History as Witchcraft
A mini-collection of brief reviews.
This space has been silent for some weeks as my work has squeezed out both my spare time and spare neurons to devote to an unread and unreadable blog. In an effort to get back on the proverbial horse, I am here writing the lowest possible effort format of post: the collection of reviews of things I happened to see recently (in the last couple of weeks).
Two Notes on Adapting Shakespeare
Macbeth, like many of Shakespeare’s plays, takes place mostly in the imagination. This is of course true in the staging: played with limited cast on bare sets, castles and forests and roving armies are depicted only as a line or two of pentameter. It is true also within the mind of the protagonist: Hamlet battles more with his own reservations than with his uncle, Macbeth’s terror and desire wrestle until his death over the meaning of the witches’ prophesy.
Film adaptions of Shakespeare have their own wrestling to do: realize the phantasms, give what is described and alluded to natural, visual form; or leave it unseen or, if it must be seen, stylized. Macbeth has seen strong adaptions on both sides of the spectrum, from the sound-stage/green-screen Gothic of the Welles or Coen version to the grand and eerie vistas of Throne of Blood. Along this gradient, Polanski finds an odd middle ground. His Macbeth is set “on location” (which reportedly caused no end of production troubles) in the Scottish highlands, the castles are real, their interiors well-apportioned with at least some nods given to “historical accuracy.”
Yet nothing surrounds the castles but wastes. No farmlands, no industry, nothing exists to generate the wealth the castles consume. And the castles all have a homogenous quality: Macbeth’s is no worse and no better than that of the king he kills. Macbeth’s ambition therefore has both a brutal and a brute quality: nothing explains or nurtures it; it remains as definite and anomalous as these strange masses of stone.
This halfway-house between naturalism and theater-of-the-mind extends to the treatment of Macbeth’s madness. All of the speeches are there—tamed as voice-overs rather than spoken soliloquys—but they are given tangible form as well: we are shown the dagger, Banquo’s ghost, the vision of the line of kings. Already in the text, Macbeth’s malevolence spills out of his skull and onto the landscape as earthquake and storm and ill harvest. Here, the sense of being dragged into the middle of Macbeth’s nightmarish interior is heightened. There is only power, to be obtained by cruelty and put to yet crueler ends.
Eddie Izzard’s solo performance of Hamlet goes about as far as one can in making the play a product of imagination. In the Globe, you may not have had sets or much by way of props or costuming, but at least you had actors, standing in definite physical relations to one another, each the very image of their characters. One at least knows which characters are present in a scene. In a one-person show, even this much is uncertain, subject to constant reimagination.
Izzard’s performance leaves the text by and large where it was. What was already comic, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the gravedigger, is played up in Izzard’s stuttering absurdism. One of the distinctive traits of Izzard’s delivery is its improvised quality: the sense that she is surprising even herself with what she’s saying, even when the material is clearly rehearsed. This quality lends a pleasingly madcap aspect to the comic delivery, but it also remains in a muted form in the serious part of the text.
With just one actor, Hamlet becomes even more a psycho-drama. With Hamlet almost always in scene, occupying such a central role, peripheral characters might as well be imaginary. Indeed, Izzard represents Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as hand puppets appearing at Hamlet’s shoulders. One fact a solo performance makes evident is how much the reaction of listening characters define the meaning of a performance. The better part of Hamlet’s cruelty consists in Ophelia’s pleas. The bite of his madness is nothing other than Polonius’ befuddlement. Without the social context of other characters, the actions of Hamlet are even more ambiguous and absurd.
The political backdrop of Hamlet is even less distinct than that of Macbeth. Sure, there are ambassadors and foreign princes, the names of kings and countries let slip. The attentive listener can even track these names and why they matter. Still, if an adaption needs to abridge anything, it’s the politics that’s the first to go.
If politics’ role is so marginal, why is it even here? I suspect that the marginal position of politics in these stories is an artefact of a modern conception of politics. If politics is economic policy, legislation, foreign relations, well there is not much of that in these stories, just a thin fabric of warfare and diplomacy. However, from a monarchist’s point of view, these stories are deeply political: both are narratives of the moral degradation of noble lines.
Both Macbeth and Hamlet are genetic terminal points. Hamlet’s rebuke of Ophelia is more a rejection of fatherhood, of furthering a cursed stock, than of romance. The ending of the play is the suicide of one line to make way for another, more vital. Macbeth’s line is abortive, cursed from the start. Moral depravation is both a cause and a symptom of genetic fall. And the happiness of a realm is little more than the personal virtue of its rulers.
Given then the tight connections between virtue, genetics, and politics in the author’s worldview, psycho-drama, family drama, and political drama are then three aspects of the same phenomenon. This is an aspect of these stories that is hard to appreciate and so to translate to a modern audience, given how pre-modern an understanding of history undergirds them. Funnily enough, I think this is an aspect of Shakespeare’s stories best captured not by any modern Shakespeare adaption but by the films of Andrzej Żuławski.
The Glory of the Empire
The Glory of the Empire (1971) is a fictional history of “The Empire.” Where and when this empire existed is very deliberately impossible to determine, but it is somewhere and somewhen on Earth: the book is constantly inventing quotes from real historical figures, historians, politicians, writers about the Empire and its ruler. The primary appeal of the novel is that it contains all of the literary charm of a well-written history without any of the pedantic, anxious concern for accuracy. Or rather the novel manufactures the appearance of pedantry and great erudition, without the need for the reader to have any keenness or learning on their own. (Though, clearly, a great deal of actual erudition was required to produce such a convincing appearance.)
To indulge in a boring aside. I have not, of late, been reading novels. (See the opening to this post.) When I have attempted to return to the hobby, I have felt myself rebuffed by a revulsion towards the endless parade of scenes. The clearest statement of this revulsion I have found comes in Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto.
If the purely informative style, of which the sentence just quoted is a prime example, is virtually the rule rather than the exception in the novel form, it is because, in all fairness, the author’s ambition is severely circumscribed. The circumstantial, needlessly specific nature of each of their notations leads me to believe that they are perpetrating a joke at my expense. I am spared not even one of the character’s slightest vacillations: will he be fairhaired? what will his name be? will we first meet him during the summer? So many questions resolved once and for all, as chance directs; the only discretionary power left me is to close the book, which I am careful to do somewhere in the vicinity of the first page. And the descriptions! There is nothing to which their vacuity can be compared; they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue, which the author utilizes more and more whenever he chooses; he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to make me agree with him about the cliches.
Now, The Glory of the Empire is not a surrealist novel, it is not free of scenes. But because it pastiches genres of writing outside of the novel, it makes much sparer and so much better use of its scenes. Dialogue is included at any length only when the characters have something interesting to discuss. Action is described only where it crosses some threshold into drama. Everything else is freely summarized, discussed, opined upon, theorized about. A creative writing instructor, armed with such dicta as “show don’t tell,” would bleed their red pen dry over the novel. Yet of course such telling is one of the book’s major charms.
Let us cut the rant off there. Needless to say the book is terribly enjoyable. (Go and read it!) I do want to briefly remark on the view of history that gets developed in the novel. It is fair to call the approach of the novel a fairly traditional great man history. Most of the novel recounts the lives of rulers and major figures, how they came to gain power and how they wielded it.
Yet at the same time the novel has a double or triple melancholy about these figures. There is a subtle and melancholy impotence built into the construction of the novel. Though the distant past of the world of the novel diverges greatly from the Earth’s actual past, its more recent history seems to converge. Lenin and Walt Whitman and Sicily and Russia, these nearer figures and places exist much as we already know them. There is something inevitable to the arc of history, then, and so something fatalistic and pointless to the characters’ attempts to leave their mark on history.
Then there is a more ingrained sense of melancholy that comes from the (fictional) epistemic limitations of the form. Read any halfway credible history of the last couple of centuries and you will find constant attention to gaps in evidence, biases and faults in sources, the range of conflicting interpretations of data, the fact that “the past is a foreign country,” and its inhabitants are therefore strange and not fully interpretable to us. The “great men” of the novel act for the sake of a posterity that will never properly remember them and will not understand what it does remember.
Häxan
The Glory of the Empire does not fully commit to the strangeness of its history. Indeed, it is one of those delightful half-paradoxes of its construction. What escapes comprehension or imagination in its world or characters does not exist precisely because the world and the characters do not exist except “fictionally speaking” as what is comprehended or imagined. More prosaically, its characters in general are either recognizably modern in their amoral citizens or, where they are driven by a code, are “ahead of their time” / proto-modern in their morality.
Häxan (1922), by contrast, interrogates a truly alien set of prehistorical beliefs. Since the loose concept of this piece is “Damon recommends random pieces of media,” let me interject a recommendation for Häxan. I know it’s easy to imagine that early silent films are going to be bores: at best, historical curios for the devotees. But Häxan is not boring! Especially as it gets going and transitions from a lightly edifying, somewhat comic account of medieval witch beliefs to an unflinching depiction of the horrors of the Inquisition.
The film’s story of the witch hunt goes roughly as follows. The Middle Ages sucked: the average person dies in childbirth and the exception scrabbles together a marginal subsistence farming in some backwater village. The only culture and learning you’ll have any kind of access to is the Catholic church.
And what does the Catholic church tell you? First, it tells you that your suspicions are right: this world is shit. But, wait, it gets worse: while, there is one way to make your time on this planet go better, magic, that way is literally demonic and you’ll go to Hell if you use it. Oh, and also if we catch you using it, or, you know, just get a tad suspicious that you might be using it, we’ll kill you. Best we can offer is: give us all your money and do everything we tell you and, pinky promise, things’ll be peachy after you kick it. (And, by the way, no skipping to the good bit or else, you guessed it, straight to Hell.)
Couple the strains of living in such depravation with the church’s propaganda campaigns with the general mysteriousness of the world pre-modern science, and you have a large chunk of the population believing in magic and demon’s and witchcraft. In such an environment, a group motivated to find and eradicated witches (because, e.g., they get to keep the witch’s property, or just for the sick and/or righteous pleasures of torturing and murdering “witches”) will have a pretty easy time finding witches. Find an old, crazed woman and she might just tell you she’s a witch, or her neighbors might tell you that, certainly she’ll tell you she is if you tie her to a rack. Tighten it a few notches and she’ll tell you who the other witches are too.
The most ambitious claim of Häxan is that, while, yes, humanity has cooled it mostly on the witch-burning thing over the last couple centuries, and mostly does not even believe in witches, what we haven’t done is start treating the mentally ill with respect. The modern inquisition might label the madwoman as an hysteric rather than a witch. And the treatment will be kinder—the padded cell rather than the stake—but not exactly kind.
Which is to say that while Häxan treats the past as genuinely strange, indeed as absurdly so, what is most familiar about the past is the desires, the limitations, the sufferings of the people in it.
To Attempt a Conclusion
A man can go his whole life understanding nothing and be perfectly happy. Macbeth would live a longer and a better life had he never heard the witch’s prophesy. Hamlet, perhaps, might have let time do the trick and inherited his father’s throne in due course of time, had it not been for the ghost’s commands. Häxan’s Inquisitors are despicable not for their ignorance but for their certainties. All striving has a mad and arbitrary quality.