SHAKSPER 2000: Re: 3rd Murderer in Macbeth

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 01/10/00 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0043  Monday, 10 January 2000.

[1]     From:   Seán Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
        Date:   Saturday, 08 Jan 2000 16:08:36 -0800
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0036 Re: 3rd Murderer in Macbeth

[2]     From:   Edward Pixley <pixleyee@snyoneva.cc.oneonta.edu>
        Date:   Saturday, 08 Jan 2000 19:28:43 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0021 Re: 3rd Murderer in Macbeth


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Seán Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
Date:           Saturday, 08 Jan 2000 16:08:36 -0800
Subject: 11.0036 Re: 3rd Murderer in Macbeth
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0036 Re: 3rd Murderer in Macbeth

My notes on the audience's implication in the events of a play have
drawn a number of responses, some of them heated, to which I'll try to
reply seriatim.

Tom Lidh asks:

>Moreover, it skews the logical: are readers of history books culpable
>for the Holocaust because they decided to read the book knowing it was
>about World War II? are writers of those same books culpable for knowing
>that there would be an audience wanting to read about World War II?

Firstly, though off-topic, we shouldn't confuse the Holocaust with World
War II.  It was an act of genocide, not of war.

Secondly, no, the dead of the Shoah would be dead regardless of whether
anyone found out about them or not.  They are, as Sartre would say of
others generally, and as Levinas emphasizes, "transcendent", i.e., they
exist regardless of the intention of the cogito.  Fictional characters,
on the other hand, are things for whose existence the audience (and yes,
also the playwright, producers, actors, director, scene-carpenter, etc.)
are responsible.  We bring them into being.  They are, under normal
circumstances, products of our gaze, not merely objects that stand
outside us regardless of whether we "regard" them, or other people who
"regard" us, whether or not we even want them to.

Thirdly, even though we're not guilty for the deaths of the Holocaust in
a direct manner, we are perhaps guilty in the broad manner in which
Levinas describes guilt, which is something like survivor guilt, though
perhaps it's better not to get into this.  In any case, our reaction
is-or at least it ought to be-ethical.  We should at least care about
what happened to the victims of the Shoah, even if we can't do anything
to stop it.  Our relation with the events between the Wannsee conference
and the liberations of the camps is not merely one of knowing.

>Oh, and to follow the line above: yes, there would be a play without
>Duncan's murder. It just wouldn't be the same play.

It would also be a pretty short play, I'd tend to think.  But we didn't
come to see just any play, we came to see Macbeth, which is (in part)
about Macbeth killing Duncan.  Judith's point about not substituting
another play is precisely correct in this sense.

Speaking of whom, Judith Matthews Craig writes:

>My argument was NOT based on "common sense" but on the principle that in
>differing levels of reality, play-acting is on a lower level.  To rush
>into a play to save a character is really not a violation of common
>sense, as people see it happening, but rather a stupid action that
>affects nothing.  It does nothing to change the play or the ethics
>involved.  Decisions that one makes in real life demand ethics because
>they really do affect others in a way that play-acting does not-a little
>girl crying because she is affected by what she sees on the stage is
>manipulated, not making ethical decisions.

Whether or not you can actually affect events is besides the point.  To
return to Tom's useful example above, one ought still to care about the
deaths in the Shoah, even though there is nothing one can do about
them.  I would say that one cares, ethically, about things before
casting around for possible responses, remedies, or reasons not to
care.  We might feel guilty about the actions of the play, realize that
there isn't anything we can do, and then suppress our guilt.  Or, we
might care about the actions of the characters on-stage without actually
feeling guilty for them.  We might feel outraged, for instance, or we
might feel pity.  Our pity for (say) Ophelia doesn't mean that we think
we're able to lend her a handkerchief. It does mean that our response to
the events on stage is an ethical response.

>If I do remember correctly,
>one of the hopes of Renaissance dramatists was to influence the
>conscience of the actual king so that he would make better decisions in
>the real world.   If Hamlet rushed in to save the player King, he would
>not have had the same effect on Claudius as he has in his actual killing
>in Act V.  He would merely look even more crazy and probably would be so
>judged by the audience members in the Elizabethan audience (or by
>extension) a modern audience.

Well, he might have made others wonder about their audience-like
response to the death of the King Hamlet Senior, by rebelling against
the normalizing of such indifference.  And as Karen noted in the same
digest that contained your message, Hamlet's plan depends on the king
having some sort of ethical response to the events on stage.  Claudius
might not feel responsible for the player king's death, but he seems to
have a suddenly renewed awareness of his complicity in the Danish king's
death, though I suppose that this depends on how Claudius is played in
the scene.

>I guess I hold that play actions seen on a stage have a lower position
>on the "Great Chain of Being" (pardon the allusion to such an outdated
>concept) than actions a living person takes in real life in his
>relationships with other real people actually interacting with each
>other.

So would I, at least in everyday events.  I don't spend my time fasting
in guilt over watching NYPD Blue.  I do, though, realize that my
interest in the violent and simply distasteful is part of the reason
that this television show is produced.  Now what shoud my reaction be?
Should I stop watching it?  Should I send hate-mail to the producers
(who apparently do receive hate-mail)?  I wouldn't do any of these
things, but what is it that would turn my impotent care about (say) Andy
Siepowitz's cancer into action?  Or should I enjoy the indulgence of
emotions without actual amelioration of the world as a catharsis?  And
wouldn't this be sort of selfish, which is to say, guilty?

I'm not suggesting that I know the answer.  I am, however, suggesting
that our response to the stage is ethical irregardless of whether
there's anything we can do about it, and that blandishments about how we
really do know the difference between real life and fiction just
obfuscates the problem:  what, philosophically, is our response to the
stage?  What ought it to be?

Tom Sellari refines his argument as follows:

>I'm not talking about common sense, but about common practice, for which
>I make no claim of universality. To assume a spectator should interfere
>with the action of a play is, in our culture, to misunderstand the
>genre.

Yes, but referring to the social basis of the genre doesn't really
justify the genre.  Why should we get this vicarious thrill out of other
people dying?  Why should our society approve of such a thing?

>Doesn't it sound fishy to you to offer an example from a film? I could
>in this way prove, for example, the existence of Jabba the Hut.

Actually, I wasn't showing the existence of anything, just the failed
claim to universality of our cultural practices.  The fact that a
different response could even be imagined makes our response to the
stage only a matter of social norms, no more intrinsically ethical than
many things which many cultures have approved.

>I agree that using the concept of play-acting doesn't explain much, but
>that's why I find this line of questioning about guilt to be
>unenlightening. The only reason I can offer for not stopping a stage
>Macbeth from his misdeeds is that we wouldn't have much of a play if I
>did. (Not to mention the possibility that a stage Macbeth might be
>carrying a real dagger.) So what can we learn from the question about
>the guilt of the audience? Only that we don't interrupt plays... which I
>suppose we already knew. Should we interrupt them? Not if we want to
>have this genre at all... isn't that the question you're really asking?

You can put it that way if you like.  In any case, I think it leads us
to the central issue:  How do we justify this genre?  And how do we
justify following its demands?  And if there is no good reason to follow
its demands, should we?

>I appreciate Cavell's work on Wittgenstein (whose On Certainty addresses
>the present issue), but as a critic of drama he tends to pursue
>questions that interest him regardless of whether they are relevant to
>the play or not. I submit that we do know what a fictional setting is,
>and can in most cases readily identify one when we see it. 'Knowing' is
>not the same thing as 'defining' or 'explaining'. I agree with the
>second point: 'drama' implies no interference from the audience. So,
>until we change the genre, we won't be interfering. But again, we
>already know this.

Sure we know it.  But do we have a good reason for it?  And is our
knowing it really automatic?  Moreover, is knowing the same thing as
accepting?  I don't think so.  The more I think about the fact that we
accept the idea of drama as a genre, the more surprising it seems.

Finally, David Frankel writes:

>It seems to me that different levels or modes or worlds (I'm still
>searching for the right words) are being confused here.

Of course.  But that's not an uncommon experience.  The possibility of
confusing different levels of reality shows that their distinction isn't
simply given, by God as it were.  Karen offered the example of the rude
mechanicals.  And the religious controversies show a vast number of
understandings of liturgical drama, from transubstantiation all the way
through to Zwinglian memorialism.

Now why are there different levels of reality?  And how can we
invariably tell them apart?  And why should we?

One way to make a distinction would be phenomenologically:  there's a
difference between gazing at something, and therefore making it my
object, and being gazed at by something, like another person.  Both can
be experienced when watching plays, depending on the production method
and script.  But both are actions with a certain ethical weight.

Cheers,
Seán.

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Edward Pixley <pixleyee@snyoneva.cc.oneonta.edu>
Date:           Saturday, 08 Jan 2000 19:28:43 -0500
Subject: 11.0021 Re: 3rd Murderer in Macbeth
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0021 Re: 3rd Murderer in Macbeth

> Eric Beato and John Ramsay point out, quite sensibly, that Macbeth
> remains free.  I'm not contesting this.  If the idea of a freedom frozen
> into fate seems paradoxical, that's because it actually is paradoxical.
> Macbeth chooses to kill Duncan, yes, but he makes the same choice on
> every night of every production.  Because he's a literary character, in
> a play that has a script, he's fated like Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and
> Guildenstern to repeat the same actions.  Though he still has choice
> within the fictive world, he doesn't get to choose the fictive world
> he's placed in, which represents a sort of fate, not merely in the sense
> that character is fate, but in the sense that the future is already
> known.  Macbeth's famous awareness might be seen as an awareness of this
> fatality, even though he remains free.  This is what makes his
> soliloquies so fascinating.
>
> It's as if he exists in the past, and what he will do has already
> happened, so that from a certain perspective it can't be changed, though
> from another perspective, he's operating in the eternal now and can
> always choose otherwise.

This is why I've always been fascinated by the notion that the play
actually takes place in hell, as the Porter seems to perceive in his
drunken state, and that Macbeth is doomed to keep repeating the entire
process of his earthly crime and punishment throughout eternity.

Ed Pixley


about SHAKSPER | current postings | submitted papers | browse SHAKSPER | search SHAKSPER
  
Copyright © 2002, Hardy M. Cook, design by Eric Luhrs. All rights reserved.