Irregular Prose 3.. nirmal bhattacharya

 

I am no scholar in Shakespeare. Let alone declaim,  I cannot recite lines from Shakespeare without the text before me. Still, you cannot uproot my obstinacy in the belief that there is no playwright or poet of greater insight than Shakespeare in the world. I am a Bengali by birth, and obviously by race also . The noble laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore blessed this land of Bengal by his deeds in all the fields of culture on a mammoth scale. On the one hand he wrote poetry, plays, essays, stories and novels, and songs putting  music to nearly all of his lyrics alongside doing paintings of very high quality in terms of artistry, and on the other hand he was a social activist addressing various contemporary social ills and fighting to root them out. In India, only Tagore was perhaps closest to the Renaissance type personality.
    Modern Bengali people at large claim that Tagore's songs respond not only to their all emotions but also to every shade of every emotion. I cannot say how strong such a claim is, empirically. But my predilection for Tagore, especially for his songs and essays, tends to make me stay pleasurably biased towards him . My bias towards Tagore notwithstanding, I naggingly assert that there is no playwright or poet more insightful than William Shakespeare who Stephen Greenblatt fondly calls Will.
    I know that the key word in my autocratic claim is ' insight '. What do we mean by insight? It's often said that good poets have the power of insight, meaning that we can see the reflection of our ideas and emotions in their works. Besides, there are insights of the kind found in saints of various religions that can see into your future ---- whether it is going to be bright or gloomy, whether your rise in life is on the way or a steep fall is going to knock at your door within minutes.
    For ordinarily educated mortals like us ' insight ' and ' intuition ' are the same thing. So we, often unbeknownst to ourselves, claim to have insight , while we have at command a modicum of nature-given ' intuition '. Almost every one of us has a boastful side of being very ' intuitive '. By this one means that one boastfully claims to be able to read another's  mind. All these ways of understanding ' intuition ' or ' insight ' may have come to be of use in the practice of psychiatry but when we talk of the insight of Shakespeare all these ways of understanding may come to be worth little use. Yet, there is no poet/ playwright of greater insight than Shakespeare in the world.
     I am hellishly disqualified to give a definition of my own of what Shakespearean insight is like. But in 1998 Harold Bloom of Yale University wrote a beautiful book on Shakespeare. He writes in that book " The literary character before Shakespeare is relatively unchanging; women and men are represented as ageing and dying but not as changing because their relationship to themselves, rather than to the gods or God, has changed. In Shakespeare characters develop rather than unfold and they develop because they reconceive themselves." I have said I am no Shakespearean scholar. So it is not my concern whether what Bloom says of Shakespeare holds for the Bard or not. But the claim that pre-shakespeare literary character is unchanging because pre-shakespearean characters could not be made aware that " their relationship to themselves....has changed" is very provoking. And add to this his next remark  that characters in Shakespeare " develop because they reconceive themselves". What a wonderful realisation  that beyond the fact of natural changes of being born, " ageing and dying " human beings develop through their relationship to themselves! This is a huge thing --- this developing of ours through being related to ourselves. In spite of huge material changes owing to the advancement of science, technology and economics men's relationship to themselves remain stagnant. As human beings we need to " reconceive " ourselves in the context of the forces of such external changes but we sadly remain unaware of that need. I know a view like this could run in multiple directions. But I don't  know why I feel like tending to a view that a good society is, in essence, a society of enriched inner selves, and that enrichment can come by relating ourselves to ourselves. This is reconceiving ourselves. This might sound asking to be selfish or individualistic. But that would not be true. We begin to be related to ourselves only through the interventions of others. In fact, relating ourselves to ourselves through the interventions of others is perhaps the way forward, though certainly not the only way, to man's secular redemption.

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