Once again there’s been a gap in this blog, partially due to travel and family commitments, but also because I keep forgetting that this blog isn’t about me saying anything. Rather, it’s about sharing quotations, especially, that I want to share. So let me take up a book that I imagine few people read these days, Maynard Mack’s King Lear In Our Time, published in 1965, my first year in university. If Mack is best remembered as one of the founding editors of the Norton anthologies, that misses the depth of his own critical writings–critical in both senses. I don’t think it’s just nostalgia that draws me to the literary scholars who were prominent in my early days. They had a different understanding of what scholarship was for, and who it was for. Dare I say, a broader view. Kenneth Burke’s phrase literature as equipment for living might summarize this view. But as always, an example is better than a description.
Mark writes: “In what kind of world do we go on a mysterious journey of which we do not altogether understand the reason, arrive in places whose topography seems to be psychological and spiritual, commit actions and make gestures which have a profound ritual meaning, face logical improbabilities and indeed impossibilities with total equanimity, all in the company of persons whose reality is absolute yet seems to consist in something beyond themselves which after the experience is ended we can no longer recapture? In what world do people and events possess circumstantial reality for each of us, yet at the same time … function ‘really’ as huge cloudy symbols of a history generic to all human beings…” (78).
I don’t find writing like that in recent Shakespeare scholarship; maybe I’m reading the wrong people, but I think times have changed. I won’t begin to unpack the quotation phrase by phrase; I offer it as something worth contemplating for a while. But I will say something about what kind of world Mack describes. He goes on to say it’s a dream world, which it is, but it’s also the sort of dream that the best theatre creates. Specifically, it’s the world of King Lear, as an experience of theatre. But as you might have already guessed, given my obsessions, for me it’s also an uncanny description of the world of illness, or a description of how illness precipitates uncanny experiences. It’s the world of the quest narrative, as I called it in The Wounded Storyteller. The quest narrative isn’t only different claims about what it is to be ill. It’s experiencing illness on a different plane of experience and signification, those two being intertwined. It’s a different topography, in Mack’s phrase.
This leads me to consider how what I call vulnerable reading–to which Mack’s statement is a fine epigraph–does its work, and maybe how narrative medicine works. We enter a literary world that condenses and intensifies the ‘real’ world we struggle to inhabit. Being in that second-order world has a medicinal effect that can be suggested by the metaphor of homeopathy: treating like with a small dose of like. It’s not that the sufferings of the characters in Lear have direct analogies to the sufferings of people in the theatre of health care. It’s that we, real people, can recognize ourselves differently after spending time in the theatre of Lear. It’s not catharsis, as differently understood as that term is. It’s more a pedagogy, to return to a word I’ve often leaned on when I was hard pressed to express a form of supportive relationship.
The pedagogue was, I’m told, originally less a tutor than someone who walked the child to school; a sort of older companion in the literal journey of education. The pedagogue guided and maybe protected. Accompanied by the pedagogue, I imagine the child being able to relax and take in aspects of the journey that might otherwise be missed. But I’m probably pushing my own agenda onto an ancient practice. What I want to say is that the pedagogue of my imagination held the child, in D.W. Winnicott’s sense of holding as offering a foundational security that makes exploration seem safe in a world of unforeseeable hazards.
Homeopathic theatre allows us to experience, from the comparative safety of our seats, a world that is both magical and yet even more real. It allows us to see both the circumstantial and the generic, in Mack’s words. It enables doing something that we should not take for granted: experiencing, when what is being experienced is beyond unwanted.
Arthur W. Frank 