or 21st century Shakespeare…”
I hate to begin with this, but Cymbeline confirmed to me that I am not a person who enjoys theatre. I can’t only blame only my attention span, for I find rewarding gazing into paintings that a typical American teenager would glaze over, or reading dense literary works that would cause any other person of my age to hurl said work at a wall. Yet, whenever I’m in a piece of theatre, whether it is shows as diverse as Spiderman the Musical, RENT, The Book of Mormon, and yes, unfortunately, Cymbeline, I find myself unable to concentrate on the plot, more interested in the inner works of my imagination rather than the ones being projected towards me.
And, what a shame that is, for Cymbeline was clearly an excellent show. I loved the movement between the six cast members as they changed characters without even once breaking character, unless intentional, I loved how they changed lines and outfits to fit the sounds of the 21st century (Imogen says “I hate you” to Iachimo, and Iachimo looks like he’s wearing a sweater designed for Grease), I loved that Noah Brody and Paul L. Coffey looked like twins (inbreeding on the set, much?) and, dare I say it, I loved the acting, which was good enough to suspend my inner turmoils for a moment and watch with complete belief a grown Posthumus cry on stage.
If history is when memory is annihilated for the sake of creating the collective identity of a peoples, myth is when memory is distorted, bended, and altered to allow a memory to speak for the collective present of a different time period. In that regard, Cymbeline is clearly a myth. It may feed us the lines of Shakespeare’s originals, but re-imagines them, not only creates the laugh for the audience but laughs along. The actors show none of the rigor I associate with the theatre, and I think that is good. Like all myth, Cymbeline re-adapts a memory and puts it in front of the audience in a way that can’t be ignored. For that, I will at the very least give it my utmost respect.
December 11th, 2011: “A reaction to Ulysses, the greatest book of the 20th Century…”
This is my fourth time reading Ulysses. The first time I don’t remember, other than I put it down. The second time was in Spanish; horrible life decision. The third time was when I was in Dublin, in which I thought it was well done, but not for me. So, the moral of the story is that, every time I come back to Ulysses, I find myself admiring it more and more, but never in love with the world presented, and this remains my reaction, now to an incredibly strong climax. I had to read Ulysses at this point of my life. I’m in a stage where I’m changing directions in a direction already chosen for me, and it’s been causing me to obsess a little bit with Joyce. What can I say? He finished Dubliners at 22 (it just took him forever to get it published), which makes me feel inferior in every imaginable way, and he wrote work that offered infinite new pathways for language. Joyce, whether he knew it or not, wanted Ulysses to be the last novel ever written, and it shows.
In that regard, I would say that Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written. It uses every technique, from stream-of-consciousness, journal clips, various third persons, even various characters, to construct a day in Dublin in 1904. It’s very easy to see how Ulysses led the world to postmodernism. It was probably the first novel that exhausted every possible way a story could be told, which then led to hundreds of novels that used Ulysses multitude of techniques, but without the search for a truth, a light at the end of the tunnel. It was also a novel that fused myth with the novel, compressing the entire history of the West into both the history of Leopold Bloom, a trend that later became perfected in postmodern literature (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight’s Children, etc). What is most impressive is how Ulysses represents the ultimate mergence of the self with history. One has the sense that Joyce has taken every moment in his life, fused that with a moment with history, and as a result, made himself part of the very tapestry of Western existence, so that one can’t even read the phrase E. Pluribus Unum without it referencing something else. It is the fact that Joyce has made himself the ultimate memento, the focal point to which all the memories of Western history collide, makes me incredibly envious. I would agree with everyone who has claimed that Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written.
That being said, I don’t think it’s the best novel ever written. First, I honestly don’t believe in original or authentic art, nor in tiers, because then you get into “what’s bad for one person is true for another” argument. The only way, in my opinion, that one can really evaluate art, is as either important, art that has shifted thought in such a strong direction that one can never forget it, as great, art that moves, impassions, and inspires both the world and the individual, in such ways that one feels that one’s very thoughts, emotions, and, dare I say it, soul, has been ripped right in front of you and shown pulsing through the very work you are reading, and then everything else. Works that are that intricate that any person can see themselves in it, and works that change the very way we think, those are both rare, important, and unforgettable (coincidentally, things that are none of the above are commonplace, average, and pretty forgettable, even if they can also be very good). So, while I would say Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written, I wouldn’t put it above and over, say, War and Peace, Moby Dick, The Tale of Genji, or Shakuntala. They all did something that had to be done, weaved a story that had to exist, and for that, we should, to all of them, be eternally grateful.
Nonetheless, I am incredibly jealous of Ulysses. Joyce broke through the cacophony of traumas and memories that made him who he was to create music. He exhausted the entire history of both literature and the West. That being said, I don’t think that Ulysses did everything. Ulysses may have exhausted every trick in the book, but he did so in a way that created a world that ultimately saw the end of language as we had known it (yes, in some ways, I blame the beauty of modernism for the melancholy of postmodernism). Plus, Joyce clearly wanted to give voice to a nation, rather than distort what it means to be of a nation. He may have created a multitude of events, but a central event anchors them down, and at the bottom of that trove is the land of Ireland. Ulysses is an incredibly Irish work. In other words, Ulysses may have done a lot, but it didn’t place the globe in the context of a novel.
Thank you, Ulysses, for coming to me at a time when I had to learn that art has to be personal, that it’s not just enough to tell a story that needs to be told, but to merge oneself with the world in such a way that your very soul becomes the very history that the world looks back upon to know it existed.
December 13th, 2011: “as new worlds replace old…”
When I was in Spain, Segovia, I saw errant knights fighting each other in the hills while archers hidden in the castle flung arrows their way. Couple with the speech my professor/tour guide Eugenio was giving us, I suddenly felt a desire to compress the history of the world into a novel. I knew that this novel had to exist even before I knew what it was about. I had dreams of clouds ascending, people changing, all the way back in high school, highly abstract thoughts that I later pinned down to the ebbs of the world. On that day, my vision was born, and with it, The Hearkening, the book I am always orbiting, writing towards, but have yet to have pinned down and constructed. I am not ready for the sheer breadth and depth the world needs. It is coming to me slowly, day by day. Maybe once I am ready to write it, I will talk about it less abstractly. Until then, it is best that the work remains plunged into my subconscious, until the pressures of my psyche have compressed it into the pearl fit for the world to see.
In Spain, I also realized how much technology had compressed our world. I saw girls playing endlessly on their smart phones while walking, dressed no differently than the New Yorkers I was used to. As I traveled, I got into conversations about Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a random old Romanian man, or used the power of Futurama or Dr. Zoidberg to bridge the gap between myself and 2 Armenians who barely spoke English. The world is compressing. I always give the example of a future fifth grade classroom, one where people from all over the world (Mali, China, India, New Zealand, if we’d even go by national identities in such a world) are doing the same math homework, speaking some
