Silliman's Blog

Feeding a bird on the head of Charles Olson

If the current regime in Washington appears to be the most hostile to intellectuals since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when the People’s Republic of China sent a generation of them out to collective farms in the hinterlands for education – if they were lucky – one of the little ironies of the present historical moment is that an administration that thinks nothing of tossing overboard the last century of diplomacy in order to bring democracy to the Arab world at gunpoint, and which would happily deconstruct Social Security in order to send more of our dollars into the coffers of its contributors, has actually been good to the National Endowment of the Arts. It has not be eradicated, which had been a non-negotiable demand of a lot of conservatives heretofore. It has even had its budget expanded, albeit modestly.

There is something bordering on universal agreement that no small measure of the credit for this counter-intuitive trend can rightfully be assigned to its current chair, poet Dana Gioia. Gioia, a Republican businessman who writes poetry, has demonstrated to his peers in D.C. that there is nothing inherently un- or anti-American about the arts & has even engineered something of a rapprochement between the two constituencies.

Two programs in particular have stood out in Gioia’s attempt to return the NEA to credibility with his fellow conservatives. The first is a series of creative writing courses being taught to U.S. troops; the second, developed actually in advance of Gioia’s arrival at the NEA but so heartily taken in hand by him that it has become his signature effort, is Shakespeare in American Communities, underwriting some 1200 performances of the bard’s plays in 550 U.S. locations, mostly focusing on areas traditionally untouched by Shakespeare in the Park productions in New York City. For example, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival brought its version of Macbeth – an interesting choice given the short cuts George W took in claiming the throne in 2000 – to 13 military bases. And got $1 million in Defense Department funding to help pay for the effort. The program also has produced 25,000 education resource kits for use in schools. Shakespeare, as it turns out, is to be a unifying element for American culture, or so envisions the NEA.

Shakespeare, to my mind, is an interesting choice. One can imagine, for example, what might have happened had some other foreign playwright been imported & underwritten on a similar level. Such as Bertolt Brecht or Dario Fo. Even, I dare say, an attempt to underwrite 1200 performances of African dance or Indonesian gamelan might have had the xenophobes who populate capitol hill slicing away at the artery of federal funding that makes all this possible. Shakespeare, on the other hand, gets a pass. Nobody seems to notice, for example, that the dude never set foot in this hemisphere.

I have argued – even this week – that one of the defining elements of the School of Quietude is its sense of American art as a tributary of British culture & a national program to immerse the American psyche in the works of the glove maker’s son from Stratford sure sounds like the apotheosis of that worldview. One can only wonder what the Americans whose ancestors can’t be tracked back to the British Isles must think of this attempt to insinuate this perspective into our culture at this late date. “The thought of what America,” as the old Pound poem puts it, “would be like if the classics had a wide circulation, well it troubles my sleep.” Of the 6,379,157,361 people on this planet as of last July – the estimate is the CIA’s – just 51 million come from Great Britain, Scotland included. Roughly twice the size of Canada, but less than that of the two most populous states.

One might argue, as does Harold Bloom, that Shakespeare creates the modern psyche, regardless of nationality. Or merely that he was the greatest of playwrights or poets, a position more than a few credentialed people here & elsewhere are prepared to advocate. But the fact remains, whatever else one might wish to say about him, there is nothing American, nothing even remotely “national,” about William Shakespeare. Save perhaps for his influence always already on American writing.

When the Royal Shakespeare Company filmed its minimalist version of Macbeth for the BBC in 1979, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, the rest of the 12-person cast & the accompanying production crew got together to simply count the number of different versions of the play they had worked on or in during the course of their careers. The total went into the hundreds. In a society the size of Britain, this obviously could have some impact. By comparison, even the ambitious program of the NEA must seem like a token effort, a drop in an ocean of just under 300 million people. Further, the context is radically different. The idea that Shakespeare in America could have the same meaning or import, even on a far smaller scale, is a fantasy.

I do see Shakespeare as a decisive influence in the work of two major American writers, Herman Melville, especially in Moby Dick, & Melville’s most direct literary descendant, Charles Olson of Gloucester. Indeed what makes Melville’s novel about the whale unique, in Melville’s own writing as well as in 19^th century American letters, is the degree to which its author’s diction & imagination have been bathed, completely immersed, in the diction & drift of the Shakespearean tongue. That even accounts, I would suggest, for the book’s crash-and-burn reception when it was first published, a reaction so brutal it functionally undermined Melville’s career. No one, at least in the U.S., in the latter half of the 19^th century, was prepared for a work that would not only short-cut fiction’s long march toward a pictorial (and, in some instances, psychological) realism, bypassing modernism entirely, on its route to what might now be recognizable as pomo literature. Even in the United Kingdom, writers needed to go through the realist crucible of Joyce’s “The Dead” to begin the modernist revolution in prose with Ulysses.

The echo of Shakespeare is everywhere in Olson, from Call Me Ishmael, which explicitly reads the impact of Lear on Moby Dick to Olson’s sense of quantity in verse, which he traces back to the last decade of the bard’s plays. But where I really hear it, constantly, is directly in Olson’s verse. As in this opening strophe, from a poem named for its first line:

As the dead prey upon us,

they are the dead in ourselves,

awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you,

disentangle the nets of being!

Or, to take another first stanza, this time from “In Cold Hell, in Thicket”:

In cold hell, in thicket, how

abstract (as high mid, as not lust, as love is) how

strong (as strut or wing, as polytope, as things are

constellated) how

strung, how cold

can a man stay (can men) confronted

thus?

So much of Olson reads as tho it were written to be shouted out over a heath, or else to be whispered to an audience, a stage whisper capable of reaching hundreds of ears at once. It is not so much dramatic monolog – tho Maximus is a persona – as it is soliloquy. Olson’s sense of how a sentence interacts with the line – something I suspect an entire generation or two has internalized so deeply we don’t even recognize it – has always struck me as coming right out of Shakespeare, far more than from Melville or Pound. This feel for the materiality of the relationship between the two is apparent, right there on the surface, in Olson, & through his influence it radiates outward. I can hear echoes in Creeley, in Duncan or Levertov, in O’Hara & Whalen & even in Ginsberg. And it ripples again, just a little more faintly, through every one of us influenced by any of them.

So the idea of all these people reading, seeing, hearing Shakespeare is, I suspect, much more of a wild card than the NEA’s leaders may comprehend. Because where it won’t lead is back to is either the homogenous retro-utopia of so many a Congressman’s dream nor to the same ol’ stuff the School of Quietude has been shoveling. Inseminating Shakespeare into the American literary landscape is far more apt to generate a bunch of wild men & wyrd sisters instead. As Olson himself most certainly was.

My own reaction to all this has been to return to Shakespeare – I’m midway through the Greenblatt biography, Will in the World, I’ve watched the Royal Shakespeare Company’s DVD of Macbeth, & I’m halfway now through a rereading of Lear. While I probably see one Shakespeare production maybe every 15 months or thereabouts anyway, I haven’t visited this body of work in this concentrated a fashion since I was a student of Jonas Barish at Berkeley some 35 years ago. I’ll let you know how it turns out.