Prospero's Books

A systems look at Twelfth Night

This week my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" class read Twelfth Night, especially in the light of another pair of premises:

7a. Open (“living”) systems exchange matter and energy with their environment.

7b. Texts exchange “matter” and “energy” with their discourse communities. Shakespeare’s plays have changed, and been changed by, other works. (This fact is the basis of intertextual criticism.)

For me, the most interesting idea to arise from my students' writing, and our subsequent discussion, was the way the love-sick Orsino and the mourning Olivia constituted a closed system until the arrival of energy from outside, in the form of Viola and, later, Sebastian, landing on the coast of Illyria.

"What," says Viola in her first line, "should I do in Illyria?"

Bring life to a dying system, Viola.

The reader's creation of a poem

Last week, in my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, we explored another pair of premises:

6a. Systems exist in the relationships among their parts. “Systems are greater than the sum of their parts.” That is, they have “emergent” properties that are not properties of their parts but emerge only at the system level.

6b. Artworks, and their communities of discourse, exist in the relationships among their parts. For example, literary works, such as plays, exist in the transaction between text and reader, or between production and audience. Similarly, theatrical productions exist in the collaborative relationships among artists and script. (Thus the concept of “faithful” and “unfaithful” productions of Shakespeare is meaningless; all productions are a transaction between script and artists.) And Shakespeare’s plays exist in their intertextual relationships with other works.

Louise Rosenblatt, in The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978), spoke of emergence, and laid the foundation for a systems-theory approach to literature:

The reader's attention to the text activates certain elements in his past experience—external reference, internal response—that have become linked with the verbal symbols. Meaning will emerge from a network of relationships among the things symbolized as he senses them. . . .

. . . the reader's creation of a poem out of a text must be an active, self-ordering and self-corrective process (11).

To judge a text bad is to admit defeat

This week, in my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, one of our readings is from The Reader, the Text, the Poem, by Louise M. Rosenblatt, a mother of "reader-response" criticism. One passage struck home for me, as a member of a discipline that too easily pronounces flip judgment on literary works and performances:

Critical theory and practice both suffer from failure to recognize that the reader carries on a dymanic, personal, and unique activity. Many contemporary critics and teachers evidently think that they are being "objective" when they discuss identifiable elements of the text. They do not include in their theoretical assumptions recognition of the fact that even the most objective analysis of "the poem" is an analysis of the work as they themselves have called it forth (15).

A literary work doesn't exist alone; it exists only as a text is being read by a reader. To judge a text—or a performance—bad is to admit defeat. It is to say, "I don't have the ability to call forth a satisfying work from this."

Draw thy breath in pain to tell my story

Last week in my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, we read Hamlet and reflected on two more premises:

4a. Most systems are composed of smaller systems.
4b. Literary texts can be composed of smaller texts, with their own system properties.

5a. Most systems are components of larger systems.
5b. Literary texts, like other artworks, exist in and create discourse communities, "conversations." Shakespeare's plays have created among the largest and most enduring discourse communities.

But what struck me most as I reread Hamlet was the fatal absence of open information flow in the system that is the Danish court. I counted at least six instances in the play of attempts to gain information by subterfuge. And I thought of a passage in Margaret J. Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science (2nd ed.):

For a system to remain alive, for the universe to keep growing, information must be continually generated. If there is nothing new, or if the information merely confirms what already is, the result will be death. Closed systems wind down and decay, victims of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The source of life is new information—novelty—ordered into new structures. We need to have information coursing through our systems, disturbing the peace, imbuing everything it touches with the possibility of new life (96).

Hamlet and almost everyone around him are mortal victims of a lack of open information. It's no wonder that Hamlet's dying request is that information be spread:

Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

And so we do.

Newton's sleep

To Thursday's meeting of my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, I brought two poem fragments, the first by Alexander Pope and the second by William Blake:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
__________

Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep

Sir Isaac Newton has been called both the first modern scientist and, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, "the last magician." Both Pope and Blake were right about Newton. His discoveries of some of "Nature's laws" formed the basis for the light of modern science and technology. But they also led, in the popular view of his work, to a numbed conception of the universe as nothing more than particles impacting each other like so many billiard balls.

Alas, that popular view continues today, while true "post-Newtonian" science has joined Blake in transcending this "single vision" and conceiving a much more magical cosmos. It's a view of which Newton—as alchemist, magician, and theologian—would approve.

Unless we were poets or lovers

This week, in my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, we read Neil Gaiman's Sandman adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with, among other things, a chapter from Ervin Laszlo's Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos (near the end of the What I've Been Reading list in the right column of this blog).

My premises for the week were

3a. Connections among parts of systems are not always obvious.

3b. Connections within, and among, literary texts are not always obvious. In some of Shakespeare’s plays, magic works by making non-obvious connections among parts of natural and social systems.

Laszlo writes:

The emerging vision of reality is more than theory, and it is of interest to more than scientists. It gets us closer than ever before to rending apart the veils of sensory perception and apprehending the true nature of the world. Even in regard to our life and well-being, this is a happy re-discovery: it validates something we have always suspected but in modern times could not express (nor, unless we were poets or lovers, did we even try). This something is a sense of belonging, of oneness. We are part of each other and of nature; we are not strangers in the universe. We are a coherent part of a coherent world; no more and no less so than a particle, a star, and a galaxy (2).

Modern science doesn't tell us that fairies are real. It tells us much stranger things.

City and forest

Last weekend, I met for the first time a regular reader of this blog, Jay, who tactfully reminded me that I hadn't posted for two weeks. My excuse was that I had just finished the first two weeks of a very busy semester. But that's no excuse, especially since my students are giving me so much to write about.

In my "Conversations with Shakespeare" course, which I've subtitled "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality," we began last week reading A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with a couple of essays on the play and a couple of introductory chapters from books on systems theory. I offered two pairs of premises:

1a. The universe is composed of systems: physical, chemical, biological, cultural. Stars, starfish, star chambers, and starships are all systems.

1b. Artworks can be seen as systems: cultural systems that emerge from, and reflect, biological systems, social systems, and other cultural systems. As Hamlet says, art holds “a mirror up to nature.”

2a. Systems are integrated, indivisible.

2b. Successful literary texts, like other artworks, are integrated, indivisible. Aristotle called this integrity “unity of action.”

In his book General Systems Theory, Lars Skyttner writes:

Through the constant interaction between system and environment, environment affects systems and systems in turn affect the environment. When it comes to social systems, this interaction is especially pronounced. Its scope is suggested in the following pairs:

Living system

• Society
• We
• Self
• Ego
• Mind
• Consciousness

Environment

• Nature
• Them
• The other
• Id
• Body
• Subconsciousness (64)

Skyttner could have been talking about the two interrelated worlds of city and forest that provide the setting for A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play reminds us that "civilization" exists within a larger system of which we're often unaware. In leaving the day world of the city and entering the night world of the forest, Shakespeare's lovers and amateur actors descend into the "uncivilized" dreamworld of their subconscious and discover deeper truths about themselves.