Art vs Ideology

One thing I inadvertently ended up doing as part of researching my recent book on Shakespeare was a comparative analysis of the various intellectual frameworks that have been used to interpret literature down through the centuries. What I noticed was that, although the content of the ideological models has changed drastically over the centuries, there is one key property that they all lack, which prevents them from understanding the works of Shakespeare or any other stories of comparable greatness. In order to understand what has been missing, let’s do a lightning summary of the various schools of literary interpretation.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to find that, during the Renaissance, classical models were dominant. Literature was judged according to Aristotle’s focus on mimesis and catharsis, the Stoic idea of moral instruction, and the Horatian ideal of beauty. However, under the influence of scholastic philosophy, the ancient models were also turned into strict rules that were handed down like the laws of God. Among other things, these rules determined whether a work was a tragedy, a comedy, a pastoral, etc. Just as the schoolmen argued about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, they had heated debates about whether such and such a work fulfilled the criteria to make it a tragedy, or whatever. Most writers of this era consciously or unconsciously wrote their works to accord with these kinds of “rules”.

It was in the middle of the 18th century that the neoclassical paradigm began to be superseded by a new way of thinking that would eventually be called Romanticism. Strict rationality was abandoned in favour of a focus on passion and emotion. Another prominent feature of Romanticism was a fixation on the author of a work of literature. Thus, the Romantics were always concerned with trying to reverse engineer the author’s intentions from the work itself. Breaking the rules could then be seen as a form of artistic expression and perhaps even a sign of genius, one of the favourite concepts of the Romantics.

The backlash against this excessive focus on the author began in the late 19th century with an intellectual movement that aimed to treat stories as quasi-independent entities. This was the precursor to the idea of a “meme”. The propagator of a meme (its author) is not important. What is important is the content. In relation to stories, this translated into a focus on the plot and thereby facilitated an appreciation for how certain stories evolved over time, seemingly independently of their authors.

At around the same time, psychoanalysis took Romanticism’s fixation on the author and modified it by attempting to reverse engineer not the author’s conscious intentions but his or her unconscious mind. Psychoanalysis also contributed the concept of the archetype to literary studies and was able to trace recurring character patterns in various works spanning different historical periods and cultural backgrounds.

Finally, the 20th century gave us the postmodernist, deconstructionist, and existentialist (hermeneutic) schools, all of which focus on the audience rather than the author. Thus, we have the idea that there is no universal meaning to a work and that people from different backgrounds will have different readings. This is closely related to the Marxist school which had already divided the audience into different categories based on class.

There have been other schools of interpretation, but this brief summary will suffice for our purposes here. We can see that literary interpretation has investigated the author, the audience, the emotional effect on the audience, the morality of the story, the structure of the story, the archetypes of the characters, the existential effect of the story on the reader, the class dynamic, the power structures, the comparative history, and all kinds of other properties. But there is one thing that has been missing from all of these frameworks. Incredibly, none of them bothered to investigate what is the most important part of every story. Every story is about a hero and the transformation that they go through. Without that, there is no story.

There was one thinker in the 20th century who did finally place stories in their correct context. Joseph Campbell coined the invaluable concept of the hero’s journey and noted that every story is about the hero’s transformation. However, because Campbell was investigating “myths”, and doing so within a psychoanalytic paradigm, his work had a quasi-mystical tinge that appealed to the hippie generation but which was all but completely ignored by modern academia.

Still, this failure cannot be attributed to either Campbell or his specific ideas. What our brief historical overview has shown is that thinkers from Aristotle onwards have religiously avoided getting to the heart of what a story is. They have systematically failed to address the main point. That cannot be a coincidence. There has to be something more fundamental going on.

The irony is that every normal person who is uneducated in the fine art of literary interpretation automatically understands stories as a transformation of the hero. To use a modern concept, we approach stories with empathy. It is another irony that German intellectuals had to discover this idea for themselves in the 19th century. The same irony is behind the fact that Harold Bloom said that Shakespeare “invented the human”. Only people removed from normal human intercourse at a young age and initiated into the artificial world of academia could fail to appreciate that this is what everybody does by default. But, again, the Western academic tradition has been ignoring these truths for two millennia.

The much larger issue at stake here goes all the way to the foundations of the Western intellectual tradition beginning with the Pre-Socratic philosophers. From the very first, “truth” has been defined in the abstract. It was not to be found in any specific story, certainly not in an empathetic connection with the hero, but in the abstract principles that governed the story. In the exact same way, you couldn’t derive the “truths” of politics or religion from any specific instance of them. Thus, philosophy, and especially modern science, has been predicated on ignoring specific instances. To care about the hero of a specific story was irrelevant, something best left to the vulgar mob. The job of the intellectual was to focus on the abstract principles.

The influence of this belief was not constrained to the hallowed halls of academia. It structured society in a more general fashion. Prior to Shakespeare, there were two main camps of storytellers. Firstly, there were wandering minstrels, poets, balladeers, and others who travelled around telling stories at fairs and other public events. These people eked out a subsistence living by focusing on entertaining the public. The kinds of stories they told were meant to appeal to the common folk and were suitably bawdy and down to earth as a result.

The second types of stories were those that came from the intellectual and religious institutions of society. The latter were invariably morality tales designed to instil correct thoughts in the lower classes. The former were written according to the “rules” that had been constructed by the schoolmen. Writing those kinds of stories was more like a game to be played than our modern idea of artistic inspiration, which was promulgated by the Romantics. If you didn’t know the rules of the game, you couldn’t appreciate the story.

The uneducated person had very little interest in either of these kinds of stories, because what the uneducated person wants out of a story is the human element. Plus, most people are not generally interested in having condescending moral dogma imposed on them. That didn’t prevent the authorities from jamming the works down everybody’s throat anyway. (Is this starting to sound familiar?)

Shakespeare was born at a time when the old institutional and political arrangements had broken down due to the Reformation. Alongside a mini-economic boom that occurred in England, and London in particular, one of the unanticipated results was that popular art suddenly became a profitable enterprise. Indeed, Shakespeare ended up becoming quite wealthy later in his life due to the commercial success of his plays.

The dynamic that occurred in Elizabethan England was very similar to the music industry of the 1960s and 70s. There was a large paying public creating an excess of demand, and therefore a high price, for great theatre. That was already unusual. What was more unusual was that the public included members of all social classes. That is why Shakespeare’s works could combine elements of both the minstrel tradition of popular storytelling targeted to the common folk and the higher intellectual tradition that came from the learned classes. This is not only true of the content and presentation of the works, Shakespeare shows it directly in the relationships between various characters. Thus, we get combinations such as Prince Hal and Falstaff, Hamlet and the gravedigger, or, in tragic form, Othello and Iago.

Shakespeare himself straddled the schism between the intellectual classes and the general public. He was an educated man, but he spent most of his time in the theatre, which, at that time, was a seedy environment frequented by people of ill repute, again very similar to the rock scene of the 60s and 70s. As a result, Shakespeare never became an intellectual. In fact,  it’s clear that he rejected the stale pretences of the intellectual and moral tradition of the middle ages. One of the ways he did that was to foreground the human element in his stories. Although Shakespeare deals with the highest questions of human existence, he does so through his characters rather than through artificial intellectual conventions.

One of the results of this is that the only way to understand Shakespeare is by understanding his characters as human beings, and that is why the various intellectual traditions of Western culture have all failed to get to the core meanings of his work. It doesn’t matter whether the ideology is neoclassical, romantic, Marxist, deconstructionist, postmodernist, or whatever, the result is always the same. This follows because Shakespeare was not just objecting to the specific details of any ideology, he was objecting to ideology in general.

All of this is directly relevant to the time in which we live because Western culture continues to churn out ideological-intellectual frameworks. Indeed, with the massive expansion of academia in the post-war years, we are producing such drivel at an unprecedented rate. The only redeeming feature of it all is that nobody reads it.

Meanwhile, the “elite” class of society is still populated by the same kind of moral wowsers that were around in Shakespeare’s time. In fact, the Puritan movement arose in the 16th century as a reaction against the breakdown of the old institutions. The early Puritans managed to shut down some of Shakespeare’s plays during his lifetime. Later, when they came to power following the British Civil War, they actually had the Globe Theatre in London demolished. No doubt, they would have burned all the copies of Shakespeare’s work if they’d had the chance.

Thus, there is something more at stake here than simple intellectual disagreement. The Puritans and the intellectuals both hated Shakespeare. They hated the human element in his work, exactly the element that had been deliberately excluded from Western “high culture”.

The exact same dynamic is present in our time. Of course, the neo-Puritans that are churned out in industrial quantities by modern universities can’t have the Globe Theatre pulled down anymore. But they can ensure that Shakespeare’s works are “reinterpreted” according to whatever ideology is currently fashionable. In fact, I’d say for such people it is a psychic necessity to do so lest they have to actually confront what Shakespeare wanted to show us, namely, humanity.