Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (60 page)

OPHELIA: At home, my lord.

hamlet: Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in's own house. Farewell.

Ophelia: O, help him, you sweet heavens!

hamlet: If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, farewell. (III.i.119—134)

There is something quite fascinating in the double accusation put forth here, well on this side of madness. Hamlet indicts himself by rehearsing his repertory, walking through the many scoundrels he knows himself (also? yet?) to be. Hamlet's diatribe is profoundly inscribed in time as well as in interiority—not simply that he acknowledges his potential as villain, but that he knows time may actualize his parade of selves. Thus his words to Ophelia are especially ominous and disturbing in their sense of futurity: yes, you are pure now, but. . . . And this is the plague he offers: you will alter, I will alter, we will alter. You may want to say: he does this because of what he has seen in his mother. To which I answer: his mother is a representative figure here.

Let us recall the original accusation against Gertrude: she sins because she is made of flesh, is ruled by carnal desire: "Fie on't, ah, fie, 'tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely" (I.ii.135-137). Sex and death, I said; the play is about what lives and what dies. Flesh lives, lives its own life, lives in ways having little to do with our moral distinctions. The beast that makes its way throughout this book—synonymous with our anarchic body, defying diagnosis, mating and infecting in the dark, programmed for an en-tropic exit—is
real,
and we, well, we are phantoms. Yes, this spells out death, death of who we are, who we want to be, but Hamlet's awesome truth is life, not death. He has discovered the all-powerful, amoral principle of life, endless life, creation without form or meaning. He has seen that the world is precisely "an unweeded garden / That goes to seed," thereby exposing the hubris of weeding itself, indeed the hubris of gardens in a world not at all so fine and proper, a place where "Things rank and gross in nature / Possess" everything. Especially somatic creatures.

Thus it is, he tells Polonius: "For if the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion—Have you a daughter?" When told yes, he goes on: "Let her not walk i' th' sun. Conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive—friend, look to't (Il.ii. 150-151, 153-154). To focus on the bawdiness of these last lines is to miss the more generic principle at work: ceaseless generation, in the earth, by the

sun, upon dead flesh, within live wombs. It is hard to surpass "The sun breeds maggots in a dead dog" as a tribute to the spawning principle that animates all matter, that metamorphoses dead dogs into live maggots, that tells us that rot itself is pure life, a kind of cellular or molecular fiesta. Flesh lives; photosynthesis knows nothing of morality or of human design. In this logic, gangrene would be just another form of life, just as cancer would, just as infection is. The famous joke about the dead Polonius's whereabouts—"Not where he eats, but where 'a is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him," leading to the final zinger, "But if, indeed, you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby"—conveys the same cashiering of spirituality in the name of rotting matter.

Hamlet is the fellow who is thinking incessantly about this fleshly carnival, about the avatars of human flesh that make a mockery of all design, all notions of personality. But mortality is not the only threat; you can also die while still living. Ophelia, become mad, is described as "Divided from herself and her fair judgment, / Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts" (IV.v.83-84). What does it mean to be either pictures or mere beasts? Hamlet is wondering about just this. There is indeed a plague settling into Denmark, and it announces the collapse of all human self-possession and agency. For this is hardly just a matter of decomposition after death. As I said, Hamlet's discovery is of life, of discovering that one is amorphous and metamorphosing at the same time, that chastity today leads to vice tomorrow.

We know that Shakespeare inherited a view of human inconstancy and indeterminacy from Montaigne, whose splendid term
ondoyant
(wavelike) perfecdy captures the fluid nature of identity. In
Hamlet
this view of transformation is bruited from every corner of the play. The mad Ophelia expresses it in folktale terms: "They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be." (IV.v.41-42). Claudius, urging Laertes to take action, espouses this same dark wisdom: "That we would do, / We should do when we would; for this 'would' changes, / And hath abatements and delays as many / As

there are tongues, are hands, are accidents, / And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift's sigh / That hurts by easing" (IV.vii.116-121).

Considered as a philosophic proposition, Claudius's words utterly recast Hamlet's own dilemma, since "procrastination" is irrelevant and meaningless here, in that the failure to act stems more disturbingly from a changed actor. "Would" is an enormous fiction, a fiction of constancy and immutability, in the kaleidoscopic view of emotion and character presented here, and willpower is exposed in all its promiscuity and capriciousness since the wilier is altered. Claudius's advice has nothing to do with cowardice or falseness; it is, in a far more radical sense, about a human subject who should be wary of making promises because he may not be around any longer, i.e., still be the same person, when it is time to deliver on them.

We see this theme everywhere. At play's end, Hamlet begs pardon of Laertes, saying "Was't Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet. / If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away / And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes, / Then Hamlet does it not" (V.ii.207-210). Of course, these lines have been facilely glossed as bad faith (It's not my fault, it wasn't me), but their full force is felt if we realize that Shakespeare is showing us a world in which a person "from himself be ta'en" is a natural event. I repeat: a
natural
event. "Madness" is, in some sense, the great alibi of the play, the convenient cover term that seems to account for human absenteeism, for vacating the premises, for being yanked off the stage while still on it, for being picture or beast.

The metaphysician of this doctrine of alterations is unquestionably the Player King whose response to his wife's assertion of fidelity unto death is among the most stunning speeches in the play: "
I
do
believe you think what you now speak; / But what we do determine oft we break. / Purpose is but the slave to memory, / Of violent birth, but poor validity;/ Which now, the fruit unripe, sticks on the tree, / But fall unshaken when they mellow be"
(III.ii. 169-173). "Memory" is the guarantor of our pledges, but its "validity" is "poor," is subject to time, which Shakespeare wonderfully expresses in the organic metaphor of unripe fruit

that sticks on the tree (is firm in its commitment) only until ripeness comes, at which point it can "fall unshaken," i.e., collapse or change without any external force applied.

This "ripeness"—which will later be famously expressed as "readiness"—is an evolutionary process governed by nature, not by man, not even by the most well-intentioned man. Later in that same speech we have the marvelous line, "Our
thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own,''''
buttressing an ongoing disconnect between other binaries in which we want to believe: "fortune" and "love," "will" and "fate." The glue that holds these things together—that makes us keep our promises, remain ourselves—is being dissolved in
Hamlet.
The ultimate ramifications of such a view are unhinging, because what is unseated is any proprietary view of self, any view that we can claim ownership to our acts. On the contrary, "our" is a sort of verbal conceit here—possessive pronouns have gone out of business—because the actor is different from the wilier, shares only a name.

I want now, at long last, to say that Hamlet's melancholy is to be understood in the light of this devastating view that time undoes self, that all our notions as to who we are and what we would are quaint fictions, as whimsical as soap bubbles that the air dispels, dissolved simply by the act of living. This is what is rotten in Denmark. This is why Polo-nius's paternal, immortal advice to his son—"This above all, to thine own self be true, / And it must follow as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man" (I.iii.79-81)—is a formula for disaster: there is no firm self to be true to, no "own" self to serve as compass, and hence, Hamlet, in all his multiplicity, is the truest man in the play.

Shakespeare everywhere measures the reach and price of this vision. We are to understand the touching account of poor Yorick in this fashion: that exhumed skull suggests the current status of Alexander and Caesar, imagined now to be stopping a bunghole or keeping the wind away, but this physical grotesquerie, the bad joke that life plays on the (now) living, is but a lead-in to the harder truth that is spiritual: a recog-

nition of one's absurd metamorphoses, of what it really means to be
on-doyant.
"I did love you once," Hamlet tells Ophelia; why so he didjust as Gertrude did love her husband once. The immensely theatrical vision expressed later in
Macbeth
of the human subject as a player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage is fully adumbrated in
Hamlet,
and the earlier tragedy measures even more deeply how much wreckage such a vision entails. One has no command over one's repertory. One cannot know how long-lived or short-lived one's feelings are to be. "To be or not to be," that is indeed the question. Life is change.

Hence there is wisdom, humility, and also fatigue in Hamlet's final great recognitions, the pact with change and fortune that he makes in the fifth act of the play. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will" (V.ii.10-11) and the even more sublime, "The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is't to leave betimes" (V.ii. 196-197). The famous preceding lines about a "special providence in the fall of a sparrow," along with the meditation on death's certain arrival and uncertain schedule ("If it be now, 'tis not to come; it if be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come"), have led us to think in terms of the body's fate, but the lines are even more powerful if we consider that the "aught" that one leaves may also be oneself, a prior self, left because one is willy-nilly en route to being someone else, something else.

"Readiness is all" unmistakably sounds a note of acceptance and reconciliation, but those valedictory lines do not erase the sound and fury of the earlier Hamlet's astonishment and upheaval that the self is kaleidoscopic and decentered, that its cogency and projects are transitory and frothlike. In saying this, I have returned to the theme of melancholy and depression, and I want now to characterize depression as a state in which one's cogency and projects lose their validity, in which the things one has done, perhaps for decades, all of a sudden appear emptied out, mere constructs: one's work, one's relations, one's beliefs.

Here is a ghosdiness that many of us have either known or seen, and

it has little to do with the specter of a dead father seeking revenge. The entire argument that I have sketched out about the unraveling of self, about the discovery that the world is made of cardboard and that what we are today is no augur for how we will wake up tomorrow: all this has common cause with depression. And I have chosen
Hamlet
as my test case for another reason, no less crucial:
depression turns reality into theater.
Not theater as something multicolored and vital, but theater as hol-lowness and artifice, theater as unreality. The old debate as to whether Hamlet is
acting,
is
playing a role,
needs to be reconceived and turned on its head. One fine day you
discover
how theatrical your life is, how what seemed natural and spontaneous and self-evident is now somehow different: mechanical, a role, a construct. This can apply to everything: having a meal, loving a spouse, going to work, writing or reading a book. Let us recall the clown's way of parsing the verb
act
at the graveyard scene: "an act has three branches—it is to act, to do, to perform" (V.i.9-10). Depression is when that middle term
do
loses its innocence and spontaneity, becomes
act,
in the sense of playing a role, and
perform
in the sense of pleasing a public. Depression is when this most unwelcome change of life simply declares itself, and that is when Humpty-Dumpty enters your life. And it may well be that all the king's horses and all the king's men—the tender ministrations of analysts or loved ones, the prescribing of lithium or Prozac or other wonder drugs—fail to put you back together again.

Hamlet
has long been recognized as a "revenge tragedy" that goes amok, a play where the obvious work to be done—kill the king, stupid— becomes undoable, is put off and rationalized. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that Hamlet's "tragic flaw" (thanks to good old Aristotle) is
hesitation.
Shakespeare's play is indeed a revenge tragedy, but the revenge is of a different order: it is the revenge of life—sprawling, amoral, bestial, haphazard, anarchic—over design, over purpose, over self. To borrow from the old TV show, it is the announcement that the play's mission—kill Claudius—is impossible, that every mission is impossible.

Hamlet
is about the discovery of living death, not in the trumpeted soliloquies about the virtues of suicide, but in the quotidian experience of alteration, dissolving, imploding. Yes, this play has a kind of fire and frenzy that are hardly what comes to mind when we think "depression," but then Shakespeare is not that kind of realist. Instead, he has given us a portrait of a
new man,
a man for whom reality has just become pure histrionics.
All the world's a stage:
for years, I took this phrase simply to denote a delightful, baroque picture of life. In the light of
Hamlet,
in the light of what depression is and does, I now perceive the sheer horror of those lines, the horror of being "ghosted," of discovering that all is spectral and factitious, that our most personal feelings are hideously time-bound, regulated by a clock we did not set, just as prone to stop or explode as our bodies are prone to stroke and heart attack. But unlike those somatic time bombs, this one is scandalously invisible, goes off on the inside, rending the fabric of our life and self in ways that no camera or blood work is likely to show. That is why we turn to literature.