Harold Bloom hinted at this in his Shakespeare book, and it's hard not to see the point here, which he has elaborated on in his new book:
"It does not matter that Satan is an obsessed theist and Hamlet is not .... Two angelic intellects inhabit a common abyss: the post-Enlightenment ever-augmenting inner self, of which Hamlet is a precursor ...."
--from The Anatomy of Influence, as quoted in the New York Times Book Review
What Bloom might add here is that Montaigne is the to some extent the real-life antecedent to both of these characters.
It is easy, perhaps, to dismiss Bloom as pompous and bombastic, but it is not easy to dismiss the pull of his ideas, and I cannot help but feel that more often than not there is the ring of something valid in what he has to say.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Trappings and Suits of Woe
There's a moment--in poetry, in culture--when melancholy, the traditional form of sadness, gives way to depression of a more modern and clinical sort. It wasn't Freud, really, but the aftermath of Freud, something in the ever more specialized post-war culture, that signified the shift. Freud was still grounded enough in the classics--he wasn't really a social scientist--and there is something relentlessly romantic about the notion that one's psychological suffering can be identified by its classification via mythology. To see your own anguish in terms of that of Oedipus or Electra is to give a certain dignity and gravity to it that would defy the effects of prescription medication. This is psychological afflication as fate. The shift from sadness as melancholy (grounded either in fate or in a Galenic humor, to be treated historically by bleeding, then by Freud through a cure that is verbal if not essentially literary) to sadness as clinical depression (to be treated--ineffectively, as it most often turns out to the poet--by therapy) occurs with the confessional poets, and at this point I wonder if one could ever go back to the way things were. (We have since made the shift from therapy to drugs, but that is not relevant to the poets I am thinking of--Plath, Sexton, Berryman--who succumbed in the pre-drug era.)
Melancholy is primarily, though not exclusively, a British phenomenon in English-language poetry. We Yankees have been too busy carving out a home in the wilderness--or to wrought in our siamese-twin national obsessions, religion and capitalism--to feel the weight of our sadnesses, and neither Hawthorne's frequent gloominess nor Poe's rabid mania qualify as melancholy. Consider, by contrast, the moodiness of Hamlet, which either stems from a temporary imbalance of the humors (that is, it is situational, resulting from his father's untimely death) or emerges naturally as an innate aspect of his character (which is also his fate, the two terms being nearly synonymous, most of the time, for Shakespeare*). Cranky old Coleridge was not unfamiliar with melancholy, and of course Keats, staring his own mortality in the eyes, knew it intimately. Byron's bravado bears a trace of it. W. H. Auden might be said to be a 20th century inheritor of it, but then he had those religious longings that sidetracked him. Going back, though, even the Beowulf poet, with his grim fatalism, knew it: with every monster defeated, another one sprang up with bloody claws in its wake, and then what do you have? Thus the meadhalls full of warriors sad in their cups, and the keaning laments of the women that so pervade the poem.
As for Americans, we can take as an example of the pre-clinical culture of sadness Robert Frost, a poet whose sober, earthy groundedness sometimes (when he is at his best, I think) gives way to melancholy of a traditional sort. "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening" is perhaps the best instance of Frost's melancholy. Reading this poem as a sort of thinly veiled death wish does, I believe, overshoot the mark. It is not death per se that the speaker is longing for as much as it is a communion with nature that he can only have through death. The speaker is the inheritor not of the British tradition of melancholy (though he possesses melancholy, which we might define as a pervasive sadness, or sadness as a state of being) but rather of an opposite tradition: New England Transcendentalism. His melancholy presents itself in spite of this inheritance, but also because of it. It is worth noting that the Romantic poets in England exulted in nature but were stung by the ephemeral qualities of human experience, by the passage of time and by the inevitability of death. American Romantics--the Transcendentalists--gave us "Thanatopsis" instead--the triumph over death through a communion with nature. Frost is a displaced Thoreau, really, who took a different path in that yellow wood, and in this poem the speaker seems to be lamenting the fact that he cannot be Thoreau in practice. Melancholy then emanates from the poem because it describes a condition of being that cannot be resolved favorably and a pervasive disappointment that results. It also describes--"miles to go before I sleep"--the speaker's resolution to endure this state of being, and this, too, is essential to melancholy. The speaker is not suicidal; he knows how to endure a disappointment, and that is perhaps the very definition of melancholy.
Lowell, Plath, Berryman, Sexton, Bishop--theirs is the poetry of a more modern depressive state. Despite their best efforts to fight it, their sadnesses (and their manic dispositions) drove them mad. The suicide rate alone for the five poets above tells a story: 60%. What kept Lowell and Bishop from joining the others is a tale for someone who knows them better than I do. Perhaps they were better at self-medication. The difference between the melancholics and the depressives clearly emerges from a cultural disposition, not just in the way we treat the sad see themselves or how we treat the sad in our midst but in how we define attitudes toward life. Life, we take it for granted now, is something to be enjoyed. Life in the past was so often something to be guarded or perhaps simply endured: tuberculosis, plague, high infant mortality rates, malnutrition, chimney sweeps who rarely made it to the age of ten. There was plenty to be unhappy about it in the past, but here and now in the land of plenty we feel that if we are not happy, there is something wrong with us. In a modern, industrialized nation, we often feel that there is nothing to separate us from our own unhappiness except for ourselves.
What most separates confessional poetry, though, from its antecedents is the intense awareness on the part of these poets that what they are facing is a clinical condition--and the accompanying notion that poetry itself just might be the therapy they need. This is most clearly the case for Sexton, who literally began writing poetry as therapy. Then there was the realization, for Plath and Sexton at least, that poetry couldn't do it--it couldn't save their lives--and their subsequent suicides.
Consider, by contrast, Keats' treatment of melancholy in his Ode to it. There is joy in life, but it is ephemeral, and its satisfactions leave you dissatisfied with what ensues. A cheap summary of the poem, no doubt, but it gets the central point across: that melancholy is something to be endured. That suicidal despression may be impossible to endure is the subject of another time and another poet.
------------------------------------------
* Incidentally, from a modern, deterministic perspective, we could also see character as fate today--product of a biological, genetic, or psychological determination, rather than something astrological, but fate nonetheless.
Melancholy is primarily, though not exclusively, a British phenomenon in English-language poetry. We Yankees have been too busy carving out a home in the wilderness--or to wrought in our siamese-twin national obsessions, religion and capitalism--to feel the weight of our sadnesses, and neither Hawthorne's frequent gloominess nor Poe's rabid mania qualify as melancholy. Consider, by contrast, the moodiness of Hamlet, which either stems from a temporary imbalance of the humors (that is, it is situational, resulting from his father's untimely death) or emerges naturally as an innate aspect of his character (which is also his fate, the two terms being nearly synonymous, most of the time, for Shakespeare*). Cranky old Coleridge was not unfamiliar with melancholy, and of course Keats, staring his own mortality in the eyes, knew it intimately. Byron's bravado bears a trace of it. W. H. Auden might be said to be a 20th century inheritor of it, but then he had those religious longings that sidetracked him. Going back, though, even the Beowulf poet, with his grim fatalism, knew it: with every monster defeated, another one sprang up with bloody claws in its wake, and then what do you have? Thus the meadhalls full of warriors sad in their cups, and the keaning laments of the women that so pervade the poem.
As for Americans, we can take as an example of the pre-clinical culture of sadness Robert Frost, a poet whose sober, earthy groundedness sometimes (when he is at his best, I think) gives way to melancholy of a traditional sort. "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening" is perhaps the best instance of Frost's melancholy. Reading this poem as a sort of thinly veiled death wish does, I believe, overshoot the mark. It is not death per se that the speaker is longing for as much as it is a communion with nature that he can only have through death. The speaker is the inheritor not of the British tradition of melancholy (though he possesses melancholy, which we might define as a pervasive sadness, or sadness as a state of being) but rather of an opposite tradition: New England Transcendentalism. His melancholy presents itself in spite of this inheritance, but also because of it. It is worth noting that the Romantic poets in England exulted in nature but were stung by the ephemeral qualities of human experience, by the passage of time and by the inevitability of death. American Romantics--the Transcendentalists--gave us "Thanatopsis" instead--the triumph over death through a communion with nature. Frost is a displaced Thoreau, really, who took a different path in that yellow wood, and in this poem the speaker seems to be lamenting the fact that he cannot be Thoreau in practice. Melancholy then emanates from the poem because it describes a condition of being that cannot be resolved favorably and a pervasive disappointment that results. It also describes--"miles to go before I sleep"--the speaker's resolution to endure this state of being, and this, too, is essential to melancholy. The speaker is not suicidal; he knows how to endure a disappointment, and that is perhaps the very definition of melancholy.
Lowell, Plath, Berryman, Sexton, Bishop--theirs is the poetry of a more modern depressive state. Despite their best efforts to fight it, their sadnesses (and their manic dispositions) drove them mad. The suicide rate alone for the five poets above tells a story: 60%. What kept Lowell and Bishop from joining the others is a tale for someone who knows them better than I do. Perhaps they were better at self-medication. The difference between the melancholics and the depressives clearly emerges from a cultural disposition, not just in the way we treat the sad see themselves or how we treat the sad in our midst but in how we define attitudes toward life. Life, we take it for granted now, is something to be enjoyed. Life in the past was so often something to be guarded or perhaps simply endured: tuberculosis, plague, high infant mortality rates, malnutrition, chimney sweeps who rarely made it to the age of ten. There was plenty to be unhappy about it in the past, but here and now in the land of plenty we feel that if we are not happy, there is something wrong with us. In a modern, industrialized nation, we often feel that there is nothing to separate us from our own unhappiness except for ourselves.
What most separates confessional poetry, though, from its antecedents is the intense awareness on the part of these poets that what they are facing is a clinical condition--and the accompanying notion that poetry itself just might be the therapy they need. This is most clearly the case for Sexton, who literally began writing poetry as therapy. Then there was the realization, for Plath and Sexton at least, that poetry couldn't do it--it couldn't save their lives--and their subsequent suicides.
Consider, by contrast, Keats' treatment of melancholy in his Ode to it. There is joy in life, but it is ephemeral, and its satisfactions leave you dissatisfied with what ensues. A cheap summary of the poem, no doubt, but it gets the central point across: that melancholy is something to be endured. That suicidal despression may be impossible to endure is the subject of another time and another poet.
------------------------------------------
* Incidentally, from a modern, deterministic perspective, we could also see character as fate today--product of a biological, genetic, or psychological determination, rather than something astrological, but fate nonetheless.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Hamlet and Identity
Hamlet is one or more of the following:
"To thine own self be true": to which of these selves ought he be true? All of them, apparently, at one point or another.
Hamlet tries out the different roles until he finds the one that is most dramatically expedient. The play is like a maze, a game that Hamlet plays until he finds his way out--which is to say that he finds his fate, which is death.
The identity Hamlet creates for himself in Act 5 is a result of his experiences in Act 4, Scene 4, and in Act 5, Scene 1: the only two scenes in the play that take place outside of Elsinore. Hamlet has to get outside, get a bit of fresh air, observe Fortinbras, and dig about in the dirt a little to figure out his motivation. The graveyard scene is perhaps most apt: Hamlet fears death; he muses on the fate of the body, and then he viacariously encounters that fate in the most direct of fashions. He even ends up inside of a grave for a while, wrestling with Laertes. Finally, death is no longer a thought but a reality. Hamlet learns something from the gravedigger as well: that death is something one can grow accustomed to in such a way that the jokes can lose their sting. What is death to the gravedigger? A business opportunity, and that is all.
It is the intersection of all of the above identities that Hamlet stands upon in Act 5, Scene 2. Hamlet's allusion to scripture, his belief in the "special providence in the fall of a sparrow," is less a full-fledged Christian precept than it is a representation of the intersection of Christianity and stoicism, where the two modes of living arc together on the Venn diagram. Hamlet summarizes his acceptance of fate in two words: "Let be." He knows the role he is supposed to play, and he plays it. And in doing so, he robs death of its glory, which is and always has been merely the fear of it.
A university-trained scholar.
A scientific rationalist.
A follower of stoic philosophy.
Montaignean skeptic.
Clinically depressed son/son-in-law/nephew.
A paltry lover.
Actor/dramaturge.
A Christian prince.
A pagan warrior.
Machiavellian killer.
A tricky fool, more fit to be son of the late king's jester than son of the late king himself.
"To thine own self be true": to which of these selves ought he be true? All of them, apparently, at one point or another.
Hamlet tries out the different roles until he finds the one that is most dramatically expedient. The play is like a maze, a game that Hamlet plays until he finds his way out--which is to say that he finds his fate, which is death.
The identity Hamlet creates for himself in Act 5 is a result of his experiences in Act 4, Scene 4, and in Act 5, Scene 1: the only two scenes in the play that take place outside of Elsinore. Hamlet has to get outside, get a bit of fresh air, observe Fortinbras, and dig about in the dirt a little to figure out his motivation. The graveyard scene is perhaps most apt: Hamlet fears death; he muses on the fate of the body, and then he viacariously encounters that fate in the most direct of fashions. He even ends up inside of a grave for a while, wrestling with Laertes. Finally, death is no longer a thought but a reality. Hamlet learns something from the gravedigger as well: that death is something one can grow accustomed to in such a way that the jokes can lose their sting. What is death to the gravedigger? A business opportunity, and that is all.
It is the intersection of all of the above identities that Hamlet stands upon in Act 5, Scene 2. Hamlet's allusion to scripture, his belief in the "special providence in the fall of a sparrow," is less a full-fledged Christian precept than it is a representation of the intersection of Christianity and stoicism, where the two modes of living arc together on the Venn diagram. Hamlet summarizes his acceptance of fate in two words: "Let be." He knows the role he is supposed to play, and he plays it. And in doing so, he robs death of its glory, which is and always has been merely the fear of it.
Hamlet and Montaigne
Montaigne establishes one of his essays upon a quotation from Cicero: "To Philosophie is no other thing, than for a man to prepare himself for death."
Shakespeare knew Cicero. Shakespeare also certainly read Montaigne, or at least some Montaigne, later in his career; we have passages from The Tempest that mimic Montaigne's "Of the Caniballes" as proof. Shakespeare was reportedly a friend of John Florio, Montaigne's first English translator, and may have read early translations before they were published in 1603.
Hamlet was written some two or three years before the publication of Montaigne's essays in English, but it is thrilling to think that there may be some link between the two. Certainly, there is a likeness in sensibility. Hamlet seems an enactment of a principle asserted by Montaigne:
Montaigne writes: "You have seene many who have found good in death, ending thereby many many miseries" (Book I, XIX). This is the very lesson Hamlet seems to have learned by Act V.
Hamlet represents a revolution in drama, a new mode not only for Shakespeare but for all literature. The intense inwardness of the title character was previously unknown to the stage, to poetry, even. The soliloquys are unprecedented in their depth of expression, in their complexity. Rank biographical speculation bears little fruit, I believe, but here is a plum: what if Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne prompted this revolution?--prompted Hamlet?
We can never know the extent to which Montaigne influenced Shakespeare. Regardless, the two operate so much in parallel that they are rightly acknowledged as co-founders of the modern sensibility, giving us, among other things, the vision of the fragmented self and a modern attitude toward death that, despite the real or supposed Christianity of both authors, is founded ultimately upon a secular humanist attitude, one borne of much reflective thought.
Shakespeare knew Cicero. Shakespeare also certainly read Montaigne, or at least some Montaigne, later in his career; we have passages from The Tempest that mimic Montaigne's "Of the Caniballes" as proof. Shakespeare was reportedly a friend of John Florio, Montaigne's first English translator, and may have read early translations before they were published in 1603.
Hamlet was written some two or three years before the publication of Montaigne's essays in English, but it is thrilling to think that there may be some link between the two. Certainly, there is a likeness in sensibility. Hamlet seems an enactment of a principle asserted by Montaigne:
So have I learned this custome or lesson, to have alwaies death, not only in my imagination but continually in my mouth. And there is nothing I desire more to be informed of, than of the death of men; that is to say, what words, what countenance, and what face they shew at their death. (Book I, XIX)
Montaigne writes: "You have seene many who have found good in death, ending thereby many many miseries" (Book I, XIX). This is the very lesson Hamlet seems to have learned by Act V.
Hamlet represents a revolution in drama, a new mode not only for Shakespeare but for all literature. The intense inwardness of the title character was previously unknown to the stage, to poetry, even. The soliloquys are unprecedented in their depth of expression, in their complexity. Rank biographical speculation bears little fruit, I believe, but here is a plum: what if Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne prompted this revolution?--prompted Hamlet?
We can never know the extent to which Montaigne influenced Shakespeare. Regardless, the two operate so much in parallel that they are rightly acknowledged as co-founders of the modern sensibility, giving us, among other things, the vision of the fragmented self and a modern attitude toward death that, despite the real or supposed Christianity of both authors, is founded ultimately upon a secular humanist attitude, one borne of much reflective thought.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Wherefore Hamlet?
One of the challenges of reading Hamlet is to figure out what the fuss is all about.
To wit, Hamlet's most famous soliloquy, "To be or not to be ..." Some of the most famous lines in the English language.
Why? Most of us do not walk around in a suicidal depression on a day to day basis.
But we do possess an awareness of our own mortality, and Hamlet dealt with that awareness on a level more profound than anyone before and perhaps since. And we do, each of us, have to find a way to live in this world, which is to endure the suffering that it presents to us. And in the modern world, with a multiplicity of viewpoints beyond the received truth of the medieval church, this challenge takes on further complications.
Hamlet wanted to know the meaning of death. He questioned it bluntly and boldly and with a degree of thoughtfulness previously impossible. A by-product of the Reformation, Hamlet inhabits a world that is not fully Catholic or Protestant; he is in a sense the first post-Christian figure in literature because conventional religious sensibility is insufficient to him in answering questions about death. This does not necessarily make Hamlet an atheist, but it does make him agnostic or at least a doubter. No one could have gotten away with a public expression of doubt in those old Church of England days except for a character on stage; the law wouldn't have allowed it. But certainly people were thinking it: with Catholics and Protestant splitting each other to bits all across Europe, it might lead a sensible person to doubt the validity of the enterprise altogether. But one couldn't say so except on a stage.
Then there's the matter of two value systems in conflict: the Christian one that forbids suicide as a mortal sin and the classical-stoical one that condones it under certain circumstances. Hamlet grapples with stoical precepts throughout the play, but he cannot free himself from his passions, from his own depth of feeling. If stoicism is about the denial of feeling in order to endure the "slings and arrows" that come automatically with living in this world, then Hamlet is not a stoic, because Hamlet is nothing if not two things: thoughtful and full of feeling. It is above all his capacity for emotional depth and not his critical thinking skills that make him admirable. And it is depth of feeling that an audience expects to see when they see Hamlet.
To wit, Hamlet's most famous soliloquy, "To be or not to be ..." Some of the most famous lines in the English language.
Why? Most of us do not walk around in a suicidal depression on a day to day basis.
But we do possess an awareness of our own mortality, and Hamlet dealt with that awareness on a level more profound than anyone before and perhaps since. And we do, each of us, have to find a way to live in this world, which is to endure the suffering that it presents to us. And in the modern world, with a multiplicity of viewpoints beyond the received truth of the medieval church, this challenge takes on further complications.
Hamlet wanted to know the meaning of death. He questioned it bluntly and boldly and with a degree of thoughtfulness previously impossible. A by-product of the Reformation, Hamlet inhabits a world that is not fully Catholic or Protestant; he is in a sense the first post-Christian figure in literature because conventional religious sensibility is insufficient to him in answering questions about death. This does not necessarily make Hamlet an atheist, but it does make him agnostic or at least a doubter. No one could have gotten away with a public expression of doubt in those old Church of England days except for a character on stage; the law wouldn't have allowed it. But certainly people were thinking it: with Catholics and Protestant splitting each other to bits all across Europe, it might lead a sensible person to doubt the validity of the enterprise altogether. But one couldn't say so except on a stage.
Then there's the matter of two value systems in conflict: the Christian one that forbids suicide as a mortal sin and the classical-stoical one that condones it under certain circumstances. Hamlet grapples with stoical precepts throughout the play, but he cannot free himself from his passions, from his own depth of feeling. If stoicism is about the denial of feeling in order to endure the "slings and arrows" that come automatically with living in this world, then Hamlet is not a stoic, because Hamlet is nothing if not two things: thoughtful and full of feeling. It is above all his capacity for emotional depth and not his critical thinking skills that make him admirable. And it is depth of feeling that an audience expects to see when they see Hamlet.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Hamlet and Meaning
I.
Either meaning is transcendentally signified, or it is not. In Hamlet, it is not. Thus Hamlet's predicament: there are no set principles upon which to act, so he must define them himself. No mean task, that.
A. D. Nuttall uses the word "vertiginous" to describe Hamlet's famous line "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Indeed, the entire play could be described as vertiginous. Hamlet's vertigo, then, is the consequence of understanding that things are only what you define them to be, that you are only what your mind defines yourself to be. Here is the power of mind, which is both a creative force and a destructive force at once. Out of it, Hamlet must invent a self. He has less than four acts left to do it. How?
II.
Polonius offers us the stoic commonplace, so often quoted out of context, "to thine own self be true." To determine the utility of this advice, we must not only look at the character who speaks these words (at best, a doddering fool; at worst, right-hand to a fratricidal murderer) but also consider how they might apply to Hamlet himself were the advice given to him: to what self ought he to be true? Hamlet begins the play a mopey undergrad and ends as something entirely different, not quite a warrior, but someone who can play the role of the warrior to good effect. In between (that is, for the vast bulk of the play), he is nebulously defined. Vertigo is his only identity.
Hamlet is merely an amalgam of words, always shifting, disappearing. He wishes the body to "resolve itself into a dew," but it is only identity that proves itself vaporous, not the body for which Hamlet has so much disdain. Either he possesses no self to which to be true or the self to which he ought be true is no self that's going to get him anywhere he wants to be. Hamlet is a modern character because he faces the same predicament we face in the modern world: he must invent the idea of that self that he hopes to become, and he must then struggle to become it. Easier said than done, even for a character whose only existence is words on a page (or drifting to the heavens from the stage).
III.
Thus Hamlet's preoccupation with drama, which is also Prospero's preoccupation with drama, which also must certainly be Shakespeare's obsession with drama. It is through drama that Hamlet hopes to discover truth. One philosophy of Polonius that is actionable: "by indirections find directions out." Reality--that is, certainty--can be mined by sifting carefully the grains of illusion.
It has been observed that Hamlet is out of place in his own play, a tricksy fool miscast in the part of the prince. Hamlet needs to learn his part, and once he does the actions will define him.
IV.
Harold Bloom says that Hamlet is no more obsessed with death than any other Shakespeare play, but that can't be right. A play that not only contemplates life and death but hinges on suicidal impulse must be said to explore the meaning of death from a singular perspective. The core of the play is the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and in this speech Hamlet identifies the uncertainty of death--"the undiscovered country"--as that which "puzzles the will." Hamlet does not know if death is something he ought to embrace or something he ought to flee from. He accuses himself of cowardice, but if this is so it is a cowardice in need of qualification: a metaphysical cowardice--looking over the edge of the abyss and not knowing where to place your foot--and no mere knocking of the knees with fright.
Hamlet's core problem is that he does not understand the meaning of death. Once he figures that out, he can learn how to live, even if to do so means to proceed posthaste toward his own certain death. Thus, as Montaigne, quoting Cicero, has it: "To philosophize is to learn how to die." Hamlet confronts the uncertainty of death until he finds certainty: and the certainty is that of the grave. This knowledge becomes bedrock for him in Act 5.
V.
The experience upon which Hamlet forges an identity--the experience upon which he rights himself and overcomes his vertigo--is the direct confrontation with death. More than Fortinbras, more then the gravedigger or even Yorick, it is the soil itself--the desolate patch of ground that Fortinbras sends an army to its potential doom to gain, the muck of Yorick's grave, the fresh dirt of Ophelia's--the soil that he will relentlessly become, that gives Hamlet certain knowledge of death. Once he knows it--once he has prepped for his part, practiced the method--then he knows he can play the part. "The readiness is all": Hamlet decides to determine his being through his actions and not through his death. He decides to accept his fate and not to defy it. He will face the uncertainty, which has become a certainty: that the "quintessence of dust" is indeed just that, just so many skulls in the dirt.
VI.
Ultimately, Hamlet goes beyond good and evil, beyond God, beyond character as it is traditionally understood, to a secular mode of being that is on its own level, framed in the mind. There is a relativism at work here, both ethical and epistemological, and it is true that Hamlet--like every other Shakespeare play--offers no moral truths. In fact, it is predicated on the assumption that there are no hard and fast moral truths as we wish to understand them. That is, there are no transcendentally signified moral truths. The only values that matter are the ones that Hamlet himself resolves to believe in.
One cannot disavow relativism simply because it bears the potential to present unpleasant consequences. Hamlet gives us those unpleasant consequences--and, in its final act, a way to get past them. It is the power of the mind that causes trouble for Hamlet--more so than his uncle, a middling sort of villain for Shakespeare--but it is also the power of the mind that renders to Hamlet a sense of self, forged from experience.
Either meaning is transcendentally signified, or it is not. In Hamlet, it is not. Thus Hamlet's predicament: there are no set principles upon which to act, so he must define them himself. No mean task, that.
A. D. Nuttall uses the word "vertiginous" to describe Hamlet's famous line "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Indeed, the entire play could be described as vertiginous. Hamlet's vertigo, then, is the consequence of understanding that things are only what you define them to be, that you are only what your mind defines yourself to be. Here is the power of mind, which is both a creative force and a destructive force at once. Out of it, Hamlet must invent a self. He has less than four acts left to do it. How?
II.
Polonius offers us the stoic commonplace, so often quoted out of context, "to thine own self be true." To determine the utility of this advice, we must not only look at the character who speaks these words (at best, a doddering fool; at worst, right-hand to a fratricidal murderer) but also consider how they might apply to Hamlet himself were the advice given to him: to what self ought he to be true? Hamlet begins the play a mopey undergrad and ends as something entirely different, not quite a warrior, but someone who can play the role of the warrior to good effect. In between (that is, for the vast bulk of the play), he is nebulously defined. Vertigo is his only identity.
Hamlet is merely an amalgam of words, always shifting, disappearing. He wishes the body to "resolve itself into a dew," but it is only identity that proves itself vaporous, not the body for which Hamlet has so much disdain. Either he possesses no self to which to be true or the self to which he ought be true is no self that's going to get him anywhere he wants to be. Hamlet is a modern character because he faces the same predicament we face in the modern world: he must invent the idea of that self that he hopes to become, and he must then struggle to become it. Easier said than done, even for a character whose only existence is words on a page (or drifting to the heavens from the stage).
III.
Thus Hamlet's preoccupation with drama, which is also Prospero's preoccupation with drama, which also must certainly be Shakespeare's obsession with drama. It is through drama that Hamlet hopes to discover truth. One philosophy of Polonius that is actionable: "by indirections find directions out." Reality--that is, certainty--can be mined by sifting carefully the grains of illusion.
It has been observed that Hamlet is out of place in his own play, a tricksy fool miscast in the part of the prince. Hamlet needs to learn his part, and once he does the actions will define him.
IV.
Harold Bloom says that Hamlet is no more obsessed with death than any other Shakespeare play, but that can't be right. A play that not only contemplates life and death but hinges on suicidal impulse must be said to explore the meaning of death from a singular perspective. The core of the play is the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and in this speech Hamlet identifies the uncertainty of death--"the undiscovered country"--as that which "puzzles the will." Hamlet does not know if death is something he ought to embrace or something he ought to flee from. He accuses himself of cowardice, but if this is so it is a cowardice in need of qualification: a metaphysical cowardice--looking over the edge of the abyss and not knowing where to place your foot--and no mere knocking of the knees with fright.
Hamlet's core problem is that he does not understand the meaning of death. Once he figures that out, he can learn how to live, even if to do so means to proceed posthaste toward his own certain death. Thus, as Montaigne, quoting Cicero, has it: "To philosophize is to learn how to die." Hamlet confronts the uncertainty of death until he finds certainty: and the certainty is that of the grave. This knowledge becomes bedrock for him in Act 5.
V.
The experience upon which Hamlet forges an identity--the experience upon which he rights himself and overcomes his vertigo--is the direct confrontation with death. More than Fortinbras, more then the gravedigger or even Yorick, it is the soil itself--the desolate patch of ground that Fortinbras sends an army to its potential doom to gain, the muck of Yorick's grave, the fresh dirt of Ophelia's--the soil that he will relentlessly become, that gives Hamlet certain knowledge of death. Once he knows it--once he has prepped for his part, practiced the method--then he knows he can play the part. "The readiness is all": Hamlet decides to determine his being through his actions and not through his death. He decides to accept his fate and not to defy it. He will face the uncertainty, which has become a certainty: that the "quintessence of dust" is indeed just that, just so many skulls in the dirt.
VI.
Ultimately, Hamlet goes beyond good and evil, beyond God, beyond character as it is traditionally understood, to a secular mode of being that is on its own level, framed in the mind. There is a relativism at work here, both ethical and epistemological, and it is true that Hamlet--like every other Shakespeare play--offers no moral truths. In fact, it is predicated on the assumption that there are no hard and fast moral truths as we wish to understand them. That is, there are no transcendentally signified moral truths. The only values that matter are the ones that Hamlet himself resolves to believe in.
One cannot disavow relativism simply because it bears the potential to present unpleasant consequences. Hamlet gives us those unpleasant consequences--and, in its final act, a way to get past them. It is the power of the mind that causes trouble for Hamlet--more so than his uncle, a middling sort of villain for Shakespeare--but it is also the power of the mind that renders to Hamlet a sense of self, forged from experience.
Friday, October 22, 2010
A Soul at the White Heat
Brenda Wineapple's White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson is, if nothing else, worthwhile for one great feat that it accomplishes: to rescue the reputation of Higginson from that of being a mere sidenote in the story of how Emily Dickinson's poetry was first published to the masses. In Wineapple's presentation, Higginson is not so much the bumbling editor who nearly demolishes Dickinson's accomplishments in the process of preparing her poems for posthumous publication, or the product of the then-fading era of Transcendentalism who cannot recognize The New when he really sees it, as he is a man on the cusp of two movements, a man on the verge of the modern but not wholly of it, who has the sensitivity to recognize Dickinson's genius without the capacity to fully understand it. In fact, no one in Dickinson's time understood her poetry; Higginson at least realized that the future would understand her. And Dickinson realized that she had an ally in Higginson, someone who would at the least be receptive to the possibility of her genius at a time when no one else was willing to entertain the thought of it. What Dickinson sought from Higginson, despite all the talk of "precepter" and "pupil" in her letters, was sympathy, it seems.
Higginson is (and was even in his day) less of interest for his own literary efforts than he was for the way in which he captured the ethos of his time. If Emerson was the great armchair Transcendentalist who enjoyed nature best from the comfort of his study and Thoreau the man of deed who translated the attitude of the movement into action through his experimental living in Emerson's back forty, Higginson is somewhere between the two but closer to Thoreau, though more politically involved. In addition to writing essays, novels, a few poems, and yet more essays, Higginson received a saber cut while storming the gates of the federal courthouse in Boston in an attempt to free the captured slave Anthony Burns, he ran guns to free-staters in Kansas, and he--not Robert Gould Shaw--was in fact the first to lead a regiment of black soldiers during the Civil War. Higginson was a Unitarian minister, as well. For years, he was a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, the medium through which he first sparked the interest of Miss Dickinson. Though his writing is not without some moments of eloquence (Wineapple cites some of the finer passages), he is not remembered as a major writer of his era for a reason. Rather, it is fullness of his life story that prompts our attention today--that and his relationship with Dickinson.
Like most biographies of this sort, White Heat sometimes veers a little too close to rank speculation. Did Higginson harbor romantic feelings toward Dickinson? The books suggests that maybe he did ... then pulls back on that assumption, because if he did he certainly did not tell anyone in any direct manner. Wineapple wisely lets most of the speculations on Dickinson's sexual behavior resonate on their own. Was Dickinson in love with her sister-in-law, Sue Dickinson? The two were close in an odd sort of way, but Wineapple stops short of drawing any conclusions. That Dickinson fell in love with Judge Otis Lord is not to be doubted; what is uncertain, however, is the precise nature of their love affair and whether it was ever consummated in full-blown fashion. Lord, the very epitome of crusty, conservative cranks, seems a truly odd choice for the feisty and spirited Dickinson, but this relationship merely furthers the point that Dickinson's private life, including the precise nature of her feelings for Higginson, whom she did meet several times before she died, will forever be fraught with unknowns.
Which bring us to the poetry itself. Any literary biography is primarily of interest in its capacity to bring greater depth and meaning to a writer's work. And in this case, our appreciation of Dickinson's poetry is enhanced by a greater understanding of how her contemporaries received it--and in particular how Higginson perceived it. Wineapple points to Mabel Loomis Todd, Higginson's co-editor in preparing Dickinson's poems for publication, as the one with the heavy hand in the editing process. The examples she presents do indicate that some blunt and savage editing work was done by Todd, though Higginson was indeed guilty of altering the poems to make them more presentable to a mainstream literary audience of the 1890s. Regardless, the poems in their current "restored" form (first published as such in 1955) still have the power to captivate a contemporary audience with their startling sensibility, and they remain the most unique and idiosyncratic body of verse in American literature--a challenge, certainly, for any editor.
Higginson is (and was even in his day) less of interest for his own literary efforts than he was for the way in which he captured the ethos of his time. If Emerson was the great armchair Transcendentalist who enjoyed nature best from the comfort of his study and Thoreau the man of deed who translated the attitude of the movement into action through his experimental living in Emerson's back forty, Higginson is somewhere between the two but closer to Thoreau, though more politically involved. In addition to writing essays, novels, a few poems, and yet more essays, Higginson received a saber cut while storming the gates of the federal courthouse in Boston in an attempt to free the captured slave Anthony Burns, he ran guns to free-staters in Kansas, and he--not Robert Gould Shaw--was in fact the first to lead a regiment of black soldiers during the Civil War. Higginson was a Unitarian minister, as well. For years, he was a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, the medium through which he first sparked the interest of Miss Dickinson. Though his writing is not without some moments of eloquence (Wineapple cites some of the finer passages), he is not remembered as a major writer of his era for a reason. Rather, it is fullness of his life story that prompts our attention today--that and his relationship with Dickinson.
Like most biographies of this sort, White Heat sometimes veers a little too close to rank speculation. Did Higginson harbor romantic feelings toward Dickinson? The books suggests that maybe he did ... then pulls back on that assumption, because if he did he certainly did not tell anyone in any direct manner. Wineapple wisely lets most of the speculations on Dickinson's sexual behavior resonate on their own. Was Dickinson in love with her sister-in-law, Sue Dickinson? The two were close in an odd sort of way, but Wineapple stops short of drawing any conclusions. That Dickinson fell in love with Judge Otis Lord is not to be doubted; what is uncertain, however, is the precise nature of their love affair and whether it was ever consummated in full-blown fashion. Lord, the very epitome of crusty, conservative cranks, seems a truly odd choice for the feisty and spirited Dickinson, but this relationship merely furthers the point that Dickinson's private life, including the precise nature of her feelings for Higginson, whom she did meet several times before she died, will forever be fraught with unknowns.
Which bring us to the poetry itself. Any literary biography is primarily of interest in its capacity to bring greater depth and meaning to a writer's work. And in this case, our appreciation of Dickinson's poetry is enhanced by a greater understanding of how her contemporaries received it--and in particular how Higginson perceived it. Wineapple points to Mabel Loomis Todd, Higginson's co-editor in preparing Dickinson's poems for publication, as the one with the heavy hand in the editing process. The examples she presents do indicate that some blunt and savage editing work was done by Todd, though Higginson was indeed guilty of altering the poems to make them more presentable to a mainstream literary audience of the 1890s. Regardless, the poems in their current "restored" form (first published as such in 1955) still have the power to captivate a contemporary audience with their startling sensibility, and they remain the most unique and idiosyncratic body of verse in American literature--a challenge, certainly, for any editor.
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