Reintegrating Sensibility: Situated Knowledges and Embodied Readers

It was over thirty years ago this summer that I, Deanne Bogdan, the senior member of this writing team, sat in the balcony of the theatre of the Canadian Stratford Shakespearean Festival, where I witnessed my very first live performance of The Merchant of Venice. Having studied the play in high school and at university, I had just finished teaching it to first-year secondary school students, and that day I delighted in the powerful springing to life of the characters on stage before me. The role of Shylock was played by the legendary Czech actor Fredric Valk, who electrified his audience with a portrayal of dignity and grandeur. Riveted into silence by the power of Valk's delivery of the famous "I am a Jew. . . . Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech in Act III, I was presented with another drama of a somewhat different sort: at the conclusion of that soliloquy, a middle-aged man in the fourth row leapt to his feet, fist defiant, uttering a piercingly anguished "No! No! No! . . ."

This speech occurs just after Salarino asks Shylock what would be accomplished by insisting upon an actual pound of flesh, whereupon Shylock replies:

To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? if we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. ¹

As a young English teacher then, I had no way of justifying critically either the gesture described above or the pain of (mis)recognition underlying it. So conditioned was I by my literary training in the now-old New Criticism, the only way I could account for the outburst was as an expression of the spectator's inability to contain his emotional response to a great work of literature: whatever his motivation, I was sure that the man in the fourth row was clearly just suffering from an "unfortunate lack of aesthetic distance." The Merchant of Venice was, after all, one of the greatest dramas ever written, wasn't it? Surely any negative feelings toward any part of the text would be ultimately neutralized, or at least counterbalanced, by addressing the work "as a whole." At least it should be, if the audience were reading it properly. You just had to know how to distinguish between convention and reality, literature and life, literary and "real" experience. Confident that I certainly knew the difference between literary experience and real experience, I surmised that so did the man in the fourth row. He must have just been temporarily overwrought, a state he would soon get over. My intellectual framework had limited me to regarding what now I would call a poetics of refusal--the act of saying "no" to a literary classic, either in whole or in part--within the context of a mistaken interpretation, deficient understanding, or a kind of agnosis or resistance to knowing. ²

Despite...