Bard's Craft

                                  The Craft of The Bard

What more pleasure than to set upon a project to know the Bard more, when he is going to be 450 on 23^rd April, 2014.  In my attempt as a reader and celebrator of literature, I am devoting the coming 2 years to the study of William Shakespeare and his works.  I began the year by revisiting his 154 sonnets. The singing of the Shakespearean sonnet is an ongoing delight with me still, and moreover it is too short a time, since I began, to have devoured them all. But rather than just indulging in one genre of his writings I am also on to his plays. The four great tragedies:  King Lear, Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth, have the greatest following, and I am with Macbeth this season.

The triumph of the Macbeth lies in the portrayal of Macbeth as a Dostoyevskian character, an Aristotellian tragic hero, with his penchant for self-reflection.  He is a tragic hero indeed, because we, the audience, can see ourselves in him. The play has startling power and is akin to a modern work of art with its thick, poetic language and fast-moving pace, which makes it feel like a modern political thriller. The weird sisters, evil and grotesque, add darkness, mystery and doom to the play.  The powerful imagery is steeped in blood, the supernatural and shafts of conscience warring with serpents of desire.

Macbeth is introduced as a brave warrior, bathed in a bloodbath. He slays the enemy mercilessly and wins the war for his king, King  Duncan. He is a loyal subject to the monarch, a good friend to Banqo and lover and friend to his wife.  Lady Macbeth herself illustrates that Macbeth’s nature is "... too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness/To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great/Art not without ambition, but without/The illness should attend it." A compassionate, intelligent, honorable man whose dormant ambition ignites after listening to the prophesy of the weird sisters "Thane of Glamis!", "Thane of Cawdor!" and "King of Scotland hereafter". Macbeth’s grandeur is then suffused with acts of murder; he commits regicide propelled by his wife, Lady Macbeth.  Our awareness Macbeth’s grandeur  at the onset of the drama is important when we later witness his downfall and mental decay to the point where his persona, his rule and dear wife, all degenerate into the abyss of disease, instability, psychological trauma and finally death. Macbeth is a potent rendition of a tragic hero, the epitome of good and bad. Course of events and a flaw in his character makes him befriend the devil, and therein begin his downfall. The soliloquies, interior monologues give the readers access to his inner turmoil and descent into the realms of the underworld. We identify with him closely; ambitious, yet ambiguous; warring persistently with his conscience to achieve his desires. His strife is our strife and in his death we sympathesize and stand by him.

It is when we read the sources of Macbeth, that we get a peek into the genius of the Bard. It makes real interesting study to compare the sources and what Shakespeare finally achieved after altering and mixing historical records of Scottish period from the 11^th century.  The exercise then turns into a writing class – How to craft a dramatic, enthralling  story  from a raw material of history and fact.  Shakespeare's chief source for Macbeth was Holinshed's Chronicles (Macbeth), who based his account of Scotland's history, and Macbeth's in particular, on the Scotorum Historiae, written in 1527 by Hector Boece. Other minor sources contributed to Shakespeare's dramatic version of history, including Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, and Daemonologie, written in 1599 by King James. The Bard wrote the play during the reign of James I from Scotland in the early 17^th century , to hail the king’s Scottish ancestry, his interest in witchcraft, and the supremacy of Kings. He altered the character sketches and intermixed stories of periods of time, to render a dramatic account of a tragic hero, (original Lord Macbeth in Scottish history kills a weak and scrupulous King Duncan, to rule admirably for a decade, before he is replaced by Malcolm the heir to King Duncun).  

The nymphs and angels were reworked by the Bard into witches based on writings on witchcraft of the times and by the king himself.  They are grotesque wiry women but bearded , dole out a bizarre rhymed speech which makes  them seem ridiculous, but the undertone of doom is irreplaceable. They are the harbingers of  the supernatural and fate. Shakespeare has them speak in rhyming couplets throughout “Double, double, toil and trouble, / Fire burn and cauldron bubble” which separates them from the other characters, who mostly speak in blank verse. Despite their resemblance to the Fates of Greek mythology, they are the most dangerous characters in the play, found in the intersections of the human and the outer world, wickedly toying with human lives. Reading the play, we are not really helped in deciphering them, but their sure presence and meddling with the tragic hero (with whom we identify) imbues the story with layers of uncomprehending ominous darkness and palpable dread.
Reading his writings is not just about another story, but lessons in fiction writing, human psychology, the cosmic consciousness, poetic language and the Bard himself.  I feel closer to him every time I read him.
Watch out this space for more interludes with the Bard!

Histriographic Metafiction

                                     NOVEL Novels

My article ‘Winging Historical Writing’ came in the wake of announcement of Eleanor Catton having won the Booker last year for her historical novel ‘The Luminaries’.  Before that, we recounted the success of Hilary Mantel winning the title for same genre of writing. What is it about historical novels that the literary world is churning out so many in different parts of the world? Myriad writers are revisiting or recreating many periods of history.  Epics and Classics from antiquity are a favorite segment of the reconceptualization process. ‘Linda Hutcheon’s ‘Poetics of Postmodernism’ studies this very  current cultural phenomenon in postmodern writing  that exists; is attracting much public debate, and so deserves critical attention. She illuminates the paradoxes which come into play when a writer sets out to juxtapose his aesthetic autonomy, and self-reflexivity with the historical, social and political world.  This study is an attempt to see what happens when culture is challenged from within: challenged or questioned or contested, but not imploded.  Privileging the novel genre, and one form in particular, a form that she calls “historiographic metafiction ”. Those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages:’  Grass’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Rushdie’s Shame and Midnight’s Children, Gregory’s Plantegenet series, Atwood’s Penelopiad….. 

Phillipa Gregory’s Plantegenet series is five books strong and followed by ten million readers, who are completely hooked after the enrapturing ten-episode BBC drama series on her first book ‘The White Queen.’  She has infused passionate and independent lives into women characters of the Plantegenet dynasty, marked in history by ‘War of the Roses’. A time in English history before the Tudor’s, also known as the three decade long Cousin’s War between the two houses of the Plantegenet dynasty, the House of York and the House of Lancaster. Women who just appeared as names on family trees, or footnotes to the reigns of powerful kings have been portrayed as strong women unto themselves, who pursued alliances, created rebellions, joined battles, and became Queens of England or ambitious mothers who made the impossible possible and with a killer instinct in the pursuit of power and swerving loyalties to the crown, got their sons to become kings. Powerful women

whom chroniclers of history may have projected as brood mares, or diplomatic currencies , sworn to their saintly vows of being good model wives and self sacrificing mothers. But Gregory enumerates character sketches of women personalities  made of  sterner stuff which propelled them to rule, that which could not be achieved aboveboard could then be possessed  using dastardly means, and scheming manipulations. Elizabeth Woodville a commoner who marries King Edward IV against all norms, bears him a dozen children, acquires estates, marriages and titles for her ten siblings.  Inspite of the imprisonment of her sons ‘The Princes in the Tower’, she makes sure her daughter, Elizabeth of York becomes the Queen of England. Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, grandmother of Henry VIII (the legendery Tudor King who went against the church to legitimize his six marriages),  plotted the Buckingham Rebellion, then known as the Beaufort Rebellion, which was the first step towards the ultimate defeat of Richard III, and the crowning of her son Henry VII.

Margaret Atwood in ‘The Penelopiad’ reworks the Odyssey and gives space and voice to Penelope and the hanged handmaidens to tell their story and circumstances which tradition and history barred them from doing.  Panchali in Govinda by Udaysankar is married to the eldest Pandava brother only.  She questions her identity and role, and her quest is justice and individuation of women.  Colm Tóibín, shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker prize, is a plaintive monologue by Mother Mary who recounts certain episodes in the life of her son, shorn  of   celestial powers that myth has empowered her with through the centuries. She pines for a comfortable home with her husband and son and wishes to be delivered of the cross that her child is ‘Son of God.’ She is a pained mother reliving the stings and arrows of atrocious misfortune that flesh is heir to. Myths are demythologized to unearth the history of mankind. Defamilairization is a tool used by writers to give us an overworked myth from the perspective of unknown and unconventional angles. Others have questioned and rebelled against established iconic legends like the question of whether the sacrifice of Sita was greater than Urmilla (Lakshman’s wife) in the epic  Ramayana.

Rushdie in ‘Midnight’s Children’, revisits the birth of a nation, a promise through magic realism. He imbues the children born at the stroke of 15August, 1947 with extra psychic powers, magical in their reach and dreams. Their ultimate humiliation, torture and unmaking is a metaphor for the dissolution of the promise of a nation, through wars, politics, societal control , racism and the Emergency. Hilary Mantel subverts the character of Thomas Cromwell to a machiavellian Chanakya. ‘Wolf Hall’ is a book which portrays the break from Rome, a process where one man is wolf to another and the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon. ‘Bring up the Bodies’ deals with the reign of the second queen Anne Boleyn, and at the end, her execution ordered by Henry himself. Hilary Mantel doesn’t mess with factual history but experiments with the gaps in history and that becomes her playfield as a writer.

“Historiographic metafiction has often been noticed by critics and is a major debatable topic at literary festivals in India and abroad.  It is not just metafictional, nor is it just another version of the historical novel or the non-fictional novel. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is metafictionally self-reflexive and yet speaking to us powerfully about real political and historical realities: “It has thus become a kind of model for the contemporary writer, being self-conscious about its literary heritage and about the limits of mimesis...but yet managing to reconnect its readers to the world outside the page.  Modern history and modern literature [postmodern in both cases] have both rejected the ideal of representation that dominated them for so long. Both now conceive of their work as exploration, testing, creation of new meanings, rather than as disclosure or revelation of meanings already in some sense “there,” but not immediately perceptible.”

Historiographic metafiction has a liberating quality that has been seized by feminist and postcolonial writers to enable plural voices in the corridors of history to be verbalized and previewed.

Novel Novels indeed!

Brevity is thy name

       Be Brief, the new Brief

A Little Tooth

Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,

and four, and five, then she wants some meat

directly from the bone.  It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall

in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet

talker on his way to jail.  And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue

nothing.  You did, you loved, your feet

are sore.  It's dusk.  Your daughter's tall.

The appeal of poetry lies in its brevity. Reduction, compression and brevity are the soul of good poetry. Sharp images, compressed timelines, minimalist prose raise simple poetry to highbrow literature. To cut the excess and hone to the bone, to suck the bone marrow out of life is the essence of poetry.

Poetry makes use of contradictions, improbable associations as well as similarities and coherence, to comprehend the enigmatic enigma of life journeys.   Poetry juxtaposes paradoxes to make a surprising whole. It startles, amazes, cuts to the core, finds the essence, and hits home starkly and precisely.

The lesson

Maya Angelou

I keep on dying again.

Veins collapse, opening like the

Small fists of sleeping

Children.

Memory of old tombs,

Rotting flesh and worms do

Not convince me against

The challenge. The years

And cold defeat live deep in

Lines along my face.

They dull my eyes, yet

I keep on dying,

Because I love to live.

Poets have an endorsement of none other than Shakespeare,   who said “brevity is the soul of wit.” Brevity is an art used to the hilt by poets and prose writers too, who excel in short, precise sentences. Art design in advertisements, especially designing of logos, icons, ad imagery relies on reduction of form. This condensation of idea and form to its simplest outline is akin to Cézanne’s etching of essential form in his paintings – to basics shapes of circle, cone and cylinder. All arts and creativity coalesce at hailing brevity monumental to their work, and expression of supreme creativity. 

 

I had no time to hate, because

Emily Dickinson

The grave would hinder me,

And life was not so ample I

Could finish enmity.

Nor had I time to love, but since

Some industry must be,

The little toil of love, I thought,

Was large enough for me.

Five centuries old Kabir Vani, still features prominently today at Litfests in India.  The just concluded Jaipur Literary Festival and The Goa Art/Lit Fest celebrated the songs of Kabir, known for its core of truth; rendered bluntly, presicely, explicitly and bitingly.  ‘As Rumi is to the Sufis, so Kabir is to five centuries of Indians, less an individual author than a bullet exploding through their collective poetic gene pool.’—Richard Sieburth

Moond Munddavat Din Gaye, Ajhun Na Miliya Raam
Raam Naam Kahu Kya Karey, Je Man Ke Aurey Kaam

Shaving the head, Ages have passed, yet no union with God
Recitation of God’s name is futile, when the mind is doing something else

Book art, Twitter and TTT (Terribly Tiny Tales), Flash Fiction are contemporary forays into the art of brevity.  

She washed her body

She washed her clothes

She washed the house

She washed her baby

Paranoid of disease

She washed invisible dirt around, but the fear in her mind

And Whitman said it succinctly when he said:

OTHERS may praise what they like; 

But I, from the banks of the running Missouri, praise nothing, in art, or aught else, 

Till it has well inhaled the atmosphere of this river—also the western prairie-scent,

And fully exudes it again.

Be brief; Be effective.