Weekly Readings #26 (08/01/22-08/07/22)

bitter ball | delirium of jewels

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

One subject flows into another, the more questionable into the least objectionable, and so this week I’ve found myself progressing naturally from a dubious interest in that subculture in New York—the one that is irresistible for some, impenetrable for others, and unendurable for still a third—to the supposed Shakespeare question.

I’ll make a full report on the latter shortly. Right now, I’m halfway through James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? and a rereading of Troilus and Cressida, a play I remember or misremember as smug and nasty, though I only read it once and quickly two decades ago, the summer after a college Chaucer course where we read the medieval romance that partially inspired Shakespeare’s problem play.

On the former—the Dimes Square question—my own interest only comes because I anticipated this shift in high and fringe culture back in 2019 under the rubric “The New Conservatism” and am interested to see the shape it takes and whether or not it will produce serious art. The worst we can say is that arty rich kids in the metropole have always been annoying, but that the milieu they empower with their money has long been where serious art takes root in modernity—with the caveat that the artist must remain more than half unseduced. And it’s not reductive identity politics to say that hailing from places and cultures outside the metropole, wherever and whatever those are, can be a considerable advantage here.

Refusing to understand that last sentence explains why these people are anti-Stratfordian on the (inexistent) Shakespeare question, even when the best counter-evidence, literary counter-evidence, evades their eyes and ears. Take the neoreactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin—please!

The return of the Earl

In support of his crude and not-even-ad-hominem argument that the man from Stratford couldn’t have written those plays because he was a “rent boy” and an “illiterate Ghanian immigrant,” Yarvin quotes these lines from Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the most fashionable among rival claimants to the Shakespearean mantle:

Is he god of peace or war?
What be his arms? What is his might?
His war is peace, his peace is war;
Each grief of his is but delight;
His bitter ball is sugared bliss.

What be his gifts? How doth he pay?
When is he seen? Or how conceived?
Sweet dreams in sleep, new thoughts in day,
Beholding eyes, in mind received;
A god that rules and yet obeys

Yarvin praises the “mastery of rhythmic variation” and “play with the caesura” in this poem as reasons that Oxford “rocks,” Shakespearean showmanship he takes as comparable to Ulysses’s speech on degree from Troilus and Cressida, which our monarchist philosopher enters into evidence that Shakespeare was a reactionary and not a democrat. To which I replied on my daily casual blog, and will repost here with some light editing to make sure everyone sees it:

Yarvin assails a straw man, the supposed Stratfordian belief that Shakespeare was a “democrat,” which nobody believes. Shakespeare fully expresses his view of “people power” in Julius Caesar’s popular sparagmos of Cinna the Poet. And if Julius Caesar held the early American stage and then became the staple American high school text, it was because the drama celebrates not democracy, which Shakespeare didn’t distinguish from resentful and fanatic mob violence, but republicanism in the tragic figure of Brutus. 

As for Shakespeare’s overall politics, well, it’s always hard to say with a dramatist, who stages conflicts rather than enumerating theses, and this chameleon poet makes it harder than most. Yarvin quotes every reactionary’s favorite passage, Ulysses’s hymn to degree from Troilus and Cressida, but this is the utterance of a single dramatic character. Rosenkrantz—a sycophantic idiot—argues the same case in Hamlet while kissing Claudius’s ring. By contrast, that play’s hero pronounces what I suspect to be closer to the poet’s own political credo: “The king is a thing of nothing.” 

In my reading, Shakespeare is a political nihilist, placing his faith in no institution and no ambitious men. He’s lyrical, where he is lyrical, only about love and private life and nature: precisely the quasi-anarchist (not democratic) anti-politics I find throughout modernity in writers who hail from the lower middle class—Yarvin, like a Marxoid polemicist, abuses the bard with this label too—from Keats to Dickens to Joyce (see my essay on Les Murray for a longer explanation). 

From the reliquary of middlebrow kitsch: a midcentury Stratford-upon-Avon commemorative plate that hung on my great uncle’s and great aunt’s wall and now hangs on mine, speaking of the mutual affinity of Shakespeare and the lower middle class

Does de Vere’s da-dum da-dum doggerel really “rock” like Shakespeare? I count only one potential metrical inversion: in the first foot of the first line, “is” may be stressed for interrogatory emphasis, mainly because the line is short a syllable. But even if you read all the interrogatives as stressed, which you don’t have to, that’s hardly a poetically surprising reversal. Otherwise, the thing tick-tocks robotically like a metronome. Similarly, “the way he plays with the caesura”—what way? The caesura is precisely where we’d expect it to be in each line, not least because Oxford punctuates six of the 10 lines right in the middle, between two balanced sets of iambic feet. I can only conclude that Yarvin relies on an audience ignorant of his subject.

Ulysses’s speech, by contrast, is in Shakespeare’s general style, or at least his mature style, gnarled and enjambed, bristling less with neat Metaphysical paradoxes than with a careering rush of concrete and mingled tropes. Here is play with the caesura, sound mimicking sense: “And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets…” Likewise, I recall that Frank Kermode thought hendiadys the Shakespearean rhetorical signature, sign of his copiousness and bounty: “Divert and crack, rend and deracinate / The unity and married calm of states.” 

A more sophisticated reactionary would say that this apparently disordered and undisciplined style is just what we’d expect from a half-educated rube off the farm who could only read the classics in translation. But what do I know? I myself am just a scion of the anarchic lower middle class, while Yarvin, as he likes to remind us, is a descendant of that very oligarchic bureaucracy from which he promises, eventually, to deliver us.

Now the sparagmos of Cinna the Poet went from Shakespearean tragic farce (in Harold Bloom’s phrase) to farcical farce in the countercultural scene Yarvin haunts, as we can see in Mike Crumplar’s exhausting, exhaustive account of his filmed chastisement by this demimonde, orchestrated by the erstwhile star of MTV’s I Just Want My Pants Back, an entirely forgotten show that I once proclaimed (solely as a provocation) superior to Lena Dunham’s Girls:

My Own Dimes Square Fascist Humiliation Ritual

Not that I have any more respect for Crumplar’s faux-naive East Coast trust-fund “communism” than for Yarvin’s snickering West Coast techie “monarchism,” each of them notional and aesthetic postures whose chief effect will not be to liberate or satisfy the people but to empower the very forces of technocracy battening on us all. These labels, including “fascist,” borrow the dark political drama and bloody moral prestige of the apocalyptic 20th century, “the worst so far,” as Elizabeth Bishop called it, and critics sling them around to avoid present reality, converging as it is under various ideological standards left and right to imperial technocracy.

Finally, in a brief squib where Yarvin confirms the substance of Crumplar’s memoir, he tellingly hails Yvor Winters (alongside Edmund Wilson) as critics who made criticism an art. These aren’t the first 20th-century names that come to my mind—I would think first of Woolf and Eliot, Sontag and Ozick—but that’s because their names are present ideologically. As I wrote, and will again repost (again lightly edited) for anyone who missed it,

The tossed-off reference to Yvor Winters as beau ideal—critic-as-artist!—might be the most telling element. I assume Edmund Wilson is named for convention’s sake, the first literary critical name that occurs to one, his ideological significance—his Marxist-to-libertarian journey, from the Finland Station, as it were—more or less nugatory even if he might be said to have ended in the same place Yarvin did, minus the technocrat element. But Winters is the punctum. For context, see here:

In one corner we have [Hart] Crane, a devotee of the imagination and its “delirium of jewels,” a seeker of “new thresholds, new anatomies,” a Modern Romantic who strove to refresh the poet’s kinship to the shaman and the seer. In the other corner, Winters, a decrier of unreason, a skeptic of poetic ecstasy and rapture, a moralist who dismissed visionary individualism as potentially dangerous fakery. Poets today probably know who they would have rooted for.

Or do they? Certainly Crane is the more widely admired figure now, in part because the difficulty that his work posed to its first audience has been softened by decades of celebration and study. Yet many of those who would like to imagine themselves cheering valiantly for Cleveland’s Whitmanian rebel regularly accuse their contemporaries of the very deficiencies and extravagances Winters derided in Crane. Winters still has his advocates, of course, including many who don’t realize that that’s what they are.

This is a false choice, by the way; I choose both and neither. The initial seeing is shamanic, visionary, irrational, but the immanent disposition of the transcendence seen hardly inimical to reason. True art synthesizes all these philosophers’ and polemicists’ weary antinomies—and rises above the modern left-right struggle, too, as Homer rose above the warring parties on the plain of Troy.

I’m sure it’s presumptuous, but I can’t help but think of this moment in Crumplar’s testimony:

Nearby, tears began welling up in Honor [Levy]’s eyes, and the cameras then zoomed in on her. She was pressed to tell the crowd how she was feeling. She said that what I had just said had moved her, that when I had said I was so happy and proud of my work she realized she didn’t feel the same about her own. I appreciated that she didn’t join in the denunciations like the others.

Those tears, I think, and not communism or monarchism, fascism or anti-fascism, are the properly Homeric (by which I just mean literary, poetic, aesthetic) lens through which to survey the spectacle of our ignorant armies clashing by night:

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.