‘The Bowe of Ulysses’

This chapter traces the history of the artistic criticism—via retelling—of Shakespearean tragedy, beginning with Dryden and continuing throughout the works of, among others, Edward Bond, Akira Kurosawa, and Jane Smiley. Given Shakespeare’s cultural authority, subjecting his work to revision risks derision or dismissal; the act of reworking self-consciously encounters resistance from a collective predisposed to view Shakespeare as sacrosanct. In “reworking” Shakespeare’s tragic narrative, then, artists from disparate cultures and eras, often operating in different modes, are forced to confront the contemporary and local nature of tragedy and the degree to which Shakespeare either influences or suppresses that nature. This struggle against the cultural absolute of Shakespeare reflects the struggle with the cosmic absolute within tragedy itself, rendering the reworking an attempt to undo the tragic dynamic created between the contemporary author and the legacy of Shakespeare.

Reading on the Move

It is often said that proper reading relies on the art of taking a pause: On our abilityto suspend the pressing rhythms of the everyday and allow ourselves to absorb, and be absorbed by, alternative structures of temporality. The clocks of the imagination do not run at the same speeds as the timetables of the real; to read is to inhabit the present at one's own pace and in the light of a multitude of unknown pasts and possible futures. Recent years have witnessed a swell in publications pondering the state of reading in our world of instant connectivity and shrinking attention spans. In one of these books, Jane Smiley, a Pulitzer Prize winner, considers the peculiar acts of writing and reading a novel as profound contributions to the process of enlightenment—a kind of enlightenment enlightened about itself and no longer repressing the other of reason: “The way in which novels are created—someone is seized by inspiration and then works out his inspiration methodologically by writing, observing, writing, observing, thinking through, and writing again—is by nature deliberate, dominated neither by reason nor by emotion” (176). According to Smiley, the act of reading a novel re-creates an author's deliberate negotiation of affect and rationality. As readers follow the lines of a (good) book, they remain in relative control over the speed of their reading, able to pause when necessary, to hasten forward when desiring so, to reread passages at their leisure, and to close the pages of the book when overtaken by exhaustion. Good stories rely on intricate plot constructions and narrative tensions, but they also situate readers as subjects freed from the temporal determination and ideological drive of other time-based media. Good books can certainly move readers, but—following Smiley's logic—they will not curtail a reader's freedom to move along the text at his or her own speed, and hence they will allow this reader to simultaneously bring into play emotion and reason, the absorptive and the distant.