A Touch More Rare: Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation

1. Enlisting in Harry Berger’s Imaginary Forces

c h a p t e r 1 Enlisting in Harry Berger’s Imaginary Forces Leonard Barkan Let us say it is the ultimate tribute to Harry Berger that the editors of this volume have permitted me to retain the occasional quality of its first performance, which was an MLA session in 2003. After all, Harry is himself one of the great theorists of performance, and also one of the great performers. He is also, for all his many meticulous and magisterial scholarly tomes, one of the great teachers by personal conversation, someone who (as Socrates tells Phaedrus) writes on the soul of his listeners. With all those lofty pretexts, I beg my readers’ indulgence if I take them back to an earlier celebratory occasion when these words were spoken and, with very few changes, transcribe them into words that are written. I begin with two anecdotes. It is safe to say that not many Modern Language Association talks remain in the mind, word for word, after many years—which makes one particular occasion stick especially in my mind. I can’t recall the city, or the hotel, or the year, but I remember that Harry Berger was speaking about Henry V. He was doing his own very special take on the play’s speech-making, the rhetorical efforts of the Chorus and of the king himself . It wasn’t shocking or new to see these as interrelated; that is, to observe similarities between the way Henry urges his men into battle and the way that the prologues impress upon the audience an analogous sense of 13 14 Enlisting in Harry Berger’s Imaginary Forces imagination and communal engagement in the theatrical process. What did remain forever engraved on me as I view the play, however, was his reading of the famous opening chorus in the light of the military rhetoric that is to come. He read some of the celebrated lines: Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts; Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance Think when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth; For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times, Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass. (Henry V, Prologue, 23–31) And he said—maybe it was even an aside, not part of the written text in front of him (does Harry speak with a written text in front of him?)— ‘‘What’s this guy trying to do? He’s trying to get us to join the army!’’ The play has never been the same for me since. It’s a few years later, and there is a small conference at Stanford on early modern literature and culture: a day and a half of a rather packed schedule, including brief papers and a couple of longer keynote addresses. Though Harry is not one of the speakers, he attends faithfully, sits in the front row, performs as a highly energetic discussant (even outside the discussion periods). The second keynote paper, while a bit long, was not without interest, but it traveled rather far, and with argumentation that was more allusive than it was syllogistic. I imagine that it wasn’t quite what the audience was expecting, and they probably needed a little help in giving it the benefit of the doubt, in letting themselves appreciate its poetics in the absence of its philology. The speaker finishes, there is a moment of silence during which the question of whether or not there will be applause hangs very heavy over the room (not to mention over the speaker), when from that front row, scarcely four feet from the podium, comes a loud stage whisper in a familiar accent: ‘‘God, that was cool!’’ The speaker’s happy fate was assured, and he—or should I say I?—could go on to engage in a splendid give-andtake both with Harry and with the rest of the room. So, an introduction to Harry Berger: a brilliant sensitivity to rhetoric; spectacular generosity; and not only that, but generosity toward a piece of 15 Leonard Barkan work that by no means possessed the kind of steel-trap reasoning and intensity of textual focus that characterize his own acts of persuasive literary rhetoric. I say this as though it were an attempt to sum...