor did Melville in "Moby Dick." Nor Saul Bellow in any of this novels. Nor James Joyce. Nor Nabokov. Nor Gass. Nor Barth. Nor Pynchon. Nor Ondaatje. Nor Hemingway -- however deceptively simple his prose and word choice look to those unwilling or unable to look more carefully.
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