Inversion.

"The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark"

SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the castle.

FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO

BERNARDO

Who's there?

FRANCISCO

Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

BERNARDO

Long live the king!

FRANCISCO

Bernardo?

BERNARDO

He.

FRANCISCO

You come most carefully upon your hour.

BERNARDO

'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.

FRANCISCO For this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.

Across the continent and on the island for the first time: here's one from the Bard. But first, I want to quickly explain why I've chosen this particular passage for tonight: events in and around my life have curiously enough reflected a conversation I had with one of my professors this last Thursday. During coffee and Dante-housekeeping, he suddenly referenced the opening of Hamlet and noted that there is something terribly awry in the scene that presents itself. As an opening scene it does much to reflect the disorder that will follow in the play for at this point, it is not the guard who asks "who's there" but the apparent passer-by. Yet, while thinking about this scene right now, I am thinking of sheer uselessness of prophecy and warning-- do we ever read the signs to begin with?
This question sequence is a fascinating one though; "Who's there" says Bernardo who has just entered upon Francisco's guard. Francisco's reply "nay, answer me," however, is uncanny-- suggesting almost as if an exchange unknown to audience or reader has taken place already. This, of course, is yet another reflection of the events to follow-- there will be events and conversations that take place without Hamlet's knowledge. This exclusion of his figure from the events of the play make him resemble, strangely enough, us, the readers or audience who watch and read, but emerge finally without much knowledge of what has occurred.
I wonder if inversion comes hand-in-hand with a loss of the self. Bernardo's self-identification is his loyalty to the King of Denmark, and by his attachment to the hour of midnight. He is not Bernardo, but rather the King's servant and the midnight guard. He begins after the day ends. In other words, he is someone who is not himself-- in fact, perhaps we can say that he hails the spirit of inversion and chaos that not only characterizes Hamlet, but is also seen in other Shakespearan tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and King Lear (I just cannot forget the scene of Cordelia carrying her aged father) being among them.

Now to come back to the question I asked at first, what does it mean to have a sign in the first place? Is the sign or the prophecy just a privilege of the author, and a trick that is played upon the reader? There are several things at play here I think-- yes, the sign is most likely something the author wants to show off with, but it may well be also something that is completely unimportant. What I mean to say here is that the sign enters at the very beginning of many Shakespearan and sometimes even Greek plays, precisely because the beginning is the point that no one cares about, that audiences fail to hear, and that readers tend to dismiss. Who cares whether Benvolio and Tybalt fight at the beginning-- this is a supposed to be a play about lovers? Who care whether the guards are babbling nonsense on a cold night-- isn't this play about a royal family? The unimportant place of the sign is then, I think, an awful reflection on human nature itself, on its optimism, its perseverance, and its inability to admit defeat until the benign sign is suddenly the unleashed beast.

Et tu, Dante?

"As pilgrims wrapped in meditation pass
someone they do not know along the road
and turn to stare and then go quickly on,

so, from behind us, move swiftly, came
and passed us by with a quick look of doubt,
a band of spirits, silent and devout,

their eyes dark-shadowed, sunken in their heads,
their faces pale, their bodies worn so thin
that every bone was molded to their skin."
Purgatory, Canto XXIII.
Two repeats today: Gustav Dore and Dante Alighieri. On reading Purgatory and Paradiso, I realized that these canticas are far more complex and spread out than the Inferno. Whereas those damned to eternal punishment exist in structure those half forgiven and those rewarded seem to occupy (naturally) a far more sprawling and meandering route to Empyrean. But T. S. Eliot has summed up Dante in one very powerful sentence, "Dante's is a visual imagination." One way of understanding Dante, specially if one exists outside of his historical and political loop is through images that resulted from artists' immediete understanding of Dante's elaborate word.
The Gluttons are amongst the groups that roam the higher echelons of the Mountain of Purgatory-- their sin is one of excess, but interestingly enough is told through the element that will later dominate completely the journey through Paradise, i.e. love. Purgatory, then, is the place of imbalanced love and the gluttons are amongst those who had an excess of it. Directly after introducing this group, Dante characterizes them through Ovid's King Erysichthon who out of starvation ate first his daughter and then his own flesh, and Josephus's Miriam who during the seige of Jerusalem ate her infant son. It is this likening, this establishment of relationship that interests me the most here. Even though Dante encounters a literary colleague Forese Donati as one of the group, his first instinct as a narrator is to remove this group from "the journey of our life." Of course, the Divine Comedy is rife with this trend, but when it comes to the gluttons Dante is deeply torn. They are at one point a group who is devout, and penitent, and yet their punishment, and their state of starvation is worse than that of the man who ate his own flesh. So the question that comes up here how can a character at once be so damned and so close to redemption? Or if we shift this to the level of the narrative, how is it that Dante achieves this peculiar neutrality in his telling of the gluttons' state?
I want to read this moment in Purgatory through the figure of Dante himself. I read Dante as succumbing to the sin at this point in the narrative as he pesters Donati for information. Donati's presence is an additional reminder of Dante's own earthly misdemeanours (see Robert Hollander's commentary on this episode). I want to think of Dante no longer as a special guest, but as one of the many characters he encounters throughout his journey. Also of note at this point is that Dante walks with not just Virgil, but also Statius, an early A.D era poet who forms a kind of bridge between Virgil's paganism, the pre-Christian moment, and Dante's own desire for a Christian salvation. In other words, Dante's own figure is failing at this point. His guides are not guides, but companions.
I would answer my own question then by thinking about the figure of a narrator as it becomes engrossed in its own narration. It would also be of interest to think back to other figures in the Comedy who were somehow related with food-- Ugolino comes to mind. How does Dante's figure change with respect to Ugolino? Similarly, does Paulo and Francesca's earthly love somehow attract Dante in the earthly moment of the Inferno?
I haven't said much about Dore, except for using him as a means to understanding the layout and words that run in the Divine Comedy. I'll leave this image up-- it suggests a complete opposition to what I've just argued.

The man himself.

"This great world which some do yet multiply as several species under one genus, is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves, to be able to know ourselves as we ought to do in the true bias. In short, I would have this to be the book my young gentleman should study with the most attention. So many humors, so many sects, so many judgments, opinions, laws and customs, teach us to judge aright of our own, and inform our understanding to discover its imperfection and natural infirmity, which is no trivial speculation. So many mutations of states and kingdoms, and so many turns and revolutions of public fortune, will make us wise enough to make no great wonder of our own. So many great names, so many famous victories and conquests drowned and swallowed in oblivion, render our hopes ridiculous of eternizing our names by the taking of half-a-score of light horse, or a henroost, which only derives its memory from its ruin... Pythagoras was wont to say, that our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize; others bring merchandise to sell for profit; there are, also, some (and those none of the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their own." From "Essais," by Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton.

Last Sunday, a now very repentant friend stood me up for brunch by mistake. Too far from the townhouse on the UES where I'm spending my last few weeks of summer, I decided to do something I haven't done or been in a while-- hang out solo until my next scheduled rendezvous. Chelsea Market is my new favorite Manhattan spot so I took myself there, bought myself a New Yorker and sat down at Ronybrook Farm's Milk Bar (again) for a lovely breakfast involving raisin-walnut bread, cinnamon butter, and a mysterious egg-in-a-hole, and of course, quelques tasses du cafe. I could have bought Vanity Fair or Harper's but the New Yorker took my breath away with the fact that there was an article on Michel de Montaigne hiding within. What better date for a quiet morning with oneself than the man who invented the very concept?
In her article Jane Kramer picked up on the very best of Montaigne-- his struggle to know himself and how exactly this plays out in his essays. In this post though, I want to move away from that and examine an excerpt where Montaigne engages briefly with the route to selfhood: it's from "Of the Education of Children," and M talks at length about the schooling of a young boy. This passage is kind of special for me because it's one of the rare moments in the Canon where a writer speaks without judgment, censure, or bias. Maybe I've had too much of Dante and Hell and Heaven and Purgatory, but Montaigne is and always has been a breath of fresh air. The best education cannot be got from an ecole or seminary, but from being a citizen of the world. This is now an old and cliched idea, but it remains unappreciated for not enough of us walk the map. To know ourselves in a "true bias," says Montaigne, we must know not the other, but others. It is this philosophical effort at people-watching that might free us from the shackles that we're placed in by what is familiar to us in our immediate lives.
We're far from the Divine Comedy where Dante loves to assign his fellow Italians, his literary heroes, and figures in history to the infernal, the purgative, and the heavenly. Instead, Montainge gives us the power to judge ourselves and not in terms of virtue or vice, but in terms of who we are in relation to those around us. I'm reminded of the age-old parent to child line: "It doesn't matter what your friends do or think, so long as you're a good person."
Is Montaigne then suggesting a new way of being a "good" or as I would take it, contributing citizen of the world? Is virtue important only insofar as it is able to relate to the rest of the human race. Does it derive from what it means to be human, or what it means to be a human in the face of God? Montaigne was not exactly the most devout Catholic, several members of his family went over to Luther without causing a schism. When Montaigne chalks out this program for education, does he somehow see himself as a prophet of the world we live in today-- a world where to try and know only what is familiar is almost a sin?
The other for Montaigne is very different for what other will become just a couple of centuries later. For someone whose intent is to "essai" or try to know himself, Montaigne is surprisingly permeable. I wonder then, at the end of the Essais, is it just Montaigne the mayor, father, squire, or is it the man who has discovered the larger, happier secret of what it means to have a self?

The reader.

"In short, our hidalgo was soon so absorbed in these books that his nights were spent reading from dusk till dawn, and his days from dawn till dusk, until the lack of sleep and the excess of reading withered his brain, and he went mad. Everything he read in his books took possession of his imagination: enchantments, fights, battles, challenges, wounds, sweet nothings, love affairs, storms, and impossible absurdities. The idea that this whole fabric of famous fabrications was real so established itself in his mind that no history in the world was truer for him." Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by John Rutherford.

I could have delved deeper into the History of Don Quixote de la Mancha when searching for a piece of text to read, but of late I've become interested in looking at artists' renditions of literary scenes and characters. So here we have Cervantes' description of Don Quixote's descent into madness, but we also have Gustav Dore´'s (1832-83) rendition of Quixote going mad from his books. What struck me about both the image and the corresponding textual description is their sheer richness. Cervantes wants us to be in touch with the body as much as the mind. We must feel the relationship of what is physically within us to what is somehow contained despite of our physicality. What is written is somehow able to transform and possess the body of one who succumbs to it. This is a cause that writers early in the modern period took up and that in some ways defined many of the great books that were to emerge between 1500 and 1900. My other favorite for this, of course, is Emma Bovary.
It seems what I'm saying then is that this richness of image and text comes from the relationship that writer and artist establish between what is body and what is not. In Dore´'s strikingly detailed image we have the object i.e. books lying untended on the ground, and Quixote, this regal looking old man, sits in his chair attempting to stave of the "disorderly notions" that crowd around him. The key word here is "attempt"-- if we look at the image again, we'll see that the sword points in a direction almost opposite to where the monsters, princesses, and angels surround the hero. Clearly, Don Quixote likes to play.
We never really know how tongue-in-cheek Cervantes was being when he addressed Don Quixote's problem for surely he was aware that the adventures of this crazy would be analyzed forever. Similarly, when Flaubert said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," there was a tacit admittance that the problems of the character were his as well. What I want to say here is how do we judge ourselves or characters such as Emma or DQ for living a life that is imagined through the help of objects, words, and images. Or should we perhaps do the opposite-- judge ourselves against them? I mean, Emma was a bitch to her husband and Don Quixote couldn't have cared less whether Sancho Panza lived or died-- yet, these people obsess us because of their naked presence and because we see them digesting what they read and see.
Yesterday my cousin A. and I had a conversation about writers who make their readers physically react through their words. My favorite example for this feeling is TSE and his Love Song. Emma and DQ experience something similar-- except that unlike us, they let themselves try to make it real.