Of course, what she really needs is a live synthesis of the two. And it is her task to arrive at it. But without the encounter with Homer, and without our raising the simple and supposedly elementary question of identification—Is there anything in you that is Achillean?—she might not have had access to her own divided state. With such self-knowledge achieved, she is in a position for productive change. This was an instance not only of reading and interpreting a book—we spent a long time coming to understand the heroic code and considering Homer's highly equivocal attitude toward it—but of allowing the book to interpret and read the reader.
Some teachers say that we must teach books like the Iliad because they show us a world so different from our own that it presses the values of this, our world, into sharp contrast. On the contrary, I teach the Iliad because in many significant ways, Homer's world is ours, though we are not always able to see as much immediately. In a passing remark about Homer, Nietzsche observes that part of what makes his world hard to assimilate for moderns is that to Homer's heroes, jealousy is not a negative emotion, not a feeling to be suppressed. Rather, one's desire for the first place is proudly announced. One revels in the hunger for dominance. In a culture where pagan values contend with Christian values—that is to say, in our culture—often the Christian aspirations to modesty and grace serve to cover over lust for glory and other kindred drives. Reading Homer can peel the cover back and allow us to see ourselves as we are. This great book—among the greatest and the most disturbing in the Western tradition—is anything but a period piece. Rather, it is a book that lives very much in the present. It is news that stays news, to cite Ezra Pound's still valuable, still newsworthy description of what makes literature literature.
Yet exactly how far is one to go in expanding literary meanings to make them apt for the present and future? It's unlikely that Homer ever imagined a pervasive cult of the warrior, however sublimated, that would be comprehensively open to women. By what right do I, or my students, enlarge his sense to fit our needs? I think that, having established the author's vision, insofar as it's possible, and having been as true to him as, say, Bowra seems to me to be true to an aspect of Homer, we are free to enlarge the work, always being aware of what it is we do. The test of the reading that leaves the provinces of the author's vision is use. What can we do with this work? What aspects of our lives does it illuminate? What action does it enjoin? We test the work, then, against the template of experience, as my students did. They wondered what would happen to them if they brought Homer's vision to life here and now. The ultimate test of a book, or of an interpretation, is the difference it would make in the conduct of life.
But Shakespeare?
DOES THE WORK contain live options? Does it offer paths one might take, modes of seeing and saying and doing that we can put into action in the world? How, in other words, does the vision at hand, the author's vision, intersect with—or combat—your own vision of experience, your own Final Narrative?
Do you want to second Wordsworth's natural religion? It's not a far-fetched question at a moment when many consider ecological issues to be the ultimate issues on the world's horizon. Is it true, what Wordsworth suggests in "Tintern Abbey" about the healing powers of Nature and memory? Can they fight off depression? Not an empty question in an age when antidepresant drugs have become unbearably common. Is Milton's Satan the shape that evil now most often takes—flamboyant, grand, and self-regarding? Or is Blake's Satan—a supreme administrator, mild, bureaucratic, efficient, and congenial, an early exemplar of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil"—a better emblem? Or, to strike to the center of the tensions that often exist between secular and religious writing, who is the better guide to life: the Jesus of the Gospels, or the Prometheus of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who learned so much from Christ, but rejected so much as well—in particular Jesus' life of celibacy?
All right, one might say, but those are Romantic writers, polemicists, authors with a program. Even Henry James might be considered part of this tradition, albeit as an ambivalent anti-Romantic. What about other writers? What about, for instance, the famous poet of negative capability, who seems to affirm nothing, William Shakespeare? The most accomplished academic scholars of Shakespeare generally concur: they cannot tell what Shakespeare believed about any consequential issue. How can you employ Shakespeare in a way of teaching that seeks to answer Schopenhauer's question "What is life?" And if you can make nothing of Shakespeare, greatest of writers, then what value could this approach to literature, this democratic humanism as we might call it, possibly have?
If Sigmund Freud drew on any author for his vision of human nature—right or wrong as that vision may be—it was Shakespeare. The Oedipus complex, to cite just one instance of Freud's Shakespearean extractions, might just as well be called the Hamlet complex, as Harold Bloom has remarked. From Shakespeare, Freud might also have gathered or confirmed his theories of sibling rivalry; of the tragic antipathy between civilization and the drives; of bisexuality; of patriarchal presumption; of male jealousy; of all love as inevitably being the love of authority; of humor as an assault on the superego; and a dozen more psychoanalytical hypotheses. Shakespeare may not have affirmed these ideas out and out—he is not, it's true, a polemicist in the way that Blake is. But the question remains: Does Shakespeare/Freud work? Does their collaboration, if it is fair to call it that, illuminate experience, put one in a profitable relation to life, help you live rightly and enjoy your being in the world?
Readers of Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego will recall the daunting image of the leader Freud develops there. The leader, from Freud's point of view, is a primal father. In him the crowd places absolute trust, the trust of the child as it was aimed at his own father early on in life. Here is how Freud describes the primal and primary figure: "The members of the group were subject to ties just as we see them today, but the father of the primal horde was free. His intellectual acts were strong and independent even in isolation, and his will needed no reinforcement from others . . . He loved no one but himself, or other people only in so far as they served his needs. To objects his ego gave away no more than was barely necessary . . . Even to-day the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that ihey are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic, self-confident and independent."
In Shakespeare, whose work he read intensely from early on in life to the end, Freud could have seen precisely such a dynamic of leadership unfold. When we first encounter Prince Hal, later to become the mighty Henry V, he seems to be something rather different from the leader that Freud describes. He is mischievous, witty, and dissolute, and bosom friends with the prince of dissipation, Sir John Falstaff. In the three plays in which Hal appears, developing into King Henry V, we see a metamorphosis. However free-form he may be in the beginning, by the time he invades France in the last play of the trilogy, Hal has become as cold and self-contained as the figure Freud describes. Hal banishes Falstaff, who has taught him so much, and he hangs his old drinking buddy, Bardolph By the end of the play, Hal, a little like Michael Corleone at the end of Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, The Godfather Part II, truly loves no one but himself. Despite some subdued ironies directed against the king in Henry V, the play suggests that, as humanly off-putting as the self-loving Hal may be, he is nonetheless a superbly effective monarch. For the people need such rulers. With kings who can also jest, who can take themselves lightly, if only at times, they can have nothing serious to do. Such figures do not command allegiance. Falstaffian figures cannot activate the fantasies of omnipotence that we all, Freud argues, attached to our fathers when we were children, and that we still nurse in the unconscious. Northrop Frye observes that men will die for a brutal autocrat, but not for a joking backslapper. Freud, and Shakespeare as well, can offer reasons why this might be so.
Freud believed that in reading the book of Shakespeare, he read the bo
ok of nature. Even if he did not draw his theory of the leader directly from Shakespeare's pages, he could at least have found it corroborated here. In fact, Freud's vision of the leader and Shakespeare's are barely distinguishable, except that Freud is rather disgusted by the human weakness the vision reveals, and Shakespeare seems to see Hal's sort of kingship as simply necessary.
From Hamlet, Freud draws much of the material he needed to formulate the Oedipus complex. He does so directly. But all through Freud there are instances of convergence with Shakespeare. What these instances indicate, at least to me, is that Freud effectively acts as a literary critic of Shakespeare. He takes the work at hand and draws a theory of human nature and of human social life from it. Freud has seen that Shakespeare poses the question "What is life?" and he has done his best to construe his answer.
And this, in fact, is what literary criticism ought to do. A valuable literary critic is not someone who debunks canonical figures, or who puts writers into their historical contexts, or, in general, one who propounds new and brilliant theories of interpretation. A valuable critic, rather, is one who brings forth the philosophy of life latent in major works of art and imagination. He makes the author's implicit wisdom explicit, and he offers that wisdom to the judgment of the world.
When he encounters works that are not wise but foolish, what he does, in general, is to leave them alone—he doesn't teach them, or write about them, or give them any more notice than they already have. The world is aflood with bad ideas and flawed visions: the true critic seeks and finds live options; he heralds forgotten news that is still new. He discovers the discoveries of art.
The truest example of literary criticism I know of is this one: one July day in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson, by far the preeminent man of letters in America, received by post a volume of poetry from an absolutely unknown carpenter living in Brooklyn, New York. The volume had been privately printed, since no commercial publisher would touch it. Its author sold it door to door; he also reviewed it himself, anonymously: "An American bard at last," one of the reviews began. Emerson, who in himself concentrated the prestige of all of our current literary Nobel Prize winners rolled into one, did not do what one might expect. He did not take the volume and toss it into the trash.
He took it into his home, read it, and immediately, with a shock of recognition, felt its genius. He called it the greatest piece of wit and wisdom that America had yet produced. He overwhelmed the unknown author with praise. He endorsed the book to everyone he knew.
Emerson himself had always hoped to matter preeminently as a poet. In his essay on the uses of poets and poetry, he described the kind of writer he thought America most needed and that he himself aspired to be, someone responsive to the variety, energy, and promise of the new nation: "Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres." It was clear to Emerson that, much as he wanted to fill that role, he never would. He was a poet of the inner self, not of teeming democracy. But when he saw someone else rise to the task, he didn't turn away with resentment, or offer measured, feline praise. When Walt Whitman sent Emerson the first volume of Leaves of Grass, Emerson forgot himself and embraced a new hero.
Hamlet
POETRY, HORACE SAID, ought to give pleasure and instruct. And one need not look only to Freud to find instruction in the work of Shakespeare. There are other ways to go.
The Romantics took Hamlet as the representative contemporary individual, and their instinct was in many ways just. Hamlet stands between the Homeric figure that Bowra describes and the Christian ethos. He feels impelled by his father's ghost to take revenge and murder King Claudius. Hamlet the Elder is a figure steeped in the old heroic code. He would have looked to Achilles as an exemplar. When someone kills a member of your clan, you don't turn the other cheek, or even call on God to deliver just punishment. You strike, in as quick and deadly a way as you can.
Hamlet is responsive to this warrior code. Yet at the same time, he feels constrained by a Christian sense of right and wrong. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not take revenge. Hamlet is a thinker, a deeply inward man with a Christian conscience. But along with that conscience he possesses the residue of a Homeric drive for ascendancy. He wants preeminence.
The tension between these two ways of life, Christian and Homeric, informs the language of the play, the language tha Hamlet himself speaks. No interpretation of the play is complete without a careful study of the protagonist's idiom. But such responsiveness is only part of a full reaction to the play. At the beginning of his first solioquy, Hamlet makes his Christian commitment clear, calling out "God, God," and wishing that "the Everlasting had not fix'd / His canon 'gainst self-slaughter." Suicide can, of course, be a noble end in the classical world. In Christianity it is entirely forbidden.
Not much later, Hamlet moves from the idiom of Christianity to the idiom of classical antiquity. His dead father is "Hyperion," his usurping uncle a "satyr." Then his mother is weeping Niobe. He cries out against Gertrude for marrying his uncle—"my father's brother, but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules." In part, Hamlet wishes he could be Hercules, the better to rise to his father's revenge. But to his Christian conscience, Hercules is a throwback, a barbarian ideal.
Paul Cantor, the source of this Nietzschean reading of Hamlet, summarizes the situation: "In some ways, the figure of the ghost encapsulates the polarities Hamlet faces. As the ghost of his father, dressed in military garb and crying for revenge, it conjures up the world of epic warfare and heroic combat. But as the ghost of his father, rising out of what appears to be purgatory, it shatters the narrow bounds of the pagan imagination and opens a window on the eternal vistas of Christianity. In short, the ghost is at one and the same time a pagan and a Christian figure, and as such points to the heart of Hamlet's tragic dilemma as a modern Christian charged with the ancient pagan task of revenge."
Hamlet is caught between two worldviews, two circles or narratives—a state that may be the essential condition of tragedy. He is looking toward both Jesus and Achilles, two dutiful sons whose piety is in dramatic opposition, to see which way he needs to go.
The result is delay, irresolution. But, we must ask—and our students with us—is Hamlet's lot not sometimes ours, too? Many of the crises that give us the greatest pain and that are, in their effects on our day-to-day lives, potentially tragic, involve the collision of these two sets of values, Christian and pagan. Are we for or against capital punishment? Shall we follow the old classical code of honor or the modern code of mercy when a fellow citizen has been wronged? And abortion? Shall we do as the classical world did and, without excessive qualms, snuff out the newborn or unborn for our own advantage, or even our own convenience? Or shall we go the way of the Gospels and be, like Jesus, shepherds of souls? (Not some souls, but all of them.) Contemplating suicide, some of our contemporaries will also inevitably hear voices contending in a way that evokes Hamlet. To the classical world, as Shakespeare accurately dramatizes it in Julius Caesar, suicide can be an honorable end. It offers a dignified exit from a life that would otherwise end in shame. To the Christian mind, suicide is associated with acedia, or despair, the crime against the Holy Spirit, and the one unforgivable sin.
When these two worldviews, Christian and classical, enter conflict, it is unlikely that we will be able to find a satisfying compromise. Hegel believed that tragedy began when two highly desirable and mutually exclusive courses of action collided with each other. For Hegel, tragedy is two rights making a wrong. Two rights make a wrong for Hamlet, and often, I suspect, for us as well, as we confront prospects for action—revenge, suicide, abortion—that dramatically divide our spirits. Encounters of this sort will not offer satisfying resolu
tions. There is not likely to be any plan of action that can leave us fully at peace. And frequently, the result will be grief of tragic proportions.
Not every interpretation geared to discovering usable truths leads us to happiness. Not every such reading answers questions. Tragic awareness, which Shakespeare often bequeaths, can only reveal to us that certain griefs are not fully negotiable, cannot be readily converted into happiness or tranquillity. (Robert Frost thought that a central element of a literary education was learning to distinguish grief from grievances. Grievances may be remediable; griefs are to be suffered.) But perhaps in the foreknowledge of such sorrows there is some consolation; at least one will not be taken entirely by surprise.
Good Medicine?
Is THE KIND of literary education that I'm endorsing here a form of therapy? Yes and no. Yes, in that this kind of teaching, like Socrates', like Freud's, offers possibilities for change that are not only intellectual but also emotional. When we're talking about Final Narratives, we're talking about ultimate values, and strong feelings inevitably come out; tensions similar to the ones that proliferate in Freudian analysis can arise. (I sometimes preside over a raucous classroom.) But there is also a crucial difference. Patients come to psychoanalysis because they suffer from the past. Their obsessions, in some measure unconscious, with past events prevent their living with reasonable fullness in the present. The form of teaching that I espouse assumes a certain ability to live now (that is to say, a certain sanity) and so aims itself not primarily at unearthing the past, but at shaping the future. What will you be? What will you do?
There is a story about a psychoanalyst who, after the first day's intake interview, asked his patients an unexpected question. "If you were cured right now, if you were well, what would you do?" There would usually come forth a list. "I'd get married; I'd travel; I'd go back to school and study law." To which the therapist, trusting his instincts, sometimes replied, "Then why don't you go off and do those things?" Assuming that he posed that question at the right moment, to the right patient, then what the analyst had observed was that the analysand was not caught in the past, but was actually alive enough to the promise of futurity (healthy enough) to expand out of his existing sphere.
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