Random: Shakespeare, Tragedy, Modernism

Left: King Lear or Polonius?

Even with The Bard, sometimes we just have to love the boy in spite of himself. A couple of years ago, in the final scenes of an excellent production of King Lear, the play came to its predictable conclusion of dying humans flopping around the stage like hooked fish flailing on a pier. It might have been worse in Hamlet, sometime later, again in an otherwise excellent production.

This business of death as group seizure, or Shakespeare's intimation of the mosh pit four centuries later, would be absurd under any circumstances. Add to it the sound of bodies thumping against the wooden stage floor and the eloquent dying declarations (as our TV cop and lawyer shows might say, “excited utterances”), and it is all simply comic. Shakespearean tragedies must give directors fits.

All that flopping and thumping ruin my willing suspension of disbelief, along with any empathy or glee I’d developed toward the dying. It makes me long for Gary Cooper in a dusty ten-gallon hat, mumbling “Yes, Ma’am, this here eight-inch hole in my gizzard, it hurts a might.” Or Yogi Berra’s “Pain don’t hurt.”

I know, I know, you don’t go to a Shakespearean tragedy if you want Amy Hempel or Raymond Carver minimalism. But classic theater, along with the excesses of opera, might instruct us on why we have come to value understatement and restraint the way we do. Maybe the Renaissance showed us the idealized human, what we hope we can be at our very best, but an occasional or permanent attempt to see what we really are cannot be an entirely bad development.

ABOUT BOOKS

Above: Rocky the Reader

Here are the numbers of Blogspot bloggers, including me, who include these works or authors as their favorites.

The Great Gatsby 358,000
King Lear 7,700
Raymond Carver’s stories 5,700
Tobias Wolff’s stories 265 (or does that include his book-length work as well?)
Alice Munro’s stories 4

These numbers have a kind of logic, except for one item: why so few for Munro? At least in Canada, she’s become well-known and highly awarded in the last decade or two.

I suspect the problem is that her stories aren’t page-turners in the usual sense of the word. But if you want multidimensional, thoroughly developed characters, who find themselves in intriguing, troubling, believable situations in remote small towns or country settings, she is your writer.

My favorite Munro stories tend to be set somewhere in the past (1950s backward to the nineteenth century) in the villages or wilderness of Ontario. Munro makes me care deeply about people and places that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with me. The only exceptions for me are occasional tilts toward soap opera in a few of the stories with modern settings.

If you’ll allow yourself to slow down to Munro’s dignified, but never turgid style, you’ll learn about distant places and their humans; I have found page-by-page satisfactions and surprises (including beauties of phrasing and leaps in plot or characterization).

Try “Meneseteung,” “Carried Away,” “Wilderness Station” and “Vandals”—all four of which are placed toward the end of her Selected Stories 1996).

I’d also be interested in your responses to the stories of Aimee Bender and two poets I’m getting know somewhat, though they seem to inhabit different universes: Bob Hicok and Karen Volkman.

I almost added to my favorites Edward P. Jones’s magnificent The Known World, but I’ve only read it once, and, in case there's a quiz, I decided to include only works I’ve known really well at one time or another.