Shakespeare and biology
Mar. 5th, 2011 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI'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.
And then later he goes on to say that if we stop being born from mothers and go all Brave New World then Shakespeare probably won't make much sense any more.
So... my reaction... I can see what he means, but I'm not so sure what he thinks follows actually follows.
The things he lists and the issue he lands on don't connect so naturally as he seems to think. Yes, we are born of mothers, and so are other siblings. From that could follow a logical lot of stuff about competing for scarce resources of mother love. I hear Freud goes there. But the bit about fathers getting jealous and possessive about daughters does NOT follow as 'human nature' from the fact we're born from mothers. Especially if fathers don't also get jealous of the divided love of their sons.
When we were studying Greek tragedy one of the shapes that kept on coming up was a woman who married in to a new family but didn't leave behind loyalty to her brothers, which inevitably brought ruin upon them all. On account of it being tragedy, obviously. But it was because of the purely political and economic fact that a man stayed in the one family-business his whole life, inheriting it, but a woman was supposed to be moved out and go give her whole effort to the new family-business she'd make sons for. (I really hope I'm remembering this right, if I stop to look it up I'll be here all day). Fathers lost their daughters to other men, so they never really trusted them as much in the first place, and husbands knew their new wife had brothers so they couldn't quite be sure of her allegiance either. Big mess.
Consider a contrary case - Matrilineal society where men marry in to a female line. Fathers would never lose their daughters to another man, they'd gain sons. Mothers would lose the loyalty of their sons. You'd have to gender flip that particular Shakespearean preoccupation to make it make any sense at all.
Or another matrilineal set up where the assumption is that you can never know who your father is, all the babies come from mothers. Loyalty is to sister-sons. You never lose anyone, your sibs are your sibs and your nephews and nieces are your nephews and nieces and that's just how it is. Shakespeare becomes quite bizarre, with all this 'father' concept.
And none of those are biological. Babies still get born of mothers, but the whole system of allegiance that springs from that is socially assigned with economic/political differences built in. It isn't 'human nature' and it doesn't require science fiction to change it, it's human society and there's already rather a lot of different versions around.
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.
[...] the plays are open and sensitive to so many of the currents that are set up by this relationship that every subsequent performance constantly reminds us of the enormous complexity of moral and filial obligations. [...]
One of the deep structures that persists throughout all Shakespeare's plays that deal with fathers and daughters is the almost pathological theme of fathers who are ultimately always betrayed by their daughters. They betray only in the sense that they have to teach their fathers that the filial love they owe is in fact divisible, and must in the end be assigned in part to another - a deserving competitor - in the form of a potential husband or lover. Men in Shakespeare seem to have exorbitant expectations of the love that is to be obtained from women 0 wives, daughters or lovers - and they become raging monsters when the possibility of a divided love appears, whether in the form of infidelity, when they are cuckolded by an unfaithful wife, or in the form of the legitimate infidelity of the daughter who finds that she must now allocate one half of her love to a deserving husband.
And then later he goes on to say that if we stop being born from mothers and go all Brave New World then Shakespeare probably won't make much sense any more.
So... my reaction... I can see what he means, but I'm not so sure what he thinks follows actually follows.
The things he lists and the issue he lands on don't connect so naturally as he seems to think. Yes, we are born of mothers, and so are other siblings. From that could follow a logical lot of stuff about competing for scarce resources of mother love. I hear Freud goes there. But the bit about fathers getting jealous and possessive about daughters does NOT follow as 'human nature' from the fact we're born from mothers. Especially if fathers don't also get jealous of the divided love of their sons.
When we were studying Greek tragedy one of the shapes that kept on coming up was a woman who married in to a new family but didn't leave behind loyalty to her brothers, which inevitably brought ruin upon them all. On account of it being tragedy, obviously. But it was because of the purely political and economic fact that a man stayed in the one family-business his whole life, inheriting it, but a woman was supposed to be moved out and go give her whole effort to the new family-business she'd make sons for. (I really hope I'm remembering this right, if I stop to look it up I'll be here all day). Fathers lost their daughters to other men, so they never really trusted them as much in the first place, and husbands knew their new wife had brothers so they couldn't quite be sure of her allegiance either. Big mess.
Consider a contrary case - Matrilineal society where men marry in to a female line. Fathers would never lose their daughters to another man, they'd gain sons. Mothers would lose the loyalty of their sons. You'd have to gender flip that particular Shakespearean preoccupation to make it make any sense at all.
Or another matrilineal set up where the assumption is that you can never know who your father is, all the babies come from mothers. Loyalty is to sister-sons. You never lose anyone, your sibs are your sibs and your nephews and nieces are your nephews and nieces and that's just how it is. Shakespeare becomes quite bizarre, with all this 'father' concept.
And none of those are biological. Babies still get born of mothers, but the whole system of allegiance that springs from that is socially assigned with economic/political differences built in. It isn't 'human nature' and it doesn't require science fiction to change it, it's human society and there's already rather a lot of different versions around.
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...?