Bookstorm

Is the Western canon inherently racist?

Afrocentrists do have a valid point when they argue that championing a Eurocentric canon can help reinforce the prejudice that white is cerebral and black is physical. It is precisely the righteous black quest for intellectual parity that infuses discussions of the canon and its provenance with such tension, since there has historically been so much at stake. And while I do not subscribe to the "Beethoven-is-Black" school of thought, it is true that the canon is more diverse than many people realise. Terence, regarded as one of the founding fathers of western drama, and a seminal influence on Renaissance humanism, was in fact a freed black African slave from Carthage. Saint Augustine, philosopher, theologian and intellectual bedrock of Christianity, was North African, from modern day Algeria. In our consciousness, we have come to see these figures as white. So the way the canon has been refracted through racist lenses does need to be incisively and intelligently critiqued.

I've been reading William Shakespeare's Macbeth, which is part of my self-imposed Halloween reading list. (I haven't read the play since high school, but it's always been a favorite of mine, especially when I'm in the mood for a horror story.) I'm amused that the play is cursed: saying "Macbeth" or quoting directly from the play while inside a playhouse is bad luck. According to legend, the witches' scene at the beginning of Act Four contains a real spell, which Shakespeare stole from an actual coven. The pissed-off coven then cursed Macbeth, and productions have been plagued with disaster ever since the play's premier:

Beginning with its first performance, in 1606, Dear Will himself was forced to play Lady Macbeth when Hal Berridge, the boy designated to play the lady with a peculiar notion of hospitality, became inexplicably feverish and died. Moreover, the bloody play so displeased King James I that he banned it for five years.

When performed in Amsterdam in 1672, the actor playing Macbeth substituted a real dagger for the blunted stage one and with it killed Duncan in full view of the entranced audience.

[ ... ]

In 1937, when Laurence Olivier took on the role of Macbeth, a 25 pound stage weight crashed within an inch of him, and his sword which broke onstage flew into the audience and hit a man who later suffered a heart attack.

In 1934, British actor Malcolm Keen turned mute onstage, and his replacement, Alister Sim, like Hal Berridge before him, developed a high fever and had to be hospitalized.

In the 1942 Macbeth production headed by John Gielgud, three actors--Duncan and two witches--died, and the costume and set designer committed suicide amidst his devilish Macbeth creations.

I'm finally reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Sure, I'm a little over a hundred pages into it, and it's (surprise!) dense and confusing, but it's also quite enjoyable. Pynchon has a colorful, breathless style that perfectly suits the story's strange, vivid imagery. I really have no idea what's going on--Gravity's Rainbow, which is set at the end of World War II, is like a splatter painting, and is full of provocateurs and double agents--but there's something to be said for chaos and confusion. At this point, Gravity's Rainbow is more about color than structure. But it makes for pretty fun reading.

Here's a round-up for your weekend ...

• Booktryst takes a look at product placement in nineteenth-century British novels. Examples include Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Bram Stoker's Dracula.
• I don't normally link to book reviews, but Jennifer Egan's review of Tom McCarthy's C is worth a look.
• "[Lady Chatterly's Lover] was not only the most sexually explicit novel [D. H.] Lawrence ever wrote, it is probably the most sexually explicit novel ever by a canonical author."
• And finally: Liquortarian!