The Phrenological Journal & Haunted Typebox Blog

According to Stein, the esteemed entomologist, Jim’s problem is an inability to match his deeds with his romantic notions. It’s not so much that he jumps ship and violates the moral code, but that he fails his own ideals.

Stein sits in a wunderkammer, surrounded by beetles and butterflies. Chapter XX takes on a gothic cast: shallow pools of light, “the graves of butterflies,” endless hallways, mirrors and flickering candles. The German entomologist, after exulting in the beauty and fragility of the butterfly, says, “We want in so many different ways to be.” The only way to save ourselves from ourselves is Hamlet’s cure, notes Stein: “Or not to be.”

I hover on the edge of this cut-rate exegesis. I want to admit my own faults, my own weakness. I find myself at the end of Stein’s pronouncement, “I tell  you, my friend, it is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough.”

It’s in these shadowy halls that they ponder Jim’s “to be.” Perhaps it’s a hypothetical one, or perhaps it’s one that results from that strange gothic milieux: is he? This question of existence is hard to grapple, rather like those flickering shadows. We’ll leave it now, maybe it will become more tangible.

Stein and Marlow end on the subject of dreams, those achieved and those let go. Stein is a success, Jim is a failure. Jim seems to wait for an opportunity (and so do I!), and Stein has a biography that asserts that he did not. But his own admission, he too has let things go.

Why does Bierly jump? Why does Jim? For all the latter’s expulcation, we hardly know. We can posit that Bierly jumped because of Jim. Jim seems to stir in all sailors conflicting feelings of guilt and duty. Everyone recognizes the wrong, yet there’s an understanding too, a recognition of the imperfection of man. In short: some mix of duty, indecision, and fear.

Bierly would have Jim vanish, to save the collective soul of mariners all. The Frenchman would excuse the fear, yet not the dishonour. And Marlow? His aims are conflicted (as are Jim’s deeds). He seems to want to salvage some sense of himself, some sense which only unfolds in his telling.

Marlow interogates Jim. But who interogates Marlow? We are invited to his table, and we seek the truth–Marlow’s truth–about Jim. Marlow may be scoundrel or savior; we don’t know. But we are subject to his report, his judgement. A judgement which even Marlow is unsure of.

“All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks,” say Ahab to Starbuck. And I think of Don Quixote’s pasteboard equivocations, his assault upon Master Pedro’s puppets. Just as the sea was bringing peace to dreamy Ishmael, the madness of Ahab errupts. It’s appropriate to bring up Quixote, but it’s Faustus who may be most convivial with the Pequod’s Captain, shouting down as he does the divine. And it’s not just in content but in form that Marlowe comes to light. Melville, not content to just reference, ney articulate, the bible and the reference work, turns the narrative to a play with stage directions, asides, and soliloqies. Yes, the play’s the thing.

As Ishmael takes to the sea, the style of narrative changes. On land a somewhat ecstatic, idiosyncratic narrator, at sea a man of ceremony, classification, strategy, ologies. He takes to the sea to escape a kind of death. On the Pequod he is outside of himself, even omniscient. Here too he brings us his text-within-text, his cetology (whose own form ‘quarto’ and ‘folio’ are noted just as the whales inside).

Ishmael notes the order of the Pequod, describes its society and stratifications at length. Just as the ship has unspoken orders, the ship brings order to our Ishmael.

“…and that the pages that are heavy with words shall be bent in and over him, so that he is engulfed in the sere Text…”

Titus is literally in the text, wrapped in an ancient tome for his christening. I too am in the text. In Mervyn Peake’s “Titus Groan.” And for the first time in sometime I am in a text that exists outside of other texts.

Engulfed as I have been in the 16th and 17th centuries, I’ve been in a world of referants. Quixote reads the books of chivalry, Pentagruel quotes the works of Erasmus, and Hamlet references the plays of Johnson. The world of Gormenghast is another matter: time-less, place-less, it brings its own library of works, it’s own literary legacy, and the author of all is Peake. Gormenghast seems to even have it’s own religion, though one based more on archaic secular tradition than any deity. So that even the word christening feels odd when broken into its component parts. For in this world, there was no Christ. No, this is a world without Shakespeare (poor and as unthinkable as that would be). And yet it isn’t. Pyke is not an author without Shakespeare, nor without the Bible.

This is not a profound revelation. And Pyke not the first author to invent his own library to forsake all others. But as a reader it’s a startling discovery to make.

Dr. Faustus, it would seem, is in he’ll. Lead there by Mephistopholes after entreating Helen, Christ, and the elements (in that order). He fulfills his part of the contract, rending his soul to Lucifer. But what did Faustus get?

Surprisingly, the play is short on magical reads. Yes, he travels around the world, turns invisible, torments the pope, raises spirits, and puts horns upon a man’s head. But that’s just what he ‘does.’ What he wants is knowledge. Within moments of signing himself over he starts asking Mephistopholes for books. The first is about necromancy, but the other two are cosmolgical and biological. Faust wants to know. While a workable example of the first volume is beyond our grasp, the latter are rather commonplace today. We have access to Faust’s knowledge on our phones. Which is not to say that an iPhone would have kept him out of he’ll.

Our want to know is not diminished. I read Marlowe’s Faustus because I’m creating a paper theatre narrative that requires a play within a play. My main character, Alexander, sees a paper theatre performance of Dr. Faustus. This inspires him to his own pursuit of knowledge discovery and containment.

Our want to know is it’s own damnation, because it’s never enough. After all, there’s always more to know. But it’s not just that. I think we’re hardwired to acquire information. And the pursuit can be an avoidance. Once we capture it, we don’t know what to do.

And I suppose that this time it’s my fault. After all, I chose to read it. It was I who put again the drama in motion, had them woken up, summoned as it was, to Elsinore. “I come to bury Caeser, not to praise him” it was said in another play. But I think it comes to me to eulogize Rosencrantz and gentle Guildernstern. The news comes to my ears, even though I did not order it. To close the book is to turn the earth over on their coffins, but while the bodies are still warm, let us remember the men who could not themselves remember.

They would not be the first nor the last men to forget themselves. Just the other morning, while in the shower I convinced myself I could not recall my own past. The reasoning I took was this: so barely could I connect the person that I was seven years ago to the person I an now (then)–not because I was so changed–but perhaps because I was not, that I seemed birthed from that moment. I would have all but forgotten myself, had I not remembered.

But Rosencrantz and Guildernstern never had that luxury, even when confronted with their tragederian dopplegangers. And yet even as they failed to recollect their collective past, they were always somehow cognizant of their shared and inevitable future, their absurd and tragic fate.

My friends, I recognize myself in them. I too, far too often, am waiting for another to direct my fate, feeling as if I were conjured to act the part in another’s story, that my fate is already part of the plot.

But this is about them, not me. They gave us entertainment, came to us to divine our maladies at their expense. They were summoned for us, for our melancholy. That they should die, that’s just part of the play.

Poor Ophelia, that she should go mad for Hamlet’s actions. If he’s not mad, but she goes mad for his choices, it’s a sorry outcome.

That Hamlet should see the sacrifice of many, for a poor trifle of land, as justification for his own murderous actions, well that makes more sense.

That I should be acquiring two-dollar copies of Hamlets at used bookstores, stuffing them up in my closet—there’s a tragedy!

Until now, I’ve never read Hamlet. Not entirely, not specifically. I am 32 years old, close to the age of Jesus when crucified (supposedly 33). He never read Hamlet either. But he had an excuse. If he exists, we can assume he’s read it now. He’s had enough time. By that measure, I’m not doing so bad.

If I’d taken those advance placement English classes, I would have read it. But at some point I made the foolish decision that to be writer, you should take writing classes. That I made it through high school and college without reading of the Danish Price, is evidence of a failure. But most probably with me. That I took four semesters of drama (five if you count junior college) without reading Hamlet, that’s something else: drama classes are based on scenes and monologues.

To say it plainly: I never read ‘Hamlet’. Never. After a while you just pretend, since the play is so much a part of us. It’s like saying that you have no DNA. So I make schoolboy errors in my reading today. And yet, missing ‘Hamlet’ is not the greatest of my youthful regrets. Yet, if I’d read the play, it probably would have given me an idea of how much my indecision would haunt me (Holden Caulfield was then my god).

Just today, the King has learned that his step-son was captured by pirates. I could rush the end, but I savour my endings. Plays unfold either in your head or on the stage. Even if all my observations are obvious—or even worse, wrong—they are honest. Plus, I have other ideas.

I’ve made the somewhat obvious (but no less satisfying) jump from ‘The History of That Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de La Mancha’ to ‘The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark’. The parallels are many, the discoveries joyous (even through Hamlet’s eternal gloom). While I would not be the first to point out these shared sympathies—I could read criticisms on the subject—there’s nothing better than making those discoveries for one’s self. Thus prefaced, let’s get to the Prince and Knight.

That William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes died on the same day, is almost a little too perfect, propelling all observations into a kind of literary kismet (which, according to wikipedia is a bit of conceit, as Spain and England were using different calendars). In Bloom’s introduction to Don Quixote, he points out a similar murkiness in ‘authentic motives’ shared by the two characters. He doesn’t get much into the madness, and that’s where I’ll begin.

Hamlet’s story is the reverse of Don Quixote’s. Hamlet tells us in the beginning that he’s putting on the aires of madness. Don Quixote tells us in the end that he’s taking them off. Yet it’s hard to say how much control either one has over their madness, despite their claims to the contrary (Don Quixote has madness within madness in the Sierra Moreno). Yet they are their own stability. Those around them, all those kings, barbers, bishops, and dukes have their lives dictated to some degree by it. I.e., while Hamlet and Quixote are infirmed, it’s those around them who are affected.. Hamlet’s compatriots engage in the Quixote guessing game, trying to disprove madness with intelligence, and vice versa. They can’t hold the two values simultaneously, and this cognitive dissonance reverberates across both narratives.

Which makes me wonder just what was going on in Europe at the turn of the 17th century that engaged these two men to write these stories about characters who have so transcended the boundaries of their respective stories. I’m unable to answer the cause, but rather interested in  the effect. These characters are so transcendent because they break through their texts. Bloom points out that in Hamlet, “all the rules of normative representation are tossed away, and everything is theatricality. Part II of Don Quixote is similarly and bewilderingly advanced”. Both narratives contain critiques of their respective forms. Both narratives offer stories within their stories, external readings brought in to affect their characters actions.

And yet, as much as these two characters are so alive in our universe, it’s impossible to imagine them existing in the same universe. Sure, both live in corrupt and crumbling kingdoms, and suffers the slings—if not arrows—of outrageous fortune. But they could never meet. Their characters are of different forms, and different stuff. You can be mad like Quixote, or you can be mad like Hamlet. I think most people flatter themselves as the former, but the latter is probably closer to the truth.

Here’s an observation on kitsch, to back me up. Through my journeys to various antique stores and flea markets, I’ve noticed the preponderance of decor influenced by Don Quixote from the 60s and 70s: sculptures, paintings, and wall reliefs of Don Quixote and Pancho*. There’s a dearth of Hamlet book ends. Yet, how the play’s lines litter our speech. I’m not sure what we would say if Hamlet had never been written. Because of Don Quixote we know jousting at windmills, but because of Hamlet we know ‘murder most fowl’, ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’, ‘methinks the lady doth protest too much’ and ‘to sleep, perchance to dream’. And many more. If Quixote decorated our dens, Hamlet still corners the market on adorning our words.

I leave it here, because I’m not yet done with Hamlet. I’ll get to that apology, anon.

*This probably has a good deal to do with Man of La Mancha, which is a different beast, true.

Bloom says in his introduction that we will never know the true motives of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. But just as we will never know their motives, we will never know the motives of Cide Hamete, the history’s fictive author. After all, what can we make of a devout muslim who praises the actions of this delusional Christian knight? How much irony do we ascribe to his ovations? And for that matter, what do we believe he has left out (given that the book’s second author makes claims that Hamete, “probably gave us too little rather than too much.”) Like Cervantes, Hamete’s apparent purpose is to denounce those false and degenerative books on chivalry. But Hamete’s polemic is frequently subsumed by the crackling velocity of Quixote’s narrative. Without those chivalric tomes, Quixote would still be Quixana, and the history would be not.

It’s hard to tell if Hamete is genuine in his appreciation of Quixote—and if he is, he must suffer from Quixote’s infectious madness. Many who meet Quixote find themselves pretending to Quixote’s situation—with ostensible motives of helping or mocking him. As Hamete himself points out, the duke and duchess are just as mad for going to such lengths to have fun at the expense of Quixote’s apparent madness.

I suppose Hamete sees the fulfillment of his own purpose in Quixote’s madness. Every windmill mistaken for a giant, is another knock on chivalry’s tarnished image. But even Hamete seems inconstant here. We must wonder if he would facetiously praise Quixote in Mohammed’s name. In a sense, his polemic against chivalry is his excuse for following Quixote, for pretending to his madness.