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Monday
In my weekly report on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of the World, I look today at the importance he attaches to Hamlet’s great soliloquy over whether or not to end his life. Such soliloquies help us see (in the words of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson) “the infinitude of the private man.” Through their identification with Hamlet and his heirs, Fletcher writes, audiences and readers were able to feel connected to “every person on earth.” And from there (so goes the transcendentalist credo) the soul stretched “to include every tree, every star, everything in the galaxy.”
As Emerson puts it in his poem “Each and All,”
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
How is the “to be or not to be” soliloquy a breakthrough? Fletcher says that engaging in a back-and-forth interior dialogue has “an extraordinary neural effect.” It makes our brain feel “I am the character asking the questions. I am Hamlet.” Here’s the opening of the speech if you need reminding:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.
The brain goes on alert when we have such internal conflict, Fletcher says, shouting out to us, “Hey! You’re fighting with yourself! You need to sort out which part of you is right!” This warning in turn
rouses our self-awareness, reminding us that we’re not part of the undivided flow of life. We’re a distinct entity with our own individual drives and needs and those drives and needs could be compromised if we don’t resolve our inner conflict…Biologically speaking, self-awareness is thus a tool of self-preservation It makes us aware that we have a self so that we can protect that self by stepping back from life’s flow to act more coherently.
“The sheer experience of being mentally torn between ‘To be or not to be,’” Fletcher continues, “will make our brain feel that part of us is Shakespeare’s prince.”
While Fletcher acknowledges that people felt for characters prior to Hamlet—say, for Achilles and Antigone—he says that Shakespeare’s prince took us “beyond caring about characters.” From henceforth that possibility existed that “we would become them.”
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Harold Bloom’s idea that Shakespeare invented the human. As he writes in his book on the subject,
Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare’s greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness. Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater…
Fletcher gives us another way of understanding how this invention happened, at least with Hamlet.
Then he provides instances of subsequent literary inventors building on Shakespeare’s soliloquy. For instance, 21 years after Shakespeare’s death, there was Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid, in which we see the title character struggling “between the honor demanded by his father and the love demanded by his betrothed”:
My father or my betrothed? Love or honor?
Duty’s harsh bonds or the heart’s sweet tyranny?
Either my happiness dies, or my name is ruined;
One is bitter, the other unthinkable.
The moment is so powerful that theater patrons attended the play night after night. Some, Fletcher reports, stood upon their gallery seats and chanted these lines in unison with the actor. As he explains, “The audience had literally become the character. Their lives had fused with his.”
This evening was so unprecedented, Fletcher says, that the civic authorities became perturbed, unsettled by this new force that had been released into the world. “Fearing that Le Cid might herald a social revolution,” he writes, “the king’s chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, censored the play for being a dangerous novelty.”
The next step in the innovation was the novel, and Fletcher mentions Robinson Crusoe, Sorrows of Young Werther, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In each work, we see characters wrestling with themselves—Crusoe between duty to his father and his hunger for adventure; Werther between his love for Charlotte and his admiration for Charlotte’s betrothed; and Huck on his duty to report Jim to the authorities and his urge to free him (even if it means going to hell).
In fact, first-person novels specialize in the drama of the soliloquy. One of my favorite examples occurs at that key moment when Jane Eyre wrestles with whether or not to become Rochester’s mistress:
While [Rochester] spoke my very conscience and reason turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamored wildly. “Oh, comply!” it said. “Think of his misery; think of his danger—look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair—soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?”
Still indomitable was the reply—“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
Novels, Fletcher says, “upgraded the soliloquy by accident. Their authors didn’t craft a new literary mechanism to insert into Hamlet; they simply deleted the stage and the persons upon it…By eliminating the physical element that disrupted the soliloquy’s identification effect, the novel added via subtraction.”
Fletcher adds one more novel to his discussion. What stands out about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is that the soliloquies multiply. Not only does Scout soliloquize but she observes “other characters as they soliloquize.” At which point, Scout identifies with those characters, prompting our brain, through Scout, to identify with them too. Scout finds herself identifying with two people who are also torn, Atticus (who talks about his inner conflicts) and Boo Radley (who’s conflicted state we see in his advance/retreat behavior). At the end of the novel, Scout comes to understand Boo:
Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.
In this remarkable moment, Fletcher writes,
Scout realizes that she’s come to identify with two other people. She sees through her father’s eyes—Atticus was right—as she stands in Boo’s shoes. And while she is perceiving two minds in one, we the reader are experiencing three minds in one. “This is multiple times the identification provided by Hamlet,” Fletcher writes. “It’s Emerson’s greater soul, expanded, giving us an intuition of the humanity beyond…and beyond…and beyond.”
What we see, in this process, is “not our fleshly desires, but the more rarefied elements of our consciousness: higher meaning, eternal truth, universal justice.” And the intuition of these cosmic values “can give our brain purpose in times of peace and strength in times of disaster.” It becomes possible to follow Martin Luther King’s injunction to “respond to hate with love.”
Fletcher adds that, when we extend that love, “one last wonder occurs”:
As modern psychologists have learned, nothing boosts our neural happiness more reliably, more deeply, or more enduringly than acts of generosity. So by giving our love to others, we really do receive ourselves. Like…the transcendentalists, we find connection to a greater human soul.
So if you find yourself losing faith in that soul, Fletcher has a ready solution: go read a novel. “Anytime that you notice yourself identifying with a character who seems nothing like you,” he says, you will probably be responding to some version of a soliloquy.