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Shakespeare and biology
Mar. 5th, 2011 12:47 pmI've been doing reading for Textual Transformations on Monday. There's a theory about why Shakespeare is still relevant after 400 years that made my brain go to the SF place, and also go 'yeah but no' (which phrase mum has banned me from ever using again) (but it's so useful!)
Photocopied reader has the cite in squigglesquiggle but it probably says Jonathan Miller at the top.
I would agree that the plots depend upon a certain grammar of relationships, but as a science fiction reader I'm also quite certain it is possible to watch Shakespeare as a message from a foreign culture, or alien planet. If you don't share that relationship-grammar the message becomes quite different, probably a horror story more than a tragedy, the inevitability falls out until you see them trapped in their cultural expectations. But you can still watch it and find value and connections in it.
The basic units of emotional grammar that connect us to stories are even simpler than family. They're hope and fear and happiness and sorrow and loss and reunion and discovery. But once you get that basic you can't explain 'why Shakespeare' in preference to anyone else. To understand the preference I think you have to see how much we still have in common in the political/economic ways.
Yet I don't think we have to still have kings and kingdoms to understand them, as long as we still have families. Any small social unit that can get torn apart might do. Kingdom stories just multiply up the consequences of some poor sod's bereavement or bad break up and bring the whole world down around him literal as well as emotionally.
This line of pondering is interesting but will draw no conclusions.
But I am now left wondering, how would science fiction cultures feel about Shakespeare?
Barrayar would love it, Beta would find it incomprehensible I think.
Centauri would get it. Oh so very.
Minbari...?
Photocopied reader has the cite in squigglesquiggle but it probably says Jonathan Miller at the top.
What is it about human nature that is the same? What institutions would have to change so that one would no longer recognize the living individuals as being exponents of something we can call human nature? I think what is common to both Shakespeare and our time, regardless of the massive technical, political and social changes that have overtaken us in the past 400 years, is simply the fact that we breed in the same way - we are born of woman and are reared by mothers and share our parents with others born in the same way: in other words, that we have parents and siblings, and share a grammar of relationships that is grounded in this particular method of reproduction.( Read more... )
I would agree that the plots depend upon a certain grammar of relationships, but as a science fiction reader I'm also quite certain it is possible to watch Shakespeare as a message from a foreign culture, or alien planet. If you don't share that relationship-grammar the message becomes quite different, probably a horror story more than a tragedy, the inevitability falls out until you see them trapped in their cultural expectations. But you can still watch it and find value and connections in it.
The basic units of emotional grammar that connect us to stories are even simpler than family. They're hope and fear and happiness and sorrow and loss and reunion and discovery. But once you get that basic you can't explain 'why Shakespeare' in preference to anyone else. To understand the preference I think you have to see how much we still have in common in the political/economic ways.
Yet I don't think we have to still have kings and kingdoms to understand them, as long as we still have families. Any small social unit that can get torn apart might do. Kingdom stories just multiply up the consequences of some poor sod's bereavement or bad break up and bring the whole world down around him literal as well as emotionally.
This line of pondering is interesting but will draw no conclusions.
But I am now left wondering, how would science fiction cultures feel about Shakespeare?
Barrayar would love it, Beta would find it incomprehensible I think.
Centauri would get it. Oh so very.
Minbari...?