The Weird Sisters (from The Life and Death of the Brothers Macbeth)

Abstract

How can critical writing recover the experience of a story at its most engaged — an experience in which we might linger upon details or in margins; in which images repeatedly exceed the speaker, working autonomously from the exigencies of their moment; in which we expand what is given and imagine beyond it, zoom in and out at unpredictable moments? In thus expanding or contracting with our altering recognitions and sympathies, the self is experienced as a succession, sometimes a simultaneous succession, of emissary-selves. In such a case one will undoubtedly experience more antagonisms than any singular subjectivity can warrant. Intense art-experience defies, even embarrasses the presupposed, secure self. It is densely meshed and riven as chain-mail. This is because the artwork is not an object: it is a subject, and many subjects.