JOLLY DAYS

Soul Mates

I've been reading Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets so it was especially interesting to me to read this review by Walter Kirn in the NYT of Ron Ronsenbaum's paean to Shakespeare, The Shakespeare Wars.

Kirn says, “… the literary journalist Ron Rosenbaum sets out to do what my teacher tried and failed to do: explain and transmit a sense of ravishment, “unbearably pleasurable,” brought forth by the “bottomlessness” of Shakespeare’s writings.”

There is an element of courage in Rosenbaum's efforts, in these days of adolescent ironic cluelessness masquerading as adult sophisticated ironic detachment, simple enthusiasm for a great work of art seems revolutionary. As Kirn notes, if you are going to lose it for great works of art, Shakespeare isn't a bad choice.

Vendler's book expresses another breed of love for the great poet's work. She memorized the Sonnets as a child — they are woven into her mind. One version of this book includes a CD of her reading many of the Sonnets. There is a dreamy, non- emphatic way she reads, as though in a trance. It is touching to hear this great critic read with such melting affection. (She criticizes actors who have read the Sonnets on CD for their lack of understanding of the text in their habits of emphasis.) The book itself is different in tone than the wonderful, conversational pieces she has been doing for years for the New York Review of Books. The book has a bit of the Latinized stench of structuralism, a pseudo-scientific analytical feel that isn't true to Vendler's depth and fiber as a commentator.

An Amazon.com reviewer was harsh:

I quote a single passage more-or-less at random as an example (this is from her discussion of Sonnet 129): “The impersonal mode allows for the habitual incompatibility and the perpetual sequentiality of both models. The couplet ironizes both models, ultimately, putting both mutual incongruity and repetitive sequentiality in a larger cyclical totalization in which one is only the obverse of the other, both existing in a mutual temporal dependency, represented formally by the chiastic well knows and knows well.” (p. 553) I realize this is out of context but trust me the context would not help relieve the ugliness of this “lit-crit” baloney. This is the style of her writing: “ironizes,” “sequentiality,” “totalization,” and her favorite word used in one form or another on almost every page “chiastic.” Vendler ostentatiously is given to using technical terms from philosophy and linguistics such as “speech act” or “deixis” and I question whether she is concerned to use them correctly or even understands their technical meaning. And on and on and on.

But Vendler is better than that — the Amazon reader's frustration is too global, excessive. Vendler's introduction is wonderful, her insights clearly wrought — there is much to learn from Vendler's balanced, complex reactions to the Sonnets:

She speaks of Shakespeare's mind “…working out positions without the help of any pantheon or any systematic doctrine.” That is, without religious or classical truisms to bolster his work.

Like Rosenbaum she is filled with wonder at Shakespeare's “…capacity to confer greater and greater mental scope on any whim of the imagination, enacting that widening gradually, so that the experience of reading a poem becomes the experience of pushing back the horizons of thought.”