Tribune. Edgar Illas
Professor of Catalan culture and literature at the University of Indiana
Shakespeare in the supermarket
In Indiana every Saturday morning, my son and I go shopping while my wife stays at home doing housework. At nine, we go to the farmer's market to buy lettuce, chard, potatoes, onions and bread. After that, we go to the organic shop where we buy fresh products: tomatoes, fruit, cheese and milk. Then it's off to the fishmonger's, which also sells meat. Finally, we end up in the supermarket where we get cleaning products, sparkling water, oil, ice cream and nappies.
In each place you find a different type of person: neo-rurals and alternative youngsters in the farmer's market, teachers and professionals in the organic food shop and the fishmonger's, and working people in the supermarket. The topics of conversation also vary. The professionals talk about technical subjects (university, politics, wine), while working people talk more about general topics (the weather, kids, unending work days).
A few days ago we were at the supermarket checkout and I asked the cashier if she could put the sparkling water in two bags so that the bottle would not break. (In the States, the cashiers also pack your bags). “Could you please double-bag the water?” I asked. She assented but added: “Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” I asked her what she meant and she told me that she was quoting verses from the play Macbeth, the famous work of William Shakespeare. The verses she quoted are said by the witches at the beginning of Act IV.
Social purpose
We all consider culture to be important. However, we must also remember that culture has social uses. Shakespeare can be used in two ways: to show social distinction, in other words as a mere aesthetic signal that allows us to establish our social class, or in the way that the cashier used the lines, to subvert social expectations, allowing the speaker to extend his or her range of experience and possibilities. This does not mean that culture only has a liberating function in the hands of the lower classes. However, it does have a dynamic and creative effect if it creates some type of short-circuit between the fiction projected and the social situation that frames it. If this destabilising effect does not take place, culture becomes merely a thing of pleasure or just a way of showing off privilege.
Yet that does not necessarily mean that culture has to lead to revolutionary action. In fact, the opposite may be true: to the extent that the cashier finds liberation through Shakespeare, she is not focusing on the specific struggle against the exploitation of her job. Thus there is no direct causality between culture and politics. Culture perhaps does not generate what was known before as class consciousness, but nor must it be understood as a humanist product wrapped in cellophane. Culture makes sense when it edifies and creates fissures, when it shines a light on the world and at the same time when it reveals that which unites and separates the cashier and the customer from the conveyor belt, the thin bags and the damned credit card machine.
