Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (61 page)

To be sure, the Renaissance prince neither dresses nor speaks as we do. But his antics and his brilliant sorties illuminate the galaxy where we keep house. Galaxies are larger than houses, especially the cramped quarters of depression, and this is good to know when we feel cornered and lessened, since it offers us living space. Moreover, his problems are just as intimate as those which unhinge us today. "Sex and death," I claimed. I could just as easily say, "Mother and Father," since Mother's sexuality is unbearable, and Father's expectations are unmeetable. Shakespeare has not put his young man on a couch, nor does he have any medications to offer. Instead, he has staged his dilemma and made us see its unforgettable fireworks and vistas. This is no happy picture. It is no accident that Claudius refers to Hamlet in outright medical terms, as a scourge, a pestilence, a disease that needs extinguishing (which task he asks England's help in accomplishing); nor is it happenstance that Ophelia goes certifiably mad just by dint of observing this man's sickness and "fall."

But where modern thinking would seek to trace causes and derive an

etiology, as indeed I myself have done in my remarks on sex and death, on Mother and Father, as the "origin" of the disease, Shakespeare seems to have a darker, virtually absurdist view of the human project. It is a view that is in line with the haphazardness of all things concerning the creature who moves from four legs to two legs to three legs, suggesting that fixity is illusory, that explanations are frivolous, that appearances are deceptive, and that knowledge is unattainable. Reflecting on the senselessness of soldiers giving their lives for a small plot of land, Hamlet proffers a spellbinding assessment: "This is th' impostume of much wealth and peace, / That inwards breaks, and shows no cause without / Why the man dies" (IV.iv.26-28). I am not sure even today that I completely understand these lines; the glosses tell us that "impostume" means "abscess," and hence this medical idiom seems to be about the impossibility of diagnosis, the utter misfit between appearances and reality, between surface and depth. Hamlet seems to be saying that no equation is imaginable between this piece of land and the "value" ascribed to it in war (either in terms of money or soldiers' lives).

But the image of an abscess that breaks
on the inside,
beyond our scrutiny or knowing, and kills its man forthwith, well, this image carries the venom of the entire play. Yes, the self is dying in
Hamlet,
but it is all taking place in the dark, according to rules we cannot know, just as our impending heart attacks and strokes are coming to meet us along paths that we (mercifully) cannot see. But the illness here is not stroke or heart attack; the abscess envelops the mind, the soul, and it can simply
pop,
leaving us not so much dead as other. This is Shakespeare's tragic insight, that identity and personality are not only constructs but capricious constructs that can come undone at any moment, without warning, showing absolutely "no cause without / Why the man dies." With this formulation, we measure in full the horror of all mental and psychic disorders, all those alterations and inner deaths whose coming cannot be charted, whose legacy is wreckage (of "I"), whose dimensions constitute that larger dread territory to which the word
depression
points.

HAMLET'S PROGENY

Depression has its writers. Coleridge had his own demons to wrestle with, and hence had much to say about
Hamlet,
conceiving him as one of the first great intellectual heroes, and getting in trouble for just those reasons. In fact, Hamlet does not truly mystify or mesmerize readers and audiences
until
nineteenth-century Romanticism. It is no surprise that Dr. Johnson has little to say on the figure, whereas Goethe, acutely aware of the changing philosophical weather in Europe, reflected long and hard on Shakespeare's prince, found him too tender for the brutal charge laid upon him, and offered countless, rich reflections on him in
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.
Or one could evoke the French Romantic playwright Alfred de Musset whose hero, Lorenzaccio, is unmistakably conceived as a jaded version of the Shakespearean prince with an existential dilemma.

One thinks especially of Dostoevsky's "Underground Man" who seems to have inherited Hamlet's decentered self. Dostoevsky goes on to assure us that the nineteenth century is full of such sick creatures, people without a compass, chameleon types who know themselves to be all role. It even seems to be a virtue: "Yes, an intelligent man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be a pre-eminently characterless creature; a man of character, an active man, is pre-eminently a limited creature" (5). By the end of his bitter story, Dostoevsky has illustrated the poverty and pain of this mind-set, this modern condition, and we especially measure the toll exacted in the area of human love and charity. The Underground Man's self-loathing resembles Hamlet's, and his torture of Liza (the prostitute whose heart he has touched) seems modeled on Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia.

Doubtless the most extravagant twentieth-century rendition of Shakespeare's prince would have to be James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, peerless razor-sharp intellectual with his own share of sexual and parental problems, and possessor of a "Hamlet-theory" of humongous complexity, upon which he famously expatiates in the "Scylla and

Charybdis" chapter of
Ulysses.
Stephen's meditation on the melancholy prince targets fatherhood itself as the supreme fiction of history and religion, as well as family. Moreover, Hamlet's shadow is sensed also in the character and rendition of Bloom, where Joyce has tried to create a staggeringly
indeterminate
character, at once various and evolving, reminiscent of the randomness articulated by Shakespeare. Yet Joyce's temperament is essentially radiant in this book, a kind of
gai savoir,
drawn to the prince's cerebral high-wire act, but rather less attuned to the dark side of the Hamlet story, the life-sapping side.

And of course we have our contemporary figures who have set out to chronicle their bouts with depression, their
saison en enfer.
I am thinking of the moving accounts left by Kay Redfield Jamison, William Sty-ron, Andrew Solomon, and others, who offer a report from the actual battlefield, so that those of us who are intact might at least have a glimpse of what it feels like when one goes under. But I'd like to conclude by focusing on the single modern writer (in my view) who can sustain a comparison with Shakespeare along these lines: William Faulkner, and his depiction of Quentin Compson, melancholic young Mississippian who commits suicide at Harvard at the end of his first year. My text is, of course,
The Sound and the Fury,
a title that advertises Faulkner's debt to Shakespeare, to the famous speech in
Macbeth
that closes with this cheerful definition of life: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The first segment of Faulkner's novel is the interior monologue of Benjy, the idiot son, but the second sequence, giving us the inner thoughts of Quentin, the Compson family intellectual, seems ready-made for our purposes. Quentin's dilemma is that of manifold impotence: son of a decaying Southern family, he is powerless to prevent its decline, to stop his father from drinking himself to death, and, above all, powerless to protect the honor / chastity of his sister Caddy in accordance with the chivalric code he has inherited.

I invoke Faulkner's novel in full awareness that it is a notoriously difficult read. What makes this book so hard to negotiate? The most likely answer has to do with the narrative achievement for which Faulkner is

most credited: the use of the interior monologue. His novels seem to defy us at every turn, because they appear to be written from the
inside
of the minds of his protagonists, and as readers we are thrust—without guide or guidebook—into these unruly, often anguished and capsizing interiors. This is not a voyage that every reader is prepared to make, even in the best of days, but to expect a reader who is conceivably suffering from depression to perform the labor necessary to sidle up to Quentin Compson—well, that may well seem quixotic. So, let me say why I choose to close with Quentin. Yes, he is depressed. Further, he seems exiled in his own mind, and this matters for two reasons: (l) it is what makes the interior monologue so riveting, for it conveys Quentin's consciousness with a rare immediacy, and (2) being exiled in the mind is the very signature of depression.

Remember Hamlet once more. The most famous speech in English literature, which starts with the words "To be or not to be," closes with something very close to an indictment of
thinking,
thinking (or "conscience") now understood as a paralyzing force: "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, / And enterprises of great pitch and moment / With this regard their currents turn awry / And lose the name of action" (III.i.83-88). On this head, Hamlet's dilemma is that he thinks too much, has too much consciousness. Shakespeare is particularly modern in the medical idiom he offers here: our indwelling power of volition and agency, figured as "the native hue of resolution," is subject to something almost like pollution, a kind of advancing fog that blurs things and saps resolve, so that "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" seems very close to what we might term "neurosis" or "depression," a mind-induced disorder that robs us of strength and the power to act.

William Faulkner's genius consists in finding a new narrative language for just this consciousness, the incessant
thinking
that can be a feature of depression. Hence, the Shakespearean device of the soliloquy, brought in to cargo the thoughts of the mind in a shockingly direct way

to a Renaissance audience, now becomes precisely the interior monologue, the stream of consciousness, in which the repressed thoughts, damning affective material, and general garbage of one's past rise to the surface and to language. I am saying that Faulkner may indeed be difficult but that you should listen in because you could well be eavesdropping on the very music of your own mind.

But the Mississippi Hamlet has none of the vigor of Shakespeare's prince. He does indeed strut and fret his hour upon the stage, but we sense early enough that this young man is soon going to be down for the count. He is, I think, more damaged, more undone in his inner wiring, more a portrait of distress and depression than anything we see in Shakespeare.

Here is what a typical byte of Quentin's consciousness sounds like:

Sometimes I could put myself to sleep saying that over and over until after honeysuckle got all mixed up in it the whole thing came to symbolize night and unrest I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray halflight where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who. (211)

This is, in my view, what Hamlet might sound like in American modernist prose. The condition of being neither asleep nor awake, the long corridor of gray half-light, these are the vistas of depression. Moreover, Quentin's dirge records a series of collapses: a discovery of the world as perversely theatrical, as a dumb show that mocks one's designs and hopes; as a turning inside out of the forms of coherence, culminating in the most drastic collapse and implosion of all, that of the self, "thinking I was I was not who was not was not who." It would be hard to improve on these lines for saying the erasure that depression entails.

Quentin is still farther Hamlet in the sexual malaise he experiences. Expected to protect the honor / chastity of his sister Caddy, Quentin finds this to be difficult for many reasons. The external obstacle is Caddy herself, a feisty, strong-willed girl who is not to be stopped in her hunger for sexual freedom; but there are internal problems also, notably that Quentin himself harbors sexual desire for Caddy, and if this were not enough, Quentin also happens to be deeply fearful about sexuality, a trait that is beautifully exposed when Quentin remembers a story he heard about a man found in the woods who had castrated himself, then muses:

He went into the woods and did it with a razor, sitting in a ditch. A broken razor, flinging them backward over his shoulder the same motion complete the jerked skein of blood backward not looping. But that's not it. It's not not having them. It's never to have had them and then I could say O That That's Chinese I don't know Chinese. (143)

We have come a far piece from the sexual bawdiness and brutality Hamlet evinces with Ophelia and Gertrude, inasmuch as sex itself seems a plague to the modern young man. The longing for innocence is seen as the absence altogether of genitals ("It's not not having them. It's never to have had them"), and this is in turn coded linguistically: Oh, "testicles"? what are they? Chinese? I don't speak Chinese. Welcome to modernity.

Quentin's most powerful and unhinging relation to Hamlet comes from their joint recognition that love can die, that time at once alters us and cancels us out. Whereas Hamlet looked straight on at these tidings and expressed his reconciliation by claiming that "readiness is all," Quentin cannot bear such news of human promiscuity. Moreover, he has not figured it out on his own, but must hear it from his own father, who offers him this nihilistic medicine (which goes by the name
of temporary
)
in hopes that he will cheer up and stop being depressed and sui-

cidal over the fate of his sister and his own vexed feelings about her. This too comes to us via Quentin's interior monologue, in the form of a long-remembered conversation with his father about whether or not to end his life. The dialogue itself (consisting of
i
and
he)
reveals how powerfully and even fatally others can live inside us; it is not so different from the Ghost's "Remember me" in
Hamlet,
a terrible sign of the father's law that cripples the son. This magnificent passage stumps far too many readers because it is written without punctuation or capital letters, so I shall take the liberty of using bold letters to show the remembered dialogue (and a few italics to emphasize what is crucial), and you will easily see just how clear it really is: