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I'm interested into getting into some deep NPR level culture war.
No geopolitics, no woke-vs-not debates, no (not) Trusting The Science.
I want to talk about books.
Let me NPR whisperspeak overanunciate that: mmmmbbbboooOOOOkksszzzz
Is postmodern literature
To throw up some examples of what I mean;
I've never read Vonnegut, Heller, or DeLillo at all, but I know they are "canonical" in the postmodern genre.
I made it 100 pages through Gravity's Rainbow and was earnest convincing myself I was "getting it" before literally slamming the books shut and verbalizing "This is fucking unreadable."
Back in college, I did the thing and carried around the Big Blue copy of Infinite Jest so people could see I was reading it and I stuck pens in various places to show I was capital-R Reading it. I think I made it a little further than 100 pages, but I can't be sure because I can't remember a damn thing about it.
In my opinion, I think postmodernism pretends to be this ultra-layered "commentary" on a bunch of intersecting meta-themes. Something like socio-political philosophy but explained through dense plots and idiosyncratic characters.
But ... it isn't? Nothing actually holds together. The plot becomes a non-plot or endless branches of a single plot. The characters become weird disposable mouthpieces for the author talking to himself. The commentary, such as it is, gets so jumbled that you lose the point.
And so postemodernism reveals what it actually is; a heavily stylistic exercise, much like jazz, where unnecessary complexity is treated as "skill." Additionally, it's a pure signalling mechanism. People get to do that think when you bring up Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow; "Dude, there's like SO MUCH in that book, right? Crazy, yeah, no, I loved it" Which isn't saying anything at all, but inviting you to be the one who makes a fool of himself by venturing something like, "I'm not sure I got it though" to which the other person gets to puff themselves up and retort with, "Hahaha, yeah, it's not for everyone! Definitely pretty dense, haha." With the snide implication being "But me and my big ole brain totally got it".
This is why I ask, first, "is it real?" The serpentine prose in postmodern literature seems to me to be a kind of forer statement; a reader can (literally) read anything into what's being written and arguments trying to pin down essential meaning are pointless because the point is there is no essential meaning.
I like books about ideas and can deal with density. But I think a novelist has the duty to respect his readers and put together a cohesive narrative. Blood Meridian is an Epic in the classic Homeric sense. You can re-read it 10 times and pick up new strands of thinking on the biggest of The Big Questions; life, death, judgement, heaven, hell.
And it's also a sick western. So you can read it at the level of "fuck yeah, they killed those comanches" and get a lot out of it. You do not need to (although you may want to) keep a notebook next to you while reading. You can just read and get a lot out of it.
So, uh, why are you reading? Like what are you reading for?
You should read what you like if it's for enjoyment. Whether that's Tom Clancy(RIP) or Jane Austen(also RIP), or in your case Cormac McCarthy(RIP again). If you're trying to become well read, then read Shakespeare. If you just want to blend in with a certain crowd, well, that's going to entail plenty of other things you wouldn't necessarily choose to do, I'm not sure why the modern equivalent of Dickens is a bridge too far.
I have never understood the appeal of Shakespeare at all and I’ve tried to grasp it. Although the one book I suspect that has a chance at making me like him I haven’t got around to yet.
I enjoy Shakespeare because the language is beautiful (as @HereAndGone2 said), but also because I find the way in which he highlights the universality of the human condition to be deeply moving. I remember when I was young and I finally understood the meaning of Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy (rather than just bouncing off the language). It was a formative moment for me, realizing that his topic (wishing to die, but being too afraid of what comes after to death to commit suicide) was something that was still relevant to modern people. It made me realize that humans through all the years have felt the same kinds of feelings we do, and struggled with the same kinds of things we do.
Also seconding that Shakespeare meant his work to be performed, not read. I still enjoy reading his plays, but seeing them performed brings a lot to the experience.
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For me, anyway, it's the beauty of the language. I first tackled a Shakespeare play, "Hamlet", when I was about fourteen-fifteen expecting it to be a hard slog because it was Great Literature and more than that, Great Poetry, and all the Great Poetry I had encountered up till then was difficult to understand because of what seemed to be deliberate obscurantism and excessive verbiage.
So I gritted my teeth and girded my loins and expected to have to hack my way through the undergrowth. But it wasn't like that at all. First, I suspect, because I was reading a schools edition of the play which was in modern English and meant for idiot school kids to be able to follow. Second, because a lot of the terminology was recognisable to me as idioms still current in Hiberno-English (e.g. the bit about "walking abroad", I didn't need a note telling me this meant 'outside' because this was how it was used in my locale as well).
I ended up with bells ringing in my head because the words all struck against one another and chimed. When I finished, I understood why Shakespeare was considered a great.
Maybe you're not as susceptible to the mere sound-music of words, but yeah. The plays are meant to be performed and not just read, but even Iago's little speech here is just so hypnotising because of the slurring, murmurous repetition of the syllables if you read it aloud:
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The problem with Shakespeare is that he's (really well done) junk food that was so good and foundational that it has aged into literary prominence.
This causes problems - he has a lot of just funny shit, low brow humor, and satisfying basic chicken soup plotting (think Star Wars original trilogy). The facet of "you" that can enjoy Billy without engaging in classiness masturbation is the low brow blockbuster side of things.
But because most modern people require a reference guide or really turning their brains on they'll try and engage in a more "literary" way.
Those two things end up hitting at cross purposes.
The end result is that the most rewarding way is experience - know it well enough that you don't need to think really hard to realize that something someone just said was an upscale dick joke.
This is not helpful because a good response to "ehh I'm doubting" is not "watch it 50 times."
I guess I would recommend trying to see a stage version after recently having struggled through the written, and then just trying to vibe with the play.
Yeah, Shakespeare is hilarious but some of the jokes definitely don't land without footnotes. Like in Hamlet:
"May I lie in your lap?" "No, my lord." "I mean my head in your lap." "Ay, my lord." "What, did you think I meant country matters [sex]?" "I think nothing, my lord." "That's a fair thought, to lie between maids' legs." "What?" "Nothing."
That scene is funny as hell if you know that "nothing" was used as slang for the vagina, and that Shakespeare was doing the equivalent of making "pussy" double entendres. But that's something most people aren't going to know without having it pointed out, which just makes the scene confusing to a modern audience.
An actor can probably get "country matters" across, perhaps by breaking accent and rhythm a bit so it's clearly "cunt-ry matters" (whether that's the derivation or not). As for "nothing" meaning "vagina" (or "pussy"), that's likely a recent fabrication.
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I agree with @07nk. Shakespeare is meant to be performed, not read, and reading a play is almost always an inferior experience. Sure, some people do enjoy reading his plays because most of them have some banger lines, but the drama, the humor, the intensity, is all in the performance. It's why there are so many "interpretations" of Shakespeare using the same lines but completely different sets and costuming and you can still deliver a compelling experience even if they don't look like Elizabethans.
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Are you not getting it because of the dialect issues, or because of something else? I find his plots very funny, but with writing that requires some footnotes(and of course, it often doesn't have a deeper meaning, it's entertainment)- but, the first folio and the KJV are, literally, the defining core of modern English literature, and if you want to understand literature in modern English, you have to read those two things.
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Does this come from trying to read Shakespeare? I feel like Shakespeare is best enjoyed in performance form, and trying to enjoy his works from reading them is like trying to enjoy The Godfather from reading the script. There's enjoyment to be had, likely, but there's a lot to the experience that's missing, because the target audience for the script wasn't readers, but rather actors and directors and such, for the purpose of informing them on what to perform for viewers. Personally, my favorite Shakespeare experience is the 90s film Twelfth Night starring Ethan Hawke and Helena Bonham Carter.
I have never watched Shakespeare on stage, but I have watched film adaptations that kept the original language, such as Romeo and Juliet (1968), Othello (1995), and Hamlet (1996). I prefer reading the plays; they have helpful footnotes, and in any case I can't understand what the movie actors are saying because they speak too fast. Besides, Shakespeare's directions are very minimalist ("exit, pursued by a bear"), with most of the action being implied through dialogue, so they are hardly distracting.
I'd recommend the Olivier Lear. TV version, stage-bound, and it started off (to me) slow. But when Lear hit "Come not between the dragon and his wrath" it just revved up and kept going from there on.
You can see why Edmund might have a grudge against his father, since Dad keeps insisting on introducing him as "Do you know my bastard son? Yeah, he's illegitimate. I have a proper born in wedlock elder son, but I never married this kid's mom." Yeah, thanks Dad!
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The first time I ever enjoyed Shakespeare was in a tavern that served food and booze while putting on the performance. Can't recommend highly enough (no tomatoes thrown, alas).
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I don't like Shakespeare either.
But to give him credit, I'm sure he was exceptionally talented in his time. I think it's like criticizing Newton because he only discovered classical physics: we've progressed not only material and objective knowledge but changed taste.
Likewise, I read Lovecraft and his depiction of eldritch horrors is tame compared to what he inspired.
(Although unlike material and knowledge, whether our culture's taste "progresses" is debatable. Especially because sometimes "what's old is new again". I do think it progresses in that some concepts, like tropes, are discovered then always remain in style; at least until we undergo change as radical as an apocalypse that destroys material and knowledge progress.)
Part of the criticism I have for him lies on me. How can I say I don’t like him if I don’t understand what he’s about? I just don’t see the appeal at all. I’m not sure if Newton is a good parallel case. And actually in his case, Newtonian Mechanics still has a ton of practical applicability today, specifically in fluid dynamics.
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