Thursday, August 18, 2011

Cultural Construction: Much Ado About Fundamental Matters

Two days ago I posted on family values (from Merry Olde England to Fire Island), with an informal and semi-organized discussion about how Shakespeare began “reconstructing” the family. That, of course, is not what he thought he was doing. We don’t really know what he thought about much of anything, we just have his plays and poems. But one of his thoughts, no doubt, was “I gotta get paid.” So it’s only in long retrospect that we can see him reconstruct family values.

But what does that mean, reconstruct family values? Just what is being constructed, and how?

The literary Darwinists would have us believe that Shakespeare’s texts are just fancy costumes over ape behavior, behavior which is quite plastic and complex. And they ARE that. But their thinking is dominated by E.O. Wilson’s poverty-stricken view that culture is held in check by a “genetic leash,” a metaphor I find to be useless. If you really want to use THAT metaphor, then surely it’s the other way around, that culture holds the genes on a leash.

But I prefer a different metaphor, that of building blocks, or of a game, such as chess. Biology provides the basic pieces and the basic rules, but culture plays the game, or builds the structure. Given that the pieces and the basic rules are what they are, culture can’t build just any structure, or make just any sequence of moves. But culture does have quite a bit of freeplay.

Shakespeare Moves Biology's Game Pieces

And that’s what we see in Shakespeare, he’s making new moves. The fact that, for the most part, he’s retelling old tales let’s us see the newness in his moves. Without knowing what the basic pieces are, however, it’s hard for us to read the moves.

We know more about those basic pieces than we did, say, 40 or 50 years ago. We know, for example, that the system for infant-mother attachment is different from the system for sexual bonding between adults; and we know something of the neurophysiology. We also know that we regulate relationships and interactions according to distinctly different principles, egalitarianism and hierarchy; these, presumably, are neurally separate as well.

This may seem, well, commonsensical. The trouble with common sense is that it doesn’t explain anything. It’s just how we think and talk. What’s new is carefully gathered evidence, and the neural clues. It’s not just that we have different words for different behaviors, but that we now know there REALLY ARE different underlying systems.

Just what they are . . . well, I’m not going to try teasing that out here. What’s important is simply that there are these underlying neural systems and that they are different. How does culture train them? And, in particular, how does culture construct systematic patterns of behavior over them?

The deep question, of course, is what’s going on in the brain? Psychoanalytic theory, for example, talks of mother figures and father figures, good and bad, and how we interact with others by means of such psychological constructs. Whatever it is that they’re talking about in that fashion, I’m talking about it too.

What we see, for example, in Shakespeare, are the traces of those systems. And when Shakespeare reworks a source in a substantial way, as he reworked Green’s Pandosto into The Winter’s Tale, he’s thereby reworking those underlying systems (see this paper for some remarks on these two works). That is to say, he’s making a new sequence of moves with the basic biological game pieces.

What’s the difference between reading about Pandosto lust after his daughter, though he doesn’t at the time realize that the young woman is his daughter, and seeing Leontes look at Perdita, not knowing she’s his daughter, without lust; not only that, he helps her in her desire to marry Florizel? Yes, every reader is going to respond differently, and any given reader, for that matter, will respond differently at different times, but few (adult) readers are going to gloss over the difference between lust and its absence. So, what difference does THAT DIFFERENCE make to reader responses? What hoops did Shakespeare put his audience through that Greene did not put his through, and vice versa? That’s what we need to understand. Before we understand it, however, we must describe: what happens, when?

Much Ado

Consider Much Ado About Nothing, the Claudio / Hero plot. He sees her, falls in love, and gets his military commander to broker a marriage though her father. The deal is done, the date set. Everyone’s anticipating a joyous ceremony on a happy day.

But then Don John stages a deception and fools Claudio into thinking that Hero, whom he has talked to all of once or twice, to whom he is betrothed but about whom he knows almost nothing (except her lineage), Don John fools him into thinking she’s been having sex with another man. Claudio is, naturally enough, angry. He decides to denounce her on their wedding day.

So, we’re at the beginning of Act IV (a division, I note, put there by editors, not by Shakespeare himself). All the main characters are gathered on stage, save Claudio. They’re all expecting a wedding, all but Don John, who knows better. And we the audience, what are we expecting?

We know Claudio’s going to kick up a fuss. We also know that he’s dead wrong. I know that, when I first read this scene, I was thinking don’t do it, @sshole, don’t do it, you’re wrong wrong wrong. Of course, he did it, people were surprised, and angry, and poor Hero fainted dead away SO CONFUSED was she. Somehow it all worked out in the end, as we knew it would. Because that’s what comedies do, work out to a happy ending.

Getting back to the denunciation scene, what’s going on deep in your mind, your brain? You know those two ought to get married, they’re destined to do so (by the conventions of drama, if not by the stars). You also know, from things they’ve said before this point, that both are skittish about sexuality. That’s certainly a BIG issue in the play; Beatrice and Benedick, the other couple, jest about it constantly. So, true love, sexual anxiety, deception, denunciation, all that comes together in this scene. How does that play out in the mind?

How do we shape our lifeways around such scenes? How do they interpret and re-interpret our feelings and desires? That’s what we need to know. And, yes, to know that we need to understand the basic psycho-biological building blocks, the basic game pieces, of our behavioral systems. But we also need to understand how plays work, and understand that in a way we’ve not yet attempted.

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