Ur-Story: What is lost

Some quotes:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 'East Coker' V. ll. 172-189

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, III. 'The Fire Sermon' ll.173-186

"The dump was roughly square, half a mile on each side, sunk fifty feet below the streets of the sprawling housing development which surrounded it. All day long, Rocco said, two D-8 bulldozers would bury the refuse under fill which was brought in from the north shore, and which raised the level of that floor a tiny fraction of an inch every day. It was this peculiar quality of fatedness which struck Flange as he gazed off into the half-light while Rocco dumped the load: this thought that one day, perhaps fifty years from now, perhaps more, there would no longer be any hole: the bottom would be level with the streets of the development, and houses would be built on it too. As if some maddeningly slow elevator were carrying you toward a known level to confer with some inevitable face on matters which had already been decided. ...Whenever he was away from Cindy and could think he would picture his life as a surface in the process of change, much as the floor of the dump was in transition: from concavity or inclosure to perhaps a flatness like the one he stood in now. What he worried about was any eventural convexity, a shrinking, it might be, of the planet itself to some palpable curvature of whatever he would be standing on, so that he would be left sticking out like a projected radius, unsheltered and reeling across the empty lunes of his tiny sphere."

Thomas Pynchon, "Low-lands"

"In his novel, Snow White, [Barthelme] tells us about the manufacture of buffalo humps.

They are "trash," and what in fact could be more useless or trashlike? It's that we want to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon, the everted sphere of the future, and that's why we pay particular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may seem as a model of the trash phenomenon.

Much interest is also shown in "stuffing," the words which fill the spaces between other words, and have the quality at once of being heavy or sludgy, and of seeming infinite or endless. Later we are told (Barthelme is always instructing the reader) that the seven dwarfs (for the novel is a retelling of the fairy story)

...like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves...

Dreck, trash, and stuffing: these are his principal materials. But not altogether. There is war and suffering, love and hope and cruelty. He hopes, he says in the new volume, "these souvenirs will merge into something meaningful." But first he renders everything as meaningless as it appears to be in ordinary modern life by abolishing distinctions and putting everything in the present. He constructs a single plane of truth, of relevance, of style, of value—a flatland junkyard—since anything dropped in the dreck is dreck, at once, as an uneaten porkchop mislaid in the garbage.
...
But cleverness is also dreck. The cheap joke is dreck. The topical, too, is dreck. Who knows this better than Barthelme, who has the art to make a treasure out of trash, to see out from inside it, the world as it's faceted by colored jewelglass? A seriousness about his subject is sometimes wanting. When this obtains, the result is grim, and grimly overwhelming.

People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. "Do you think this is a good life?" The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. "No.""

William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life, "The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon," p. 100-101.

"The construction crew had gone for the day. We stood above a hole in the earth, an engineered crater five hundred feet deep, maybe a mile across, strewn with snub-nosed machines along the terraced stretches and covered across much of the sloped bottom by an immense shimmering sheet, a polyethylene skin, silvery blue, that caught cloudmotion and rolled in the wind. I was taken by surprise. The sight of this thing, the enormous gouged bowl lined with artful plastic, was the first material sign I'd had that this was a business of a certain drastic grandeur, even a kind of greatness, maybe—the red-tailed hawks transparent in the setting sun and the spring stalks of yucca tall as wishing wands and this high-density membrane that was oddly and equally beautiful in a way, a prophylactic device, a gass-control system, and the crater it layered that would accept thousands of tons of garbage a day, your trash and mine, for desert burial.
...
Detwiler said that cities rose on garbage, inch by inch, gaining elevation through the decades as buried debris increased. Garbage always got layered over or pushed to the edges, in a room or in a landscape. But it had it own momentum. It pushed back. It pushed into every space available, dictating construction patterns and altering systems of ritual. And it produced rats and paranoia. People were compelled to develop an organized response. This meant they had to come up with a resourceful means of disposal and build a social structure to carry it out—workers, managers, haulers, scavengers. Civilization is built, history is driven—
...
Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn't discard, to reprocess what we couldn't use. Garbage pushed back. It mounted and spread. And it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics.

The sun went down."

Don DeLillo, Underground pp. 285-87.

The upper torsos of two figures, one female, one male, emerge from a pair of garbage cans:

"Nell: What is it, my pet? Time for love?

Nagg: Were you asleep?

Nell: Oh no!

Nagg: Kiss me.

Nell: We can't.

Nagg: Try. (Their head strain towards each other, fail to meet, fall apart again.)

Nell: Why this farce, day after day?

Nagg: I've lost me tooth.

Nell: When?

Nagg: I had it yesterday.

Nell: Ah yesterday!

Nagg: Can you see me?

Nell: Hardly. And you?

Nagg: What?

Nell: Can you see me?

Nagg: Hardly.

Nell: So much the better, so much the better.

Nagg: Don't say that. Our sight has failed.

Nell: Yes. (Pause. They turn away from each other.)

Nagg: Can you hear me?

Nell: Yes. And you?

Nagg: Yes. Our hearing hasn't failed.

Nell: Our what?"

Samuel Beckett, "Endgame"

Ur-Story: Hamlet

Today, let's take a look at The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

T.S. Eliot felt Hamlet needed a good editor:"So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure." "Hamlet and His Problems" in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1922). Harold Bloom takes characteristically broad exception to Eliot's point in his essays on Hamlet in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. As Bloom says, "Shakespeare might have subtitled Hamlet either The Rehearsal or Unpack My Heart With Words, for it is a play about playing, about acting out rather than revenging. We are self-conscious, but Hamlet is consciousness of something." Hamlet, p. 11.

Hamlet does indeed mark the great divide in Western lit, and Eliot nails the dismount:

"The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare's more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife's death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic "inevitability" lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him."

One thinks of the nearly half-century of conspiracy theories arising out of Oswald's assassination of JFK: how could such a great man be taken down by such a schlimazel?

For Eliot disgust is the overriding emotion animating Hamlet, the artistic aim of the play. Bloom's point is that Hamlet has a new feeling, and that feeling is consciousness. Hamlet, the fictional Dane, intuits that he is (let us say) 'like' a character in a play. The things that happen to him have a certain dramatic resonance, and he needs to craft a 'play within a play' to vet this feeling. This is the beginning of modernity, the origin of "consciousness" in Western lit. (Of course, there's the argument that a similar sort of consciousness was arising in his contemporary Quixote, but more on that anon.)

Nothing less than realism is at stake: Eliot pegs Hamlet (the play) as a departure from realism. Thoughts and feelings are splattered all over the page without any dramatic correspondence. Interiority without external cues/clues is his definition of artistic failure. Faithful readers of this blog will recognize Eliot's influence: we find that fiction strongest which builds genuine, detailed POV perceptions from the "spray of phenomena" and derives emotion from perception.

Bloom, too, pegs Hamlet's departure from the limits of the representational; though, for him, it is a good thing. Progressive. There is something considerably more than irony at work in a play about a 'fictional' character who feels himself to be caught up in a 'fiction' and who crafts a play to stage his feeling of existential unease; though it provides him no relief, we readers can recognize that somehow he is onto the 'truth': indeed, he is a fictional character who is caught up in a fiction. That, to Bloom, is the greatness of Hamlet.

We need not take sides in this dispute—I often counsel my friends who find themselves in the middle of a 'political' dispute between two bosses (let's say a department chair and a dean) at work not to get in the middle of an "elephant f--k". That's not quite what we're doing here. We just have a different take. If it were up to us, we would subtitle Hamlet "Where's the Beef?" or "This Time It's Personal". We've been theme-blogging something we call the 'Ur-Story' as a purely human way of understanding the inevitable sense of loss that accompanies death. Indeed, Hamlet is precisely about Hamlet's response to the death of his father. The traditional response to such sadness and loss (whether as a function of honor and duty or emotional satisfaction) has been to find out who's to blame and exact revenge/justice. Hamlet, then, we might say, poses the question, inter alia, 'whether the testimony of a ghost is sufficient to indict and convict someone for the murder of a king/father?' The answer, of course, is no. At best it can arouse our suspicions, maybe give us a clue where to look. (Though, in Macbeth, the appearance of Banquo's ghost is sufficient to elicit a sense of guilt in the regicide. Here, though, the ghost is merely an aide to, or representation of, conscience—not a coming to or representation of consciousness.) And that is insufficient legally to convict or, as the case may be, exact revenge.

How, then, does one confirm one's suspicions? First, you try to query witnesses, as does Hamlet to no avail. Nobody's talking, not even dear old Mother. Hamlet's frustration grows and he takes out a harmless interloper behind the arras. This atrocity, though, will not be avenged.

What then? Hamlet concocts the artistic solution: the play. He has the players re-enact the murder scene in front of the prime suspect, Claudius, so he can gauge his uncle's reactions. These prove confirmatory, but still insufficient to elicit a confession from the evildoer. Normally, one suspects, this would be enough to evoke action. For Shakespeare it isn't. It sounds like to me like WS is kicking the legs out from under the established conventions of the revenge genre. Is there satire here? (I'm not enough of a scholar of the Restoration revenge play tradition to say, but it'd be a good guess for further research.) So, yeah. Art can exactly imitate life (oh! oh! there's REALISM in the play!) and can produce genuine emotions in its readers/viewers/patrons/listeners. So what? Such aesthetic experiences are insufficient grounds on which to base a real-life life-or-death decision, Shakespeare seems to be showing us, though they can be insightful, illuminative. [Recall our discussion of Aristotle's rules for tragedy: the emotions elicited by the play provided the viewer with 'a sentimental education' in how to deal with real life loss. Hamlet tries to push the envelope with respect to their efficaciousness, alas, to little avail.]

What then? Hamlet, the proto-detective, is defeated by a lack of corroborating evidence and because of his madness (taking out Polonius, e.g.—this is how the elites are handled when they maltreat their lessers) is sent away. Here is where the murderer, Claudius, makes his big mistake: he sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to have Hamlet killed. He knows of Hamlet's suspicions and knows he's a potential rival; besides Hamlet's getting too close to the truth. Hamlet discovers and foils the plot and comes back to take his revenge for real this time, turning the tables once again on another of Claudius's plots to take out his nephew/rival: This Time It's Personal. It takes two attempts on Hamlet's life by Claudius before Hamlet finally decides he has sufficient evidence to take him out. Hamlet, if anything, is just. Revenge is a personal thing that in undoing the deed also undoes the doer.

Thus the play ends in bloodshed. It's as if Shakespeare is conceding the genre point: "Okay, Globe crowd, I know this has been a hell of a long play, and I know you're all expecting a big revenge-type finale. So, here it is! Take that." Hamlet slaughters pretty much everybody, taking himself out in the process, much to everyone's satisfaction; the story alone, and its teller, surviving.

The rest, as they say, is silence.