Henry Fuseli, “Macbeth and the Witches”
Mention Hamlet in the title of your column and you’ve got my immediate attention. Frank Bruni of the New York Times did so yesterday in an article about a Democratic pollster and political strategist and I clicked on it right away.
Bruni featured Joel Benenson because he was a theater major in college and Bruni is interested in the uses to which people put their liberal arts educations. Benenson helped get Barack Obama elected and is now working for Hillary.
Knowing how language works has proved to be very useful:
Parsing Hamlet and Macbeth gave him an “understanding of the rhythm and nuance of language,” he explained, that’s as useful as any fluency in statistics or political science per se.
And further on:
He was attracted to acting by more than the bright lights. “To do it well, you have to get at what’s going on beneath the words and the emotional content of it,” he said, adding that such attention to the details of speech and gesture is crucial “for anybody who’s communicating.”
So are a firm grasp of language and context, which drama and literature hone.
In that sense, he said, he prepared for a political world of slogans, focus groups and opinion surveys by doing plays by Harold Pinter and Terrence McNally and reading novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.
All those glorious words really did pave the path to sound bites.
“THAT term has become derogatory,” he said, divulging that he once pushed back at Obama’s skepticism of such tidy, pithy locutions by saying to him: “Mr. President, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ is a sound bite. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’ is a sound bite. We remember them because they reflect high principle and clarity of thought and universal truths. That’s the power of them.”
Obama, who is very well-read himself (note his use of The Waste Land when he was courting a woman in college), probably didn’t need a lot of persuading. I’m sympathetic with his reservations, however. Language can be used for bad as well as for good. Just as, say, psychologists can exploit their understanding of the human mind to cynically manipulate people, so language and literature majors can misuse their special grasp of language.
High stakes politics, with all the money and power involved, threatens to lead practically anyone astray. I’m therefore more interested in how the authors Benenson mentions might help a political consultant stay in touch with his soul. I don’t know for sure if that’s why Benenson mentions Pinter, McNally, Hawthorne, Melville, and later Shakespeare—the article doesn’t give me enough to go on—so I’m going to discuss how I hope that he’s using them.
Hopefully he hasn’t turned to, say, Melville’s Confidence Man to figure out ways to dupe the American public. The protagonist figures out the weaknesses of a wide multitude of characters and proceeds to take advantage of them. If Benenson has this book in mind, let’s hope instead that he’s using it to see through slick-talking political salespeople.
Moby-Dick could be useful. After all it gives us one of literature’s great monomaniacs, and the presidential election process virtually selects for monomaniacs. Can Benenson keep his charges from destroying themselves and everyone around them?
The Scarlet Letter provides us a useful example of a self-righteous and soul-sucking individual in Chillingworth. That certainly would be useful knowledge in the political world.
Harold Pinter is famous for his “theater of menace,” where seemingly innocent conversations are filled with hints of dire threats. I suspect one encounters a lot of such talk in our centers of power.
I don’t know much about Terrence McNally but here’s a discussion of his work by professor Raymond-Jean Frontain explains why a political idealist might be drawn to him:
WHAT BRINGS AUDIENCES to the theater is “the expectation that the miracle of communication will take place,” explains a protester to the board of a city arts complex in Hidden Agendas, a one-act play that Terrence McNally wrote in 1994 in response to government-inspired attempts to censor an exhibition of the late Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. “Words, sounds, gestures, feelings, thoughts! The things that connect us and make us human. The hope for that connection!” The purpose of theater, McNally says in a subsequent interview, is to “find out” and explore “what connects us” as human beings. For McNally, theater’s most important function is to create community by bridging gaps opened between people by differences in race, religion, gender, and most particularly sexual orientation.
And in another article where Frontain quotes McNally, quoted by Wikipedia:
I think theatre teaches us who we are, what our society is, where we are going. I don’t think theatre can solve the problems of a society, nor should it be expected to … Plays don’t do that. People do. [But plays can] provide a forum for the ideas and feelings that can lead a society to decide to heal and change itself.
I’m particularly glad that Benenson keeps three copies of the collected works of Shakespeare since, of course, the Bard provides the ultimate examples of political leaders who court disaster when they follow their egotistical impulses and forget about their sacred duty. Kent in King Lear is the ideal political consultant —although he gets fired for speaking truth to his boss—while the witches function in that capacity in Macbeth.
And who knows, maybe Bill Clinton wouldn’t have strayed with Monica Lewinsky if one of his advisors had given him Antony and Cleopatra.
