Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (59 page)

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON DEPRESSION

HAMLET AND HIS PROGENY

I have of late
—
but wherefore I know not
—
lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a stale promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appeareth nothing to me but afoul and pestilent congregation of vapors.

— SHAKESPEARE,
Hamlet

ENDING WITH THE MELANCHOLY PRINCE

Could there be something worse than death? I want, in this last foray, to move beyond physical death in order to address what is arguably the most urgent social and medical issue facing us today:
depression.
You will hardly be surprised by my conviction that art and literature offer the same shocking and eye-opening testimony about depression as they do in all the other areas of life discussed in this book, and I wish to invoke the single best-known figure in Western literature to make my case: Hamlet. His is a story we know; I think it is also one from which we have much to learn about a disorder that seems distressingly of our special moment.

Why, however, end this book with this topic? Can depression "follow" death? Handsome view of afterlife that would be! Depression is, in America at least, doubtless a better candidate for modern plague than AIDS is, inasmuch as the real numbers of people who suffer from it are probably well in excess of the statistics we possess. Moreover, whereas I argued that mourning is the healthy person's survival-experience of

death, it does not seem exaggerated to say that depression is the other side of the coin, a way of dying without dying, of leaving the living while still dwelling among them.

Depression seems to be nature's scheme for letting us experience death ahead of time, for letting some of us experience it on virtually a chronic basis. Often enough, as we know, depression can lead to physical death, not infrequently by means of suicide as an exit that is preferable to the state of mind that living entails. I feel that depression tests my thesis as nothing else does. What is depression if not that
unheard
"scream that goes through the house"? And what is the basic certainty of those who are depressed if not that their scream goes nowhere, that no one can hear or help them, that their life is dispossessed of beauty or value, that they are bereft of resources? Could
Hamlet
illuminate here?

First of all, is Hamlet depressed? The question is not as frivolous as it may appear. The term that would have come to mind to an Elizabethan audience looking at this young man's behavior and mind-set would doubtless have been
melancholy,
a medical term denoting the "black bile" that caused an excess of sullenness or moodiness or even violence according to the Renaissance humoral scheme of personality. This may not be our view of serotonin deficiencies or bipolar disorder, but it accords with a pharmacological view of the human subject, which leads me to think that the contemporary running joke that Hamlet needed only Prozac or Zoloft to solve his problems would, if translated into Elizabethan medical terminology, have made sense to those folks.

But Shakespeare's pharmacy had no magic bullets, and even if it did, the play is not about
curing
Hamlet, but about displaying him, indeed displaying him and his strange temper as a subject of endless fascination. It has been noted that virtually everyone
in
the play—Gertrude, Claudius, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern—is mightily invested in
diagnosing
the sick prince. It is not far-fetched to say that we have had some four centuries of diagnostic work devoted to the enigma and infirmity of this (mesmerizing) single young man who exists only as a character in a play. Can any "living" creature (with a "real" case

history) claim as much? Therefore, to use Hamlet as a "guide" for what depression looks like is not in the least wrongheaded, and I agree entirely with the view argued recently by Harold Bloom that Shakespeare
invented the human,
that his plays offer the most capacious map for what it is to be human that civilization has ever devised. Literature, especially Shakespeare, may well be our most authoritative source when it comes to the behavior of the human psyche; his works are the literary version of the human genome.

Listen to Hamlet describe to his friends how he feels, and ask yourself if a better description of clinical depression has ever been written:

I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (Il.ii.282-292)

Loss of joy, loss of pleasure, loss of exercise, a disposition turned heavy: it would be hard to improve on Hamlet's words for characterizing the anomie, dullness, and general mix of torpor and doldrums that spell out the behavior of the depressed. But note how mind-bogglingly eloquent this young man is in his inventory of disappointments; most of us, when depressed, would be hard put to see our everyday sky as a "majestical roof fretted with golden fire," and even though such a person would agree that the universe has become "but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors," the very words bespeak a kind of visionary sharpness beyond the energies of the depressed.

Hamlet evokes a world of grandeur—the purest expressions of Renaissance idealism: man as "noble in reason," "infinite in faculties," "admirable in action," even "like a god"—in order to close with the most reductive formula imaginable, "this quintessence of dust," as if to display the hubris of all the Humanist huffing and puffing. We are looking at a
before / after
picture that seems at once personal and historical, as if this young man's experience of
fall
were not merely individual but also representative. It is also the very cartography of depression, the graphing of what we were, what we are potentially, and now what we have become. Measures are being taken here. This is the backdrop against which depression must be seen, the
bas-relief which
enables us to gauge heights and depths, yielding essentially a
four-dimensional
portrait of depression, including length, width, depth, and time. Yes, Hamlet beggars most of us through his verbal splendor, but, then, that is one reason to turn to him, because he is mapping the very itinerary of melancholy.

The sheer vitality of this speech is of a piece with the stunning vibrancy, physical as well as verbal, of the character throughout the play— as seen in the derring-do of the Mousetrap, the brutal attacks on Gertrude and Ophelia, the murder of Polonius, the leaping into Ophelia's grave, the fencing with Laertes—and it will hardly do to read Hamlet as some sluggish, moping creature who would prefer to stay in bed or live in a closet. It won't even quite do to call him
manic depressive,
since his mania seems of a piece with his blues (rather than alternating with it), since he seems hyperactive right on through, perhaps most of all when he is just
talking,
as exemplified in the showdown with Gertrude, where he elects words as his weapon: "I will speak daggers to her, but use none" (
III.ii.359
). And even though this play closes with crossed swords and poisoned chalices and many cadavers, its profoundest message has just been adumbrated:
words are cutting,
speech enters into us, just as it does into Gertrude when she begs her son, "O, speak to me no more! / These words like daggers enter in my ears." (HI.iv.95-96). How else to account for the fact that a literary text some four hundred years old penetrates us even today, limns for us the contours of human behav-

ior? I repeat Mallarme's definition of the poet's mission:
"rendre plus purs les mots de la tribu."
("purify the words of the tribe"). Hamlet is a living portrait of the self out of sync, a reflecting mirror of our woes.

Hamlet's predicament is no less than a roll call of the gathering ills and crises charted in each of my chapters: the autonomous body with a will of its own; the enigma and capriciousness of motive; the metamor-phic self; the view of hidden transgression as social toxin, as plague; the discovery of death as pure corrosion, not so much of life as of meaning itself. More on stage than any other character in Shakespeare, this young man articulates a nonstop scream that goes, from his initial encounter with the ghost to his final exit, through the house. All that is left is to understand his hurt.

Yet, this is the play's riddle: who understands Hamlet? One of the most persuasive explanations of Hamlet's problem is indebted to Freud, as relayed through the offices of Ernest Jones: Hamlet has an Oedipal complex. On this heading, he unconsciously desires his mother, hence unconsciously identifies with Claudius—the man who has killed his father and is sleeping with his mother—since this is what he (or his id) would like to do. I have put this libidinal thesis a bit blundy, because I think it has its undeniable share of the truth and accounts for the twisted sexuality that seems to drive this young man. By "twisted sexuality," I mean an overpowering disgust for sexual intercourse, a disgust that leads him to indict Ophelia (told to get herself to a nunnery) with the same diseased, lecherous desires that he equates with his mother, whose lovemaking with Claudius is evoked with venom and fury: "Nay, but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty—" (III.iv.92-95). There is a generalized kind of hot nausea about female sexuality that makes up a good bit of Hamlet's problem.

But this won't quite do. If we think back to passages such as the immortal "to be or not to be" speech, we find that sexuality is nowhere to be seen, whereas the obsession with death appears central. It has been

argued that death is indeed the play's great theme, and that Hamlet is its ambassador. This interpretation gives us a Hamlet who has seen through humanity, who is like Mephistopheles in his brilliance, cynicism, and nihilism. G. Wilson Knight (whose thesis I am rehearsing) goes on to claim that all of the play's other characters are essentially decent, life-affirming creatures (so that Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, and Laertes are glimpsed as they might appear in another world, a world un-contaminated by Hamlet), but that Shakespeare has so powerfully sided with his death-obsessed, death-dealing protagonist that the others—at least in the eyes of the audience and of the play's readers over time— never have a chance. He torments them, terrorizes them, sees through them, has them see through themselves (as in the case of his mother), all this as part of a merciless truth crusade. Hamlet's encounter with the grave digger, and the number of corpses at play's end, help to shore up this interpretation. So we have identified two major problems, each quite recognizable today as well: sex and death, the body's pleasure and the body's end.

Now you may well be wondering, what does all this have to do with depression? So let me begin to put some of this together. Shakespeare is out to offer us a portrait of dysfunctionality, and it is for us to see both "how" and "why." As mentioned, Prozac may be good for alleviating your symptoms, but has little to actually
say
about your problems. The old school of psychotherapy might produce a narrative for you, but it could take years of analysis to get to it. Shakespeare's play is
thinking
about depression. It is thinking about what saps our belief in life, thinking about why a young man in his prime becomes dysfunctional, thinking, ultimately, about what lives and what dies. In its peculiar way, it is wrestling with that familiar riddle of the Sphinx, about the transition from animal to human, about whether it can be done. But it is no longer a question of walking straight, nor is Hamlet's
wound
—for he is wounded—like that of Philoctetes. Let me then say straight out: what is infected and dying in this famous play is the notion of a
unified person-

ality.
Even more bluntly:
self is dying
in this play. The behavior of this prince is new in the way that entire continents were new in the Age of Exploration. Hamlet comes to us as the victim of a disease without name, but I think the play offers a gathering, essentially choral, assessment of his ills.

Let us begin with sex. Sexual appetite transforms his mother and his betrothed into unrecognizable creatures: the first he sees, the second he imagines; to Ophelia, he rants, "God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig and amble, and you lisp; you nickname God's creatures, and make wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't, it hath made me mad" (III.i.139-143). But sexual transformation is only the most blatant crime committed by nature; metamorphosis itself—the view of identity as a merry-go-round—is the terrifying truth of things. Take another look at the scene where Hamlet berates Ophelia; you will note that his indictment of her is inseparable from his self-description as kaleidoscope:

hamlet: Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where's your father?