Craft Notes
Vonnegut Gives a Free Creative Writing Lesson From the Grave
I suggest all you Harper’s/New Yorker haters get on Lewis Lapham’s Quaterly boat. Personally, I can’t believe I’ve been out to sea so long since parting ways with The Believer, although I do still find myself running fuzzy fingers sidelong across her stilted bow anytime I see one in port.
Anyway, so umm… O yeah click of his graph for Vonnegut’s writing lesson, in which he compares the plight & plot of protagonists in popular books, film & teevee, to that of Cinderella, Gregor Samsa & the kingshit himself, Hamlet.
This from the Spring 2010 issue of Lapham’s, “Arts & Letters” which is up for their first National Magazine Award.
Also if you are still interested here is an awesome essay called “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare” by James Baldwin, whose “Sonny’s Blues” I read in the same issue of Lapham’s and there is so much more brainfood in there. And they have a great website and a podcast. It’s all good, guys, really, I’m telling you, please take the time to read more than a blog post that really contains more or less mostly the watered down ideas Lapham’s delivers straight from the source; these guys are really motherfucking goddamn smart.
Tags: cinderella, franz kafka, hamlet, james baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, lapham's quarterly, Lewis Lapham, plot and stuff, the media of capitalism wants your brain!, william shakespeare
I generally think Vonnegut’s advice is fucking golden, but this is a pretty ridiculous assessment of Hamlet. You see this kind of shit all the time in bad philosophy, especially in bad epistemology: a few examples from an internalist perspective, then an example from an externalist perspective and a lot of shouting eureka.
I generally think Vonnegut’s advice is fucking golden, but this is a pretty ridiculous assessment of Hamlet. You see this kind of shit all the time in bad philosophy, especially in bad epistemology: a few examples from an internalist perspective, then an example from an externalist perspective and a lot of shouting eureka.
do you read bad philosophy and especially bad epistemology often?
“I have just demonstrated to you that Shakespeare was as poor a storyteller as any Arapaho”: fuck you.
I think it isn’t such a lousy assessment, michael – Vonnegut is saying that, at the endropey of Hamlet, he, Kurt, can’t tell the good news from the bad noose. That’s a pretty common experience of that mess, isn’t it? (cf. Eliot) — and, for me, evidence of Shakespeare’s tremendous artistic success (not “failure”; cf. Eliot). One of the remarks on the thread rang especially true to me: Vonnegut was particularly smoove at making the obvious clear – no mean trick, in my slow-learner’s book. (I would have drawn several lines – all except perhaps Fortinbras’s – plummeting at the right on the Hamlet graph.)
Have you had a look at Baldwin’s Shakespeare apprehension/appreciation? Except for the ‘soul of man’ crap at its very end, it’s very good — “worse than impossible: useless” is exactly the frustration of being a groundling before Shakespeare’s – and foxgoebbels’s – stage of Big Shots Moving and Shaking.
He or she does when he or she reads my comments.
Not anymore. But as an undergrad I got interested in (read: obsessed with) a fledgling area of phenomenology that centered upon redefining the notion of an ‘event’ in phenomenological terms (though Nietzsche said lots of smart things on the subject before the field was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye). It (the field) kind of sprung up in the aftermath of 9/11.
There are only a handful of books on it, and because it’s more or less uncharted territory, I saw problems get glossed over with this kind of sophistry all the time, the kind of sloppy argumentation that would never fly anywhere but the fringe.
is this what badiou is talking about if so you are the first person i have met who has read badiou and thinks he’s ‘not worth it’
is this what badiou is talking about if so you are the first person i have met who has read badiou and thinks he’s ‘not worth it’
you completely missed the point
Well, he does warn that he’s not trying “to intimidate you”. He took the time to learn enough to dismiss – who denies it? – “stupid”, “backward” primitivos — what rational person would refuse these bona fides??
[shhh!]
Lapham’s Quaterly is seriously one of the best fucking things out there. I can’t recommend it enough.
I’m not terribly familiar w/ Badiou, I’ve only read excerpts, but I think his definition of the event is metaphysical in nature (event-as-interruption-of-truth) and therefore decidedly un-phenomenological. His work was definitely appropriated by some of the dudes I was reading, though.
fair enough but vonnegut is not a philosopher, writers strip things to their most basic means and then use those means to prove a point all the time, some people call this metaphor: in literature it does fly, so is literature then the fringe you speak of
yes baldwin seemed to hunker down a bit but it’s hard to kick a heart in the balls
Aw damn, I just lost my reply as I was typing it. Long story short: I see your point, and I see Vonnegut’s point. My beef is just that the way Vonnegut goes about “demonstrating” his point relies more on changing the rules (from commenting on the relative happiness of the characters to commenting, from a cold, objective, retrospective standpoint, on whether the events of the story were ‘good’ or ‘bad’) than anything else.
By Vonnegut’s initial methodology, Hamlet is quite chartable: he’s bummed out, to varying degrees, 24/7. It’s only after he changes the rules that the narrative enigmas emerge. If you go back and apply the same rule switch, the events of Cinderella become similarly unchartable: even the death of her mother can be read as an element in a causal chain of events that produces infinite happiness, so maybe her mother’s death was a good thing! Of course a retrospective analysis of a fairy tale is fucking inane. But you see my point, I think. Without the rule change, there’s no eureka, and KV has basically said “[Literary tragedy] is better than [formulaic happy-ender] because it’s more complex.” To which I say, like, duh.
Well, the point of view of the protagonist of either a fairy tale or a tragedy is the point of view of the outside-the-story (but never ‘objective’) audience, no? – that, what, ‘fallacy of non-alienation’ is the engine of the narrative whenever there’s a ‘protagonist’. Vonnegut doesn’t really “switch” from the protagonist to the (external) reader – their experiences of “fortune” are closely parallel (through the alchemy of storytelling).
Cinderella doesn’t look back at the death and usurpation of her mother as “good” because she only wins (when her foot fits the shoe) what was hers from the beginning – she (with her sympathetic audience) has suffered the mistreatment that that restoration of “fortune” stops but doesn’t obliterate. Indeed, without the fairy godmother, the wheel of “fortune” stays stopped at its lowest – and ineradicably real – point. – surely not an “inane” retrospective!
I think you’re right about Hamlet’s line – it starts low and swings manically below the break-even level, as though the present tense (at any point on the left-right time line) were a mirror, so when he’s actually succeeding, it looks to him like a depression, and he turns downward thinking it’s ‘up’.
Hamlet’s in a desperate box, isn’t he? – I mean, why can’t everybody in the community see plainly that the new king and his queen conspired to whack her first husband (who was his brother)?? It’s Shakespeare’s art that spools that enigma – and the several others – through Hamlet’s untenable position.
I’d say that the “good news” of Hamlet is that reality is right . . . there, in but only through the dramatic poetry. But Vonnegut feeling like he can’t tell ‘heaven’ from ‘hell’ after the final body count – that feels right, too.
– and that’s not true of tragedy in general. At the end of Macbeth – an unusually uncluttered, direct arc, to be sure – we (Scotland) have been in ‘hell’, where “nature” itself has been made to be wrong, and we’ve been and know ourselves to have been purged. Hamlet‘s a weird discomfort-machine, I think Vonnegut is saying, and differently from how tragedy is more difficult than the darkest fairy tale is.
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