Tempestuous Procedures

Sometime around 1610, Shakespeare penned The Tempest, one of his most famous and interesting works.  Except he didn't really write it.  At least not the whole thing.  On his own.  I dislike as much as anyone bickering and arguing about whether Mr. Shaxpere or Sir Bacon, or whomever the hell else might be involved actually wrote one play, sonnet, line, or word, but evidence in The Tempest is overwhelming.  Yet this work remains, without the Author's explicit signature, one of the great literary masterpieces of all time.  The work, whether we like it or not, is a great work, with or without Shakespeare's involvement.  If it was completed by a court jester or a plebeian patch worker, or a bourgeois land-owner, our Marxist critics will have a bit of a time reading it, but they cannot deny its beauty (actually, the New World allusions, the dis-Utopian and power-play tendencies of the play make it quite a Marxist mayhem!).

I assume that I do not need to argue the point that The Tempest is a great work.  Nor should I need to argue that it stands apart from its author(s).  But consider this:

A new wave of posthumous books by iconic authors is stirring debate over how publishers should handle fragmentary literary remains. Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010.

How can I logically read a Graham Greene or Vladimir Nabokov novel I know has been tampered with?  Do I want to read it?  I have become familiar with the authors based on the books I have read previously, and now it is quite difficult to overcome my desire to reject these posthumous offerings.

My reasons for not wanting to read these books are different than you may think.  It is not because I want to preserve an aura of health and holiness around the author's oeuvre.  I have come to terms with the fact that someone I have never heard of, who was chosen at random by Knopf's low-ranking no-name publisher, will finish Vlad's book.  Nor do I really care whether he or Twain or Kafka requested that their stuff be burned (they should have burned it themselves, a fact which reduces their intelligence in my mind) after death.  I don't want to read the books for the same reason I have never liked Michael Jordan--it's all a publicity stunt.

The Original of Laura, will cause more debate over its construction and publication than over its literary content.  That pisses me off.  The publisher is going to put the 138 index cards that the novel was penned on in perforated sheets so you can reconstruct the novel yourself.  WTF.  Lolita was written the same way.  Can you imagine putting Humbert Humbert's reflections on innocence after his final encounter with Lola?  Didn't think so.  This is the most ridiculous marketing ploy in the history of mankind.  People will do what I am doing now--they will berate the publishers, tear apart the novel before they have read it, then read it and pine for the last wishes of a great and dead white man--and the publishers will use it to make more fatuous and puerile productions to draw in those who have never before thought about reading a 500 page novel.

As Prospero says in the Epilogue to his play,

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

I hope to God that the writings of average authors will stand above their stories and give good credit to the only name that will appear on the dust jacket (besides Alfred A. Knopf pub., or HarperCollins).  That they may say, "What strength I have's mine own."