Question of the Week
Scott Malia of The Shakespeare Blog poses a question:
While Shakespeare appreciation might be near universal among writers, it begs the question of comparison. Who among today’s writers is what might be considered the twenty first century answer to him?
Malia goes on to make a compelling case for Aaron Sorkin. Look, Shakespeare is so much of a product of time and place, as well as genius, that there never really can be another. However, the same genius can manifest itself distinctly within any particular culture. Virginia Woolf wrote a famous essay about what would have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister with equal gifts to his. Can we imagine a Shakespeare born in our time? What would he do? Who would he be? I posted my own response:
I’m a huge fan of Aaron Sorkin, but I would instead nominate David Mamet. Writing for both stage and screen, Mamet has elevated the art of the dramatist to create a body of work that simulaneously embodies and trandscends his contemporary culture. His use of language has the natural credibility of truth, while at the same time making use of the subtle artifice of poetry. His subject matter ranges from insightful cultural criticism to the basest elements of humanity. If anyone from our time qualifies as today’s Shakespeare, I vote for David Mamet.
Anyone else have an opinion?
Who is today’s Shakespeare?
January 10th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU. Joss Whedon is our generations Shakespeare. Hands down.
January 10th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Give me the weekend and I’ll put together a more articulate case for this position…
January 10th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
All in the spirit of good debate and discussion, I vote for Stephen King (I know, I know, but run with me a little bit!):
He has a distinctive literary voice and is not averse to creating his own vocabulary; he is quotable.
He leads, without parallel, his particular medium.
He is most assuredly a product of his time whose work provides a window into his time (the role of horror and sci-fi genres as a mirror/metaphor for the end of the 20th century world view/mentality is worthy of an essay in itself)
His work is both prolific and popular (presenting in the form of poetry, short stories, novella, novel, television, film, theater, non-fiction and periodicals)
At his very best, he is at the top of the literary game; at his worst he’s good, cheap entertainment. (He just doesn’t necessarily do it all at the same time, the way WS did).
While I concede that Mamet could be a good choice, especially from the standpoints of being incredibly prolific and establishing a distinctive voice and style of language, he has always seemed to me to be such a misanthrope – but perhaps that is part of being “of his time.” However, he may be too much a product of too specific a time: he screams “80s” to me, whereas King really runs the full 30+ years from the 70s to present day, and his stories span many more decades (centuries?) than those in which he writes. Will Mamet endure throughout the ages? We’ll have to wait and see, but I think King is more likely to endure, if only for the fact that more people today read than go to the theatre and that his body of work is considerably larger.
Other issues contribute to the potential endurance of King over Mamet:
Is Mamet read/seen internationally? I know King is. Certainly Shakespeare is, and is at least as, if not more so, beloved by the Germans, for example, as by Americans.
Also, like Shakespeare, King often derives his stories (or at least elements of them) from various primary sources (i.e. his use of old tales of American Indian deities/beliefs parallel Shakepeare’s use of the Greco/Roman; in Insomnia, King even makes use of Greek mythology for three of the key characters). I think Mamet, to his credit, is more truly generative in his work than derivative (his Faustus excepted, of course). Work that is somehow connected to other works has an extra “hook” – an added element of accessibility that contributes to longevity.
There is a strong, central element of magic/superstition throughout the works of both Shakespeare and King that is not apparent in Mamet, who is as much of a realist as one can get. And I think the fantasy of any given time has better staying power than the reality of any given time, because it is instantly more accessible and more open to interpretation.
Furthermore, I think King, for all his blood, guts and gore (and WS had plenty of that himself, from time to time!), loves people, and celebrates humanity (the humans, or at least the good ones, always seem to triumph), and it seems like Shakespeare did, too. At least, WS’s works seem to indicate a love of humanity and all those follies and qualities that make us human. King does that for me as well, but Mamet pretty much just leaves me with a sense of “humanity is rotten.” In the long run, I think humans will carry the torch more faithfully and willingly for the artist who celebrates rather than derogates them.
January 10th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
I thought of you when I posted the question, but I thought it was best to let you speak for yourself. I’ll look forward to reading your argument.
January 11th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Whew. I wanted to stay out of this, but, as Bill knows, debating what makes a writer’s work canonical and what works might stay in the canon, *indeed* what the canon of English literature even is at this point, is something which I simply cannot resist.
First of all, I agree with Bill’s assertion that there can be only one Shakespeare: time and place, the nature of what he did and how it shaped what we perceive as “literature” means there can never be another Shakespeare, unless we start all over (and after the Revolution comes or we run out of oil or water and are all stabbing each other with steak knives for bread/water/purple berries, we just may.) However, the original question (which I can’t seem to read in context because the link doesn’t work and I’m too lazy to go looking for it) seeks a twentieth-first-century answer to him. That presumes someone with a talent, I believe, of some sort of equal measure: capacity to influence, capacity to endure, and capacity for what Keats called, when discussing Shakespeare, “negative capability” – the ability to portray all varieties of human experience convincingly, in such a way that the author’s voice disappears; his hand is invisible in the work. It is that last quality that causes hoardes of quasi-scholarly and not-so-scholarly cranks to suggest that Shakespeare wasn’t the man who lived in Stratford-on-Avon, that he was a noble, that he was a woman, that he was a committee, what have you.
Before I present my entry for *our* answer to Shakespeare, however, let me make a few points. When we think about the idea of who our Shakespeare might be, I think it’s useful to attempt to pin down who the Shakespeare of previous centuries was or is: who is the 18th Century’s Shakespeare? (Swift?), the 19th (Dickens? Whitman?), the 20th? (Joyce). I can speak best to the last of these: James Joyce made no secret of his desire to supplant Shakespeare in the canon of English literature, and, among literary scholars, Joyce garners more attention, currently at least, than any writer save Shakespeare. His influence on the fiction that has followed him is extraordinary; his work is likely to continue to be taught and studied for the forseeable future. That being said, his body of work is far smaller and only in _Dubliners_ does he achieve anything approaching negative capability: his personality is etched everywhere in his work: the personalities of Stephen, of Bloom, of Gabriel all draw very heavily upon Joyce himself.
It is also useful when thinking about this question to consider the fact that the canon is constantly changing. I often begin Intro to Lit courses talking about the ways in which what we read, how we read it, and why we read it on the university level change from generation to generation: why are things canonical? We all agree, generally, that Shakespeare is the most canonical figure in the language, but we all disagree on points small or large over who else even belongs in the canon. Look at an English literature textbook from the 1940s sometime or read a literary history from that period: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Fennimore Cooper, and Rudyard Kipling stick out, in particular, as figures who were “Shakespeares” of their generations, and whose writing styles or whose values (colonial, patriarchal, uber-masculine) or both don’t particularly appeal any more to us and what we choose to see as the best and brightest attributes we as a culture have. And Shakespeare does. Harold Bloom suggests that Shakespeare invented the idea of being human; that is perhaps too bold a statement, but we, as readers, as audience members, as scholars, find in Shakespeare’s work qualities that we choose to see as the best to which we can aspire. But that brings us back to negative capability: we can also see the worst humanity has to offer, on parade, convincingly rendered, but we don’t come away damning Shakespeare because Iago is ruthless and racist, in the way that we condemn Kipling, now, for insufferable paternal colonizing values.
So, Bill, I love Mamet; his work gives me a great deal of personal pleasure and the ridiculous musicality of his language makes even minor Mamet entertaining to me, but I don’t feel like he has the broad appeal to society’s larger sense of itself that canonical literature always needs to reflect back to make him any more than a major figure of his era, viewed as a great technician, but not a universally-admired one.
I would make the case, given my own prerequisites above, and my own hesitations to make any predictions about where our post-literate society may find itself in 20, 50, 100 years, for Bob Dylan. In terms of drawing together elements of past traditions into something living and breathing that portrays a vast array of human experience without too much of the author’s own personality entering the texts, Dylan does it. The fact that his medium is popular or, to use Robert Christgau’s term, ‘semi-popular’ music may be what keeps him from being viewed canonically as a poet, given the fickle nature of audiences and the ultimately unremarkable musical achievements of his songs, whose form is song, but the breadth and depth of his vision is the closest equivalent we have at this point to that of Shakespeare.
January 11th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
As if it wasn’t obvious; I am Anonymous.
January 12th, 2008 at 1:29 am
And I thought I was going to be a maverick by lobbying for King. In that case, I’ll play the devil’s advocate to the argument.
Perhaps the crucial difference between King and Mr. S is that King makes ready use of the supernatural, when Mr. S really only had his two fantasies — Midsummer, and Tempest. King uses it almost as a crutch to otherwise well-executed works.
Consider Buick 8, or The Green Mile, or Rose Madder. More recently, and more egregiously, Lisey’s Story uses such a heinous crutch that it’s very, very difficult to finish.
Before we seriously compare King to Mr. S, we have to determine the following: what is important in Mr. S’ use of the supernatural?
January 12th, 2008 at 7:23 am
Welcome, Benjamin Baxter!
When time allows, I’d like to respond in more depth to the various comments in this post.
I’ve always thought of Stephen King as a formula hack, so I was surprised to see him getting such support here. From the posts here, though, there’s obviously a lot I’m missing. I don’t know King’s work well enough to offer an informed opinion, and I’d say the same about Joss Whedon.
I think Dylan is a reallly good choice, as he meets many of the criteria we’d expect from a Shakespeare. Your case is well made, Lee. And the link does work.
I wonder… four hundred years from now, when there’s peace in the Middle East and starships are exploring the vast reaches of the galaxy, will people be listening to Dylan? Performing Mamet? Reading King? Watching old Sorkin or Whedon reruns? It all seems highly unlikely to me. But you can bet they’ll still be performing Shakespeare … in the original Klingon!
January 12th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Bill,
I realized that I left out an important point that further makes my case for Dylan: it’s Dylan’s work as songwriter / poet, not as performer, for which I’m arguing, and it is not only the body of work itself as performed by him, but the fact that it’s so open to performance and interpretation, qualities that drama and song share and fiction does not (hence some of the limits on Joyce, King, Sorkin, Whedon). The songs are open-ended enough that I think four hundred years from now, they will be performed, if anything is . . .
January 12th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Okay, so I should have said “performing Dylan” rather than “listening to Dylan.” That makes sense. Perhaps four hundred years from now, people will still be performing songs by Dylan … in the original Klingon!
January 17th, 2008 at 12:13 am
A twenty-first-century Shakespeare?…
Scott Malia, at The Shakespeare Blog, writes:While Shakespeare appreciation might be near universal among writers, it begs the question of comparison. Who among today’s writers is what might be considered the twenty first century answer to him?His in…