Shakespeare

[alice wellintown]

Shakespeare, even in his most fantastic and exotic plays, plays that
seem a dream, gives us the real world as we encounter it, the
existential, the reality we know in concrete complexities and profound
particularities, but what we name existence. So Hamlet admonishes the
actors. And the irony here, or ironies, for this is the most ironic
play in English, that Hamlet is an actor, a poor player in Macbeth's
phrase, a fine actor, but not fine enough to give lecture to these
professional players, for he is a student still, and still a student
of politics, a man who can not play his part, the part he was born to
play, Hamlet.

Hamlet:
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this
special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature:
for any thing so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose
end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the
mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own
image, and the very age and body of the time his form and
pressure.


Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, 17–24

Shakespeare on the Subway:

http://theater.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/theater/shakespeare-on-the-subway.html

Were Pynchon to set Hamlet and Horatio sick and full of sorrow in a
scene with King Hamlet's ghost, Hamlet would never, as he does with
same boldness or arrogance with which he lectures the professional
players on acting, lecture old Horatio the philosopher on philosophy:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet, scene v

In Pynchon's Hamlet the two would debate not the existence and its
meaning, or the existental nature of the ghost, but what lies beneath
it and produces the apparent reality. This is left to discover and
advances the plot in Shakespeare. What produced the ghost? How to be
rid of it and return to the real.



On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 4:24 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> In Berlin's--Isaiah's not irving's--- terms, Shakespeare is a fox
>
> and pynchon is a hedgehog?
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Cc:
> Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2011 2:17 PM
> Subject: Re: Shakespeare
>
> Obviously, in any substantial works of a genius artist we can find all
> these elements present, but fundamentally, while I can't say if WG
> works in oppositions or not, would need to take a closer study,
> Shakespeare does and so does Pynchon. But there is an important
> difference in the constant opposition that these two use to make their
> art, while the latter sets his conflicts in a reality beyond the
> existential (the gnostic struggle of forces beyond human control), the
> former sets his in an existential reality (the rest as Edmund reminds
> us in Lear, is the excellent foppery of the world). Freud, who also
> works in conflicts, sets his in a reality beneath the real. Rushdie,
> who does not work in conflicts, nor in the tradition of tragedy,
> imposes the grouping and re-grouping of ever fluid fusions and
> conjoining on Shakespeare.  A strong misreading in Bloom's terms, is
> Rushdie's.
>
> On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 12:44 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Rushdie has said this about Shakespeare's writing, I've just discovered;
>>  “a swarm of variable oppositions, grouping and regrouping in ever fluid ‘fusions, translations, conjoinings’”.
>>
>> True of TRP or WG? Howso?
>>
>
>