(2024-11-26) Guinn Overhearing Ourselves

Rusty Guinn: Overhearing Ourselves. This is Part 2 of a subscriber-only preview of my upcoming book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds.

Helena’s Soliloquy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1, Scene 1 by William Shakespeare

Storytelling is invention. It should not surprise us, then, that our greatest storyteller was among our greatest inventors. It is only fitting that we should invent stories about him in turn.

The most famous stories we tell about William Shakespeare probably concern whether he is himself an invention. Only slightly less famous but considerably less tiresome are those concerning his invention of thousands of new words. Some of these stories of invention are even true.

His invention does not confine itself to the extraordinary, however. My wife is a Shakespearean dramaturg by training and profession. When we are in polite company, that means that she is responsible for providing actors, set designers, directors, costumers, and other participants in a theatrical production with the historical, cultural, linguistic, and social context necessary to make informed decisions about how to practice their own crafts. When we are in less polite company, we tell the truth: she is responsible for telling everybody where all the dick jokes are.

If Shakespearean philology is a cottage industry, then Shakespearean phallology is a manufacturing empire. We could probably say this about any feature of the modern movement to strip-mine literature for every possible ounce of subtext, power differential, or latent homoeroticism.

Discovering innuendo where it isn’t is what English PhD’s are for.

Still, the comedic genre structured around the male genitalia represents a rich vein of legitimate Shakespearean invention.

Shakespeare equipped twenty-five consecutive generations of humans with tools to present the profound and the puerile in equal measure. It is hard for me to imagine a more powerful legacy of literary invention. But then, I am not Harold Bloom. The late long-time Yale professor and literary scholar granted the bard a loftier invention than mere words.

As described in his seminal work Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom credits the plays and person of William Shakespeare with nothing less than our modern understanding of what it means to be human

one could consider the unparalleled beauty in Shakespeare’s verse and conclude that he ‘invented the human’ by reaching the apex of our uniquely human capacity for art and creation.

Or else we might contend that Shakespeare ‘invented the human’ by faithfully representing the common features of human nature

Alternatively, we might suggest that Shakespeare ‘invented the human’ by presenting a complete menu of the most quintessentially human stories.

not one of them is what he means by ‘inventing the human.’

His great insight is that Shakespeare was the first to permit his audiences to peer into the consciousness of his characters.

Because he was first and greatest in bringing the changes effected by the will to both to the page and to the stage, we cannot help but think of Shakespeare’s characters as the models for our own inward struggles.

join him in acknowledging that this represented a radical departure from the norms of classical, medieval, and early renaissance theater

It certainly did not help that humans knew little about what their brains did and even less about how they worked. For more than a millennium, western physiology was built on the ideas proposed by a 2nd century Roman physician-philosopher... Galen.

Men of learning believed that human conditions, temperaments, and maladies were the results of imbalances in bodily humors.

Galenic medicine also assumed a human physiology in which the purpose of the brain was to funnel so-called animal spirits to various parts of the body to give them motion and purpose.

Galenic adherents were not merely present; they were the English scientific establishment.

Natural scientists from the classical era through the early renaissance were only marginally better prepared to deal with the unknown implications of evolutionary biology. Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique, among the first texts to explore species change through the acquisition of hereditary traits, was still two centuries away when Hamlet was published.

The evolutionary basis for many human impulses, so rich with implications for plot and character development, was well outside their grasp.

The philosophers of the classical, medieval, and early renaissance would have enjoyed no greater success than the natural scientists in bridging the gap between the past and present understanding of human consciousness.

The plays of these ages cannot help but reflect the limited knowledge of the mind and our own evolution as a species. That is not to say that they lack wisdom or wit or beauty or depth. Far from it! Euripides’s Medea is complex, challenging and contains some of theater’s most powerful presentations of human emotion.

These earlier dramas are simply inherently limited in their capacity to explore the experience of being human because their authors were inherently limited in their capacity to correctly explain what it is that physiologically makes us human.

the morality plays. In the most famous example, Everyman, God and Death conspire to send our eponymous character on a journey of discovery from life to the grave.

Even the nominally human protagonist lacks anything approaching a consciousness. The play lacks the capacity, then, to use that consciousness as a device to propel the action of the play. The result is that Everyman does not develop. Everyman unfolds.

Hamlet does not unfold.

It is not as if William Shakespeare had a better understanding of human physiology, evolutionary biology, or philosophy than these playwrights, much less the scholars and scientists of his time.

And yet throughout his plays, the characters demonstrate what Freud called a primal ambivalence, a structural indecision that is at once both cognitive and affective

The tales spin them, to paraphrase Daniel Dennett.

my contention is this: that his practical mastery outpaced his theoretical understanding

Believing fully that a brain with balanced humors powered his body through the transmittal of animal spirits, Shakespeare still arrived at a usable model for human consciousness by inventing a device which spoke its language.
For story is the language of human consciousness.

Each Hamlet soliloquy in which the prince overhears himself is a catalyst to change. To action. Not to the fashioning of self in the Foucauldian sense, but to the revision of self.

We humans are each and both at once, storytelling animals and storyseeking animals. Shakespeare was able to present authentic models of human consciousness not because he understood any more about it than any of us or his august contemporaries, but because our inner voice is each of us overhearing ourselves. Neither our storytelling nor storyseeking impulse arose in the last 400 years, of course. Nor in the last 4,000, for that matter. Our story instinct was what it meant to be human for millennia before Shakespeare used it as a device to show us what it meant to be human. Story was the ‘water in which we swam’ long before we invented the very word for water. Before we invented any words, for that matter.

But what is story, really?