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Jack Foley
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Username: Foley
Post Number: 12
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Friday, January 08, 2010 - 10:39 am: | 
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HAMLET, KEATS, AND LA CONSCIENCE DE SOI: A FEW CONSIDERATIONS OF A VAST TOPIC
La conscience de soi est une nouvelle modalité du savoir, c’est un savoir de soi,
un retour de la conscience depuis l’être-autre.
French Wikipedia on Hegel
During the nineteenth century, the figure of Hamlet underwent a shift from being the central character in one of Shakespeare’s most ambitious and exciting plays to being, far more than any of Shakespeare’s explicitly “poet” characters, an emblem of the poet—“lisant,” as Mallarmé put it, “dans le Livre de lui-même” (reading in the Book of himself). What Hamlet represented to Mallarmé was man confronting his “inner life.” He burns with what Wordsworth called “that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.”
I think the central issue of Romanticism is the issue Rousseau calls “conscience de soi”: self consciousness. The poetry reaches far back into Christian modes of “confession,” as in Saint Augustine, and attempts to find ways in which “consciousness,” “inwardness” can be brought to light. This poetry includes both the intense desire for self-consciousness (as in Wordsworth) and the fear of it (as in Keats’ “Lamia”). What does selfhood taste like? How can one describe “soul”? There is also of course the demonic aspect of selfhood—its manifestation as a powerful “underground,” as in Baudelaire or even Jack Kerouac (“the subterraneans”). One thinks of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, whose terrifying self-awareness brings him to the anguished point of admitting his primal crime: “With my crossbow / I shot the albatross.”
I agree with Paul de Man (a mentor of mine at Cornell) that “What sets out as a claim to overcome Romanticism often turns out to be merely an expansion of our understanding of the movement” and that Modernism—despite its frequent explicit rejection of Romanticism—is in fact a thorough-going example of it. In general Romanticism marks the shift from thinking of poetry as a “craft” (and of the poet as “maker”) to thinking of it as a provoker of consciousness, even a creator of consciousness.
From a historical point of view, the notion that poetry is the expression of the “hidden self,” of a “deeper” consciousness, was initially liberating: the sense that we each had an “inner” life that was different from our “outer” life, our life with people, and of poetry as expressing that inner life. Wordsworth could make “the growth of a poet’s mind” his primary subject; Thomas de Quincey could make dreams his. Yet the notion of exactly what constitutes an “inner” life becomes extremely complicated during the 20th century. Various people (Freud among others) discover that some parts of “the mind” are completely unaware of what other parts of “the mind” are doing. The “inner life” of the 20th century is divided, complex, multiple—and what we think we believe, what we assert with our “egos,” may well be colored by feelings and drives of which we are unaware. How can artists assert a fullness of mind? How can we allow those unrecognized areas of the mind to speak alongside the areas we recognize?
If poetry is particularly the domain of the “inner life,” then it is precisely not the domain of the I. The notion that poetry is the domain of the I comes from the ideology of individualism—a term whose etymology insists that we are “not divided.” If we are individuals, then of course we are most authentic when we speak from the point of view of our individuality, from the point of view of our I. But what if the I is in fact multiple, divided, full of many contradictory elements not all of which are even recognized? What if the I is not the unity that the word I presupposes it to be? What sort of poetry is generated by such a conception of the “inner life”? What was the “Romantic” stance about such matters?
Hamlet springs to mind here once again. To call a play Hamlet or King Lear or Richard III or Othello is not so different from calling a television program The Johnny Carson Show or The Bill Cosby Show or Roseanne. The title implies, The Interesting Individual Show. The Renaissance, the period in which Shakespeare wrote his plays, is often described as the great age of individuality and self-assertion. Plays with titles like Hamlet implicitly promise to “tell all” about some central, charismatic character—someone usually portrayed by the most famous actor in the company—to give us a powerful psychological portrait of a fascinating “individual.”
Hamlet the character is, we know from hundreds of performances, just such a fascinating “individual”—and he is overwhelmingly real. Yet the moment we try to “explain” his reality—even to explain his essential problem—we find ourselves confused, uncertain. The reason for this is that Shakespeare’s extremely memorable characters do not behave consistently according to any system of psychology, whether Renaissance or Modern. Freud was right. There are moments in the play when Hamlet is exhibiting clear Oedipal characteristics. But not throughout the play. Hamlet himself suggests that he is “melancholy”—a psychological condition exhaustively studied by Shakespeare's contemporary, Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy. It’s true, Hamlet is melancholy, but not throughout the play. Hamlet also functions as the figure of the Avenger—as in Thomas Kyd’s famous revenge drama, The Spanish Tragedy. But, again, not throughout the play. The same character who tells his mother that he “knows not seems” displays a considerable interest in theater (an art of “seeming”) and announces that he will put on an “antic disposition” and pretend to be mad—“seeming” to the max. On the other hand, there are several moments in the play when Hamlet really does appear to be crazy.
Nor are such contradictions limited to the character of Hamlet. Polonius is throughout the play nothing but an old fool. Yet his diagnosis of Hamlet as mad for the love of Ophelia is not without some justification in Hamlet’s behavior and his “This above all: to thine own self be true” speech is one of the great set pieces of the play, something far beyond the powers of the foolish old man he is everywhere else. (Of course in delivering the speech Polonius is not being “true” to the “self” he regularly displays in Hamlet, particularly when one remembers his usual rhetorical mode: “And in part him; but you may say not well: / But, if ‘t be he I mean, he’s very wild.”)
The fact is that Hamlet seems real not because he is a coherent character or “self” or because there is some discoverable “essence” to him but because he actively and amazingly inhabits so many diverse, interconnecting, potentially contradictory contexts. Implicitly promising to tell us all about the interesting “individual” Hamlet, the play Hamlet ends by expressing the possibility that “individuality” is in fact multiplicity. It is the plenitude of contexts in which Hamlet functions—i.e., his multiplicity—that gives him density. The “To be or not to be” speech is answered late in the play by a statement of vigorous acceptance: “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all...Let be” (V, ii). Minutes after saying, “Let be,” Hamlet (along with a number of the other major characters) will be slain.
Bernard Shaw once remarked that he liked Hamlet because it was so full of quotations. The play is also full of extraordinarily different, overlapping contexts—“worlds”—which we would reasonably expect to experience quite separately from one another. The strength of the character, Hamlet, like the strength of the creator of the play, Hamlet—who, incidentally, acted the part of the “Ghost”—is that he is able to inhabit all those contexts with such ampleness and such dexterity.
Such is Hamlet, but it is important to note that the play never admits to its fundamental incoherence, its “multiplicity.” We can leave the theater and believe with Sir Lawrence Olivier that Hamlet is “a story about a man who could not make up his mind.”
It is such a conception of “inwardness” that the Romantics, leaping over the entire 18th century, inherit—both in terms of the acceptance of incoherence and in terms of the pretense that the art work is not incoherent at all. Here is Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:
ODE ON A GRECIAN URN
1
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
2
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
3
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
4
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
5
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Keats begins with desire, sexuality: “Thou still unravished bride....” The violence implied in the word “ravished” is immediately “quieted,” however, with an abstraction about quietness: “...of quietness.” In the second line, the phrase “foster child”--a phenomenon of our world--is balanced against the abstractions “silence and slow time.” Each stanza--an Italian sonnet minus a quatrain--has a feeling of great formality: one expects abstractions and elegance from such forms, and Keats supplies them in abundance. Nothing is terribly “real” in this deliberately artificial context.
Paul de Man points out that “Tempe and Arcady are the domains of Pan and Apollo, where Ovid describes them pursuing the mortal nymphs Syrinx and Daphne.” The poet’s evocation of an Ovidian “leaf-fringed legend” is very well suited to the antiquity and elegance of the form, and the evocation is followed by a slightly playful series of paradoxes. The assertion that the urn can “express...A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme” is a graceful compliment—the sort of “flowery” compliment one might pay to a woman one wishes to interest, not something anyone takes to be quite true. Indeed, “flowery tales” are often expressed in rhyme, and Ovid is probably as much in Keats’ mind as the urn itself. Something of the same thing can be said of Keats’ “deities or mortals”: we understand that these are literary or “artistic” figures—figures, not people—though the sexuality of “still unravished” is now given greater emphasis: “What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit?...What wild ecstasy?”
The second and third stanzas gave us light paradoxes which are not meant to be thought of too deeply or challenged in any way. Are “unheard” melodies sweeter than “heard melodies”? What is an unheard melody anyway? Keats assures us with a cliché: an unheard melody is something addressed “not to the sensual ear” but “to the spirit.” Again, we are not to question too much. We are in some sort of vague version of idealism—some sort of conception in which the “ideal” is to be preferred to the “real.” And the urn seems to express that idealism. Nothing is ever consummated—we are still in the realm of the “unravished bride”—but, on the other hand, desire is never quenched. Such a state, Keats argues lightly, is better than a situation in which consummation occurs. Had the scene on the urn presented forever an image of what Blake called “gratified desire,” Keats’ poem would have been profoundly altered: instead of perpetual desire we would have had perpetual orgasm—a state which is not so easily identified with “idealism.” Doesn’t Keats have a body?
He does, and it surfaces a few lines later. He attempts to put the best face possible on his assertion about the desirability of a state of perpetual sexual frustration by linking it to a state of eternal springtime—a state of paradise, though not quite the paradise of Genesis. He remains in a Classical context: “Ah, happy, happy boughs! That cannot shed / Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu….”
The “happy melodist” reminds us of the “shepherd” of pastoral poetry—the kind of thing both Spenser and Milton wrote. Yet the moment “human passion” is mentioned, the poem suddenly takes on a quality it has not had before. These lines are not fanciful, artificial or playfully paradoxical; they are utterly real:
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
That “burning forehead” and “parching tongue” might well be characteristics of a frustrated lover, though they also suggest the human diseases with which Keats was certainly familiar. It is as if the poet’s own sexual frustration, which he has been attempting to disguise as idealism, suddenly bursts forth in the form of bodily illness.
But like the earlier phrase “foster child,” the lines’ touch of reality is only momentary; the poem is not yet ready to take on such questions. In relief perhaps, Keats turns to another side of the urn and attempts to regain the balance and control of the opening lines:
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies…?
Yet, coming after assertions of intense bodily distress, the word “sacrifice” and the heifer’s noisy “lowing at the skies” have overtones they would not have had under other circumstances. Doesn’t disease cause the “sacrifice” of people? Wasn’t Keats, who had been trained as a doctor, aware of such sacrifice? The feelings of desolation, of pain and sacrifice which have entered the poem almost against the poet’s wishes suddenly have a new place to express themselves. The town the people leave—which isn’t even represented on the urn—is suddenly seen not merely as empty but as desolate:
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
“Death,” says Hamlet, “is “the undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns.” Death has suddenly entered Keats’ poem: “not a soul to tell / Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.” The artificiality of the paradise Keats was trying to describe protects us against death. Yet that paradise utterly shatters against the actual presence of death in the poem—a presence which both we and Keats know to the bone and which is linked to sexual frustration, itself a kind of death.
To paraphrase Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” the word “desolate” “is like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self”—to the very mortality the poet has been trying to escape by writing the poem. “The fancy,” he complains in the Nightingale Ode, “cannot cheat so well / As she is famed to do.” What began as simple description—this is what is on the urn, it’s only a description—has suddenly turned upon him and revealed the very sources which the poem existed to evade. Keats didn’t know why he was writing the poem, and the poem’s language is now telling him something about his own consciousness—manifesting conscience de soi. He has nowhere to go but back to a confrontation with the urn as a whole—with this enigmatic thing which, like Poe’s raven, has brought him news of his own death:
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
The idea of “silence” is important in the poem. The urn is the “foster child of silence”; Keats writes of “unheard melodies”—silent ones; the streets of the town “for evermore / Will silent be”; there is “not a soul to tell / Why thou art desolate.” In the last stanza the urn itself is called a “silent form,” though in the concluding lines it “speaks”: “thou say’st.” Perhaps the most telling phrase of the stanza is “Cold Pastoral!” At this point the urn is almost a tombstone, something which extends beyond the life of the humans who constructed it and extends as well into the midst of “other woe / Than ours.” If it is “a friend to man,” it is also cold, like stone, lacking human warmth.
My own feeling about the line, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—or part of my feeling about it—is that the statement is spoken entirely by the urn, and that Keats is addressing the urn when he says, “That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Humans, who suffer and die like the lowing “heifer,” have very different modes of knowledge. For the urn, “beauty” and “truth” can be identical because the “truth” expressed there is of a limited, artificial sort—something which evades the “truth” of mortality: “Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed / Your leaves….”
Such a “truth” is by no means comforting since a good deal of the poem is devoted to demonstrating its limitations—even its inadequacy. Yet the lines, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” sound as though they ought to be comforting. Keats’ designation of the urn as “a friend to man”—as opposed to a “Cold Pastoral!”—now becomes important. Surely a “friend” would not attack us: it would offer us comfort in our misery. The concluding lines of the poem are not only, as Paul de Man remarked, “gnomic” but deliberately evasive. There is no comfort against mortality; it is a stark fact which cannot be avoided—and there is nothing in the poem which suggests the possibility of a blissful afterlife. The poem is without comfort of any kind. And yet: the concluding lines don’t “know” that. We are given a “moral” which is in fact not the moral of the poem at all—and it allows us, in its deception, to exit without tears or anger. Beauty, truth—how nice to think that they are identical, and how nice not to have to think anything more about it.
I am suggesting here that Keats’ method is to some extent to abnegate control as he writes his poem: he is writing “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as a kind of field in which various things may happen—opening a space in which various possibilities arise. In doing so, he is radically shifting contexts. What results is a kind of rich incoherence in which various incompatible positions are all expressed—but none so emphatically that we are forced to choose one as opposed to the others. As Keats writes his poem, the words he selects lead him into contexts which are different from the one in which he began—and, instead of trying to control this tendency and to force the words back into the original context (as one might in prose), he simply allows it to happen.
Is it any wonder that he had such a profound effect on Charles Olson? |
Melanie L Huber
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Username: Melanie_l_huber
Post Number: 35
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Friday, January 08, 2010 - 11:01 pm: |
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This one will take me some time to digest, I've not seen Romanticism in quite this light before in regards to the "I" in poetry...some interesting points you bring up. I've not much of a response as yet as I don't see much I disagree with...have to ponder this whole "inner" vs. "outer" stuff for a bit. |
Jack Foley
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Username: Foley
Post Number: 15
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Friday, January 08, 2010 - 11:49 pm: |
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Perhaps I should have translated the French quotation at the beginning: "Self consciousness is a new modality of knowing, a knowing of oneself, a return of consciousness from outside." I'm claiming that this "new modality" is central to what we call Romanticism: an emphasis on the inward, on dreams, on psychology, etc. But this kind of knowing goes back to Christianity--to Augustine's "Confessions" for example. |
Jack Foley
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Username: Foley
Post Number: 16
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Saturday, January 09, 2010 - 10:04 am: |
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I might add about "individualism": If it exists at all, it exists as something achieved, not as something given--not as the unthinking assumption that "everybody's different." In a culture like ours--which propagandizes for individualism constantly--it is difficult to see around or beyond this concept. Note, however, that Madison Avenue constantly addresses consumers as if they were "individuals"--rational economic man in the marketplace making up his/her individual mind--but then, via powerful stimuli, manipulates them as if they were in fact "the same." Cf. the techniques of Edward Bernays, much admired by the Nazis! |
Melanie L Huber
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Username: Melanie_l_huber
Post Number: 37
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Saturday, January 09, 2010 - 11:44 am: |
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Interesting Jack,
But as a mom of five, three girls and two boys...I'd say there was aspects of "individualism" or say...differences in personality, or say an "essence" *I know you dont like that word* of "self" since the womb. And boys have observable differences both physically and in behavior from birth too...
I think there are inate aspects of character which are not taught or "achieved" but which are in part the structure or building blocks of what makes people people and also what makes people the same and different...though there is a universal connected thing too (though I see you saying this is a manipulation technique of society/mass media ect.) Perhaps so..but I am not quite so cynical as that. |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 19
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Saturday, January 09, 2010 - 04:01 pm: |
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Universal (one turn) is another problematical word. Usually, as with music (which is supposed to be a "universal language") it means universal western. Various kinds of oriental music don't fit the vocabulary of that universal language of music.
There may well be inate aspects of character but what makes you think that's the same thing as saying there are essences? It isn't. These inate aspects of character may be present in each of us but, remember, an essence = a set of characteristics without which a thing can't be that thing. We may each have (or have had) some aspects but do you think they amount to our "essence"? Can we be reduced to such aspects?
When I speak about essences, I am not speaking about biology or biological development. I am speaking about a way of thinking, a way of categorizing ideas which was initiated by the Greeks. I am arguing that it is a mistaken way of thinking.
Wow--five children. I have only one, but he seems to have the energy (intellectual and otherwise) of five. |
Melanie L Huber
New member
Username: Melanie_l_huber
Post Number: 39
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Saturday, January 09, 2010 - 04:28 pm: |
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Then lets use another word. Say, banana. There is a banana music which goes beyond western, is there not? As well as banana aspects of character which is to say "human" or part of humanity beyond these trappings of words or boxes of language or ways of thinking forced upon us by society or thoughts which have some how trickled into our brains in the present moment from Greece. (Not the musical, but the city.) I get mine from outer space. (thoughts that is, maybe music too.) You say essence I say banana. |
Jack Foley
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Username: Foley
Post Number: 20
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Saturday, January 09, 2010 - 04:49 pm: |
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Huh?
I give up on this one. |
Melanie L Huber
New member
Username: Melanie_l_huber
Post Number: 40
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Saturday, January 09, 2010 - 06:29 pm: |
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I don't have a logical argument at this time or the time to make any logic of an argument based around anything I can pull from text and to decipher all the work and thought you've put into this deserves more than a banana response, but in moments like this, I prefer to reach into my own brain and find the "truth"...and the truth is usually a banana, very wise of you to know to shrug your shoulders and walk away. I'd be conjuring an entire fruit salad before the end... in the meantime...I'll get back to reading and perhaps in the near future I'll be able to respond with something more enlightening than produce. |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 21
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Saturday, January 09, 2010 - 07:21 pm: |
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Well, I like fruit salads.
Bananas too, for that matter.
I know I'm throwing a lot out (in both senses) and in all directions and at some level it may seem like I'm trying to pull the heavens down (I am!), but I'm not saying anyone has to agree with what I'm saying. Try this on for size...what happens if? Does what I say about Hamlet or Keats feel right to you? Do my words feel like Hamlet or Keats? If they do, then (but this is for later) what does that imply about fruit salads? about bananas? about the things people have previously said about Hamlet and Keats? You should (and probably will) hear me on Yeats!
I have a recipe (gleaned from my mother) for delicious meat balls and spaghetti ("polpette"). Perhaps I'll run it as a column. You can serve fruit salad for dessert. Or anything you feel like serving.
"They tell you Fate
Supplies a mate...
It's all bananas!"
Ira Gershwin, "But Not for Me" |
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