Yes, a war intended to push Israel into the sea occasioned it Yes, the Israelis... And boy, did we start big! "Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews." How's that for a topic for a good night out? Not a motion you would expect any sane person to put his name to, since it is the equivalent of saying that if you don't lie down and die you have only yourself to blame. Not my favourite place, the theatre, and not my favourite play by Shakespeare. In fact my least favourite play by Shakespeare, not counting the lesser Henrys. But there are reasons to sit on your hands and put up with Lear, not the least of them being its forcible demonstration of the terrible ineluctability of event. Where, between the warring factions, was there sufficient acknowledgment of the tragedy which has befallen Palestinians and Israelis, and never mind whose grievance is greater? Also this week, speaking of passive enjoyment, I was inveigled into watching King Lear. There comes a moment when opinionating won't get us anywhere and we must give way to art.Tragedy was the word which kept occurring to me as I sat sick and sorry in the audience.
The audience is more respectful, let me tell you, when I am speaking. But then the art of debate as I see it is to make something out of nothing, to play with lightness until you coin a new and entirely unsuspected seriousness out of it, whereas the other night we began with such a something of a motion it was inevitable many on the platform would make a nothing of it.Start big and you'll end up small - that's the almost invariable rule of debate. The hero of Thomas Mann's novel Confessions of Felix Krull reports his discomfort while sitting in an audience at a circus watching clowns. Marvellous as he finds their antics, he cannot lend himself to the business of appreciation.
As a confidence trickster he is a sort of acrobat and clown himself, both entertainer and illusionist, and therefore cannot be as the seething crowd, who "merely enjoyed, and enjoyment is a passive condition" Call it "audience-fright" - that sudden blast of icy terror that hits you when you take your seat among those who passively enjoy.In fairness to this particular audience, however, I have to admit that passivity was not its defining characteristic. They stamped, they jeered, they shouted "Shame!", and no sooner did one person hit upon the felicitous formulation, "Answer the question!", than we all took a fancy to it, insisting that every speaker should "Answer the question!" even when a question had not been asked. Which doesn't leave much. Debating answers to a more intellectual craving, in my view. And might have something to do with the fact that the novel no longer contributes to the intellectual or ethical life of the nation. George Eliot once had the entire populace by the ears with such sentences as "We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves".
