Looking Backwards: The Powerful Presence of Precursors

Abstract

Looking Backwards:The Powerful Presence of Precursors Jeraldine R. Kraver Note: Our "Looking Backwards" selection continues to honor a promise made in the 80th anniversary issue of The CEA Critic to reprint past matters from the journal—articles, essays, notices, photos—that speak to the themes or topics pursued in the issue at hand. Typically, determining the past selection involves starting with a present one and then searching through the journal's archives for something that offers an interesting comparison or sets up a conversation. The paired essays for this issue of The CEA Critic capture in multiple ways the serendipitous nature of our profession. Both are focused on Jane Smiley's 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, a tale modeled on William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear. In the current issue, Jacob Berger, in his "Three Daughters, Two Stories, One Tragedy: Ownership and Incest in A Thousand Acres and King Lear," observes, By retelling a canonical text in this way, Acres invites readers to question and explore both common and uncommon perspectives in a culture's influential stories. Harold Bloom argues that Shakespeare's writing has defined literary understanding in how "Shakespeare has molded both our sense of reality and our cognitive modes of apprehending that reality" (1). With Acres, Smiley speaks to this "reality," particularly in the nature of villainous women such as Goneril and Regan, and the result is that the reader's view of Shakespeare's core story is changed forever. In developing his ideas, Berger cites Scott Vander Ploeg's 2006 ecocritically-tinged "A Thousand Acres of King Lear: Reading Shakespeare through Smiley," reprinted here. In it, Vander Ploeg explains how Smiley rejects the tendency of critics to "uniformly censure" Lear's daughters Goneril and Regan and uses the Cook sisters as part of a "literary revisionism that forces us away from great sympathy for their father." The daughters are, he continues, "used up in the play, just as the land is, that they are resources that Lear wastes through pride or dementia" (39). Vander Ploeg concludes, "Obviously, Shakespeare isn't concerned with pesticides or hog farms, but Lear's abuse of natural resources is an awareness brought by Smiley that seems quite apt. She intimates that Shakespeare shows what Vander Ploeg describes as "a dawning awareness of the use and potential abuse of the natural world, and that this constitutes an undercurrent running throughout [End Page 40] the play" (38). At the least, for either Berger or Vander Ploeg, Smiley provides a lens that shows how and why Shakespeare remains current. Beyond the different approaches to Smiley offered by our two authors, I was struck by Berger's reference to Harold Bloom in the conclusion to his essay. It made me think about Bloom's theories of "precursors" and "ephebes" and the notion that both our authors attend to the nature of retelling or recasting of (the precursor) Shakespeare's work by (the ephebe) Smiley. However, by choosing the word "precursor" in the title of this introduction, I do not wish to interpret the relationships between precursors and the ephebes as anxious—a Bloomian idea—but more through the simpler and far more prosaic fact that we all inherit something from those who journey before us. That perspective bears some remark about the small and sometimes wonderful world of the CEA. Vander Ploeg's essay appeared in a special issue of The CEA Critic honoring long-time CEA member and former president John T. Shawcross. The issue was guest-edited by The CEA Critic's current Managing Editor, Peter Kratzke (who back then never imagined he would assume the latter position). At the University of Kentucky, where Dr. Shawcross taught during the last decades of a stellar career, he mentored Scott, Peter, and me. We were his ephebi. In the preface to his essay, Vander Ploeg speaks to Dr. Shawcross' "careful scholarship, eclectic erudition, and overwhelming generosity" (36). Much of that generosity was directed towards graduate students, a seemingly countless number of whom Dr. Shawcross introduced to the College English Association—a social function integral to the CEA's mission. In the same spirit, The CEA Critic is committed to publishing as...