Shakespeare, Storytelling, and the Creative Process

By: Kris Vitols

Even when I don’t write I remain a writer, and a writer who does not write is, admittedly, an aberrant being who courts madness.
                       ---Franz Kafka, journal entry, 1922

So we begin with Franz Kafka, who wished for the entirety of his literary output to be consigned to flame, before dying a most grisly death by galloping consumption. Grisly death aside, Kafka’s journal entry is instructive, presenting us with the thrumming, suppurating mind of the tortured writer, so hyper-aware of itself that the very act of writing is a soporific against madness. Kafka seemed to have a special genius for doubt and misprision -- the level of despair and derision encountered in his journals being so acute, at times, one wonders how the man ever wrote anything at all. But write he did, even when he wasn’t putting pen to paper, his mind on fire with words, phrases, scenarios, aphoristic bits of wisdom that read like the ravings of a doomed prophet. Such was Kafka’s great understanding, his great gift.

But not all writers are as seemingly tortured as Kafka, nor as spectacularly self-conscious.

Which brings us to the work of William Shakespeare. Certainly, the man who created Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Rosalind, Cleopatra, and Juliet, can testify to his own doubts and misgivings as a human being and artist. But Shakespeare’s creative process, his creative instinct, is different from Kafka’s; Kafka was an incessant reviser, precise with his words and usage, not a word or sentence out of place anywhere on the page, whereas Shakespeare seems to have been bolder, more willing to experiment, yet pragmatic enough to understand what people responded to. Poor Kafka died largely unknown and unread, patron saint of the maddening cliché, No one understands my work. Shakespeare didn’t worry about such vague aesthetic notions---he had an audience to let him know if he succeeded or failed, and he usually knew how to cater to it. Conversely, Kafka would have willfully composed his stories in solitude and obscurity, and no one would ever have heard of him if his friend and eventual editor, Max Brod, hadn’t insisted on saving his writings from a fiery inferno.

Kafka is a more distinctive world builder than Shakespeare, creating a distinctive, icy, relentless dream-country of bureaucratic nightmare, doublespeak, and oppressive authority figures. The English language has rewarded him by referring to anything vaguely ominous or oppressive as Kafkaesque. Shakespeare wasn’t nearly as gifted a world-builder as Kafka, if only because he seemed ambivalent about his own settings. Shakespeare could afford to feel this way, his settings being hardly ever original to him, often being adapted from historical chronicles, the Ancient Greek stage, Greek mythology, English folklore, the Latin satirists; he was not shy about old conceits or tropes, and making them new. But this was perfectly fine, because Shakespeare populates his settings with the most dynamic, complex beings---human and otherwise---the world has ever known. Which is a way of saying that Shakespeare’s great gift was in creating characters so alive with thoughts and actions of their own, that the stage seems no place for them; indeed, we feel as if we are encountering archetypal beings, whom we have always known. One way to think of what Shakespeare achieved is to understand the Greek rhetorical term, mimesis, which means “to represent,” or, more literally, to “re-present,’ reality to a reader or audience. When Puck addresses the audience in the last moments of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the audience is left to contemplate what Puck and Shakespeare want them to understand: that it has been transported to the Faerie realm for a transient period, and if the performance has been a good one, has experienced something more real than real, something akin to magic. Through the Shakespearean gift of mimesis, the world has been altered for a brief time.

But perhaps more than anything else, the creative process of these two writers points to our own inclinations as human beings, to the way we choose to order our worlds. Kafka’s gift for creating mechanized, dystopian nightmares is a distant early warning of what humanity could become. Characters in Kafka’s stories are usually already in the process of diminution, in an active process of defeat, when we encounter them--- thus,we cross ourselves, relieved we are not them. But Kafka is impossible to dismiss entirely, because he is willing to show us our sickly, emaciated selves, haunted by noirish shadows and circuitous whispers. Shakespeare, on the other hand, seems more vital, his characters overflowing with various loves, hates, doubts, misunderstandings of all sorts, but for all that, willing to encounter the world as it is presented to them. Shakespeare’s ability to body-jump, to understand the cognitive and emotional states of others, gives us the eschatological, metaphysical musings of Hamlet; the haunted, poetic overreaching of Macbeth; the worldly, bittersweet, love-obsessed ramblings of Rosalind; the conniving and confident manipulations of Iago; the apocalyptic pronouncements of King Lear; these can all exist because they are Shakespeare’s way of reading and understanding himself as a writer, as a creator. Should we be at all surprised, then, that actors of every generation are so keen to inhabit these personalities? What a rush it must be to soliloquise on existence as Hamlet, to contemplate kingship as Richard II, to meditate on the vagaries of love as Viola. It is arguable whether the reading of literature or portraying a character on stage can make us better people, but both Shakespeare and Kafka force us to acknowledge the fact that we live in a world of others, a world on fire with love and death and misunderstanding. And the only way one can write about it is to live in it.