A Buddhists Shakespeare: Affirming Self-Deconstructions

•期刊原文

A Buddhist's Shakespeare: Affirming Self-Deconstructions

Reviewed by Sidney Gottlieb

Renaissance Quarterly

Vol.49 No.1 (Spring 1996)

pp.166-167

COPYRIGHT Renaissance Society of America Inc. 1996

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James Howe is both a Buddhist and a post-modernist, a distinction without a difference as we come to find in his intriguing study of Shakespeare. Howe shares with many others the notion that criticism as a disinterested endeavor to know the complex but unitary truth has given way to a belief that "any interpretation is a reader's 'reinvention' of the chosen text, and that the primary function available to a critic is to record his or her transaction with it" (15). At the same time, Howe recognizes that criticism is an act of discipleship: our transactions are influenced, to say the least, by the ideologies surrounding us and also by the teachers we choose. Howe acknowledges Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan spiritual advisor, as his teacher and A Buddhist's Shakespeare is a "partial record" (13) of his discipleship to Trungpa and the long and varied tradition of Buddhism.

According to Howe, the three masters or philosophies alluded to in the book's title - Buddhism, Shakespeare, and deconstruction - are, contrary to what might be our first impression, the most likely of bedfellows. Buddhism is the most fully articulated of the three, defined by Howe as primarily "a system of contradictions, a systematized denial of the validity of all systems" (20). By revealing the wisdom of emptiness and the "fruitful side of 'absence'" (17), Buddhism continually works to free its practitioners from self-entrapping illusions, worldly attachments, and misunderstandings about human desires and capacities. Howe sees these ideas beginning to take hold now in Western thought via deconstruction, and it might be well worth a long essay to go more deeply into what he much-too-briefly labels the "Dharmic/Derridean function of dissolution" (21). But his main concern and, of course, the reason why his book comes to our attention, is to extensively analyze the much earlier intimation of Buddhist philosophy in western culture represented by Shakespeare, "every period of [whose] career rewards an approach that joins self-deconstruction to Buddhism" (22).

Each of the eight main chapters focuses primarily on one play, and Howe, well-versed in modern critical approaches - especially those influenced by Derrida, Foucault, and Greenblatt - shows how consistent these approaches are with what he calls Buddhist dimensions of Shakespeare. He focuses repeatedly on the lessons of theatricality. Bottom, for example, "seems to embody the Buddhist teaching of non-attachment" (31), and his play not only subverts royal power but usefully reminds all spectators, on stage and off, of the limited truth-value in any representation. This lesson is also reinforced by Richard III and, perhaps most provocatively, by The Merchant of Venice, where even Portia comes to embody the monstrousness of believing we have a firm hold on a truth that will set us free. Unless this truth is that there is no truth, we remain in the "vicious cycle of samsara" (93), the world of confusion.

For Howe, Shakespeare's major tragic characters are victims of desire. Some, like Antony and Brutus, never relinquish their desires or their mistaken beliefs in an integral, unified self, and therefore die agonizing and unenlightened deaths. Others, like Hamlet and Lear, move to a "Buddhist form of desirelessness" (178). But Shakespeare's ultimate concern is not so much the characters as the audience, who by witnessing a spectacle of constant undoing, subversion, and loss come to know that "desolation" is "the basis of 'freedom'" (144).

In Howe's analysis, Shakespeare typically leaves us "without a safety net" (143) by setting his plays on a course of subversion and dissolution that, once started, cannot be stopped - a vison of Shakespeare as bold, radical, post-modern, and, according to Howe's definition, Buddhist. I also find it overstated. Hovering on the edges of philosophical Fluellenism, he is quick to collate every appearance of negation either explicitly or implicitly with the wisdom of Trungpa, and in many instances such collocations are insubstantial rather than synergistic. Moreover, his frame for Shakespeare's drama and philosophy generally neglects other important rhythms in the plays, complex movements towards order and resolution and sympathetic attachment that may be bold and radical but are not post-modern or Buddhist. Despite Howe's insistent and provocative argument, the unsettling and Noble Truths in Shakespeare still only seem randomly and occasionally to overlap rather than mirror those of Derrida and the Buddha.

SIDNEY GOTTLIEB Sacred Heart University