The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  Two impertinences and an announcement

  HIS STOCKINGS FOULED, DOWN-GYVED to his ankle, the Prince wanders the galleries of Elsinore with an open book, an impotent dagger, and a wilting flower.

  “But look where sadly the poor wretch comes reading.”

  The men hiding behind an arras hear his suppressed sighs and confused words. They see the Prince’s figure moving along with unsteady step, dragging his shadow heavily behind him. They see the black cloak slipping from his shoulders. Woe betide those who don’t see anything beyond that, for whom a cloak and a shadow obscure the man.

  In the most common judgment on Hamlet, he is a synonym for weakness, for a pathological inability to act, for hesitation. In the recesses of our superficial impressions wanders a boy dressed in black who escapes his tragic responsibility by playing the fool and the artist, playing the philosopher and the madman.

  And for that matter, many scholarly commentaries have that thrust. The interpretation of Hamlet as a weakling is supported by quite a few august names. Apart from the arguments from authority there are also the arguments from quotation. Because our reverence for authorities is moderate and we know how easy it is to prove anything with quotations, we will reread the tragedy in its entirety. Against the common view that has killed him with the word “Hamletism,” and against the commentators who, of the four humors ruling man’s nature, see in him only phlegm and melancholy, let us try to give back the Prince his blood, bile, and grandeur.

  Epilogue by Snuffed Lights

  ONE OF THE REAL causes of our difficulties in understanding Hamlet is Shakespeare’s own indeterminate relationship with that personage. It seems that the author was unable to maintain the proper distance, to be an objective chronicler of the hero’s fate. Time and again it comes to dangerous liaisons, suspected collusion between Hamlet the Prince and Hamlet the Playwright.

  The strongest and most intimate link between the poet and his hero is the known fact that both of them are artists. I hold to this thesis, even if those love sonnets the Prince wrote have not been found and even if it turned out that in student theater he played the role of prompter. Nor can the enthusiasm and expertise with which he received the actors at Elsinore be counted as sufficent proof that Hamlet was an artist. For that matter, his exchange with the actors is so obviously the author speaking that it strikes us as a sudden turn from poetry to journalism. Nor will we be satisfied by that insertion of a dozen or so lines written by the Prince for The Murder of Gonzago. Where should we look for evidence of Hamlet’s artistic attitude toward the world, the attitude which, taken wrongly, brings on the accusation of “Hamletizing”—understood as immersion in the sphere of the imagination?

  We all know perfectly well that the performance of The Murder of Gonzago by the traveling troupe of actors is not only an entertainment for the melancholy Prince’s diversion. We realize that it is a moment with a special weight, a turning point, and that after it the action takes its course on the other, falling slope of tragedy. We also sense that this crucial role being ascribed to art is to be read as a sign or symbol of more profound matters. Hamlet’s intention is not particularly difficult to understand. The pantomime played by the actors is a dramatization of the Ghost’s account, the alleged course of events in the murder of Hamlet’s father by Claudius.

  The Prince is counting on Claudius, present at the performance, to betray himself as the murderer. In this very Freudian fashion, Hamlet seeks to make sure that the Ghost commanding him to take revenge is not a delusory apparition from Hell.

  But do these investigative motives play a decisive role here? It would seem that Hamlet is too thoroughly convinced Claudius is the villain to have to take recourse to such ingenious and, let us add, not entirely reliable methods of uncovering the truth. The pantomime is the first bloodless attack carried out in the world of imagination and ideal forms. It is an aesthetic revenge that Hamlet the artist has to taste first.

  The extremely odd phenomenon—no longer merely psychological, or aesthetic, but somehow “meta”—that we leave the theater after a tragedy with a strong sense of spiritual uplift, Aristotle explains with reference to the cathartic function of the play, which rids the soul of painful emotions. Participating in the main characters’ fate, we bear the burden of guilt with them, feel the lashes of punishment and the grace of forgiveness. But if a murderer hiding in the darkness of the audience undergoes a cleansing, what is that play’s “morality”? Let us assume instead that the play infuses them with an irresistible longing for true cleansing, with a will to good. If so, why does Claudius—a villain with a full moral consciousness, a villain who prays, who dreams of snow at night—why does Claudius not confess his crime in public right after the performance? Can it be that art—

  With Shakespeare we search for the great power contained in works of art, the power that, liberated, raises up the fallen world and betters the moral order of reality. We seek art that, like religion, can throw us to our knees and raise us up again, absolved. But our searching arms remain empty.

  Hamlet is a tragic artist, an artist who discovers that his art will not save the world.

  The actors and audience have left the theater in a panic. Only the director and an initiated member of the audience remain in the empty hall among dwindling candles and discarded costumes: Hamlet and Horatio.

  Let us not be deluded by the improvised verse and forced jollity of the two friends, for this epilogue by snuffed lights is heartbreakingly sad. The actors have taken off their masks, but the spectators are still wearing them.

  The end of a certain hope, a certain dream of actors’ slippers with a Provençal rose.

  The Blood of Thought

  THE MAD OPHELIA AND the mock-mad Hamlet express the poet’s many-sided rebellion against the world’s ordinariness. For there is a kind of normality that is unacceptable, a base, comfortable normality that submits to reality, forgets easily. It is universal because some inner law of economics doesn’t allow us to experience reality to the full, to the depths, at the level of the most profound feelings and meanings. The same instinct for self-preservation in the sphere of the mind protects us from an excessive sensitivity, from the ultimate why and wherefore. Hamlet is the contradiction of that attitude.

  We invented his conjectural essay on the syllogism to bring out a conviction necessary to understanding of the character: the conviction that before the gates of Elsinore closed on him, he had a worldview of a sort, based on faith in the rational order inside man and outside him. He had his own system of values and a ladder perhaps not too high, but with solid rungs on which one could confidently put one’s feet. Apart from indifferent concepts easily kneaded in the hand there were in that system nasty, hard concepts like death, crime, but a few measures could turn even those into bricks supporting a rational and attractive architecture. Man was one of the beings placed highest, tightly incorporated into the building’s structure.

  If it had not been for the tragic events that tore the Prince from the mood of study and contemplation, he might have been a bit of a Stoic, a bit of an Epicurean, a bit of an Aristotelian till the end of his life. His father’s sudden death eluded all rational interpretation. It was a fact, a thing that is, a hard, rough object, naked and senseless. His whole artful system was shaken by this experience.

  His second experience was the discovery of the crime. To the bitter truth of man’s transience was added the truth about smiling villains, triumphant criminals. Unplumbed human nature opened up before the Prince like an abyss.

  Hamlet—and this is a mark of intellectual greatness—rejected the acclaimed recipe of philosophy and did not tread the old path to Nature, by way of soothing indifference and endurance. The cruelty and wretchedness of man infected even nature. The earth seemed to him “a sterile promontory, the brave o’erhanging firmament a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.”

  Before Descartes risked his universal doubt, before he began demolishing the foundations, he built himself
a cozy little temporary morality not only to avoid hesitating to act when his reason obliged him to be hesitant to judge, but also to live as happily as he could in the midst of those intellectual storms. The Prince of Denmark does not seek any protection. The current of his doubt is religious, metaphysical, moral, not merely methodological.

  We meet Hamlet in a negative, skeptical phase. In this phase, definitions and theses are not important. There are situations in which a man should be able to do without a philosophy. There are experiences in the face of which one must discard systems of gentle persuasion and plausible consolations. Hamlet’s greatness as a thinking being resides in his passion for blasting things away, in his nihilistic impetus, in the ardor of his negation, the bitterness of his skepticism.

  Thinking is sometimes seen as a form of luxury in life, a narrow little puff of reflection trailing from the forehead. Down below the instincts, senses, and all the other condemned dark forces are seething. Thought is opposed to life as the only form of clarification and justification.

  In Hamlet, thinking does not oppose itself to life or any other inner powers. He thinks with his whole life and with his whole person. The fingers touching Yorick’s skull are the beginning of reflection; in Hamlet’s conversation with his mother, thought weeps and bleeds.

  What is sometimes interpreted as indecision, in the intellectual sphere as well, is in fact Hamlet’s orientation toward the concrete, the thought form that is an immediate reaction to reality, a response to a situation. That is why the Prince’s soliloquies, in which the dramatization of thought reaches its peak, are as thrilling as the action, if indeed not more engaging. They are woven so subtly of thought’s material that you can listen to them with your eyes closed, even regretting that they are being spoken aloud. If the shallow trace left in one’s consciousness by the recitation of a poem learned by heart or a reading from someone else’s text can be called “thought thought,” then thought that rips up a whole man, wholly absorbing him in the process, with a complete sense of responsibility and risk to the point of questioning himself—such thought may be called after a contemporary philosopher “thinking thought,” fully and integrally connected to the subject. This heroic form of the intellect as it experiences reality, despite its undulations, its rises and falls, has nothing in common with moodiness, differs from it in depth and authenticity.

  Hamlet’s madness is a veil behind which he prepares himself for the decisive trial. It is also battle: it liberates the strength of one driven into a corner—irony—and permits outbursts of sincerity and truth uninhibited by convention. But just as aesthetic revenge proved powerless, this ploy also lets him down and only makes the Prince reveal more of himself. Even such a capital calf as Polonius discovers the method in this madness, and Hamlet’s main antagonist Claudius is fully aware of the mystification. Hamlet’s gloomy joke, taking a stroll to a grave, his parables about man as pipe and as sponge, that Pascalian paragraph from the words “What a piece of work is a man…” to “But to me what is this quintessence of dust?”—all of them make an all too profound sense. It is not healthy common sense but an obsessive thickened form of thought, and for that reason the scenes of performative madness are closest to the soliloquies. The famous soliloquy on the risk of suicide (to be or not to be), cut off by Ophelia’s entrance, turns into an explosive dialogue that despite glaringly obvious difference of tone and an intensified level of cruelty, has the same foundation, the same material of thought and even a consistently arrived at conclusion.

  The truly mad Ophelia and the mock-mad Hamlet cross the garden (murderers say there are snakes in it). The Prince watches closely and tensely listens to her words. Ophelia’s eyes are changed, wide, burning, her breath is quickened, she hums a song she would never have dared to sing before. Seeing all this, Hamlet thinks of a philosophy as powerful and authentic as madness.

  Greatness

  “AN OAK PLANTED IN2 a precious vase that could only hold frail flowers, the oak’s roots push; the vase breaks. A beautiful, noble, highly moral being who does not have the inner strength that makes a hero, perishes under the weight he can neither carry nor throw off.”

  According to Goethe, this precious vase is Hamlet. This whole unnatural comparison gave rise to the quite natural and generally accepted interpretation according to which the Prince “twists and turns, frets and worries, steps forward and immediately retreats.” Pondering the sources of this interpretation we arrive at the conviction that it was an attempt to look at the hero from the point of view of the whole work, whose perfection was assumed from the start; second, it was about Hamlet not “in himself” but the role of the actor performing the character; and finally, such a personal tone crept into Goethe’s explanation that it threw a shadow on the disinterestedness of his research aims.

  Goethe was under the powerful spell of Shakespearean tragedy, but he couldn’t fail to notice the significant flaws in the play’s structure, the elaboration of superfluous themes, the fading dramatic line, and so on. How can a work built so imperfectly make such an impression? Was the person of the hero so fascinating that his elusive “charm” made up for the faults of the whole? The interpreter got caught up in a false antinomy between the main character and the artistic construction of the whole. It seemed to him that to save the consistency of the play’s structure, and thus Shakespeare’s greatness as a playwright, he should make the hero guilty of any defects in the work. Plot lines are cut off and the action is broken up because Hamlet hesitates, is indecisive, “hamletizes.”

  The other consideration which inclined him toward that interpretation was practical through and through: Goethe wanted to give actors the key to the role, tell them how they should play Hamlet. This practical question replaces the more difficult and perhaps more theoretical one of who Hamlet really was. Showing the mechanics of melancholy gestures, the tones of indecision, the unsteady steps and sighs is relatively easy. But suggesting the human double bottom of Hamlet, as Olivier did, allowing people to feel his entirely consistent and courageous character beyond words and gestures—that is the deep understanding and personal sensitivity of the performer, not a costume that can be fitted and passed on to others at will. The truth of the Hamlet who does not hamletize is an unpractical and difficult truth.

  In the end our suspicion of Goethe’s personal investment derives from the thought that he put across Hamlet as a Romantic figure, a close relative of Lotte’s unhappy adorer. Meanwhile, the comparison with Werther allows us to grasp Hamlet in the perspective of greatness. The sentimental gesture of a young hysteric clashes with Hamlet’s profound drama and shows the incommensurability of the two characters and their spiritual formation. One can sympathize with Werther, but one can’t feel a deep solidarity such as binds us to Hamlet. The Romantic drowned in tears and infinity does not once achieve the high tone of Hamletian pathos. Even the letter to his beloved before he dies is less of an envoy to human beings than are the Prince’s soliloquies. We feel strongly which of the two most fully and worthily represents humanity. I think that if they ever met in the other world, it would immediately come to a scene as violent as the fight of Hamlet and Laertes by Ophelia’s grave. In any case, Werther covered up a not entirely admirable detail of Goethe’s life and compensated him for it. Hamlet’s moral climate and his mood of responsibility indicate that Shakespeare did not write him to justify or stylize himself for anybody’s benefit.

  Orestes is often compared to the Danish prince. The comparison is interesting not as an analogy but as a contrast. Orestes is a naïve Hamlet. The sword he sinks into the bodies of his mother and her lover has the simplicity of an elemental force. Not until after the deed do thought and conscience catch up with the revenger. Hamlet withdraws and fulfills himself in his act completely because he has traveled a long path from the moment when he realizes “fate cries out” to him, going to meet the Ghost, right up to the words “Readiness is all,” when he decides on the duel. In the bracket of those two phrases are contained his choice
and conscious destiny.

  In deciding on the role of avenger, Hamlet makes a great choice. A great choice is always an abstract choice. Its meaning and authenticity are fulfilled by a whole sequence of concrete choices made every moment. The pain of the Hamletian dialectic of “I and the universe” is verified not only in the distant stars but in every stone stumbled over by those who seek. Hamlet feels this on every plane of reality, in his relation to every person. His choice must be cruel and synonymous with a rejection of love, friends, Ophelia, his mother. And the Prince is more and more alone (Horatio is drawn with such a faint line that he in no way disturbs this solitude), until in the end he is left alone with his fate.

  Fate is an inexorable alien force that can neither be drawn into a pact or crushed. So heroes rebel and fight. Hamlet belongs to the righteous who do not shake their fists at heaven but grow into their fate. When he finally touches it with his mind and heart, when he accepts it inwardly, it ceases to be violence and becomes a hero’s strength. In the final scene Hamlet is strong and when he chooses his weapon before the duel, he stands above all the blind forces of the universe.

  Moral greatness manifests itself in a particular tone, used in the telling by one who has encountered it. When the lights of the procession fall on the sharp profile of the Prince lying prone, we lean over him.