MacBlecch

Mostly, I like the New Yorker, at least in its present form. I understand it was mainly a literary magazine until two or three decades ago. In its present form, though, I find the literary contributions to be the source of most of its pretentiousness.

I don't blame the magazine for its short stories: although I hear that Brokeback Mountain began life as a New Yorker short story, and although I have read two or three of them in the three or four years I've been a subscriber, mostly I just ignore them, because the contemporary short-story scene is far too artsy. Likewise, after four or five successive bad experiences with novels advertised and/or reviewed in the New Yorker, I now steer clear of any fiction advertised therein, and although I don't now purposely avoid all fiction reviewed therein, even the positive reviews have served only to suggest that I would find their subjects unsatisfying.

Mostly, I suppose, this is because literature is more like art: no-one explains why I should spend my time on the works they have chosen to highlight. Why this book or author, that is, and not that one? In the absence of such information, it's just a word-of-mouth recommendation from someone I know only by their word-of-mouth recommendations. Likewise the music, drama, and movie reviews.

Fortunately for me, if less so for them, there are occasionally bits that provide good reason to doubt somewhat the perspicacity of the reviewers; or, to close the circle, bits that reek of pretentiousness rather than credibility. Which brings me to the inspiration for this: the magazine's senior drama critic's review of a Macbeth set in the early- to mid-20th c.

When he finally gets around to discussing particulars, it begins promisingly: the

Weird Sisters...are all the more terrifying because they successfully masquerade as part of the ordinary world.

But almost immediately things go very far downhill:

Goold stages the Sisters as their psychologically astute author intuited them to be—as incarnations of Macbeth's unconscious.

Dude. Dude. That is utter crap, and you should know it. Granting, for the sake of argument, that you can, in fact, know what Shakespeare intuïted, you should also know that he is not bloody likely to have intuïted any such thing (setting aside, for the sake of clarity, the question of whether anyone in the history of the English language has ever actually "intuïted" anything). Remember, we're talking about the start of the 17th century, here. Remember the Salem Witch Trials? 17th century. Isaac Newton? 17th century. He was an alchemist, among other things. Shakespeare could have been no other than a man of his time, and his time was quite convinced of witchcraft. The unconscious? Psychology? If they had any conception of these at the time, which I strongly doubt, it was only rudimentary. It was a couple or three centuries before such things began to have even professional currency.

I'm not saying the assertion is unquestionably wrong. I'm saying it is far more likely to be wrong than right, which makes it an extraordinary claim: and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; but, being an assertion, this one lacks any evidence whatsoever.

Now, perhaps Goold's staging does pose the Sisters as such incarnations. And perhaps that is a powerful interpretation to today's audiences. But it is a modern interpretation of Macbeth. That a modern director can interpret Macbeth for modern audiences should be no surprise. What it says about Shakespeare, though, is not that he thought in modern modes; rather, it says that he wrote cleverly enough to admit of a wide variety of interpretations. And this has been, throughout the 20th c., his claim to fame: that his writing transcends time and place, not that it was ahead of its own time, which is what the assertion implies.

I suppose it's only to be expected that such moments of stupidity crop up in such articles from time to time; I further suppose it's a consequence of having to write on deadline. (Interestingly, the fashion world, despite its pretensions to art, also works on deadline: I thought only twice a year, but evidently four times. Other things that get churned out with such speed and regularity – romance novels, Stephen King – don't get uniformly praised, nor are they taken as trend-setters. Nor should they be. Which is just further evidence that the fashion world is self-delusional.)