Tragedies (Hamlet and Antony & Cleopatra)
Of course, there is a number of plays missing here. Othello, Macbeth and especially King Lear, and, yes, Romeo & Juliet, are must reads. Jag has offered to let us come along with his classes during the next school year as they read Romeo & Juliet and Othello, which is great. Lear and Macbeth will have to come by other means, I suppose. But here is Antony & Cleopatra, and of course, Hamlet. Have at it.
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The Great Tragedies
Well, friends, I have little energy and less time presently for even an iota of the focus these masterpieces deserve. In fact, I wonder if much can be achieved by analysis other than by a potracted back-and-forth process, between the plays and life, moment to moment strung loosely to another moment and surprise, all unified together, forming something of an epoch, in retrospect. Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and, as I have already said, Romeo and Juliet (which is rarely considered the masterwork it is only because, it is my belief, it antedates the others by so much--because it disrupts our attempt to understand Shakespeare developmentally--even though we are sure to acknowledge that the works at the end of any writer's career hardly ever add so neatly up to be his penultimate work)--the plays are magnificent, and have been with me for more than half my life. I have played Romeo and Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet on the stage of my own life, and still they share my pulse with the promise of more work to do. And Lear seems to be waiting for me yet. That may sound a bit like doom and gloom, but that's not how I mean it--in fact, that's the opposite of how I mean it. I am speaking of magnificence and magic, of art and spirit, of the cosmic bond that is life--not misery. For so we will take it, take all of it, all of life--if in misery or tragedy, in irony or utter chaos, devoid of all purpose--we will take it most gratefully. Yes, I speak of celebration! like I were Dostoevsky, himself, or Conrad, or Nietzsche, of course.
Now, this is as true of any other great work of art as with these plays, and ultimately, we can only do what we can. And so, with the sliver of chance afforded me here, let me at least mention the plays, and say I just finished reading Bloom on each of them. The heart of Bloom's argument resides in his explication of these plays (Romeo and Juliet, excluded), and perhaps I will find time to quote him on them eventually. But for now, know that I intend to read Antony and Cleopatra this week, and then to read Bloom's chapter on it. I don't know how much will come of it here, but keep an eye open all the same...
just a guy is Joey D
Will, Bloom, Freddy, and JAG
dang, JAG! you know you some Willy S. when did you write the letters?
i had trouble getting through the whole thread above in one sitting -- i want to come back and try to digest the Bloom quotations from your last post.
i enjoyed the quotes from Nietzsche and Bloom about words expressing only what's already dead in our hearts...
nothing else to add at the moment (haven't read Hammy in many years, and i'm spread way too thin right now -- in any event it'd take quite a concerted effort to get into this discourse -- you are sending me to dictionary.com too much as it is...), but thanks for adding this library of Englishship to the site. i hope you enjoy having the journal.
Hamlet: The Poem Unlimited
The first Bloom I read was Hamlet: The Poem Unlimited. It was recommended to me by my friend Wally Princic, a retired Shakespearean professor. Obviously, the recommendation led to everything I did this summer, and the book Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (which I commented on last spring). Anyway, I wrote Wally three letters about Hamlet: The Poem Unlimited, and figure that I will paste them here in lieu of our reading of Hamlet. I am presently reading Bloom's essay on Hamlet in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and my plan is to read about the other three great tragedies before finally turning to Antony and Cleopatra. The summer is over and so is my endeavor with this focus, but I thought I might drop a point or two more as I go.
PS. Hieb, what happen to the posts on the histories?
just a guy is Joey D
glad to see you're back home
glad to see you're back home with Hammie, JAG.
just to be sure you saw, the Histories are now available again. i'd unpublished that node by accident...
Letter 1
Professor,
Thank you for recommending Bloom’s Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. I thoroughly enjoyed it and know I will appreciate it all the more intensely as I continue to work with it.
Initially, I cannot deny that I feared Bloom might be merely propping himself up, name-dropping and obfuscating. But soon enough it became clear that that is far from his aim (forgive my ignorance). He is having fun, it seems to me, writing about something he enjoys immensely, just as he would in a journal, collecting his scattered thoughts and alluding to nothing more than what arises to him effortlessly from his expansive literary knowledge. His zest, in fact, is what I relish most in the book. I am encouraged by it. Of course, it also helps that I enjoy Hamlet and Shakespeare as much as I do.
In the end (of my first reading, anyway), I am left thinking these three things: 1. Hamlet is much more influential than I knew him to be; 2. I must study more of Shakespeare than just his tragedies (the Falstaff plays, in particular, which I have only read once); and 3. Bloom is much closer to Nietzsche than I assumed he would be, both in his critique and manner (though I hazard he is not as aware of Nietzsche’s later writings as of his earlier writings)…
Thanks again, Professor.
I am looking forward to further interactions with Bloom.
just a guy is Joey D
Letter 2
Professor,
I finished reading Hamlet: Poem Unlimited again and I love it. I love it both for its illumination of a subject I have long contemplated and enjoyed, and for the high enthusiasm of its author. My sense of Bloom’s manner has developed since my first letter. I took him for insouciant, but was missing the better part of his book’s structure. It moves like the mind, spiraling down a vortex, circling around the essence of the play. Nothing of the significance of the play’s major events is held back at any point, but our understanding of that significance is deepened at every turn. The apotheosis of Hamlet’s spirit, in other words, is there at the start, but the final grasping of it comes as the thrilling climax of the book. That Bloom could so structure a literary criticism, construct such a vehicle to carry his exuberance as well as his reverence of Shakespeare and of Hamlet and, one can easily deduce, of thinking itself—that, apart from whatever else, deserves all appreciation.
In what follows, I intend to share thoughts I arrived at while studying the book. I am not attempting criticism here so much as a summary of its central ideas. Thank you again for the recommendation. The book excites me on so many levels.
Paradoxical Hamlet and apotheosis
Before Act V, as Bloom reveals, Hamlet is a walking contradiction: an “exemplary figure”, “normative”, “most refined”, but cruel and dangerous, and “essentially dust”… His supreme consciousness is at once enviable and suffocating: he knows more than us (a reverse of dramatic irony), more than Shakespeare even, and is not to be condescended to; but he is also able to conceive of himself as merely another player on the stage, “a shadow” (Macbeth) or a spirit to be melted “into thin air” (The Tempest). He is both disgusted in and saved by his own theatricality—safe in his “antic disposition” and spiritually saved by art. Nietzsche writes of the prince in Act II: “Here, where the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live…”
In Act V, Bloom argues, Hamlet returns to the stage as a resurrected consciousness. He is still as enigmatic as ever: a secular saint, “a third newness” in the line of David and Jesus, but an “angel of destruction”, a “fallen divinity”, a possessor of secrets too large for even the largest of plays, a limitless play. “If we remain in a harsh world,” Bloom suggests, “where, with Horatio, we will draw our breath in pain, it is because we are not yet ready to accept Hamlet’s judgment that the obliteration of consciousness is an absolute felicity.” Hamlet longs for “the only alternative to self-overhearing”—to coping with his “astonishing gift of awareness”—he longs for annihilation. This is Bloom’s interpretation of Hamlet’s “The rest is silence.”
Thus, the great change in the “pragmatic nihilist” returned from the sea is not that he baffles us less, but that he is no longer histrionic. All affectation, the reasons for it, is dropped. This is the apotheosis: Hamlet ceases being a player in Act V—and in life.
The play’s the thing
Perhaps what I am most grateful to Bloom for is a better orientation to Shakespeare’s method. We are reminded again and again “of how readily this play has forsaken its supposed function of representation and instead has offered itself to us as the thing itself.” I knew it was more or other than a revenge plot, but I could not figure out exactly what. I reluctantly defaulted to the criticism that Hamlet was prolix in parts, as though it suffered from an overflow of genius. Shakespeare’s art is elliptical, as Bloom states, but I could not trace the ellipsis of Hamlet satisfactorily, nor could I attempt to appreciate the experiment concealed within it. For Shakespeare’s ellipses frequently belie his experimentalism.
But now I see that, in Hamlet, Shakespeare challenges the art form itself, destroying it even. He does this by letting Hamlet loose inside it. Shakespeare, contrary to conventional logic, doesn’t control his protagonist, and the threat Hamlet embodies isn’t confined to other characters alone. Hamlet’s theatricality and, more, his consciousness of it, what Bloom calls the “Hamlet Complex,” overtakes Shakespeare’s stage.
By “theatricality,” Bloom does not only mean Hamlet’s dramaturgical inclinations, but also his sense of the “stale and unprofitable” customs of human life. Woody Allen, if you will forgive an aside, was once asked whether he had ever dated an actress. He said he hadn’t, but he had dated an Italian, and he wondered if that counted. The “Italian” in all of us, our vanity and its various subtleties, Hamlet can see it for what it is. This awareness of even his own natural theatricality—his knowledge of “the self-same” does not affect him alone—it pierces the realities of us all.
Fully aware that “he deserves the prime role in a cosmological drama,” Hamlet fights against his placement in a mere revenge plot—in essence, fighting against his own existence. “He will not allow himself to forget that he is another staged representation.” The “most acute” consciousness in all drama functions like a cancer in its own plot and, consequently, “artistry is put to the question.”
Suddenly, what once seemed errant becomes central—though still errant. Hamlet’s exchanges with the players, or with Osric, say, are rounded in by the story, but only in sequence. In substance, those exchanges and the dilemma of Hamlet’s “endlessly burgeoning subjectivity” cannot be so contained. And conversely, Hamlet’s soliloquies, the same as his interactions and relations with other ‘principal’ characters, take to their cores something of this transcendent significance—this errancy. To use Bloom’s example, Hamlet’s despondency at the beginning of the play cannot be due only to his father’s death and his mother’s “o’er hasty marriage” to Claudius. “The foreground to Shakespeare’s tragedy is Hamlet’s consciousness of his own consciousness, unlimited yet at war with itself.” Hamlet is beyond us, and certainly none of the other characters, not Gertrude, nor Ophelia, not ever Horatio can understand what’s at issue inside him. “Melodramatic farce is domesticated in this freest and wildest of plays, where anything may happen, and expectation is invoked largely to be confounded.”
Perhaps the true crux of Hamlet is best found in Bloom’s recognition of Hamlet’s lack of a “mighty opposite.” Quickly and effectively, Bloom dismisses Claudius and Laertes. They are opposites in the way Tybalt is an opposite of Mercutio—opposite in type and degree of power, but not in a share of power. (Ironically, but also right to the point of the matter, Laertes is all Hamlet would have to have been in order to satisfy the plot—Bloom’s clearly correct observation.) So, of course, Hamlet must serve as his own “mighty opposite,” which he does throughout the play. But then Bloom blows the whole thing wide open when he suspects that Hamlet’s “mighty opposite,” between the “pass and fell incensed point” of whom many a lesser character falls, is Shakespeare, himself. And though the author “loses the battle in the final scenes” to the Dane, Bloom surmises that this might very well constitute “Shakespeare’s transcendence of Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare as “no one and everyone”
I opposed the thought of Shakespeare as being everyone in his plots when it was first suggested. I tended to associate him most intimately with the transcendents of each of his stories, Mercutio, Falstaff, obviously Hamlet (or even Cinna the Poet, whose talent in the specific circumstances of such political upheaval, is at best ornamental). I also took note of the consistency among unequivocally noble characters in many of his stories, Horatio, Kent, Brutus most pronouncedly, and then hazarded to call this type, stoic and old Roman, an ideal which Shakespeare knows he cannot fulfill (perhaps because he, like Hamlet, is a “hero of consciousness” instead).
Bloom, too, does much to give Shakespeare a specific identity in his book, classifying him as a hermetic, “alienated artist-intellectual,” “a gregarious loner, the most preternatural…observer and gleaner,” who “temporized whenever necessary” to ruling powers, etcetera. And yet, though purporting to meditate “Shakespeare’s involvement in the mysteries of his final Hamlet,” Bloom is sure to leave Shakespeare, the person, as aloof in his genius as ever. I am content to leave him there also.
But the hunt for Shakespeare was only ever whimsical for me. I feel a work must stand on its own, and though historical-biological contexts can illuminate some of what is written, I feel that the value of such consideration is often overestimated—and more, that the search for an author is often diversionary, a mask even for having missed the point. Who is Shakespeare? What is Shakespeare? He’s as much to me as Alexander or Caesar is to Hamlet, mud to patch a bunghole. But Hamlet, the play—that’s the thing. I would have all my students recognize the artist’s subordinate role to his or her art—and to their own art. And this is what I appreciate most about Bloom’s book: however limited in philosophy, it can tell the heavens from the earth.)
Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Bloom
In my first letter, I said that Bloom seemed to be unaware of the best of Nietzsche’s thought—his later thought. This seems to me to be the case still. I draw this conclusion partly because Bloom quotes and refers only to Nietzsche’s first major work, The Birth of Tragedy. Of course, why should he not, especially in Hamlet: Poem Unlimited? The Birth of Tragedy is the only book to my knowledge in which Nietzsche speaks of Hamlet; and apart from a seemingly mordant line in Ecce Homo and an aphorism or two centered on Brutus from Julius Caesar elsewhere, Nietzsche steers wide of Shakespeare. But I also suspect Bloom’s limited knowledge of the philosopher for two other reasons: one, his allusions to Nietzsche do not reflect the later developments of Nietzsche’s thought (—what the “Dionysian” became, for instance); and two, he does not therefore realize how similar his pictures of Hamlet and Shakespeare are to Nietzsche.
I would press this point only because I suspect a more accurate understanding of Nietzsche might further clarify the worth of Shakespeare’s bout with Hamlet to all of us. Having already undertaken this endeavor, however, I realize that it will take more time than I can afford to give it at present. So I will leave it for the next letter. In the meantime, chew on this:
“…the strength of a spirit might be measured according to how much of the ‘truth’ he would be able to stand—more clearly, to what degree it would need to be watered down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, and falsified.”
Thank you again, professor. Ultimately, Bloom’s book has helped me to see what delightful work there is in front of me.
just a guy is Joey D
Letter 3
Professor,
Thank you for your words of encouragement. Needless to say, I relish the chance to write you. Sure enough, the kids’ papers are piling up, but I am not yet through being a student myself—hopefully, I never will be. As Irma may have told you, I bought Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and I am almost giddy with anticipation. My excitement has grown the more I have delved into Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, and in a certain sense I mean only to keep delving into it with the larger work.
For now, though, I want to conclude my earlier thoughts. It was my intention to pick up right where I left off: at the consideration of Bloom’s relationship to Nietzsche. I closed the last letter, you will recall, with the hypothesis that Bloom, despite a will to distance himself from Nietzsche, had become Nietzschean in his conclusions on both Hamlet and Shakespeare. Bloom’s failure to recognize this, I had suspected, was due to his ignorance of Nietzsche’s more developed thought. And so, initially, I set myself to a “supplementary rather than critical” task: I wanted to introduce Bloom to Nietzsche, as it were.
But then I picked up Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, in which Bloom offers, even before the title page, a quotation from one of Nietzsche’s latest works: The Twilight of the Idols. I smiled: yea, Bloom sure is ignorant of Nietzsche. Actually, I laughed.
It wasn’t just any quotation, though:
“That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”
I immediately remembered something like that in Hamlet: Poem Unlimited: “If you can unpack your heart with words, then what you express is already dead within you.” I think it was the first sentence I underlined, in fact.
Already, I had collected a number of other similar quotations, all of which, believe it or not, I had taken for coincidences. Certainly, some of the similar quotations were commonplace thoughts and hardly worth noting:
“What was he trying to do for himself, as creator and creature?” (B)
“In man there is both creator and creature.”(N)
“Don’t condescend to the Prince of Denmark: he is more intelli-gent than you are, whoever you are.”(B)
“We do not pity those we admire.”(N)
But others were clearly more central to both authors’ arguments:
“He inaugurates the situation in which each of us has to be our own worst enemy.”(B)
“The most spiritual men…find their happiness…in hardness against themselves..., in experiments. Their joy is in self-conquest….”(N)
“…Hamlet’s consciousness of his own consciousness, unlimited yet at war with itself.”(B)
“My strongest characteristic is self-overcoming. But I also need it most.”(N)
Or what about Bloom’s sense that “we tend to feel augmented, rather than diminished, by Hamlet’s death”? Compare it, along with much of Bloom’s whole treatment of Hamlet, to this quotation from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:
“The genius of the heart…whose voice knows how to descend into the depths of every soul…. The genius of the heart…who teaches one to listen, who smoothes rough souls and lets them taste a new yearning…. The genius of the heart from whose touch everyone goes away richer, not having found grace nor amazed, not as blessed and oppressed by the goods of another, but richer in himself…opened up…less sure perhaps…but full of hopes that as yet have no name.”
There are subtle differences between “the genius of the heart” and Hamlet, and those differences are not unimportant; but still I start to wonder whether Bloom’s more complete reading of Nietzsche has sunk so deep inside him as to become an integral part of his critical apparatus. That is, I wonder if I have found in Bloom at least something of what I have longed for, of what I have even felt called to myself: a Nietzschean interpretation of Shakespeare.
But this cuts Bloom out, relegates him to a mere mediator, which is hardly justifiable. My focus, I know, is too narrow to apprehend all that which could be called Bloomian, and it is important to recognize this before proceeding. Nevertheless, I hold that Bloom and Nietzsche are fused to a much greater extent than is made apparent in Hamlet: Poem Unlimited.
Sure, each time Bloom mentions Nietzsche, he does so with deference. In one place “to appropriate Nietzsche” and in another place to reveal that he was “once pleased [by] the Nietzschean interpretation of Hamlet”, Bloom freely owns up to Nietzsche’s influence. And even in breaking with Nietzsche’s thinking in a third place—breaking with thinking he “once found…persuasive,” Bloom only “but begins to doubt it.” Bloom does indeed achieve a break with Nietzsche, but the degree to which he does is muddled by the incomplete presentation of Nietzsche’s pertinent thought.
As I noted in my last letter, Bloom directly refers only to Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy. He reports: “Friedrich Nietzsche assimilated Hamlet to ‘the Dionysian man,’ and observed that Hamlet thought not too much, but too well.” Bloom then diverges, saying, “[but] Hamlet was a new kind of man… [whereas] the Dionysian is a very old kind of man: an ecstatic.” There is nothing in The Birth of Tragedy I can find to argue with these interpretations. Some chapters later, after offering as Nietzsche’s contention the idea that Hamlet dies of the truth, Bloom says that this “now also seems subtly wrong”. Again, this reading of Nietzsche’s first book finds much support: Hamlet’s will, if not his person, is definitely conceived to be endangered by “true knowledge.” So, Bloom’s departure from Nietzsche in the only place Nietzsche takes up the Prince of Denmark is not predicated on error.
Yet, as Bloom surely knows, it would be a mistake to define Nietzsche’s thought by only one of his books, and by The Birth of Tragedy least of all. For Nietzsche himself came to see his first publication as a “strange and almost inaccessible book”, “an impossible book”, “in sum, a first book, also in every bad sense of that label.” This is not to say that Nietzsche turned away from every aspect of it in subsequent writings. No, The Birth of Tragedy is still definitively Nietzschean—it is “soaked in blood” as much as any of the rest of his books, and nowhere more ostensibly than on the point Bloom draws into question. But the further development or refinement of Nietzsche’s thought is significant both for expelling confusion as to what Nietzsche most espoused in the Dionysian and for divulging how the essential aspects of that concept relate to Bloom’s views of Hamlet and Shakespeare.
Bloom’s portrayal of the Dionysian, for instance, as “a very old kind of man” is accurate, but it undermines what Nietzsche came to value most:
“One who, creating worlds, frees himself from the distress of fullness and overfullness and from the affliction of the contradictions compressed in his soul.”
How similar is that to the picture Bloom draws of Hamlet, “as critical as he is creative, as rational as he is intuitive”? Or back to Nietzsche again:
“Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathsome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole—he does not negate any more. Such a faith…I have baptized…with the name of Dionysus.”
Does this not bear a significant resemblance to Bloom’s picture of Hamlet in Act V—or even more, to Bloom’s picture of Shakespeare beyond the “graveyard of drama”?
In any case, it becomes clear that while Nietzsche “assimilated Hamlet to ‘the Dionysian’”, it does not matter, not really at all, whether he was referring to an old or new type of man. Neither Hegelian nor Darwinian, Nietzsche comes to view the Dionysian not in time, but rather against it: the Dionysian comes to represent both greatness of spirit and its own continual, albeit rare, possibility—critical, artistic, and essentially joyous, and as much to be emulated as venerated. “The goal of humanity,” Nietzsche writes, “cannot lie in the end but only in its highest specimens.” My point here is that, whether in terms of height or time, Nietzsche’s more refined “Dionysus” is much closer to Bloom’s Hamlet than can be ascertained in Hamlet: Poem Unlimited.
But the point at which this is clearest is curiously lacking in Bloom’s book. What distinguishes Hamlet as the Dionysian man, even in The Birth of Tragedy, is not just his relationship to the truth, but also his ability to become artistic both in his play and in his transcendence of self.
“On the contrary, we may assume that we are merely images and artistic projections for the true author, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art—for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”
Nietzsche is writing this in The Birth of Tragedy, in the very section in which he takes up Hamlet. But with Bloom, our focus is only on the threat ‘the truth’ poses.
Yes, Nietzsche says, “knowledge kills action: action requires the veils of illusion,” or, as Bloom quotes: “insight into the horrible truth outweighs any motive for action.” But it is what follows that is key: Hamlet is able, through art, “to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live.” This is key, any further reading of Nietzsche would reveal, not only to ‘the Dionysian’, but to Nietzsche himself. And, as we can see, it is very close to Bloom’s portrait of Hamlet, especially in Acts I through IV, and of Shakespeare too. “Hamlet’s will loses the name of action, but not the true nature of action, which abides in the exaltation of the mind”: thus Bloom concludes his analysis of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”.
Missing this creative aspect of the Dionysian, for which Bloom’s term “ecstatic” is clearly inadequate, one could easily fail to understand how much Nietzsche came to respect Hamlet. By Bloom’s allusions alone, one may even assume, however contradictory it may seem, that the philosopher would admonish Hamlet for his preoccupation with the truth. But nothing could be more wrong.
“…the strength of a spirit might be measured according to how much of the ‘truth’ he would be able to stand—more clearly, to what degree it would need to be watered down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, and falsified.”
Hamlet’s ultimate inability to alter or disguise the truth, even if it means the death of him, is admirable in Nietzsche’s eyes. One must read all of Nietzsche to understand just how admirable the search for truth is, and how devoted he himself was to it.
“At every step, one has to wrestle for truth: one has to surrender for it almost everything to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life cling otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service. What does it mean after all to have integrity in matters of the spirit? That one is sever against one’s heart, that one despises ‘beautiful sentiments,’ that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience!”
We do not require Bloom to see a significant resemblance to Hamlet here. Indeed, the philosopher and the artist are both supreme “specimens”, and they are both encapsulated by ‘the Dionysian’, by Nietzsche as well as by Shakespeare, and, of course, by Hamlet.
But we may go to Bloom too:
“Hamlet cannot believe that the proper use of his capability and godlike reason is to perform a revenge killing…The disproportion between agent and act could have only been masked by theatricalism, and honor is not mask enough to convert an eggshell, like Claudius, into a great argument. Hamlet’s impostume is the absurdity of accommodating his greatness to the rotten state of Denmark.”
Isn’t there a contradiction to the Dionysian here? Isn’t Hamlet beset more by his occasion than by his devotion to ‘the truth’? Many critics, Bloom points out, would answer yes. But we should not forget, and Bloom doesn’t let us, that Hamlet’s occasion is Hamlet’s life. There is not one without the other. In Hamlet’s complaints, “that he is caught up in a play not at all suitable for him,” we hear a most common contention, a banality, not a crux. Bloom suggests that we should not “give credence to Hamlet [here], because he is his own Iago as well as his own Falstaff.” And by this fact, and only by this fact, can we comprehend Hamlet’s return to Elsinore.
No, Bloom’s break from Nietzsche is more subtle, and much more important. The break is here: “Hamlet is the truth”. Bloom argues that rather than seeking and finding and, perhaps, even dying of the truth, as Nietzsche’s Dionysian man would, Hamlet is himself the truth, going the course the truth must. This is an important difference indeed, and worthy of being called Bloomian—at least as worthy as anything else my focus ignores. For this sets Bloom apart even as it reveals what sets Hamlet apart from the rest of humanity.
Some may cry, Blasphemy!, may argue that the truth cannot be a made-up character in a made-up situation. Bloom may even suggest this when he qualifies, “Hamlet is the truth, insofar as any hero of consciousness can be”. But I would argue, and I think Bloom would agree, that Hamlet can be the truth precisely because he is a work of art. As none of the living can so convincingly be, Hamlet can be and is wholly spirit. In fine, Hamlet’s self-awareness is absolute. And so, in the end, what Hamlet has on all of us, most poignantly and ironically, is the stage. For Bloom, Hamlet, in Act V especially, who “long has seemed posthumous,” is something beyond Nietzsche or Shakespeare, not to mention the rest of us.
Am I speaking now of an apotheosis of art?
“…it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”
Whatever I am saying, I have come to it by the modest attempt to show a greater adherence on Bloom’s part to Nietzsche than can be readily seen in Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. As I went about this task, however, a new suspicion arose, a new question of influence. In the line about words expressing what is already dead within us, a connection to Nietzsche’s thought in The Twilight of the Idols is undeniable. But, as Bloom demonstrates, it is also true that that thought correlates perfectly with a careful analysis of Hamlet. Might that not also be true of the other quotations I have offered for comparison?
Suddenly, the title of Bloom’s larger work, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, impresses itself on my mind. Is it Bloom’s argument that Shakespeare is the progenitor of modern Western consciousness—the inventor of the human as we have come to know him? Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, as Bloom hoped, seems to be much “more than a supplement to the earlier, far larger volume.” There is something culminating inside it. Shakespeare as a “mortal god” and Hamlet as “the limit of stage drama”, there is something far greater in the apotheosis of Hamlet’s spirit than the criticism of a play can propagate. There is something, Bloom seems to contend, transcending criticism, transcending literature even. Perhaps the question I should have been asking all along is not how Nietzschean Bloom is, but rather how Shakespearean Nietzsche is.
Indeed, Nietzsche’s greatest hope for humanity, one he fulfilled to a substantial extent himself, was an “artistic Socrates.” But didn’t he already have this in Shakespeare? Consider Heinrich Heine’s estimation of the Bard:
“Shakespeare is at the same time Jew and Greek…spiritualism and art have interpenetrated in him…and unfolded into a higher totality.”
Why did Nietzsche speak so little of Shakespeare? He had certainly studied and been affected by him: “I know no more heart rending reading than Shakespeare….” Perhaps predilection drove him toward the ‘Socrates’ part more than toward the ‘artistic’ part of his aspiration. “Dionysus,” Nietzsche contracted, “was a philosopher.” But Shakespeare was too, in this line of thinking. Maybe Nietzsche avoided Shakespeare much the same way Freud shunned Nietzsche:
“Nietzsche,…whose premonitions and insights often agree in the most amazing manner with the laborious results of psychoanalysis, I have long avoided for this reason. After all, I was less concerned about any priority than about the preservation of my openmindedness.”
How much of Nietzsche’s great influence in the world, so much of which is thought to have ushered in modernity—how much of it can also be attributed, if not more so, to Shakespeare?
But all this speculation, the entire letter through, fails to make a crucial point. The originality of any of these authors, Bloom most certainly included, is indubitable. And more, any question of influence matters only in as much as it becomes a means to the irreplaceable, to the utterly unique genius of an author. As Nietzsche writes, “…seeing things as similar and making them the same is the mark of weak eyes.” Or as I always tell my students, “The best parts of a comparative essay are in the contrasts, not the similarities.” All my qualifying remarks notwithstanding, I have done poorly in this regard in this letter.
In another sense, though, I have also built a framework for further endeavor of this kind. For that, I am grateful to you, Professor. Thank you for the recommendation, of course, but thank you chiefly for the audience. I have much work to do: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, yes, but first more Shakespeare—and, yea, about a million kazillion student papers before that.
Most gratefully yours,
Joseph DeStefano
just a guy is Joey D
Bloom Again
I finished reading the essay on Hamlet in Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and I want to offer a few quotations from it. Bloom felt this essay was insufficient, despite its being the longest essay in the book, which is what led him to later write Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. Having already read the latter, I understand why he felt the former was inadequate. His main readon for feeling so is that he spends more time and energy arguing about Hamlet's source than about Hamlet itself. Nevertheless, he does more directly speak about the play by the end, and the quotations I post below will come mostly from that. What's most interesting is that Bloom had most likely hoped his essay on Hamlet would have been the heart of his book, just as the play is the most highly regarded of Shakespeare's works, just as Hamlet, the prince, is the summit of Shakespeare's personages--and, as Bloom argues, of all personages in the world's literature. He speaks the name of the prince, both in the essay and the book, alongside such names as David, Jesus, and Yahweh. Without a doubt, he had wished to aver Hamlet's eminence as as one of "the canonical sublime", and, even more importantly, as the chief example of Shakespeare's impact to all mankind. The essay itself is fascinating and greatly written, powerful and beautifully framed, and yet, knowing of Bloom's disatisfaction with it, one wonders how much of a flop he consequently feels his whole book is. Hmmm. Anyway, here are a few quotations:
"Falstaff, as I observed ealier, was Shakesepeare's first great experiment in the question as to how meaning gets started. Hamlet is the perfected experiment, the demonstration that meaning gets started not by repetition nor by fortunate accident nor error, but bya new transcendentalizing of the secular, an apotheosis that is also an annihilation of all the certainties of the cultural past."
"...the prince has a mind so powerful that the most contrary attitudes, values, and judgments can coexist within it coherently, so coherently indeed that Hamlet nearly has become all things to all men..."
"Falstaff is wholly immanent, as overflowing with being as Iago and Edmund are deficient in it. As I have remarked, Falstaff is how meaning gets started. Hamlet, as negative as he is witty, blocks or baffles meaning, except in the beyond of transcendence."
"Usurping the stage is the only role he has; unlike Falstaff, Hamlet is not a rebel against the idea of time and the idea of order. Falstaff is happy in his consciousness, of himself and of reality; Hamlet is unhappy in those same relations. Between them, they occupy the center of Shakespeare's invention of the human."
"We hardly can think of ourselves as separate selves without thinking about Hamlet, whether or not we are aware that we are recalling him."
Regarding the To be or not to be monologue: it "is the center of Hamlet, at once everything and nothing, a fullness and an emptiness playing against each other. It is the foundation for nearly everything he will say in Act V, and can be called his death-speech-in-advance, the prolepsis of his transcendence."
"The late Kenneth Burke taught me to ask, always, What is the writer trying to do for himself or herself by writing this work? Burke primarily meant for oneself as a person, not as a writer, but he genially tolerated my revision of his question. He taught me also to apply to Hamlet Nietzsche's powerful apothegm: 'That which we can find words for is something already dead in our hearts; there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.' Nothing could be closer to Hamlet, and farther away from Falstaff. What Falstaff finds words for is still alive in his heart, and for him there is contempt in the act of speaking. Falstaff possesses wit lest he perish of the truth; Hamlet's wit, thrown over by him in the transition to Act V, vanishes from the stage, and so Hamlet becomes the sublime personality whose fate must be to perish of the truth. Revising Hamlet, Shakespeare released himself from Hamlet, and was free to be Falstaff again." (Bloom actually offers Nietzsche's apothegm, alone with a quotation from Hamlet, on a separate page before the table of contents of his book. Its importance to his argument, however, is deflated a bit here--he seems to quote it only to refute it with his interpretation of Falstaff, to whom he ultimately associates Shakespeare. I have no problem at all associating Shakespeare with Falstaff more than with Hamlet, and in this very way: as having broken the spell of the truth through creativity--through art. In other words, Shakespeare, through Hamlet, breaks past the point where Conrad turns back in Heart of Darkness, at the monstrous face of the abyss--of utter and endless pointlessness. But this is Nietsche at least as much as it is Shakespeare, as much as it is Bloom or me or anyone else, isn't it? Even in his earliest book, The Birth of Tragedy, before he could fulfill his own prophesy, this is Nietzsche. Marlowe, and perhaps Conrad, will haunt the world like a ghost after Kurtz has gone his way, but Nietzsche and Shakespeare and Goethe and how many others, become more Falstaffian--or Rosalindian, don't they? See my letters to Wally. How Bloom still only associates Nietzsche with nihilsim seems purely stubborn to me. He is either aware that Nietzsche's power might well overtake his endeavor or even classify it, or he is simply not as aware of Nietzsche as a quotation from Twilight of the Idols suggests he is. Here we learn that Burke steered him to this apothegm. Did he fail to steer him to Nietzsche?)
A page later, however, Bloom distinguishes Hamlet as he is spoken of above from Hamlet of Act V: "The final Hamlet is post-Falstaffian, and also comes after Rosalind and Brutus, all precursors of the prince's intellectual power. Hamlet the wily trickster may have had something Puckish about him; the Hamlet who battles supernal powers more than he does Claudius, and who knows that the corruption is within as much as in the state of Denmark, has progressed well beyond with and self-delight."
"Nietzsche, in Hamlet's shadow, spoke of the will's revenge upon time, and upon time's: 'It was.'" (This, of course, falls right in line with Bloom's assertion that Shakespeare is more the progenitor of modern consciousness than those who have received the credit.)
"Shakespeare's most astonishing achievement, however unintended, is to have made available in Hamlet a universal instance of our will-to-identity."
"You cannot demystify Hamlet; the sinuous enchantment has gone on too long. He has the place among fictive characters that Shakespeare occupies among writers: the center of centers.... It this centrality only a back-formation of cultural history, or is it implicit in Shakespeare's text?.... Hamlet, the prince more than the play, has become myth, gossip matured into legend." (This question is the first question I wrote in the margin of this book. I wrote: "I wonder if this invention of the human is more a culminative effect of centuries of appreciation than of the actual merit of the author and his work." Did I already write something to this effect--did I comment on the intro yet?...)
"As with Falstaff, we can say more aptly what Hamlet is not than what he is."
"Hamlet's universalism seems our largest clue to the enigma of his personality; the less he cares for anyone, including the audience, the more we care for him. It seems the world's oddest love affair; Jesus returns our love, and yet Hamlet cannot."
"Hamlet emphatically is not true to life, but more than any other fictive being Hamlet makes us think what we could not think without him... Hamlet, more than any philosopher, actually makes us see the world in other ways, deeper ways, than we may want to see it."
"I submit that we know better what it is we mean when we speak of the personality of Hamlet as opposed to the personality of our best friend, or the personality of some favorite celebrity... Like Falstaff, Hamlet implicitly defines personality as a mode of freedom, more of a matrix of freedom than a product of freedom. Falstaff, though, as I intimated, is largely free of the censorious superego, while Hamlet in the first four acts suffers very terribly from it. In the beautiful metamorphosis of purgation that is Act V, Hamlet almost is free from what is over or above the ego, though at the price of dying well before his death... The Hamlet of Act V appears to have cured himself, and affirms that the readiness or willingness is all. I interpret that as meaning personality is all, once personality has purged itself into a second birth. And yet Hamlet has little desire to survive."
"Like Shakespeare, Hamlet takes up no stance, which is why comparisons of either to Montaigne have been misleading. We know that we mean when we speak of Montaigne's skepticism, but we tend to mean both too much and too little when our emphasis is on Hamlet's skepticism or Shakespeare's." (If this is so, I wonder if it is the reason Nietzsche stayed away from any sustained commentary on Shakespeare, however sustained his interests might have been.)
"Consciousness itself has aged [Hamlet], the catastrophic consciousness of the spiritual disease of his world, which he has internalized, and which he does not wish to be called upon to remedy, if only because the true cause of his changeability is his drive toward freedom. Critics have agreed, for centuries now, that Hamlet's unique appeal is that no other protagonist of high tragedy still seems paradoxically so free. In Act V, he is barely still in the play; like Whitman's 'real me' or 'me myself' the final Hamlet is both in and out of the game while watching and wondering at it." (Might this be something akin to the postmodern crisis of watching ourselves self-destruct as though we were only roles in a TV show? Something of Baudrillard's simulacrum here?)
"Perhaps the best comment is Wallace Stevens's variation: 'Let be be finale of seem.'"
"Hamlet's tragedy is at last the tragedy of personality: The charismatic is compelled to a physician's authority despite himself; Claudius is merely an accident; Hamlet's only persuasive enemy is Hamlet himself."
Here and elsewhere I find that the trouble with Bloom is that his lack of substantiation makes it unclear how much he analyzes a text and how much he simply explores his own thinking. He may be like McLuhan, and yet without McLuhan's announced disregard: "I don't explain; I explore." Bloom, perhaps, is not bothered as he bothers us, but he speaks definitively as a literary critic. It is his explorative joy that I appreciate most in him, but it is also basically the only thing I can appreciate in him.
just a guy is Joey D