There could be many ways of putting Abraham Lincoln on film, but most of them would be wrong. The subject is a tough one: the heft of it threatens almost from the start to make the project collapse. A light touch is essential. Steven Spielberg, then, is a perilous choice for this occasion. Spielberg's films have in the past sometimes given way under their own weight. To wit: Saving Private Ryan, a film too full of cheap patriotism, sentimentality, and melodrama -- an action film that aspires to do too great things. Fortunately, Spielberg's Lincoln is not Saving Private Ryan. Lincoln, instead, displays the subtlety necessary to do justice to its subject. It is unequivocally a great film.
Part of what makes the film work is that it wisely chooses to focus not on the big picture but on a central event of the Lincoln presidency: the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the one that Constitutionally forbade slavery, in 1865. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was a daring rhetorical act, but it held no legal staying power; Lincoln knew that he had to get this amendment through in order for his previous actions to hold any meaning -- and in order for the war to truly settle the matter of the South's "peculiar institution" once and for all.
It helps that Spielberg has Daniel Day-Lewis on hand to play the title character. Day-Lewis's Lincoln has a kind of stately presence that one senses is more accountable to his height than to any sense of self-importance, but it's a quality of which Lincoln seems to have taken advantage. Lincoln lumbers through each scene like a minor giant, but this bearing seems natural and unaffected. Lincoln's voice is more a train-whistle whine than a deep chugging baritone that we expect, but the effect is perhaps all the better. (As Day-Lewis noted in an interview for the New York Times, his operating assumption was that such a voice carried better in a crowd.) We sense that here is a man who took everyone by surprise: the country lawyer who proved a savant, who made his way in a political milieu that more typically favored the cultural elites. Day-Lewis's Lincoln has a certain peculiar grace that is charming. He grins through minor turmoils but we never doubt that he feels the weight of things very heavily. He's homespun and plainspoken without being aw-shucks cornpone. In other words, he seems like a possible and plausible human being.
Day-Lewis's performance would have gone nowhere, however, if it weren't for Tony Kushner's script, which did something very few films of this type manage to accomplish: it gives us dialogue that is actually convincingly of the film's own historical time and not of our own. The script is almost entirely free of the modern cliches that populate so many other historical films. Each character has his or her own lively and distinct idiom, with Lincoln's being the most distinctive of all, though that of Thaddeus Stephens (Tommy Lee Jones) is certainly comparable in vibrancy. What Kushner captures best in Lincoln's language is the wide-ranging dynamics of which he was capable, the shifting from a natural low register to a soaringly high register as situation and circumstance demand. Lincoln is one moment folksy, plainspoken, humorous, capable even of some lesser vulgarities, and in the next moment he is deeply sincere, projecting a thoughtfulness that is profound. The core essence of Lincoln's character is, to my mind, captured in a conversation between the President and the staff men in the telegraph room, a conversation that hinges on a chance discussion of Euclid's geometry and which proves, in this narrative, to be a defining moment, one that more or less saves the day. This speech act is, needless to say, not one of Lincoln's famous moments, but it succeeds because it captures Lincoln's best quality -- his thoughtfulness -- in a convincing way. As for the more famous words, they bookend the film. The Gettysburg Address is recited here in tandem by a group of soldiers in the early moments of the film, which to my mind is the proper way to present it. If we started with Lincoln himself mouthing the words, the film would never have been able to recover. After a restrained and modest touch -- one displaying the lightness, the deftness sometimes missing from the director's work -- Spielberg deserves the chance to present the final lines of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address -- perhaps the President's best speech -- in their full resplendent glory near the film's close.
Spielberg's chiaroscuro is impressive. It's hard to think of anyone since Orson Welles who used light and shadow so magisterially. There's an impressive balance of levity and gravity here. In all, the film works.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
A Brief Assessment of Greek Culture
Homer aside, the Greeks left us two things as their legacy: philosophy and drama.
The philosophers, concerned with discerning the nature of reality and with defining the good, presented systematic theories on how we should live our lives. The dramatists, by contrast, told us that there was no telling appearance from reality and that all moral codes have a breaking point: systems won't work. That breaking point is most clearly defined in Antigone, which best captures the point made by Hegel, millenia later, that tragedy is not the conflict between right and wrong, but between right and right. The tragedians (more so than the comedians, perhaps) acknowledge that there are times when we have multiple conflicting moral obligations and that the good cannot be defined. Both perspectives -- that of the philosophers and that of the dramatists -- hold equally true -- and hold equal sway on our lives.
The philosophers, concerned with discerning the nature of reality and with defining the good, presented systematic theories on how we should live our lives. The dramatists, by contrast, told us that there was no telling appearance from reality and that all moral codes have a breaking point: systems won't work. That breaking point is most clearly defined in Antigone, which best captures the point made by Hegel, millenia later, that tragedy is not the conflict between right and wrong, but between right and right. The tragedians (more so than the comedians, perhaps) acknowledge that there are times when we have multiple conflicting moral obligations and that the good cannot be defined. Both perspectives -- that of the philosophers and that of the dramatists -- hold equally true -- and hold equal sway on our lives.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Hamlet and Modernity
Harold Bloom called Hamlet the most modern of Shakespeare's plays. It is, but it is distinctive also for its hero's ultimate disavowal of modernity.
Hamlet is a modern prince, not a medieval one, a university scholar and a skeptic, one who dares to question religious authority in his private thoughts, in which he questions what happens to us after death instead of taking it as a given that either heaven or hell is at stake. Hamlet looks back to Stoicism, but to do so is in context an Early Modern gesture. To espouse classical ideas in a classical era is not modern; to embrace them in the Renaissance is. Hamlet is charged with the task of the medieval warrior -- to enact vengeance on his father's murderer -- and it is no surprise that the sweet prince balks at the command.
Hamlet's father, by contrast, is a medieval warrior, right out of Icelandic saga, as Bloom puts it. He's Beowulf, more or less, too busy making war to make love or any other nicety. (No wonder then that slick-talker Claudius moves in on the Queen.) The play itself spans historical eras. At the beginning we have the Ghost, banished to Purgatory and thus a Catholic presence prefiguring the Reformation. As the Ghost generally recedes we proceed through the Protestant era and by the end find ourselves in a post-Christian landscape, one in which the Prince, forced to choose between a Stoicism that condones suicide in certain conditions and a Christianity that forbids it as mortal sin, embraces parts of each philosophy but neither one entirely. Hamlet makes a separate peace with fate, on his own terms.
Shakespeare is perhaps the Colossus of the Early Modern era. He has one foot solidly in the old world of antiquity, one in the modern era. It is a curious choice then that, by finally enacting revenge against Claudius, Hamlet ultimately chooses the warrior code of his father and lands himself firmly on the side of traditions that were perhaps already in the process of becoming obsolete. Modern he may have been, but Shakespeare, likewise, ultimately found his truest values in the classical tradition.
Hamlet is a modern prince, not a medieval one, a university scholar and a skeptic, one who dares to question religious authority in his private thoughts, in which he questions what happens to us after death instead of taking it as a given that either heaven or hell is at stake. Hamlet looks back to Stoicism, but to do so is in context an Early Modern gesture. To espouse classical ideas in a classical era is not modern; to embrace them in the Renaissance is. Hamlet is charged with the task of the medieval warrior -- to enact vengeance on his father's murderer -- and it is no surprise that the sweet prince balks at the command.
Hamlet's father, by contrast, is a medieval warrior, right out of Icelandic saga, as Bloom puts it. He's Beowulf, more or less, too busy making war to make love or any other nicety. (No wonder then that slick-talker Claudius moves in on the Queen.) The play itself spans historical eras. At the beginning we have the Ghost, banished to Purgatory and thus a Catholic presence prefiguring the Reformation. As the Ghost generally recedes we proceed through the Protestant era and by the end find ourselves in a post-Christian landscape, one in which the Prince, forced to choose between a Stoicism that condones suicide in certain conditions and a Christianity that forbids it as mortal sin, embraces parts of each philosophy but neither one entirely. Hamlet makes a separate peace with fate, on his own terms.
Shakespeare is perhaps the Colossus of the Early Modern era. He has one foot solidly in the old world of antiquity, one in the modern era. It is a curious choice then that, by finally enacting revenge against Claudius, Hamlet ultimately chooses the warrior code of his father and lands himself firmly on the side of traditions that were perhaps already in the process of becoming obsolete. Modern he may have been, but Shakespeare, likewise, ultimately found his truest values in the classical tradition.
Friday, November 16, 2012
The Marriage of True Minds
Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 offers its truest vision of love if it is read as a poem not of the consummation of love, but rather of a love that could never be consummated -- at least not in any officially sanctioned way. The poem is typically interpreted as a celebratory one -- a celebration of marriage and true love -- and I once heard a distinguished professor refer to it as just so much romantic fluff, unconvincing stuff that Shakespeare didn't really have his heart invested in -- something to keep himself busy in a plague year, I suppose. In fact, it was this comment (overheard at tea in the Folger Shakespeare Library in the summer of 2006) that set me to thinking about the poem.
The meaning of Sonnet 116, as I see it, hinges on the allusion to the Book of Common Prayer that is framed in the opening lines:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments ....
Here's the text from the Solemnization of Matrimony, the version from 1559 that Shakespeare would have known, that would have been read (and addressed to him) at his own wedding in 1582:
[Priest:] I require and charge you (as you will answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when all the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed) that if either of you do know any impediment why ye may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, that ye confess it. For be ye well assured, that so many as be coupled together otherwise than God's word doth allow, are not joined together by God, neither is their matrimony lawful.
The language remains pretty similar even in the 1928 version of the Book of Common Prayer. The Alternate Service Book (1980), however, offers this much milder version:
If any of you know cause or just impediment why these two persons should not be joined together in Holy Matrimony, you are to declare it.
There is the faint ring of tradition here in "impediment," though "just" is a curious choice that pretends to nod in the direction of justice, but in fact works in the opposite direction by saying let's not quibble with frivolous or irrelevant claims here. In contemporary civil services, however, this still friendlier version is more common:
If any one can show just cause why they may not be lawfully joined together, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.
The contemporary versions offer us a mere formality, or an excellent occasion for bringing on the climax of a romantic comedy. The purpose seems to be rhetorical, to give heft to the service lest it become too light a matter. There is little in it to bring a dissembling bigamist to his knees out of fear, which seems to me to be a likely purpose of the original -- a valid purpose at a time when, for instance, you might have a successful young playwright abiding in the town of London while his lawful wife lives far away in a small country town and a second marriage might be one of many temptations to occur to him. Even the Alternative Service Book version of the impediment warning is only mildly insistent on any notion of religiosity through its inclusion of the easy-to-overlook "Holy." My point is that we don't take marriage as seriously as we used to, and we might not be as attuned to the dire seriousness of purpose invested in the 16th-century solemnization of the event.
Of course, the newer versions of the "impediment" text also present a sharp contrast to the original in that they address the congregation gathered here today and not the bride and groom themselves. What was an intense charge levelled on man and woman is now a mild injunction to the crowd without any specified consequence. And the consequence, in Shakespeare's time, was indeed severe: a thumbs-down on Judgment Day, at what Shakespeare calls in line 12 of the poem "the edge of doom." We've seen the images painted onto the wall of the chancel arch in the Chapel of the Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon. We know what that involves.
So, the poet is saying here that his love will last till Judgment Day. But what kind of love is it? How exactly does the poem riff on the original text?
In the interpretation of the poem that I am proposing, the key phrase is "of true minds." Implicit with these words is the sense that, in this case, a marriage of any other sort between the two relevant individuals does indeed involve impediments. The only marriage without impediment here is of the mind -- that is, a figurative marriage and not one of the sort that can physically be consummated. The speaker's words become all the more bold -- and more sensible -- if we see the presence of these implied impediments to an official marriage sanctioned by both church and state. Here we have matter for the "alteration" and "remove" of lines 3 and 4, respectively; the poet will not yield to the fact that he will always be separated from the person addressed in the poem. Thus the poem carries a broader and more purposeful range of emotion, and what has seemed to so many a straightforward love poem finds proper grounding in the tradition of courtly love, with its goal being the expression of a love that can never be reciprocated, the love of the unattainable object of desire. The generic conventions of the sonnet supports this reading.
So, the speaker's love is as sturdy as the North Star, immune to the ravages of time. Comedy ends in marriage, tragedy begins with it, but the perfect love is held forever in stasis, and it endures despite the fact that it expects nothing in return. (Keats seems to have understood this, as he demonstrates when depicting his lovers on the Grecian urn.)
Biographical readings of poetry oft prove distracting, especially when the poet is Shakespeare, but this poem seems to invite such speculation. What if Shakespeare loved a lady not his wife? He could never marry her. What if Shakespeare were gay? That situation would perhaps present the very pinnacle of unrequited love in his time. These speculations are impossible to support in any convincing fashion, and it's entirely possible that the poem was written merely as an exercise -- something to do during a plague year -- but these conjectures do illustrate some of the possible meanings of the poem. Then again, it's entirely possible that I am wrong here, and the man did simply write the poem for his wife, who was indeed at some significant remove. But still, I can't get past "true minds" and the sonnet's tradition of speaking to unrequited love. In the end, with the sonnet, , every instance of which is an implicit allusion to every other of its type, genre prevails.
The meaning of Sonnet 116, as I see it, hinges on the allusion to the Book of Common Prayer that is framed in the opening lines:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments ....
Here's the text from the Solemnization of Matrimony, the version from 1559 that Shakespeare would have known, that would have been read (and addressed to him) at his own wedding in 1582:
[Priest:] I require and charge you (as you will answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when all the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed) that if either of you do know any impediment why ye may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, that ye confess it. For be ye well assured, that so many as be coupled together otherwise than God's word doth allow, are not joined together by God, neither is their matrimony lawful.
The language remains pretty similar even in the 1928 version of the Book of Common Prayer. The Alternate Service Book (1980), however, offers this much milder version:
If any of you know cause or just impediment why these two persons should not be joined together in Holy Matrimony, you are to declare it.
There is the faint ring of tradition here in "impediment," though "just" is a curious choice that pretends to nod in the direction of justice, but in fact works in the opposite direction by saying let's not quibble with frivolous or irrelevant claims here. In contemporary civil services, however, this still friendlier version is more common:
If any one can show just cause why they may not be lawfully joined together, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.
The contemporary versions offer us a mere formality, or an excellent occasion for bringing on the climax of a romantic comedy. The purpose seems to be rhetorical, to give heft to the service lest it become too light a matter. There is little in it to bring a dissembling bigamist to his knees out of fear, which seems to me to be a likely purpose of the original -- a valid purpose at a time when, for instance, you might have a successful young playwright abiding in the town of London while his lawful wife lives far away in a small country town and a second marriage might be one of many temptations to occur to him. Even the Alternative Service Book version of the impediment warning is only mildly insistent on any notion of religiosity through its inclusion of the easy-to-overlook "Holy." My point is that we don't take marriage as seriously as we used to, and we might not be as attuned to the dire seriousness of purpose invested in the 16th-century solemnization of the event.
So, the poet is saying here that his love will last till Judgment Day. But what kind of love is it? How exactly does the poem riff on the original text?
In the interpretation of the poem that I am proposing, the key phrase is "of true minds." Implicit with these words is the sense that, in this case, a marriage of any other sort between the two relevant individuals does indeed involve impediments. The only marriage without impediment here is of the mind -- that is, a figurative marriage and not one of the sort that can physically be consummated. The speaker's words become all the more bold -- and more sensible -- if we see the presence of these implied impediments to an official marriage sanctioned by both church and state. Here we have matter for the "alteration" and "remove" of lines 3 and 4, respectively; the poet will not yield to the fact that he will always be separated from the person addressed in the poem. Thus the poem carries a broader and more purposeful range of emotion, and what has seemed to so many a straightforward love poem finds proper grounding in the tradition of courtly love, with its goal being the expression of a love that can never be reciprocated, the love of the unattainable object of desire. The generic conventions of the sonnet supports this reading.
So, the speaker's love is as sturdy as the North Star, immune to the ravages of time. Comedy ends in marriage, tragedy begins with it, but the perfect love is held forever in stasis, and it endures despite the fact that it expects nothing in return. (Keats seems to have understood this, as he demonstrates when depicting his lovers on the Grecian urn.)
Biographical readings of poetry oft prove distracting, especially when the poet is Shakespeare, but this poem seems to invite such speculation. What if Shakespeare loved a lady not his wife? He could never marry her. What if Shakespeare were gay? That situation would perhaps present the very pinnacle of unrequited love in his time. These speculations are impossible to support in any convincing fashion, and it's entirely possible that the poem was written merely as an exercise -- something to do during a plague year -- but these conjectures do illustrate some of the possible meanings of the poem. Then again, it's entirely possible that I am wrong here, and the man did simply write the poem for his wife, who was indeed at some significant remove. But still, I can't get past "true minds" and the sonnet's tradition of speaking to unrequited love. In the end, with the sonnet, , every instance of which is an implicit allusion to every other of its type, genre prevails.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Further Thoughts on Hamlet
I. The Noble Mind.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune .... (3.1.57)
Take these again, for to the noble mind
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. (3.1.100-101)
The italics are mine, of course. The first quotation is from Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy, the second from Ophelia's discussion with Hamlet immediately following the soliloquy. The repetition of phrasing is startling, and coincidence seems unlikely, given that we are dealing with the one writer who boasts the broadest vocabulary in the English-language tradition, a writer who seems to have taken great pains to craft most carefully every expression his characters utter, even if the texts we read from offer only a corrupt rendition of those expressions.
Ophelia's speech would bear scanning, in its context. Hamlet's words to Ophelia immediately preceding this speech are cold, cynical even ("No, not I, / I never gave you aught" -- 3.1.95-96). His words to her immediately after it, however, are stinging, vitriolic, fraught unmistakeably with violent intent. Is it possible that this speech -- this phrase, noble mind -- is a trigger to Hamlet, a sign that he has been betrayed?
Who hears Hamlet's soliloquy, besides the prince himself and the audience? Do the King and Claudius, onstage but withdrawn, hear him, as some productions would have it? (One imagines them lurking up on the balcony of The Globe.) Does Ophelia, who is supposed to be standing by with her nose in a book? Imagine, if you will, a Hamlet who draws aside an arras at the end of his soliloquy, only to find the fair Ophelia there, and her nervous reply afterward. A possibility, perhaps.
Or is it that when Hamlet hears these words that so closely echo his own just-recently uttered sentiments, he knows then that she was there, and why she was there, thus provoking him to question her honesty. The question -- "Ha, ha! Are you honest?" (3.1.103) -- not only doubts Ophelia's chastity but also her loyalty, her trustfulness, and it echoes Hamlet's mocking, method-in-madness comments to Polonius in 2.2.174-186, which suggest a suspicion that Polonius will use his daughter as a tool in his campaign of espionage. To Hamlet's mind, both Polonius and Ophelia are part of the apparatus that is against him. Hamlet knows that Ophelia has, from his perspective, betrayed him. Perhaps, we reason, Ophelia is merely playing the obedient daughter here, but it matters not to Hamlet. Perhaps father and daughter both are just following orders -- the councilor his king, the daughter her father -- but Hamlet judges guilt by people's actions and not by their intent (cf. the hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the seemingly harsh sentence Hamlet imposes upon them).
Ophelia's post-mortem on the encounter -- "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" (3.1.150) -- aptly ties it all together thematically, but it misses the mark in judging the quality of Hamlet's mind, Perhaps his mind is one that works all too well.
II. The Process of Encountering Death.
(As foregrounding for this idea, it is worth considering Harold Bloom's claim, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, that Yorick served as the young Prince Hamlet's surrogate father and was, perhaps, the inspiration for Hamlet's wit.)
Hamlet begins with one father figure and ends with another. There is at the beginning The Ghost, and at the end Yorick. We start with Hamlet's namesake, end with his father's fool. That Hamlet himself throughout the play resembles the latter rather than the former is the true source of the play's tension. It is only when Hamlet encounters Yorick's remains, though, that he is able to get past the anxiety of Yorick's influence and become his true father's son.
Each figure is a revenant, and each figure is an emblem of one facet of death: Old Hamlet being the afterlife of the soul, Yorick being a truer, more tangible presence: the aftermath of the body. One cannot be touched, the other can be caressed or tossed, kissed, smelt, and eventually put back down into the dirt.
This encounter with Yorick's mortal remains is a significant further step in a process that begins perhaps with Polonius' death and Hamlet's subsequent meditation upon the dead man's corpse, as though by studying the product of death -- a body devoid of its animating principle -- he could come closer to knowing its meaning and thereby settle his lingering questions about the nature of death and spur himself on to further action. Setting aside the encounter with Prince Fortinbras, certainly an inspiration for Hamlet's eventually springing into action mode in Act V, this event is a turning point for Hamlet. His leaping into Ophelia's grave is the culmination of the process, the last such event before we see a changed Hamlet in the final acts of the play, one who is ready to "let be" and face what he seems preternaturally to know will be his own imminent death.
Technically, when he handles Yorick's skull Hamlet is expressing disgust at the skull as a kind of metonym for all human remains – he is disgusted at the material dimensions of death and the decay of the human body. What what can we make of the fact that we see the whole in terms of the Ghost – armed for battle, head to toe – while we see only a part with Yorick – his bare skull? Which provides the more accurate portrayal of death? The Ghost presents the spirit, while the skull presents the material reality of death. Perhaps, then, the vision of death presented by Act I (that the soul lives on) is overruled by the the vision of death presented in Act V (that death is a kind of material fragmentation. Parts of you enter the guts of a worm and so forth, while other parts linger in the dirt and are subsequently mistreated by the sexton some years later -- but the soul is nowhere to be found here. Death cannot be comprehended in its entirely, with all life's armor still intact, but only in bits and pieces, missing a jawbone. Just like the monsters in Beowulf can only be depicted through synecdoche, the reality of death in Hamlet can only be understood through its parts.
Earlier, Hamlet presents death as the “undiscovered country.” Has he been there, now? Has he explored that country now that he has held Yorick’s skull in his hands and leapt into his lover's grave? Do these experiences make death real to him? The graveyard here is the very landscape of death itself, and it is worthy to note that 5.1 is one of only two scenes that take place outside the walls of Elsinore.
III. The Symmetrical Structure of the Play
In Acts I and V, Hamlet encounters his father figures, both as revenants. It is ironic, then, that his encounter with the war-like Ghost inspires Hamlet to play the fool -- the man of wit and words -- and that the encounter with the fool inspires Hamlet to put foolish things away and to become the war-like man of action who will not only best his opponent, Laertes, in swordsmanship but also finally gain his revenge against his father's murderer. It is also appropriate that, in keeping with the medieval tradition of castrating fools so that they are harmless around the women of the house and so that their jibes do not sting so much, Hamlet in fool mode is figuratively a castrato, impotent in his ability to maintain a healthy relationship with his lover and impotent as well in his ability to stir himself to action. It is also worth noting that we can extrapolate backward from the beginning of Act I to King Hamlet's funeral, and that we can extrapolate forward from the end of Act V to Prince Hamlet's.
In Acts II and IV, Hamlet encounters his foils. The first is the Player, a man of words and of gestures that typically bear no consequences in real life. The second is Fortinbras, the consummate man of action of his generation -- as Hamlet's father was to his own.
Act III, then is the emotional core of the play: the famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy and the play-within-the-play.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune .... (3.1.57)
Take these again, for to the noble mind
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. (3.1.100-101)
The italics are mine, of course. The first quotation is from Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy, the second from Ophelia's discussion with Hamlet immediately following the soliloquy. The repetition of phrasing is startling, and coincidence seems unlikely, given that we are dealing with the one writer who boasts the broadest vocabulary in the English-language tradition, a writer who seems to have taken great pains to craft most carefully every expression his characters utter, even if the texts we read from offer only a corrupt rendition of those expressions.
Ophelia's speech would bear scanning, in its context. Hamlet's words to Ophelia immediately preceding this speech are cold, cynical even ("No, not I, / I never gave you aught" -- 3.1.95-96). His words to her immediately after it, however, are stinging, vitriolic, fraught unmistakeably with violent intent. Is it possible that this speech -- this phrase, noble mind -- is a trigger to Hamlet, a sign that he has been betrayed?
Who hears Hamlet's soliloquy, besides the prince himself and the audience? Do the King and Claudius, onstage but withdrawn, hear him, as some productions would have it? (One imagines them lurking up on the balcony of The Globe.) Does Ophelia, who is supposed to be standing by with her nose in a book? Imagine, if you will, a Hamlet who draws aside an arras at the end of his soliloquy, only to find the fair Ophelia there, and her nervous reply afterward. A possibility, perhaps.
Or is it that when Hamlet hears these words that so closely echo his own just-recently uttered sentiments, he knows then that she was there, and why she was there, thus provoking him to question her honesty. The question -- "Ha, ha! Are you honest?" (3.1.103) -- not only doubts Ophelia's chastity but also her loyalty, her trustfulness, and it echoes Hamlet's mocking, method-in-madness comments to Polonius in 2.2.174-186, which suggest a suspicion that Polonius will use his daughter as a tool in his campaign of espionage. To Hamlet's mind, both Polonius and Ophelia are part of the apparatus that is against him. Hamlet knows that Ophelia has, from his perspective, betrayed him. Perhaps, we reason, Ophelia is merely playing the obedient daughter here, but it matters not to Hamlet. Perhaps father and daughter both are just following orders -- the councilor his king, the daughter her father -- but Hamlet judges guilt by people's actions and not by their intent (cf. the hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the seemingly harsh sentence Hamlet imposes upon them).
Ophelia's post-mortem on the encounter -- "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" (3.1.150) -- aptly ties it all together thematically, but it misses the mark in judging the quality of Hamlet's mind, Perhaps his mind is one that works all too well.
II. The Process of Encountering Death.
(As foregrounding for this idea, it is worth considering Harold Bloom's claim, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, that Yorick served as the young Prince Hamlet's surrogate father and was, perhaps, the inspiration for Hamlet's wit.)
Hamlet begins with one father figure and ends with another. There is at the beginning The Ghost, and at the end Yorick. We start with Hamlet's namesake, end with his father's fool. That Hamlet himself throughout the play resembles the latter rather than the former is the true source of the play's tension. It is only when Hamlet encounters Yorick's remains, though, that he is able to get past the anxiety of Yorick's influence and become his true father's son.
Each figure is a revenant, and each figure is an emblem of one facet of death: Old Hamlet being the afterlife of the soul, Yorick being a truer, more tangible presence: the aftermath of the body. One cannot be touched, the other can be caressed or tossed, kissed, smelt, and eventually put back down into the dirt.
This encounter with Yorick's mortal remains is a significant further step in a process that begins perhaps with Polonius' death and Hamlet's subsequent meditation upon the dead man's corpse, as though by studying the product of death -- a body devoid of its animating principle -- he could come closer to knowing its meaning and thereby settle his lingering questions about the nature of death and spur himself on to further action. Setting aside the encounter with Prince Fortinbras, certainly an inspiration for Hamlet's eventually springing into action mode in Act V, this event is a turning point for Hamlet. His leaping into Ophelia's grave is the culmination of the process, the last such event before we see a changed Hamlet in the final acts of the play, one who is ready to "let be" and face what he seems preternaturally to know will be his own imminent death.
Technically, when he handles Yorick's skull Hamlet is expressing disgust at the skull as a kind of metonym for all human remains – he is disgusted at the material dimensions of death and the decay of the human body. What what can we make of the fact that we see the whole in terms of the Ghost – armed for battle, head to toe – while we see only a part with Yorick – his bare skull? Which provides the more accurate portrayal of death? The Ghost presents the spirit, while the skull presents the material reality of death. Perhaps, then, the vision of death presented by Act I (that the soul lives on) is overruled by the the vision of death presented in Act V (that death is a kind of material fragmentation. Parts of you enter the guts of a worm and so forth, while other parts linger in the dirt and are subsequently mistreated by the sexton some years later -- but the soul is nowhere to be found here. Death cannot be comprehended in its entirely, with all life's armor still intact, but only in bits and pieces, missing a jawbone. Just like the monsters in Beowulf can only be depicted through synecdoche, the reality of death in Hamlet can only be understood through its parts.
Earlier, Hamlet presents death as the “undiscovered country.” Has he been there, now? Has he explored that country now that he has held Yorick’s skull in his hands and leapt into his lover's grave? Do these experiences make death real to him? The graveyard here is the very landscape of death itself, and it is worthy to note that 5.1 is one of only two scenes that take place outside the walls of Elsinore.
III. The Symmetrical Structure of the Play
In Acts I and V, Hamlet encounters his father figures, both as revenants. It is ironic, then, that his encounter with the war-like Ghost inspires Hamlet to play the fool -- the man of wit and words -- and that the encounter with the fool inspires Hamlet to put foolish things away and to become the war-like man of action who will not only best his opponent, Laertes, in swordsmanship but also finally gain his revenge against his father's murderer. It is also appropriate that, in keeping with the medieval tradition of castrating fools so that they are harmless around the women of the house and so that their jibes do not sting so much, Hamlet in fool mode is figuratively a castrato, impotent in his ability to maintain a healthy relationship with his lover and impotent as well in his ability to stir himself to action. It is also worth noting that we can extrapolate backward from the beginning of Act I to King Hamlet's funeral, and that we can extrapolate forward from the end of Act V to Prince Hamlet's.
In Acts II and IV, Hamlet encounters his foils. The first is the Player, a man of words and of gestures that typically bear no consequences in real life. The second is Fortinbras, the consummate man of action of his generation -- as Hamlet's father was to his own.
Act III, then is the emotional core of the play: the famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy and the play-within-the-play.
Sunday, September 2, 2012
On Charley Patton, Field Recordings, Dock Boggs, Et Al.
Those first ones to get it down on wax, what they produced is to popular music what Genesis is to the written word. They didn't have any antecedents, not any that we would ever be privy to, at least. Theirs is the original tale, and we can never do what they did. No pretense to authenticity on our part could ever suffice. All we can do is to riff on the lines they created, the handful of earthy metaphors. No one could ever create music now that is free of the influence of the commercial recording industry in the way that they did when they started it all, that influence for them being limited to the immediate phenomenon of the live bodies making the deals and cutting it all down to the wax.
There is no such thing as folk music now, in the true sense of the term.
There is no such thing as folk music now, in the true sense of the term.
Summer Reading
The titles I have recently read deserve a bit more time and attention than I can give to them right now, but here's a quick overview of my reactions to what I've read lately.
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace: I suppose I should have read Infinite Jest first, but I never managed to get around to it. The idea of a novel centering on the lives of IRS employees, though, just seemed too remarkable to pass up. TPK may be an unfinished, posthumously published novel, but it still forthrightly presents the work of a visionary. Of course, the final product here is somewhat uneven at times, a little messy, but in a way it's better like that: there's a fuzziness that surrounds things in a way that suits Wallace's style and tone. The posthumously published unfinished novel ought to be a standard trope in the postmodern repertoire.
Two long chapters, in particular, stand out as tours de force. The first depicts firsthand a conversion experience faced by an IRS employee, the moment when an oft-stoned self-described "wastoid" (who is also, you realize eventually, a savant with numbers) finds focus and vision in his life through a single lecture given by a substitute Jesuit tax accounting professor. That vision is what soon leads him to the IRS. The second depicts the barroom encounter between a very odd but also oddly talented auditor, who might be both autistic and in possession of a supernatural ability to levitate, and one of his co-workers, the office beauty who is heavily burdened with emotional baggage and has a long, drawn-out story to tell. Suffice it to say that she knows a good target when she sees one: someone who will listen to the whole, slightly unreliable tale until it's all over.
With this novel, Wallace gave us something that will have to be considered the postmodern equivalent of an epic, something expansive and vast that gets to the heart of weighty matters. Instead of the Trojan War, we have tax return processing. The contrast between the two is beyond anything James Joyce could have imagined.
The Long Ships by Frans Bengstrom: I saw an ad for this in the New York Review of Books (it's an NYRB title), and I felt compelled to acquire a copy. Here's a novel, originally published in Swedish in 1940, that is, quite simply, a classic adventure that could be enjoyed equally by a 10-year-old, a 40-year-old, or an 80-year-old. TLS tells the life story of Red Orm, a Viking from the late 10th/early 11th centuries, and the prose -- simple and direct -- reads like Tolkien without all of the supernatural stuff. There's an airy current of playful irony that runs through the novel, and the pace of the narrative is brisk and jaunty. Orm lives the life of a slave and then that of a great lord and chieftain. He travels from Scandinavia to Spain, to Ireland and England, back home again, then eventually to a final adventure in the rough terrains of central Europe. His fortunes are good, overall, and despite his rough and oft-violent inclinations, we recognize that what makes him a hero is, more than his strength or his prowess with arms, his basic human decency -- his sense of fairness and his willingness to give others their due, qualities that get drawn out perhaps a bit further when he converts to Christianity, but which were already with him before that. Orm catches the world on the cusp, at a moment when it begins to transform from something alien to us to something that, if not recognizably modern, at least bears the earliest seeds of something modern. A fantastic read -- fun and entertaining but not insulting to the intelligence.
Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer: I happened to be reading this in the midst of a trek through Mormon country. As my wife drove, I looked up between pages to gaze at the mirages of the Great Salt Lake Desert, mountains floating on waves of heat off in the distance. I had never been curious about Mormonism before, but now I find myself fascinated and, to be honest, somewhat appalled. Although most Mormons are not, I suspect, any more outlandish than mainstream Christians, there are some deeply ingrained issues in the LDS church that I find disturbing: the blatant racism and sexism, the history of deception and the unwillingness to face facts about church history, and the reluctance to acknowledge a separation between church and state, in particular. Krakauer's prose is not brilliant, but it's always clear and compelling. He ranges far and wide, as usual, in sourcing background information, drawing on Wallace Stegner, Harold Bloom, and others, including a lot of Mormon historians and even Joseph Smith himself. What he really gets at here is an examination of the differences between those who seek after/those who believe in revelations and those who don't. He follows through on the ramifications of what it means to believe in personal revelation, and in doing so manages (despite his attempts at fairmindedness) to make a pretty solid case for the potentially catastrophic discrepency between such belief and the values of a modern secular society.
Open City by Teju Cole: The idea of the book sold me on it: a young professional wanders through New York on foot in his spare time, commenting on what he sees. I am an avid walker myself, and I sense in Cole's narrator something of a kindred spirit, though on the surface I don't seem to bear much in common with Julius, a young and unattached psychiatrist from Nigeria. Walkers are all alike, though, in that we value: seeing and experiencing the new, and revisioning and rediscovering the familiar. Cole's novel successfully evokes what the habitual walker always seeks to achieve: a simultaneous connection to and distance from one's environs. The walker is always an observer and disdains participation, unless it be that most banal of interactions: the casual but revealing sidewalk conversation with someone you just happen to run into, of which there are many in this novel.
Early on, a reader might be forgiven for thinking that the course of the novel will be as aimless as Julius' wanderings, but patterns soon emerge. Julius' many asides on history, art, and literature sometimes begin to verge on the stale prose quality of a typical Wikipedia entry, but Cole always turns them around by the end, and they end up providing useful insights into Julius' character. Eventually, we see what Julius is reluctant to admit or perhaps does not himself realize: that he is, if not misanthropic, at least anti-social to some significant degree. He lives too much in his head. He keeps people, most people, at a distance, and thus emerges as the archetypal inhabitant of the modern open city.
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace: I suppose I should have read Infinite Jest first, but I never managed to get around to it. The idea of a novel centering on the lives of IRS employees, though, just seemed too remarkable to pass up. TPK may be an unfinished, posthumously published novel, but it still forthrightly presents the work of a visionary. Of course, the final product here is somewhat uneven at times, a little messy, but in a way it's better like that: there's a fuzziness that surrounds things in a way that suits Wallace's style and tone. The posthumously published unfinished novel ought to be a standard trope in the postmodern repertoire.
Two long chapters, in particular, stand out as tours de force. The first depicts firsthand a conversion experience faced by an IRS employee, the moment when an oft-stoned self-described "wastoid" (who is also, you realize eventually, a savant with numbers) finds focus and vision in his life through a single lecture given by a substitute Jesuit tax accounting professor. That vision is what soon leads him to the IRS. The second depicts the barroom encounter between a very odd but also oddly talented auditor, who might be both autistic and in possession of a supernatural ability to levitate, and one of his co-workers, the office beauty who is heavily burdened with emotional baggage and has a long, drawn-out story to tell. Suffice it to say that she knows a good target when she sees one: someone who will listen to the whole, slightly unreliable tale until it's all over.
With this novel, Wallace gave us something that will have to be considered the postmodern equivalent of an epic, something expansive and vast that gets to the heart of weighty matters. Instead of the Trojan War, we have tax return processing. The contrast between the two is beyond anything James Joyce could have imagined.
The Long Ships by Frans Bengstrom: I saw an ad for this in the New York Review of Books (it's an NYRB title), and I felt compelled to acquire a copy. Here's a novel, originally published in Swedish in 1940, that is, quite simply, a classic adventure that could be enjoyed equally by a 10-year-old, a 40-year-old, or an 80-year-old. TLS tells the life story of Red Orm, a Viking from the late 10th/early 11th centuries, and the prose -- simple and direct -- reads like Tolkien without all of the supernatural stuff. There's an airy current of playful irony that runs through the novel, and the pace of the narrative is brisk and jaunty. Orm lives the life of a slave and then that of a great lord and chieftain. He travels from Scandinavia to Spain, to Ireland and England, back home again, then eventually to a final adventure in the rough terrains of central Europe. His fortunes are good, overall, and despite his rough and oft-violent inclinations, we recognize that what makes him a hero is, more than his strength or his prowess with arms, his basic human decency -- his sense of fairness and his willingness to give others their due, qualities that get drawn out perhaps a bit further when he converts to Christianity, but which were already with him before that. Orm catches the world on the cusp, at a moment when it begins to transform from something alien to us to something that, if not recognizably modern, at least bears the earliest seeds of something modern. A fantastic read -- fun and entertaining but not insulting to the intelligence.
Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer: I happened to be reading this in the midst of a trek through Mormon country. As my wife drove, I looked up between pages to gaze at the mirages of the Great Salt Lake Desert, mountains floating on waves of heat off in the distance. I had never been curious about Mormonism before, but now I find myself fascinated and, to be honest, somewhat appalled. Although most Mormons are not, I suspect, any more outlandish than mainstream Christians, there are some deeply ingrained issues in the LDS church that I find disturbing: the blatant racism and sexism, the history of deception and the unwillingness to face facts about church history, and the reluctance to acknowledge a separation between church and state, in particular. Krakauer's prose is not brilliant, but it's always clear and compelling. He ranges far and wide, as usual, in sourcing background information, drawing on Wallace Stegner, Harold Bloom, and others, including a lot of Mormon historians and even Joseph Smith himself. What he really gets at here is an examination of the differences between those who seek after/those who believe in revelations and those who don't. He follows through on the ramifications of what it means to believe in personal revelation, and in doing so manages (despite his attempts at fairmindedness) to make a pretty solid case for the potentially catastrophic discrepency between such belief and the values of a modern secular society.
Open City by Teju Cole: The idea of the book sold me on it: a young professional wanders through New York on foot in his spare time, commenting on what he sees. I am an avid walker myself, and I sense in Cole's narrator something of a kindred spirit, though on the surface I don't seem to bear much in common with Julius, a young and unattached psychiatrist from Nigeria. Walkers are all alike, though, in that we value: seeing and experiencing the new, and revisioning and rediscovering the familiar. Cole's novel successfully evokes what the habitual walker always seeks to achieve: a simultaneous connection to and distance from one's environs. The walker is always an observer and disdains participation, unless it be that most banal of interactions: the casual but revealing sidewalk conversation with someone you just happen to run into, of which there are many in this novel.
Early on, a reader might be forgiven for thinking that the course of the novel will be as aimless as Julius' wanderings, but patterns soon emerge. Julius' many asides on history, art, and literature sometimes begin to verge on the stale prose quality of a typical Wikipedia entry, but Cole always turns them around by the end, and they end up providing useful insights into Julius' character. Eventually, we see what Julius is reluctant to admit or perhaps does not himself realize: that he is, if not misanthropic, at least anti-social to some significant degree. He lives too much in his head. He keeps people, most people, at a distance, and thus emerges as the archetypal inhabitant of the modern open city.
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