39 Books: 2016

I love it when people announce that "if Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be writing Eastenders", or Game of Thrones or crime fiction, according to one and another variation. The innocence of the claim is charming, giving voice to the desperation to give weight to ephemera. But I doubt that I've missed the Hamlet of primetime. As Half Man Half Biscuit sang, "In kingdom of the blind, they say the one-eyed man is king. And in the kingdom of the bland, it's nine o'clock on ITV."

Gabriel Josipovici begins his book by outlining how strange Shakespeare's play is, easily ignored given the familiarity of certain scenes and the compression of the plot in memory. "[In] no other play of Shakespeare’s – probably no other major literary work – are so many key episodes shrouded in mist":

Has Claudius been legally elected according to Danish custom or has he usurped the throne? Is his marriage to his brother’s wife seen as perfectly natural by everyone but Hamlet, or do others share his feeling that it should not have happened at all and was in any case over-hasty? Did Claudius commit adultery with his brother’s wife or merely woo his widow? Why does Claudius not react to the mime, which is meant to reflect his murder back at him? Does Ophelia drown by accident or is it suicide? What exactly is the nature of the wager that Claudius enters into with Laertes over the duel?

But rather than apply answers from disciplines outside of the play, as is inevitable in our positivist age, Josipovici wonders if the "puzzles and confusions be seen as part of the fabric of the play, part of what the play is about, rather than as so many problems to be explained away". The fabric is compared to the folds of a fan, hence the title, drawn from Mallarmé's poem about Bruges cathedral.

For a fan is not simply vertical when shut and horizontal when open, it allows us to imagine…an absolute verticality and an absolute horizontality united in one object so small and light it almost does not exist – the very model of Mallarmé’s ideal poem.

When the fan is open, the plot is revealed in its entirety with all the puzzles open before us, as light as the object cooling our face, and when compressed we recall only inconclusive elements, such as Hamlet's angst, so small that the play no longer exists. The book therefore is a patient close reading of the unfolding. This is a helpful metaphor for those writing reviews of modern novels, invariably read horizontally.

Those who wish to identify contemporary Shakespeares may point out that one can see Hamlet's existential anxiety in any number of modern dramas, but in popular culture these tend to be contingent rather than representative. To appreciate Hamlet's condition, Josipovici compares it to the curse of perception endured by Kierkegaard's indecisive young man and Thomas Mann's Adrian Leverkühn: "the coldness that comes from seeing too clearly into the nature of things." Like Hamlet, they find themselves in a limbo between one age and another, which in Hamlet's case is when an age of superstition is coming to an end. To appreciate him and the play:

we need is to understand what it feels like to live in a world that, for all its brutality, made sense, and, in one’s lifetime, see it transformed into one in which nothing seemed any longer to make any sense and where all attempts to impose meaning were immediately subject to suspicion.

This world is familiar to us only in the consistency of its unfamiliarity. It's like each of us stands in the still centre of a centrifgue as contingent factors spin before us. It's curious that when I wondered about modern correspondents of Hamlet that the movie Synecdoche, New York came to mind and checking up on Roger Ebert's review I found that he uses Josipovici's term to describe its effect on the viewer: "The surface may daunt you. The depths enfold you. The whole reveals itself, and then you may return to it like a talisman." In fact, there are metafictional parallels with the play itself when Caden Cotard stages a play to make sense of his life and then he and we struggle to distinguish between act and acted upon. If Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be Charlie Kaufman.