From our book of the year i

  

  imagine a literature
  of power without force

  

   .. as I remount the stream of composition

   I see it faintly coloured again: with the

   bright protection of the Normandy coast

   (I worked away a few weeks at Êtretat);

   with the stronger glow of southernmost

   France, breaking in during a stay at Bay-

   onne; then with the fine historic and 

   other "psychic" substance of Saint-Ger-

   main-en-Laye, a purple patch of terraced

   October before returning to Paris ..

Henry James

The American

  from the Preface to the

  New York Edition

The Art of the Novel

  Critical Prefaces

Scribner's, 1934

Preface by Colm Tóibín

University of Chicago Press, 2011©

Square One

                                               There are paths in the fog, even in the dark,                           and they fork, even in the light. 

                     

       

                                                                           

                                               I had talked for hours with him and Isaac. But he couldn't tell me how I got there.

Mark Rudman

Provoked in Venice

  Not Normalissimo

  [extracts, pp 81, 87]

Wesleyan University Press, 1999©

i, v  beggars would ride

"The god of soldiers .. inform thy thoughts with nobleness .."

For Eva Truffaut

In the scene of partings

with his mother, wife and

son, Coriolanus addresses

the boy in terms republics

have constantly cited for

exempting soldiers of the

vices of their principals.

He urges the boy to virtue

made impossible by orders,

by policy inherently cor- 

rupted by the very idea of 

force.

Shakespeare has written a

play involving the deep

genesis of the military-

political distinction, 

obliterating it and, with

it, the fallacy of capital 

sanctions. This lends a

double horror to his por-

trayal of ambitious moth-

ering; with this closing

of the natural last res-

ort, he shows the inescap-

able appeal of force. Pat-

ting our fanny in our jam-

mies on our way upstairs

to bed, why did she sing 

to us, Onward, Christian 

soldiers?

Tell me not wherein I 

seem unnatural, he says,

denying clemency to Rome.

Manohla Dargis’ appreciative review of the screen’s new Coriolanus summarises, in her praises, enough reasons for revoking one’s earlier vow to go and see it. Its writer is the author of the excellent play on Mark Rothko, Red, and this may well be an excellent movie in the same way - exploiting notoriety for its notorious elements, and spinning off an entertainment without other indebtedness. This will not have been the first time the Weinstein Company - the film’s producer - has parodied Shakespeare to great critical delight and gain, or the first time a Fiennes was involved in the undertaking. But we may as well start there.

The film has engaged the wrong Fiennes in the rôle of Coriolanus. He is, as more than one critic has stressed, youthful; and if nothing else, the Weinstein Company’s first Fiennes nailed that quality, cold. But he is not only youthful, he is mocked for the qualities of youth, and he is undone by his rage to be found out in them. A production of Coriolanus which misses the boy, misses the play. That would be enough, but the sight of Vanessa Redgrave, camping again as she did in Mission: Impossible over violence and betrayal - as we are assured she does in the part of Volumnia - would only further tarnish a hereditary credit to the stage. Volumnia is not a vamp for blood, she’s for the power to spill it.

I have suggested that the Sonnets are an especial key to this play, and this is not only for the aching loyalty in their roiling reservoir of passion - the sine qua non of any decent portrayal of Coriolanus - but fundamentally for their elective logic. They were written in the decade preceding this final tragedy, but were published close upon its production. I embrace internal evidence that they were written by the same man. In general comparison, I have never seen anything more fertile than Auden's treatment of the Sonnets in his lectures on the plays in their chronology. Coriolanus is that play in which the parti pris of Shakespeare's experience infuses the dramatic work with its defining moral energy. I do not accuse Shakespeare of pacifism; I accuse him of being one man.

The weak self that desires to be strong is hungry. The lonely self desires to be attached. The spirit desires to be free and unattached, and not at the mercy of the natural appetite. It also desires to be important, and that conflicts with its desire for freedom. The weak self wants other things to exist so it may encroach on them, the lonely self wants other existences to hold on to .. But the spirit wants to be only "I," wants its attachment to other things to be its free choice.

Something is more important than the allure of any film. This play has a tragic hero because its logic contests the sanctions of war and execution, never arguing for adapting to them with sophis-tication, much less with pop-ular consent. Those sanctions represent a specter whose im-manence, not treachery, is the chill behind his indif-ference to whom he serves. His wounds are not ornaments of the State, and their ache is not its to exalt. That is precisely the reason why Coriolanus is endowed with the Achilles heel of naïveté - of all things - so that his anger with his honours can be traced to a universal, in-trinsic, and all but divine. He craves approval he can trust, but lives in a world without it, where trust is embedded in the power to decide who dies.

This great theme, simmering beneath every speculation on republics, and boiling over in American debates in the adoption of their Constitution, is given point by the struggle of a destroyed child, for a mind that would be true and free, where such constraints would not shape its range. (A substantial body of opinion, sees his ideal as inherently anti-social, anti-communitarian. But these are con-structs rooted in approbation of force; and this Coriolanus plainly withholds, even as he wields it). There’s another one born, all the time, and still the question goes begging. 


Where is this god of soldiers?

William Shakespeare
Coriolanus, V, iii
op. cit.


W.H. Auden
Lectures on Shakespeare
op. cit.

Simone Weil
The Iliad, or
  The Poem of Force
op. cit.

  

Blue has come out for household abs

                   It wasn't so much

                   that it would be

                   unlikely, given

                   the Hermès scarf.

                   (We deploy a bath

                   wrap).

                   It was the rising

                   inflection with

                   which it happened.

                   A fount of good

                   humour got funny.

                   Guys who read need

                   to go there.

Dynamite news for Rome

These digressions

on Coriolanus end

after this inter-

mezzo, expressing

his myth, not his

identity.

"When others would give life, and bring a tomb .."

  Whence com'st thou?

  What would'st thou?

  thy name?

  Why speak'st not?

  Speak, man: what's thy name?

                

                I never saw that you did painting need,

                And therefore to your fair no painting set;

                I found (or thought I found) you did exceed

                The barren tender of a poet's debt:

                And therefore have I slept in your report,

                That you yourself, being extant, well might show

                How far a modern quill doth come too short,

                Speaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow.

If, Tullus,

Not yet though know'st me,

and seeing me, dost not

Think me for the man I am, necessity

Commands me name myself.

What is thy name?

A name unmusical to the Volscians' ears, And harsh in sound to thine.

Say, what's thy name?

Thou hast a grim appearance, and thy face

Bears a command in't. 

Though thy tackle's torn,

Thou show'st a noble vessel. What's thy name?

                This silence for my sin you did impute,

                Which be most my glory, being dumb;

                For I impair not beauty, being mute,

                When others would give life, and bring a tomb.

                   There lives more life in one of your fair eyes

                   Than both your poets can in praise devise.

Prepare thy brow to frown: know'st thou me yet?

I know thee not! Thy name?

My name is Caius Martius, who hath done

To thee particularly, and to all the Volsces,

Great hurt and mischief: thereto witness may

My surname, Coriolanus. 

.. 

O Martius, Martius!

Each word thou hast spoke hath weeded from my heart

A root of ancient envy.

William Shakespeare

Coriolanus, IV, v 

  [in italic font]

op. cit.

Sonnet, 83

  [in plain font]

1593-1596

1609 publication

Helen Vendler

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets

Harvard University Press, 1997©


René Girard
A Theatre of Envy:
  William Shakespeare
Oxford University Press, 1991©

A Sunday evening sandwich, with Scotch

BCW

As the present discussion of another play was commencing here, I had entered what I supposed would be a holiday, only to find my house swarming with contractors in the emergency replacement of a furnace, tossing me back to the office and Whit to his spa in town, there to suffer lacerations to both eyes and an ulcerated cornea for the price of enjoying a bath, which obliterated plans for a day-long visit to the National Gallery with an old friend. 

This is nothing other than ordinary life, but so is a blogger's rapport with his readers - despite their human eyes.

I'm fortunate to have some leftover roast quail to toss together a sandwich this evening with endive and a loaf of rustic wheat levain; and instead of wine I'll give myself a sip of a treasurable Scotch a friend sent my way to celebrate his engagement. To be married, I suppose I should say. I'm optimistic for the Scotch and the marriage; the sources are quite sound. I'm even happy with tomorrow's posting on Coriolanus, and I hope readers will indulge a remark from this side. Even if the hand on the back of your neck must be your own, pick up your Shakespeare; and there you are.

Coriolanus and the things people say

The modern audience for Coriolanus will vividly comprehend that it is watching the playing out of events, some years later, foretold in a child's violent separation from a sled called, Rosebud. The distinctions, that he excelled in the violence and that the wrenching away had been gradual, are immaterial.

We are well advised to resist inflicting the terms and definitions of our time upon the Renaissance, but at the same time, a manifest tragedy which stands outside established models, and arrives at the moment when individual freedom is acquiring the rudiments of a freestanding conception, and which points so starkly to the performance anxiety at the core of the rise of mercantile values, has the Age of Money written all over it. And when did that expire? Coriolanus is our first occurrence, to my awareness, of the man who refused to be rich. In this he is the kind of conservative that Charley Kane was. The fortune thrust upon him is aggravatingly trivial to him.

The life force which wrenched Charley Kane from his sled was not a character trait of his; it was embodied outside of him, and was the formative, persistent, and quite self-conscious author of his character. It was his mother. Volumnia is a wonderful new thing. Ambitious, she is not Lady Macbeth; complicit in patricide, she is not Gertrude. She is the powermommy whose passions and interests, to coin the phrase of republicmakers in every age, are focused on one thing - her boy, the term of mockery precipitating the dénouement of this play. Here, the insight of WH Auden is only too clear: all he must do, is to desire to excel, and crave approval.

In Coriolanus, these are what we call, "character flaws," because he must reject any coinciding of excellence and approval; their definition is not his own. He will revile or waste the one if he is denied the other, and he will loathe popularity. He tries, in the deb party formulation, too hard. Adherents of the Myers-Briggs hypothesis would cite him as an ENTJ: inordinately driven. A triathlon-training painter friend of mine is an ENTJ, Adolf Hitler was, Charley Kane wrote the book on him. He resents.

As a practical matter, his satisfaction is always in suspense, his disappointment always haunts him. Shakespeare's affection for him is something other than what it is for Lear, or even for Shylock. He gives Coriolanus absolutely nothing beautiful to say, as how could he? He gives us the man of conspicuous parts, whose heart has been extract-ed, not broken. Tragedy had never adopted that anatomy, before, and this has led to much dispute that this is what we are seeing. In political terms, this is a Classical tragedy. In artistic terms, it is a requiem for a man never allowed to exist. It is imperishable.

William Shakespeare

Coriolanus

op. cit.

Herman J. Mankiewicz

  and Orson Welles, screenplay

Citizen Kane

Mercury Theatre/RKO, 1941©

W.H. Auden

Arthur Kirsch, compiler

  and editor

Lectures on Shakespeare

Princeton University Press, 2000©

Stephen Greenblatt
Shakespeare's Freedom
University of Chicago Press, 2010©