[The Montana Professor 20.1, Fall 2009 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Robert Pack
Sandpoint, Idaho: Lost Horse Press, 2007
220 pp., $18.00 pb
Christopher J. Knight
English
UM-Missoula
In The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia UP, 1987), J. Hillis Miller's Wellek Library Lectures, the critic writes:
There is a peculiar and unexpected relation between the affirmation of universal moral law and storytelling. It would seem that such a law would stand by itself and that its connection either to narration as such or to any particular narrative would be adventitious and superficial at best. Nevertheless...the moral law gives rise by an intrinsic necessity to storytelling, even if that storytelling in one way or another puts in question or subverts the moral law. Ethics and narration cannot be kept separate, though their relation is neither symmetrical nor harmonious.(2)
In Willing to Choose: Volition & Storytelling in Shakespeare's Major Plays, Robert Pack's most recent contribution to literary criticism, the estimable poet is found largely concurring. Or as he writes in his discussion of Othello,
When a story is told, cause and causation (and their mystery) are seemingly locked in, seemingly frozen forever. Things are what they are by being, finally, what they have been. The freedom inherent in causation as a force to be acted on or revised, so it appears, has come to an end, and only the appearance of fixity remains. And yet it must be asked what the story's effect will be on the audience and even the coming generations to whom the story is retold? Will the story remain closed and complete, or will it become the source of new and further causation? Since we cannot "open" Iago's lips to explain himself and his incredible motivation, and since he returns to the inchoate non-storytelling silence out of which he first emerged, will we whose role it is to listen to Lodovico who concludes the play with this accepted charge to speak: "Myself will straight abroad, and to the state / This heavy act with heavy heart relate," be changed by what we hear? Will we, the survivors, be inclined to believe that Iago, like Satan, is merely a myth, a fiction within a play or will we become open to the reality of what Shakespeare's imagination summons forth? And how might that "fiction" help us live our lives? Might we become more emphatic to the fated suffering of our fellow human beings and more cognizant of human potentiality and volition for good or evil? (98-99)
For Pack, stories enhance our empathy; they enlarge our sense of responsibility to others; and they are, generally speaking, connected to our sense of life's meaningfulness. "If life means something and has some value," he writes, "then storytelling is a worthwhile choice to facilitate continuity, but if life is without meaning, then indeed no story is worth telling" (98). Like Miller, Pack offers a caveat about identifying art and morality—"Shakespeare's point is that the higher capacities of the visionary imagination, the human aptitude for art, particularly for music, are grounded in the basic senses themselves, and are different from the sources of morality" (113)—yet as morality is said to be "based on the native human capacity for empathy" (113), and as empathy is itself conceived as a form of a projective imagination, then it does appear that, in Miller's words, "[e]thics and narration cannot be kept separate" (2). So it is, writes Pack, that "human invention, poetic art (illusion perhaps)," figures for Lear as "empathy, even more powerful because it exists only by virtue of the human will as an act of deliberate choice, for the suffering of others[,]" engendering "love beyond self-love and the temptations of greedy betrayal" (147).
In focusing his attention on several of William Shakespeare's major plays—Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest—Pack is especially sensitive to the pronounced role that post facto storytelling thematically plays in each, as in the memorable instance when the dying Hamlet petitions Horatio to forego his own longing for death that he might tell Hamlet's story:
O God Horatio, what a wounded name
(Things standing thus unknown) shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story. (5.2.347-352)
Or in Othello's attempt to frame his own story in the space of his final words, offered up to Lodovico and Cassio:
I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then you must speak
Of one that lov'd not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealious, but being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand
(Like the base [Indian]) threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdu'd eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinable gum. Set down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state,
I took by th' throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him—thus. (5.2.340-356)
When life has not been experienced as meaningful, as it has not been by Macbeth, then the interest in storytelling also loses its value: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing" (5.5.24-28). Or as Pack writes, "Of the protagonists whose perspectives at the end of their lives we have considered, only Macbeth feels that life is worthless and that his story is not worth telling" (152). Yet in the affirming instances, Pack emphasizes the quality of detachment, of words spoken at the point of leaving life, a detachment that Pack sees best exemplified in the stance of Shakespeare himself: "One needs to be outside the historical moment through a willed act of artistic detachment, as is true only of Shakespeare himself, to be able to tell a complex story in its full complexity" (150). Like Ben Jonson's Shakespeare—"He was not of an age, but for all time!"—Pack's Shakespeare is found transcending his time and place. Pack is mindful that this stance puts him at odds with contemporary Shakespeare scholarship, but his is a very personal reading of the playwright's work, a reading reflective of his more than half-century engagement with Shakespeare in the classroom, an engagement of one poet with another. So if recent Shakespeare scholarship has been especially attentive to the way in which the playwright and his work are historically embedded, Pack, writing "for the reader and theatergoer who loves Shakespeare's plays and enjoys contemplating them in their complexity," prefers to focus upon those elements that are likely to appeal to a wider audience: "the richness of metaphorical language, the characters' psychological depths and dimensions, the philosophical implications of the plays as organic entities that testify to the nature of human limitation and human freedom" ("Author's Note to the Reader"). In this same note, he says, "I have not adopted any single critical approach" but has instead "responded to each play's individual identity with what seem to me appropriate and fruitful interpretative points of view." This description would appear to explain why the book is spoken of, both on the cover and title page, as "essays." And yet the book does reflect both a definite critical approach and a strong, unifying theme.
Pack's critical stance is reflected in his words of welcome—"I wish to share with my readers the humane vision I find everywhere in Shakespeare's incomparable plays" ("Author's Note")—and it is characterized by the sense that our most fundamental value is grounded in the inherent dignity of the individual, "the principle that everyone, no matter how low or foolish, by virtue of his or her innate humanity, is deserving of 'noble respect'" (122). The stance is that of a humanist, inflected by the insights of a Charles Darwin and a Sigmund Freud—one hears of "Shakespeare's intuitive understanding of the Darwinian principle of 'sexual selection'" (108) and that "a psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet is essential to an understanding of the play" (27)—as well as by the author's own stoicism. Thus, we hear Pack say that "[t]here is nothing more mysterious in all of Shakespeare, I believe, than Hamlet's concept of 'one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,'" the reference being to Hamlet's praise, in Act 3, scene 2, of Horatio's dispassionate nature. For Pack, the line admits of essentially two interpretations, of which he prefers the more optimistic: "A pessimistic reading would be that suffering renders the world meaningless and that therefore suffering cannot transform what is meaningless, 'nothing,' into something meaningful. But an optimistic reading, the one I prefer, might be that one can pass through suffering to some kind of a state of detachment in which the world is seen impersonally as a spectacle" (35), as a story reflective of humanly evolved meanings. Here, the emphasis upon humanly evolved meanings is consequent upon Pack's belief that we live in a world whose bounds God has mostly fled.
Pack's first book of criticism was Wallace Stevens: An Approach to His Poetry and Thought (1958), and he has always been a Stevensian at heart, one for whom God remains "[t]he major poetic idea," even as the idea requires revising. Or as Stevens wrote, "The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God. One of the visible movements of the modern imagination is the movement away from the idea of God. The poetry that created the idea of God will either adapt it to our different intelligence, or create a substitute for it, or make it unnecessary" (Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens [Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996], 378). Like Stevens, Pack appears to find himself in that Arnoldian space of cultural and spiritual betwixtness—"Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born"—that the English poet gave such definitive expression to in the mid-nineteenth century poem "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse" (1855). Again and again, Pack is found quoting from the Hebrew and Christian bibles, especially from The Book of Job. He can even be found, in a discussion of King Lear, saying that "[t]he absence of God is virtually synonymous with the deliberate cruelty of human beings to one another so that there is no moral force to counteract the thoughtless indifference of nature" (130-31). Yet he presents himself as a firmly secular reader, convinced that "men and women contain within themselves their own heaven and hell; virtue is its own reward, and evil, its own punishment" (148). The sentiment is here ascribed to Shakespeare, but it is a Shakespeare viewed through the lens of Pack's own attachment to nature as the first principle of existence.
The conviction that "nature" is that concept that we want to employ when speaking of being itself and that characters, like the human beings upon whom they are modeled, have the power of free will when confronted with the possibility, or choice, of whether to live in conformity with this nature or not—these might be said to be the major themes of the book. As Pack writes in his "Introduction: Will, Choice & Storytelling," "Shakespeare's representation of human character usually assumes that each person's behavior is comprehensible in terms of his or her individual psychological motivation," and while this behavior is reflective of familiar biological, social, and cultural determinants, the characters still demonstrate an ability "to leap out of their behavioral molds, to will themselves to be other than what their earlier behavior revealed about them, and, in doing so,...demonstrate a capacity for radical freedom or transcendence based on a surprising choice" (1). But whether they, in their actions, remain consistent or surprising, they are judged by what choices they make in relation to governing nature. Thus, Macbeth, whom Pack views as "a good man who decides to do evil and who succeeds"—whereas Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear are "good men whose intentions are to do good," yet who fail (148)—, is said to fail "not out of ignorance, foible, or weakness, but, like Satan, out of defiance and ambition to overthrow the order of nature, willingly and willfully embraced" (152). Of course, traditional theology would put this a bit differently, seeing Satan's "sin" as expressed in his opposition to God's "will." Pack is not himself prepared to go this far, saying,
It is impossible to read Shakespeare's plays and fix upon a consistent concept of God that runs through them. Generally speaking, any concept of God depends on the view of a particular character and also may vary according to the situation and circumstance of that particular character. When things go well, God may be seen as benevolent, and when things go badly, God or the gods are likely to be seen as malevolent. (52)
The notion that God's identity, in Shakespeare and elsewhere, rests upon the good will of his creations runs somewhat parallel to "the fact that nature both precedes and follows human art" (187), but for Pack nature is what we believe in after the belief in God has faded. Like "God" (Herbert McCabe: "'God,' 'Theos,' 'Deus' is of course a name borrowed from paganism; we take it out of its proper context, where it is used for talking about the gods, and use it for our own purposes" [God Still Matters (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 3].), "nature" is a fungible term, yet Pack employs it as a given. Actually, Pack's "nature," his Darwinian affections notwithstanding, is the nature we meet amongst the Romantics; it is not Tennyson's "Nature, red in tooth and claw" ("In Memoriam A.H.H."), but Wordsworth's "Nature [that] never did betray / The heart that loved her" ("Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"), a nature that also stands, as in Wordsworth, for all the universe's mystery and sublimity:
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply infused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man
—("Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey")
For Pack, then, "We only can make sense of human life and human values when we perceive them as a temporary effulgence of nature. Thus, it is to nature that we must give our equally deep allegiance, as well as to what we, in passing, make of nature through human volition even in its manifestation of storytelling and art" (193). "Death is the mother of beauty" (Stevens, "Sunday Morning"), and for Pack there is "the poignant beauty inherent in our ephemerality" (193). Yet if death presents no problem to our giving our allegiance to this variant of nature, evil might.
As noted, Pack works in the Romantic vein&mdaah;a vein that has a somewhat Panglossian history with regard to the manifestations of evil in this world (Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute" ["Divinity School Address"]). "No one," says Pack referring to the characters in Othello, "wants to believe in the existence of evil" (82); and he too is inclined to overlook behavior (e.g., Hamlet's sadistic treatment of Ophelia, his murder of her father, and his arranging for the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, friends from youth) that might be judged evil: "Hamlet...[is] basically a good person for whom we feel sympathy" (52). For Pack, "[p]eople are alike in their instinctual goodness," though he acknowledges that "Iago, of course, is an exception" (170). It is true that in his discussions of Iago and Macbeth, the concept of evil is often invoked and that Othello is well faulted for his blindness this way: "The tragic conclusion of the play, Othello's murdering of Desdemona, is the result, finally, of Othello's inability to believe in her goodness, as much as it is his failure to believe in Iago's malignancy. Either realization, of extreme goodness or extreme evil, could have saved him" (77). But it does appear that by defining evil or sin the way he does—"Sin is the opposition to the natural order, and virtue is the acceptance of its limits since human beings are not designed for immortality" [170])—Pack entraps himself in a linguistic or philosophical maze. The problem, again, has to do with the definition of nature, a problem that Pack, in part, acknowledges when, late in the book, he grants that "Some clarification is needed to explain how Shakespeare uses the terms, 'nature' and 'unnatural'" (189). Of course, one only has to recall, in King Lear, evil Edmund's early apotheosizing of Nature, his "goddess," to see where the problem might lie:
Thou, Nature, are my goddess, to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition, and fierce quality,
Than doth within a dull, stale, tired bed
Go to th' creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got 'tween asleep and wake? (1.2.1-15)
Shakespeare's nature is not always Wordsworth's or Emerson's ("Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us" ["Nature"]). It is as apt to signify a poor devil's lust as the emancipating heavens. For Pack, the problem most notably arises when addressing the lusty but very natural character of Caliban, in The Tempest, so different from the court educated Ferdinand, of whom Miranda says, "I might call him / A thing divine, for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble" (1.2.418-20). In explanation of the difficulty, Pack writes, "With the emergence of civilized morality, it ceases to be natural to behave naturally; some higher form of nature is now demanded of human nature" (188). As referencing Shakespeare, this appears true, but it does make the task of the critic more difficult when by the term "nature" he wishes to invoke all those good things that Pack still invokes with the phrase "God's natural order" (156).
Here, one is reminded of T.S. Eliot's objection to Irving Babbitt's humanism:
The problem of humanism is undoubtedly related to the problem of religion. Mr. Babbitt makes it very clear...that he is unable to take the religious view—that is to say that he cannot accept any dogma or revelation; and that humanism is the alternative to religion. And this brings up the question: is this alternative any more than a substitute? and, if a substitute, does it not bear the same relation to religion that "humanitarianism" bears to humanism? Is it, in the end, a view of life that will work by itself, or is it a derivative of religion which will work only for a short time in history, and only for a few highly cultivated persons like Mr. Babbitt...? (Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode [San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace, 1975], 277-78)
Pack's humanism does seem, as witnessed by the frequent biblical allusions, a derivative of Judeo-Christian understandings, a humanism that might well have a difficult time standing on its own were it not for its religious forebears. Who, for instance, truly believes that what Pack describes as the "murderous forces that are part of every human psyche beneath the veneer of civilization" (193) are to be held in check by a prayer to our "own power of self-overcoming": "What earlier had been the moral magic of forgiveness, now becomes the power of prayer, not prayer to a specific god, but to Prospero's own power of self-overcoming within the human community as represented by the audience" (190). Yet whether one believes this or not, we can, I think, say that Pack might be linked to his own description of Job, when the critic writes, "deep in his heart, where his faith was once grounded, Job still hopes that God will intervene and explain himself" (137). My point, as said earlier, is that Willing to Choose is a very personal book, wherein the author, a man of deep sensitivity, is found wrestling not only with the poetry of Shakespeare but also with a world that in its surface appearances is often cruel and indifferent to human longings, a world that prompted the prophet Isaiah to say of its creator, "Verily, thou art a hidden God" (45. 15). For Pack, too, God, like Shakespeare, remains hidden, and the book is an attempt to prod them both further out into the limelight. Given the obstacles—after all, we, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when seeking to know Hamlet's "stops" (3.2.345-72), have, with little more success, been aspiring to know their flesh and blood creator's stops these past four hundred years—this is quite an ambition. But Willing to Choose is a wise and thoughtful book—never so much as when Pack is discussing that most sacred of choices, the vows made in marriage—that I found myself most engaged by, thus recommending it to the general reader and scholar alike.
[The Montana Professor 20.1, Fall 2009 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]