An ideological bias
Shakespeare & co
February 14, 2008 17 comments
Like many readers, no doubt, I have been enjoying the increasingly bitchy catfight, in the TLS letters pages, between David Wootton and Brian Vickers. ((The exchange started here; unfortunately, the tiny Bantustan that the Times website contemptuously allots to the TLS has not yet updated with the Letters of February 8, to which I responded.)) This week’s issue contains my constructive contribution:
Sir, —
Brian Vickers (Letters, February 8) perceives an “ideological bias towards the theatrical” in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor’s editing of Shakespeare’s plays. In the same spirit, might I take this opportunity to lament the ideological bias towards the novelistic displayed by scholars of Proust, as well as the irritating obsession with the poetical among students of Wallace Stevens?
Happy Valentine’s Day, readers!
I think of it more as a catty bitchfight.
I enjoyed your letter on first reading. On reflection, it feels a bit of an elision. The novels of Proust and the poems of Stevens are fairly settled things textually, and they don’t have any substantial existence in live performance. Vickers’s remark was part of the argument over whether the Shakespeare texts are essentially playscripts or printed texts with a life outside the theatre. It’s a difficult matter, in a way that the texts of Proust and Stevens aren’t. I can’t remember his review of Wells & Taylor. He must have written one, but there’ve been so many TLS fights with Vickers cutting down all opponents. I’m sure he had good points to make. Anyway, the really nice sentence in this week’s TLS is this from Marjorie Perloff on Martin Amis: “The war against cliché has a curious way of morphing into the cliché against war.”
My cheap joke did indeed elide (or, I might plead, imply) an argument, which goes roughly like this. As far as anyone is aware, Shakespeare made no attempt to oversee the printing of “official” texts of his plays during his lifetime — whereas, by contrast, he did for his poems. This neglect would be very strange if Shakespeare the playwright considered himself to be a producer of canonical texts, rather than (or even as well as) a writer/actor/company director in the theatre. So whatever the merits of Vickers’s specific disagreements with Wells/Taylor, to accuse them of harbouring in general “an ideological bias towards the theatrical” is senseless, because the theatrical is what everyone is talking about, willy-nilly, even if they call themselves “textual scholars”.
But that would have made for a more boring letter.
The Perloff sentence you cite on Amis, meanwhile, seems to me a type of pat Clive Jamesian chiasmus that doesn’t really bear much scrutiny. How is Amis indulging in “cliché against war” when he is so patently thrilled and energized by our global-historic struggle against the forces of religious evil etc?
Or perhaps the clique against war. ;)
In Amis’s case shurely it’s cliché *for* war, anyway?
Not sure about the Shakespeare editing point. Isn’t it just that Wells/Taylor land on the theatrical side of the fence, whereas Vickers would jump the other way. Vickers’s word “ideological” isn’t needed.
Yes, I see you’re right about Perloff’s remark. The thing about Amis’s sentences is that they never are clichés, and spend so much effort in not being clichés that they become fetishized. Doesn’t Amis claim to be mostly against war? Including in Iraq?
I think most warmongers claim to be searching for peace. Although, fair enough, perhaps Amis is better described as a hatemonger and thus would only be ‘for’ war implicitly.
“Doesn’t Amis claim to be mostly against war? Including in Iraq?”
He certainly does. He has been against the Iraq war from the start. But, you know, he had a famous dad and stuff, so let’s have a go at him anyway.
Not quite sure if that was a dig at me or not – I’m erring towards ‘yes’, but if I’ve misinterpreted sorry.
Fair enough, Amis (M) has been relatively steadfast in his opposition to the Iraq war. But that’s quite an easy war to oppose for a self-styled intellectual, isn’t it? Big corporations making lots of cash from contracts, dubious operational decisions and the hefty whiff of old agendas being settled. In fact, you’d be hard pressed *not* to oppose it.
Far more insidious, and the reason for my general detestation of Amis the man, is his recent penchant for bashing Islam per se, claiming he feels ‘morally superior’ and the like. But I’m hardly very trendy with this, and perfectly willing to accept I may be reading things about him that are made-up, quotes out of context etc.
After all, there was a very good piece in the Independent recently where he begins by asserting that he once kissed a girl who was Muslim. Can’t be a racist then, eh? Over to the man himself, the square brackets are from the interview not me:
“It seems on actuarial, evidential grounds they [Muslims] are more likely to be interested in that [terrorism]. I’m assuming that 95 per cent at least of Muslims are longing to get their house in order, and hate this extremism. I said this to [the former Islamist] Ed Husain and he said yeah, about 95 per cent. So really the feeling was to say then, you can imagine a state would end up coming to the point where… Say it [jihadi violence] was happening every couple of weeks; are you telling me the state wouldn’t do something about it? It’s worth thinking about […] If it was white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who were doing this, do you think I would be inert about that? I would welcome restrictions on my own existence if it was going to suppress the level of violence.”
There we are. I know Ed Husain genuinely is much more of an expert on these things than I am, but throwing around figures like that, allowing Amis to end by saying something should be done about a particular ethnic group because he would support the same thing on himself etc etc etc – am I wrong to find something wrong there? Please let me know I’m up in arms about nothing, and just indulging a prejudice against someone with a famous father.
I suppose you’re correct though, he’s certainly not a warmonger. My mistake.
I’ve taken this very OT so I’ll stop now. ;)
As I understand it, however, the Amis collection that Perloff is reviewing (containing articles at which we have sniggered around here before) does not consist in the main of objections to the Iraq war (clichéd or not), but rather objections (clichéd in content if not in form) to religion, Islamism but also Islam, all those scary Muslims who are outbreeding us, etc, etc. Hence her formula is rather forced.
I’m a newbie to the site, so wasn’t aware you have a healthy history of Amis-sniggering – in which cases, I almost definitely did misconstrue JohnM and apologise.
New coinage for someone with a clichéd perspective on Islamic issues: an IslAmis!
Oh go on.
Steven, are you not going to reproduce or even link to your review of Iain M. Bank’s ‘Matter’? I just bought it (er, because it was half price), and dammit, I want to see an intelligent discussion about it somewhere.
If I’m allowed to be on topic for a moment, I always thought it was a cliche to say ‘the war against [something]’ even before the ‘war on terror’, but Amis didn’t seem to be using ‘the war against cliche’ ironically. “The cliche against war” seems to be a stupid quote and means absolutely nothing. If I’d known what a ‘chiasmus’ is, I’d have called it one of those.
The initial indignation of this comment is undermined somewhat – no, entirely – by the unappreciated irony of the fatuous non-sequitor and false accusation it concludes with.
Dave — that review and some comments on it are at my other website.
Good point!
“Far more insidious, and the reason for my general detestation of Amis the man, is his recent penchant for bashing Islam per se, claiming he feels ‘morally superior’ and the like.”
He was speaking of the Taliban rather than Islam in general, which is a lot more reasonable.
Saying K. Amis casts some kind of light on M. Amis seems to me absurd – they haven’t that much in common as writers.
“The thing about Amis’s sentences is that they never are clichés, and spend so much effort in not being clichés that they become fetishized.”
I don’t know what “fetishized” means but I know what you mean about the effort. He writes like Vivienne Westwood dresses. Never any every day wear. K. Amis didn’t think much of his son’s writing, complaining that he didn’t seem able to write sentences like:- “He came into the room and sat down.”
Yes, at that ICA thing. Unfortunately, as I discussed here, Amis does also feel entitled to “pass judgment” on an “ethnicity”. He does suffer, poor thing, from some very profound problems in distinguishing the Muslims he doesn’t like from all Muslims everywhere.
Yep. That is the stupid part of Terry Eagleton’s otherwise reasonable attack on Amis fils.
(I think it was “He finished his drink and left the room”.)
“(I think it was “He finished his drink and left the room”.)”
Something like that anyway. I couldn’t remember the exact quote.
M. Amis is sharp & witty when writing on other people’s books and I wish he would stick to that. I’m embarrassed for him when he starts writing on a Big Theme. You can see the crib notes.