liberal arts education

[the afflicted speculates, in an amusingly diseased manner, upon the cause of her illness through a literary effigy.]

It struck me as strange, even on the first read-through of the play, that so many of Hamlet’s school fellows were in Elsinore. Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, if not others, all knew our hero from Wittenberg. Perhaps it’s caused by the tilted time of life in which I read Hamlet, but I can’t help but think that Hamlet’s “melancholy” may simply be induced by his rigorous education.

The foundation of the “liberal arts madness” reading is simple: Horatio, the guardsmen (whose origin is ambiguous, but who are in league with Horatio and mentioned only in context of trusting and calling upon him), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are all figments of Hamlet’s imagination. Hamlet, Sr.’s ghost is not real, as it was Horatio and the guards who pointed the apparition out to Hamlet.

Why the hallucination? Hamlet’s education has filled his head with conflicting viewpoints, and has boosted his propensity to think and question to the point at which he is constantly running a heated seminar discussion in his head. In this period of time, education still went by the book –– several, actually, the Great Books –– and held a decidedly Biblical slant. The Dane’s liberal arts education actually explains his madness quite fully, all things considered: a love for reason and absolutes accompanied by the frustrating inability to live by them, a tendency to make mythological, historical, and literary allusions left and right, a sharp tongue, a quick wit, and perhaps most of all his incongruous adherence to select parts of the Catholic faith.

I’ve discussed Horatio a fair piece in another journal entry, but to state briefly his role as liberal arts illusion: he is the reason taught in classical university, the ideal, unquestionable, ever-reliable force one goes to when all else fails. Hamlet goes to him for guidance, support and, ultimately, his remembrance.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have the ghost. Hamlet, Sr., as the ghost identifies itself, rises from Hell every night in order to walk the palace grounds and make his son aware of his manifest purpose. Clearly it is not a rational illusion; rather, it is the irrational, the promise of God, the representation of an incredibly difficult Kierkegaardian leap of faith taken up by our tragic hero. (One wonders if Kierkegaard, a Dane himself, didn’t develop this portion of his philosophy after a close reading of Shakespeare’s play on Denmark.) Interestingly, Horatio is the force who rationalizes the appearance of the ghost and who decides to tell Hamlet that it exists. Because of this juxtaposition, the ghost ultimately represents the shadow of religious dogma in higher education. This is appropriate, since this play was written right around the time of the Enlightenment, during which many figures, such as Galileo, insisted that God created science as a gift to and faculty of man, and that reason and religion not only could coexist, but had to by virtue of their similarly absolute, “holy” qualities.

This does, of course, present a problem which can be reasoned away but temporarily; it is difficult to keep in mind Galileo’s famous words, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use,” without interruption by some sort of doubt. The Enlightenment and the paradox thereof is a driving force of Hamlet’s “insanity” and, I propose, has created his self-loathing personality. I’ll follow the Kierkegaardian model of Hamlet’s activity, since it fits rather well; it’s also likely that Hamlet had run across its Biblical foundation in school, and may have used it to think through his dilemma at some point.

The leap of faith is attractive to Hamlet, as it is to most any liberal arts student, past or present. (Most liberal arts agnostics I know desperately want to believe, but have a Hamletesque problem: they just can’t get over their “better judgment” and other evidence to the contrary.) Inexorably linked to the irrational and the Cartesian body, yet cushioned with the promise of purity and acceptance not normally associated with a “bodily” existence (along with the prospect of a cushy afterlife), there’s little more a man could ask for. Faith is the solution to the existentialist problem. It is unsurprising that the irrational half of the liberal arts education is what pushes Hamlet to action, on the rare occasion that he is, in fact, pushed to action. Perplexingly, Hamlet’s comforting, purpose-granting belief takes the form of a quest for revenge. His college-induced quirks had to find some way to superimpose themselves upon his life, and the way his life was going, his ludicrous family was a natural place upon which to focus.

The catch of the leap of faith is twofold: the sacrifice and the uncertainty. Just as Abraham’s sacrifice was his beloved son, Hamlet’s sacrifice was his beloved Ophelia. The uncertainties of Abraham and Hamlet are also very similar: one is visited by a purported angel, the other by an apparition calling itself the viewer’s father. Both Abraham and Hamlet have doubts about their messengers, and question whether or not they are actually agents of Satan.

After that, the stories diverge. Abraham, a servant of God, takes his leap and is rewarded by the Great Almighty; Hamlet keeps on questioning ad infinatum, as a liberal arts student is inclined, to the point at which his mind and body are at war with one another. Whenever his emotions, driven by his faith and the paranoia compulsory to his quest, get ahold of him, he simply can’t stand to be in the same room with himself. Take, for example, the end of Act II. Hamlet has just suffered a lengthy outburst decrying the false emotions of a stage actor, among other things, when his self-loathing kicks in:

“‘Swounds, I should take it, for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall
To make oppression bitter –– or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave’s offal! Bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance! ––
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave
That I, the son of a dear father murder’d,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A scullion! –– Fie upon ‘t! Foh!
About, my brain!”

Hamlet is so furious with himself for crying out in frustration that he relates himself to a woman –– and we all know Hamlet’s opinion on women. He seems to put together Galileo’s conjecture once more here, as he relates his mission to a God-given purpose. The unfortunate thing about this revelation relived is that it makes one tremendously frustrated that one ever forgot it in the first place, which we sense in his further cursing. At the last, before he starts hatching a plan wherein to catch the conscience of the king, he commands his brain to start functioning properly again –– a very liberal arts thing to do.

He relapses quickly, and momentarily errs on the side of rational proof –– to the extent to which it can be called such. The play is an experiment, and Claudius’s reaction is the result. Perhaps, had he acted as Abraham had, with absolute belief, he might’ve made the leap to Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith” status; alas, he fell, and so come we upon his title of tragic hero.

Our hero is a waffler; of this there is no doubt. His waffling is caused by his educated mind, and his educated mind is therefore the source of all his misery. Education is wonderful, isn’t it? It causes such sublime misery.

the melancholy Dane - numer eins.

I hear my people have a “culture of low expectations.” We’re easily contented because we’re used to losing. Well, my dearly beloved Western nations, why o why would Denmark be used to losing? Could it be because our ancestral religion was unceremoniously trounced by Christianity, transparently changed for the purposes of the church? Or, no –– maybe it’s because the wind burns off our ambition whenever we walk out the door. It’s hard enough to live back home. It’s hard enough to stand our frozen ground. We’re not like you.

We’re not bitter, though, and we won’t take your blood money. We are Danes, and Denmark is not our prison; there’s nothing rotten there. It is one of few free places left in the world, along with this place: existentialist France, proto-Christian Judea, and ancient Greece (among others), nestled in –– of all places! –– America.

“Mr. Wodsen?”

My name is Søren, but people are in the habit of calling me Mr. Wodsen. It’s how we operate here: last names, straight-backed chairs, fifty pages of ancient wisdom a night, not counting the dreams. A place like this conjures interesting dreams.

“Yes, Mr. Julius?” I haven’t been paying attention. This is our music class. It’s always more or less the same, a pleasant break from independent thought. The dynamics are written out in front of you. Someone else’s genius becomes your voice, flowing and ebbing, cracking when the intangible link between the centuries-old ink and your throat slips and falls apart.

Our instructor is notoriously witty. The quip is coming. It’s always there, waiting to materialize.

“Just because you finally hit the right note does not mean you have the right to hold it.”

A good one, but I’ve heard better. It must be an off day. “Sorry, sir.”

My mind has been on her hair. It falls in deep brown ringlets to her shoulders and always seems a little bit out of order, which I like. She’s a little Polish, a little Hungarian, a lot American. Her eyes are wide and brown, and she stands in front of me in freshman chorus –– an alto, I think. I’m a baritone, edging on bass, and my singing voice is actually rather terrible.

I sing, we sing. Class ends, and she turns around and smiles. She pokes me. She pokes me a lot.

She’s a fan. She’s obvious about it, always sitting to my right in seminar, going off on elaborately constructed tangents about the old gods and the new faces. The rest of the class thinks they’re spontaneous, I’m sure. Oddball scholars though they may be, they are not me. I don’t think a single one of them has a drop of Germanic blood –– they’re Celts, Moors, Magyars, Romans, Tatars, Slavs. Not Scands. Certainly not Danes.

It’s not that I’m in love with her. I don’t think she’s in love with me, either. It’s just a mutual interest, a curiosity. We’re all curious here. We just happen to be curious about one another.

We walk out on the quad. Some of the upperclassmen are playing croquet, but we’re new here, and croquet is still bizarre to us. She carries her books close to her heart: Plato and Aristotle and some Neal Stephenson novel, clutched like an infant, a treasure, invaluable and irreplaceable. Books are important. It was a shock to find so many Americans who find books so important –– a good shock.

“Been downtown yet?” she asks me. She’s from around here. (I’m not.)

“No.”

“Want to go? There’s a gelato place you’d like.”

Gelato. She has me there, and I smile, and she knows it.

“Let’s go,” she says, and she starts walking faster, toward the gate. When I don’t pick up the pace and follow, she stands there, looks back at me with a kind of perverse smirk on her face. I imagine my eyes look blank, a little confused as she grabs my wrist and drags me off campus.

Whatever. It’s gelato, and she’s Faith, and all is right with the world.