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Jun. 28th, 2016 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionResuming on pad, so more now:
If Game of Thrones is by 1st person creators but about 3rd persons and largely for 3rd persons, excepting that brief interruption in season 4, WD is trying to tell us - Gimple is trying to tell us - that that's not how he sees his job. Presumably he feels he's an I talking to a we most of the time, but once he starts manipulating our sense of personhood (at least in untraditional ways) he takes pains to show he's an I talking to a you - something he's unlikely to forget after this year's two gigantic outcries. I think this shift may be fitting for experimental writing, though of course especially for this sort of experiment. It says, "we're going to try something here, and while we feel pretty sure it's important to, we do understand you might not, so we're telling you to look at this as a message to a person from a person who is thinking about the responsibilities involved in that act - and who maybe might fail, as you too might fail, and need the forgiveness you too must hope for."
Did Shakespeare innovate that asking for applause thing he does in Midsummer Night's Dream and elsewhere? Or do I vaguely recall it from Roman and Italian comedy, or Greene or something. His election of a feature that doesn't seem to be obligatory, as well as the concern of the troupe that the ladies in the audience understand just what a play is at least, plus the plot-nudging love poem magic, plus the speech about the beautiful but disquieting craziness that creating something out of nothing constitutes ... all these show he was thinking hard about just what the fuck he was doing, and wishing us to as well. Seems a step beyond Titus, which is an expression of despair at his audience (and what it seemed to prove about people) - someone please go tell Game of Thrones that, by the way, though that pie was an art director's triumph. Taymor's likely green with envy.
But anyway that probably has something to do with his own experimentation with pronoun "modes." Probably I'm just parroting Bloom here, who IIRC sees his meta-elements as relating to the character-change via self-overhearing that he feels is S's chief innovation, though to some extent following Montaigne's near-dialogic layering practice and (somehow) the Wife of Bath.
Probably character depth is often pursued not as veiled confession or for the sake of an ages-old verisimilitude competition but just to get us to grasp something about ourselves. Tactical depth, depth for a purpose that's shallow, or anyway elusively complex rather than tangled or unconscious-driven. Doing both at once is probably the Shakespeare way, or anyway feels like it - maybe he out-Gimples Gimple and I'm simply too simple to see.
Would I get mad at The Walking Dead, if it were literature? I don't think so. It's not being told what to do that's a problem, or even ONLY being told what to do. It's being told what to do when you already know it. Since it invents new ways of saying it, it's not saying quite the same thing we've heard before - and, since I find it rewatchable, saying it using sounds not fully hearable all at once. Passes the Stevens tests, in other words. Not always with the most pleasant of pleasures, but the artistry involved is itself a pleasure once you notice it - and how much of it and how comparatively original it is. Gimple draws clearly inspiration from moral philosophy and (defogging it first, usually by translating ot into common sense) theory, so he's Shakespearean in the fanfic sense too.
Hardly related, but I was dimly wondering if Game of Thrones might be up to something (it isn't, this is just the content of a wondering) similar to what I locate in Julius Caesar, where utility and rule-based morality are shown as incompatible, thus as two (and perhaps the only) groups of people into which the morally-motivated fall - each of them making a mistake the other would not, and both enough out of step to not cooperate efficiently. The Sansa-Jon Snow scenes suggested that, in the last two episodes, since she seemed to show good sense in manipulating him and he seemed to have a point saying they needed to trust each other, but I'm not sure if the show wanted things received that way or was interested in what that entailed if it did. Sansa's cold but successful use of her brother is followed by her accession to Sadistic Revenge and the Now-I'm-All-That expression it's unfailingly paired with in this show, so maybe we're to instead think he could still have carried out her plan, or one just as successful, if he'd been in on it. Or that if he'd refused to make a deal with Littlefinger that would have proved to be less destructive thsn the alternative will or something. Plus I don't think I recall that precise implication in other contrasted pairs elsewhere, unless there was some highlightedly missed opportunity for Sean Bean and Dinklage to connect back at the start? But Shakespeare's leaving it tragic was a stronger point, anyway: Brutus and Cassius DO work together, but the problem is their brains can't. Whereas if the show's just saying that people who never break a rule and people who think nothing of betrayal both have something to learn! then that's practically no point at all.
If Game of Thrones is by 1st person creators but about 3rd persons and largely for 3rd persons, excepting that brief interruption in season 4, WD is trying to tell us - Gimple is trying to tell us - that that's not how he sees his job. Presumably he feels he's an I talking to a we most of the time, but once he starts manipulating our sense of personhood (at least in untraditional ways) he takes pains to show he's an I talking to a you - something he's unlikely to forget after this year's two gigantic outcries. I think this shift may be fitting for experimental writing, though of course especially for this sort of experiment. It says, "we're going to try something here, and while we feel pretty sure it's important to, we do understand you might not, so we're telling you to look at this as a message to a person from a person who is thinking about the responsibilities involved in that act - and who maybe might fail, as you too might fail, and need the forgiveness you too must hope for."
Did Shakespeare innovate that asking for applause thing he does in Midsummer Night's Dream and elsewhere? Or do I vaguely recall it from Roman and Italian comedy, or Greene or something. His election of a feature that doesn't seem to be obligatory, as well as the concern of the troupe that the ladies in the audience understand just what a play is at least, plus the plot-nudging love poem magic, plus the speech about the beautiful but disquieting craziness that creating something out of nothing constitutes ... all these show he was thinking hard about just what the fuck he was doing, and wishing us to as well. Seems a step beyond Titus, which is an expression of despair at his audience (and what it seemed to prove about people) - someone please go tell Game of Thrones that, by the way, though that pie was an art director's triumph. Taymor's likely green with envy.
But anyway that probably has something to do with his own experimentation with pronoun "modes." Probably I'm just parroting Bloom here, who IIRC sees his meta-elements as relating to the character-change via self-overhearing that he feels is S's chief innovation, though to some extent following Montaigne's near-dialogic layering practice and (somehow) the Wife of Bath.
Probably character depth is often pursued not as veiled confession or for the sake of an ages-old verisimilitude competition but just to get us to grasp something about ourselves. Tactical depth, depth for a purpose that's shallow, or anyway elusively complex rather than tangled or unconscious-driven. Doing both at once is probably the Shakespeare way, or anyway feels like it - maybe he out-Gimples Gimple and I'm simply too simple to see.
Would I get mad at The Walking Dead, if it were literature? I don't think so. It's not being told what to do that's a problem, or even ONLY being told what to do. It's being told what to do when you already know it. Since it invents new ways of saying it, it's not saying quite the same thing we've heard before - and, since I find it rewatchable, saying it using sounds not fully hearable all at once. Passes the Stevens tests, in other words. Not always with the most pleasant of pleasures, but the artistry involved is itself a pleasure once you notice it - and how much of it and how comparatively original it is. Gimple draws clearly inspiration from moral philosophy and (defogging it first, usually by translating ot into common sense) theory, so he's Shakespearean in the fanfic sense too.
Hardly related, but I was dimly wondering if Game of Thrones might be up to something (it isn't, this is just the content of a wondering) similar to what I locate in Julius Caesar, where utility and rule-based morality are shown as incompatible, thus as two (and perhaps the only) groups of people into which the morally-motivated fall - each of them making a mistake the other would not, and both enough out of step to not cooperate efficiently. The Sansa-Jon Snow scenes suggested that, in the last two episodes, since she seemed to show good sense in manipulating him and he seemed to have a point saying they needed to trust each other, but I'm not sure if the show wanted things received that way or was interested in what that entailed if it did. Sansa's cold but successful use of her brother is followed by her accession to Sadistic Revenge and the Now-I'm-All-That expression it's unfailingly paired with in this show, so maybe we're to instead think he could still have carried out her plan, or one just as successful, if he'd been in on it. Or that if he'd refused to make a deal with Littlefinger that would have proved to be less destructive thsn the alternative will or something. Plus I don't think I recall that precise implication in other contrasted pairs elsewhere, unless there was some highlightedly missed opportunity for Sean Bean and Dinklage to connect back at the start? But Shakespeare's leaving it tragic was a stronger point, anyway: Brutus and Cassius DO work together, but the problem is their brains can't. Whereas if the show's just saying that people who never break a rule and people who think nothing of betrayal both have something to learn! then that's practically no point at all.
