As a child I used to proof-read the letters my father sent
to his mother every week - initially to make sure I wasn’t duplicating events
he’d already written about in my own letter to my gran, but he got so irritated
by my verbal red-penning that he sacked me during my O-levels, citing his
concern about it interfering with revision So it was no surprise to anybody that
I chose to study English Literature at A-level.
However, images I had of floating about the corridors of
the school with an Austen in my hand and the works of Tennyson peeking cheekily from my satchel were whipped from my
foolish grasp the minute we sat down to translate Chaucer’s the ‘Nun’s Priests’ Tale’ into Modern
English. And *blush* the language! I swear (see what I did there?) I learnt far naughtier
words during my English Lit classes than I ever did in the playground.
But my love of Shakespeare – even before he looked like
Joseph Fiennes (honest!) - began to dilute from ruby red to pomegranate pink. No sooner had the tutor group finished a scene
than we were dragged right back to the beginning of the same scene in order to
take it apart sentence by sentence; word for word; comma by comma it
seemed. All I wanted to do was read on
and see what happened next; this wasn't what I signed up for. It became wearing, repetitive and dull.
My relationship with Macbeth is therefore fractured; it’s segmented
into terms of importance; the parts that my tutor spent w-a-a-y too long
dissecting into metaphors, similes analogies and everything in between. I personally don’t think that Shakespeare was
intentionally trying to shoe-horn so many light/dark metaphors into his play that
they became minefields for anybody to tread lightly through. I mean, surely the fact that The Macbeths
knifed Duncan in the dead of night was simply because it’s easier to stab
someone at night than in broad daylight and not because for the remainder of
the play every shadow/ dark/light reference will lead the reader to conclude
that this part should be cross-referenced with even deeper suggestions of manic
depression and other disorders that could have been present in the minds of the
murderers at another section of the play.
Er… hello? Do we enter into this
depth of dissection with episodes of Eastenders?*
*Of course I’m not implying that ANY of Shakespeare’s plays are
comparable with Eastenders scripts – but who knows, if he’d been around today
it might be something he’d have had a stab at if money was as tight for him as
we’re led to believe.
We also had a very *ahem* passionate tutor who used to go on
at length about the imagery surrounding poplar trees in a poem (I forget which)
and to this day I can’t look at one without imagining a row of erect … fill in
the blanks. But was this seriously the intention of the
poet? Did he really want his readers to
have this image in their heads or was sit just that ‘poplar’ rhymed better with….
um…. alright then, he put them in for
the benefit of scan. Or maybe he was just blimmin’ well sitting by some when he
wrote the poem. Simples. Actually, I
always had my suspicions about this particular tutor. We used to take unwritten bets on how many
sexual connotations she’d have us scribbling down in our notes every lesson we
had with her. And up until A-level English Lit, I’d always presumed
Fellatio was going to turn out to be one of Romeo’s mates. Shocked doesn’t go halfway.
So am I doing Shakespeare and English tutors a bit of a
disservice? Did the literary greats
REALLY want us to go through their poetry and prose with fine-toothed-combs and
make sure we found every subtle nuance of metaphorical trickery they’d
intentionally planted within their (what would become) classics? Or did they just write for the love of the
story and the words?
I remember a while back after a friend had read a chapter of
a book I was writing, she commented “I like what you did with the Frank Sinatra/My
Way references – very clever” and I couldn’t work out what she meant until I
read it back myself and realised that yes, there was a tenuous connection if you thought about it – but I hadn’t;
thought about it I mean – when I’d written it.
So maybe if we’re writing ‘in the zone’ we’re in such a place that all
manner of collective images are drawn on by our subconscious creative minds and
somehow end up becoming translated onto the page/screen without our initial intention.
Do you want YOUR writing to bear the stretching, slicing,
and probing of symbolic literary dissection?
Do you have an imaginary classroom of students in your mind who are scratching
their heads at some of the metaphors you’ve used in your work, wondering how
they will EVER get the ten marks for this section that they need to get their
UCAS points?
Or do you write for the sheer love of telling a good story?
