I am not posing as a movie critic in this paper, so I will not dwell on the technical aspects of the movie. Suffice it to say that the camera work is, as usual in a Kubrick movie, magnificent and without peer. There is a grainy high contrast style to the photography with lots of backlighting and many primary colors. He sets the film at Christmas, taking advantage of holiday lights, and makes it all deliberately kitsch. The overpowering use especially of red and blue -- with the marital wife bathed in red and death and danger in blue -- and the progressive juxtaposition of these colors adds to the underlying tension; there is also a peculiar music that includes a pinging on the piano that some critics found unpleasantly repetitious. The movie itself has functioned almost as a Rorschach test among critics, with reviewers ranging from those who call it a great masterpiece to those who consider it an abject dismal failure and suspect that Kubrick never finished it in spite of the studio's insistence that he did."Eyes Wide Shut" attempts to be a mystery movie; the possibilities of conspiracies and murders are lurking throughout. It has a nightmarish quality, and the hero (or anti-hero, named Bill) remains puzzled and confused almost to the end. In my opinion, he should have been confused even at the ambiguous end. When Bill wanders the streets of Manhattan at night, one is reminded of the section in James Joyce's Ulysses, titled "Ulysses in Nighttown".
Briefly, the story is of Bill, an affluent doctor married to a very beautiful young woman, but it is clear that their marriage is not going well. When his wife, named Alice, admits to an intense sexual fantasy about another man, Bill seems unable to accept that fact and ends up wandering the streets of Manhattan at night in a somewhat unbelievable sequence. He is constantly identifying himself as a doctor in a way one usually sees in movies by the detective who pulls out his wallet and flashes his identification wherever he goes. Clearly the doctor's self cohesion has become fragmented by the narcissistic wound inflicted by his wife. Later, in another unbelievable scene in which his wife is laughing in her sleep and he wakens her to tell her that she has had a nightmare, the wife astonishingly confirms this (laughing during a nightmare?) and relates a second intense sexual fantasy which is again demeaning to Bill.
In his wanderings, the doctor is knocked aside in a quasi-homosexual manner by a group of punks who offer him their behinds to kiss, is picked up by a prostitute who initiates a sexual relation that is interrupted by a telephone call from Bill's wife, and wanders into a bizarre orgy scene in which he is told that his life is threatened. The orgy scene is also strange because apparently the rich men at the orgy require some kind of anti-Pope ritual involving a group of almost naked women at first covered in monk-like habits before they can be turned on sexually.
There is a scene in a morgue where a completely naked woman is laid out uncovered on a slab in a storage locker, a procedure different from that in any morgue that I have seen in my medical experience. In the opening scene of the movie, while his wife is flirting with a Hungarian rou�, Bill is called upstairs to see a naked prostitute who has overdosed on heroin or cocaine. In a totally unprofessional way, the patient is left completely naked throughout the medical examination, and Bill does not even seem to notice her nudity. In general, the camera work on the numerous naked women in the movie gives them almost a waxy retail-store dummy kind of appearance. This I think is important in understanding what Kubrick is attempting to do.
"Eyes Wide Shut" is based on a novella by Arthur Schnitzler, a contemporary of Freud, who praised Schnitzler a great deal and felt that he had an intuitive insight into the unconscious. Schnitzler, describing Bill in the novella, wrote that "Everything seemed unreal: his home, his wife, his child, his profession, and even he himself, mechanically walking along through the nocturnal streets with his thoughts roaming through space" (reference). So, as a fragmentation of the self developed, the symptom of derealization became manifest.
Schnitzler's erotic stories, bursting with sweet young women, often offer a mordant critique of the cruelty, callousness, and hypocrisy of Vienna (see Freud: A Life for Our Time, by Peter Gay, p. 511). Schnitzler "secured Freud's unequivocal applause for his penetrating psychological studies of sexuality in contemporary Viennese society" (p. 166). Freud wrote him a letter stating that he envied him his "secret knowledge" of the human heart. Schnitzler wrote of dreams as cravings without courage which, chased back into the corners of our minds, dare to creep out only at night. He might have added "or when we are stoned on marijuana or high on alcohol," as in this movie.
There is a scene in a costume rental shop where the proprietor offers to also rent his daughter, and the movie follows Schnitzler's novel faithfully except for the introduction of a rich man who is Bill's facilitator but who manipulates him continually. Kubrick is clearly offering what one critic called a "Hobbesian theory of life" as short, nasty and brutish, and portraying the human as a deeply flawed creature decidedly closer to barbaric apes. Plato said that in our dreams we are all savages.
The title of Schnitzler's novella is "Rhapsody: A Dream Novel," but it is set in Vienna and occurs before the time of the author, indicating that it is already somewhat dated; when it is set in New York in Manhattan it becomes grotesque. What is important is Kubrick's deeply cynical view of the world, as I have described it in my paper "Archaic Sadism" (Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 24:605-618, 1996), ruled by a human species driven by greed and violence and its own delusions. It is even hard to believe that the couple has been married for nine years and has a seven-year-old daughter, because there is so little love between them; even their sex is mechanical and more like a scene in a pornographic movie.
We know that Kubrick was interested in the concept of man as a machine, a philosophical position known as eliminative materialism; he was even working on a possible movie called AI (for Artificial Intelligence). He replaces Schnitzler's sensual psychological story with a formally stilted approach that was obviously composed of numerous obsessive photographic takes and retakes, which results in a very rational cold almost inhuman series of events that one can either believe or not believe. As Heidegger might put it, Kubrick in his male fantasy is presenting to us his experience of being-in-the-world. As Kohut might put it, this is the empty mechanical world experienced by the fragmenting self.
Neither Bill nor Alice are believable characters. Bill seems to be highly irrational and devoid of basic character unless one can imagine him in a state of semi-fragmentation after two narcissistic wounds. He is a kind of as-if personality, and it is doubtful whether, as in the movie, rich and successful people would employ him as their physician. Alice is more interesting, although all we know about her is that she once managed an art gallery in SoHo but now spends all her time caring for a school-age daughter, a transition hard to believe considering the magnitude of that career change and the fact that this is 2000 A.D. in Manhattan and not 19th-century Vienna. The pictures on the wall of their apartment, allegedly painted by Mrs. Kubrick, would never be found in SoHo.
What is fascinating to psychoanalytic clinicians is that Alice has confessed to her husband that she has had two very intense sexual fantasies and that he is unprepared to accept the possibility that women have such extreme aggressive and archaic dreams and fantasies. Regardless of the quality of the acting, which critics disagree about, this is an important point because it is not uncommon for men to delude themselves that their wives, like their children, are without lust or aggression, and are unerringly faithful, whereas men are allowed to wander and play around like Bloom in Ulysses, and even Jimmy Carter is allowed to have lust in his heart.
The actress playing Alice is smashingly beautiful and could easily pass as an angel, so Kubrick achieves his aim when he reveals what is actually going on in her mind and when he puts gutter language in her mouth. One is reminded of St. Augustine's famous saying that a woman is a temple built on a sewer. What Augustine did not realize is that all of us are built on sewers, commonly called the id today. Thus each married person has within himself or herself all kinds of sexual imaginings, longings, fantasies, lusts, and hatreds, and the actual marital life of a husband and wife involves only the expression of derivatives of this, as Schnitzler was aware and Freud developed in his psychoanalysis. Shakespeare, the greatest of all psychologists, portrayed this by introducing the monstrous Caliban in the underground caves of the beautiful island in The Tempest.
As mentioned above, the music for the orgy (composed by Jocelyn Pook) is performed on a piano repeatedly struck very hard, and the dialogue of the movie also has a weird repetitiveness in which one character makes a statement and the next character repeats it with a question mark. This adds to the mechanical atmosphere of the whole film. Kubrick's insistence on showing as many naked female bodies as he can possibly crowd into the movie destroys the erotic aspect and introduces an ambience of almost clinical coldness, which is augmented by the deliberately slow pace and development of the story.
Actually "Eyes Wide Shut" is also a moralistic tale because, whether by accident or design, neither partner is unfaithful to the other regardless of many opportunities that present themselves. As Holden wrote in the New York Times (Tuesday, July 20, 1999, pages B1-B2), this serious major studio film "is a sternly anti-erotic movie that regards its sexual license with a cold Puritanical hauteur. . .nothing so much as grim ritualized necrophilia." There is no doubt that the sexual chemistry between the husband and wife in the movie is at most lukewarm, and the picture of New York is that of a city where sexual predators threaten the rather confused doctor and his wife from all sides. Holden concludes, "Their only protection from the encircling demons is a frightened trembling commitment to monogamy".
I viewed this movie as primarily the sexual fantasy of a talented but disturbed individual who has serious difficulties in relating to the human and nonhuman environment around him; that is what it tells us about Stanley Kubrick. At a more general level, it also tells us about the capacity of certain men to tolerate what is for them the narcissistic injury involved in their discovery that women are capable of the same intense lust and aggression in their fantasy lives as well as in their behavior as men are. Perhaps Kubrick's dismal view of humanity is based on his own disillusion and realization that women cannot represent the warm loving maternal breast without being accompanied by psychological baggage of their own, as many of our male patients search endlessly for and bitterly complain about because they cannot find it.
The moralistic ending of the movie, where the wife's solution is to go home and "fuck," falls very flat. Actually we never know to the very end whether death and destruction has threatened this couple or whether it is all a charade put on by a wealthy man. It is not hard to extrapolate from this the question of whether God exists and gives meaning to our miseries and sufferings or whether, as Sartre said, we are all simply the victims of contingency.
Dr. Chessick is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern University, and Senior Attending Psychiatrist, Evanston Hospital., and Training and Supervising Analyst, Chicago Center for Psychoanalytic StudyCorrespondence to: Richard Chessick, MD, PhD, 9400 Drake Ave., Evanston, IL. 60203-1106
In the middle of his 96th year, my father died suddenly. Sitting in a chair he called my mother, and when she got there, less than one minute later, he was dead. After his death, my mother told me that recently he had started to become incontinent. I myself had noted that his memory losses were becoming painfully more apparent. If death must come, what better way than quickly at the age of 95, just at the point when one is beginning to become a burden to oneself and others.Among my ruminations following his death, I recalled a telephone call I received about 25 years ago from the principal of a nearby New Jersey suburban elementary school. It was during one of my occasional ad hoc consultations that she asked me this question: "Dr. Gardner, as a child psychiatrist, I'd like your opinion on whether our fifth graders can reasonably be relied upon to take a bike trip for a picnic two miles away?"
Chuckling, I responded: "Your question reminds me of an experience my father had, as a boy, that I believe will answer your question. As you know, the typical pattern for immigrant families was for the father to come to America first and periodically send money to his wife who would then send on the children seriatim. Finally, she would come with the youngest. In 1906 my father, then 7-1/2, left for America from Kulicow, a town in Austria-Hungry to which his father had fled from Russia. He was accompanied only by his 10-year-old brother. En route to Hamburg, where they were to board their boat, they were accidentally separated from one another. My father understood that both of them were to get off the train at a certain station for a stopover visit to the home of relatives. Mistakenly, my father got off and watched helplessly as the train pulled away with his brother. Of the various options my father considered, he decided it was most likely that his brother would get off at the next stop and wait for him until the next train arrived - whenever that would be. My father went into a nearby restaurant and explained his situation to the owner. She fed him and let him stay overnight. The next morning he boarded the train and upon arriving at the next station, he saw his brother - who had waited for him all night on the station platform. They both made it to Hamburg and then to New York." The principal's response: "Thank you, Dr. Gardner, I get your point. Well said!"
Jean Piaget, the renowned French psychologist, considered a central element in intelligence to be the ability to adapt in a novel situation. Although my father's primary education did not go beyond the fifth grade, his basic intellectual capacities certainly revealed themselves with this experience. Most children that age would have just stood there and cried!
At the time of my father's death, I thought about what his life might have been like had he stayed in Kulicow. In 1914 Austria-Hungary became embroiled in the first World War as an ally of Germany . He most likely would have been recruited into the Austrian army. It is reasonable to assume that, as a Jew, he would not have been selected for officers' training and would most likely have ended up a foot soldier, traditionally referred to as Kanonenfutter (cannon fodder). Had he survived that bloodbath, he soon would have found himself no longer a denizen of Austria-Hungary, but of the newly reconstituted Poland.
Had my father still remained in the same area, it is likely that new griefs would have befallen him in 1939, not only as a Pole, whose country was now being eaten alive by both Germans and Russians but, more importantly, as a Jew. Whereas Jews in many Europeans countries could rely upon the assistance of some (admittedly few) brave gentiles to protect them from the Nazis, Jews in Poland were far less fortunate - so deep-rooted was the antisemitism. His most likely fate would have been the death camps, about which I need say no more.
If, however, he had somehow survived the Holocaust, in 1945 he would have found himself the citizen of yet another country: the U.S.S.R. Polish antisemitism would now be replaced by Russian antisemitism. Because Jewish "comrades" were "less equal" than other comrades, his life would have predictably been difficult. In 1991, in association with the breakup of the U.S.S.R. , he would have found himself a citizen of yet another nation - Ukraine.
I do not know how many people (Jew or gentile) who were born in Kulicow in 1898 lived until 1994 - but there could not have been many, and there may have been none.
But the story does not end there. There is a strange irony here with regard to one of his sons. In association with my professional work in the field of child psychiatry, I have been invited to lecture throughout the United States and occasionally abroad. Interestingly, a country in which my work is most enthusiastically embraced is Russia, the land not only of my father's forebears but my mother's as well. My therapeutic games and books are being enthusiastically translated, and I recently returned from my fifth (and last) trip there. For my more recent lecture series, people came from such remote parts of the former Soviet Union as central Asia and eastern Siberia. The son of an expelled immigrant, a person whose family fled the persecutions and pogroms of the czars, is welcomed back with honor and gratitude. During each visit I am swept up by the irony of the situation.
I often asked myself why I went back. Certainly not for the rubles. Even my professorial appointment at The University of St. Petersburg did not include a stipend, nor even reimbursement for travel and lodgings expenses. I admit to the ego enhancement attendant to my reception. It was an "ego trip" in every sense of the term. But there were more important reasons. I had the chance to reach out across time and distance to bridge a gap that divided people and separated me from my roots. Perhaps with each visit I helped counter anti-Semitism, admittedly in a very small way. I never said a word about it. My giving Russians the living experience that a Jew was helping them make up - admittedly in a very small way - for their 75 years of academic deprivation contributed to the reduction of their prejudicial stereotypes.
During my visits, I was continually confronted with the privation and frustration with which most Russians continually live. I could not help but think how lucky I was that my forebears left Russia when they did. I often think that the descendants of the Jews who were forced out of eastern Europe, who often prospered wherever they went, should build monuments to the czars in gratitude for their having driven us out.
Dr. Gardner is Clinical Professor of Child Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.Correspondence to: Richard Gardner, MD 155 County Road, PO Box 522 Cresskill, NJ 07626-0522
In my twin careers as adolescent therapist and film scholar, I have long since relinquished hopes of discovering the cure for pubescent angst or of formulating some sweeping psychoanalytic theory of cinema. My post-adolescent dreams of glory hover over a different rainbow: winning an event in the annual Las Vegas World Series of Poker and making a contribution to Hamlet studies.The golden bracelet of a World Series poker championship far exceeds my reach. But, several months ago, I stumbled upon a nook of Hamlet that seems to have been scanted by previous scholarship. Now that I am finally in the trenches, I've found my Shakespearean venture is provoking surprising trepidation, hallmarked by the well-rationalized procrastination which inveterately signals the onset of a writing block for me. (Of the attendant fears that I may have already been scooped, more presently.) Whatever other purposes this prequel may serve, it comprises the first step to a true cure -- writing the study entire.
My "find", if indeed such it be, involves Hamlet's sojourn with the pirates who abduct him from the ship transporting him from Elsinore to England, after he slays Polonius. Two days into the voyage, Hamlet has winkled out Claudius' letter to the English sovereign ordering his summary execution and turned it against its bearers -- hapless, clueless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Shortly afterwards, a pirate vessel "of very war-like appearance" gives chase to Hamlet's ship. "In the grapple" he boards it; instantly, the pirates swerve away -- "so I alone became their prisoner".
Hamlet describes his capture in a terse letter written to Horatio after the Prince has returned to Danish soil. It is not specified that the pair who convey it to Horatio are pirates themselves. They are called "sailors" and are given a few perfunctory lines. Hamlet writes that his captors are "thieves of mercy" who "knew what they did. Now, "I am to do a good turn for them." Shakespeare discloses nothing more about these merciful thieves. They appear in absentia, occupying only a corner of the action. Yet the play's conclusions certainly turns upon their prisoner's release and safe dispatch back to Denmark, presumably so he can accomplish the undesignated "good turn."
Shakespeare also does not indicate whether, or in what fashion Hamlet's pirate stay may have worked upon the Prince's psyche. His confinement comprises the blankest of screens upon which a host of questions, minor or most profound, may be projected. An initial survey indicates these have gone mysteriously unasked or are treated slimly in the vast body of Hamlet investigations. To cite just a few:
Who were Hamlet's anonymous corsairs? Did they snatch him away accidentally or deliberately?
What were the pirate's intentions? Ransom is not mentioned. Was the "good turn" a pardon for earlier misdeeds, to be granted by Claudius or one of his fellow rulers as a reward for preying upon enemies of Denmark or other Scandinavian states? (Such pardons have existed throughout piratical history).
How long did Hamlet dwell with his captors? Was he held onboard, or was he sent ashore to a pirate haven such as then existed in the Baltic or North Sea?
How was he received by the pirates? How did he perceive and behave towards them? What wracks of chance did he witness? What actions barbarous, chivalrous, or brave was he privy to?
Surely, the cardinal unaddressed issue raised by the pirate captivity is its possible relationship to the remarkable alteration in Hamlet's character, evident when he reappears on Danish soil at the beginning of Act V. Critics have been struck by and wrestled with this mysterious "sea change" since the play's first performance. Except for the violent struggle with Laertes at Ophelia's funeral, a lambent tranquility appears to have descended upon the prince's troubled soul. His rage against the impenetrable powers that shape our ends now has given way to a stoic acceptance of whatever destiny awaits him. His "thinking too precisely thinking on th' event" has dissipated. He is finally prepared to revenge his father's murder, to act even as he poignantly comprehends that action will very likely cause his end.
How could Hamlet mature so impressively in so short a time, let alone let alone stabilize his extravagant psychological disequilibrium subsequent to the Ghost's revelations? It has been suggested that an audience of Shakespeare's day, accustomed to temporal discontinuinities and compressions, would have no difficulty accepting that a mellowing of personality ordinarily requiring decades had transpired over the weeks or months Hamlet has been gone from Elsinore -- wherever he has been sojourning.
Mere absence from the court's byzantine intrigue has also been invoked as the chief cause of Hamlet's striking transformation, but seems insufficient grounds to me. According to another line of scholarship, Hamlet's newly won equanimity develops only after he returns from the aborted voyage to England. It has, for instance, been argued that his serenity attends the acceptance of mortality that develops during the graveyard scene, emerging from a trajectory which includes Hamlet's mordant observations to Horatio about the gravedigger's macabre employment, his banter with the ribald gravedigger, and the trenchant soliloquy over Yorick's skull.
My investigation proposes to seek out the origins of Hamlet's sea change in that briny element itself, notably in the buccaneering milieu and its impact upon the abducted Prince's perturbed spirit. I intend to touch upon Galenic/Elizabethan notions on the salutory effect of sea and sea-air and describe the piratical practice of Shakespeare's day. I will then construct various scenarios of a typical Elizabethan pirate captivity, during which Hamlet's gloom and paralysis of will might be remedied. Each "cure" will correspond, be responsive to a theory about Hamlet's afflictions advanced by a prominent Hamlet scholar, past or present.
To cite one example: Samuel Coleridge famously speculates that Hamlet's elemental pathology consists in a wretched excess of brain over brawn, in "enormous intellectual activity and a consequent proportionate aversion to real action...." Immediately before departing from Denmark, Hamlet encounters a troop of Fortinbras' soldiers marching to battle. In the subsequent "rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy, he contrasts Fortinbras' boldness with his own perceived fecklessness. Might the captive Hamlet, consummate role-player, introject the pirates' robust pugnacity, under the added sway of that curious compulsion to identify with the aggressor frequently noted in the sufferers of Stockholm syndrome? Could Hamlet then reinvent himself as a buccaneering Fortinbras, perhaps even lead his erstwhile captors -- now colleagues -- in piratical "enterprises of great pitch and moment," thus liberate himself from the "sickly cast of thought"?
Simply writing this precis has succeeded in jump-starting my project -- as so often happens when one finally brings oneself to confront a mild phobia head on. A noted psychoanalytic literary/Shakespeare scholar and mentor to whom I've confided my notions also wrought more than he knew by deeming my interest Hamlet's pirates worthwhile. Nevertheless, my disquiet lingers.
Not surprisingly, the anxiety -- like its subject -- is overdetermined. I've been an avid pirate enthusiast since reading Treasure Island and viewing swashbucklers like Captain Blood in childhood. Like many of my friends, I was immensely drawn to the exotic locales of pirate tales; to the dash and swagger, the pure aggressive energy of buccaneering exploits. But most enticing to an obsessive, dutiful thirteen-year-old being raised by doting, demanding parents in a cloistered suburban milieu, was the pirates' boisterous bold defiance of society's rules, the glory they took in living -- and dying -- by their own smash-and-grab code.
As an adult, I've continued to savor the idiosyncratic anarchic elan vital of pirates as purveyed in sagas of the Napoleonic era's "iron men and wooden ships" by authors like C.S. Forester, Alexander Knox, and Dudley Pope. I've become an addict of the undeniable best of class, the late Patrick O'Brian in the extraordinary cycle of twenty Aubrey/Maturin novels, O'Brian frequently pens vivid descriptions -- based on contemporary chronicles -- of bloody encounters between Nelson's navy and corsairs of every stripe, from South Seas marauders to the pirates who preyed in northern waters, upon ships like the one in which Hamlet voyaged.
As a film scholar, I have always endeavored to ground hypotheses about so called pro-filmic events on a solid textual foundation, analogous to the well-reasoned scholarly speculation about events in the Danish court prior to Hamlet. For instance, Shakespeare provides ample clues from which one may easily surmise that Gertrude's affair with Claudius commenced while her husband was alive, that Hamlet has already grasped, however dimly, the incestuous, adulterate rottenness prevailing in the state of Denmark before the curtain rises.
No such clues, however, are tendered about Hamlet's pirate captivity, so that conjectures on this score essentially must be fabricated out of purest air. Extra-textual sources such as contemporary accounts of Elizabethan piracy are useful in filling in the blanks, but ultimately are no substitute for firm textual evidence.
Confabulating Hamlet/Hamlet's past seems nervier than constructing a past for Rambo or James Bond, because of my intense admiration/intimidation regarding Shakespeare which began at the same age I was growing enamored of pirates and piracy. Probing the fiction of Henry James inter alia hasn't been problematic for me, but I've always hesitated over writing about Shakespeare, absent a passing analogy drawn in a study of The Maltese Falcon between Hamlet's disavowed death wishes towards his father, and Sam Spade's unconscious murderous intentions towards his partner Miles Archer, whose wife Spade has been bedding. I am hardly the first to assert that Shakespeare's grasp of character and conflict in every sphere of human activity, his consummate facility to create worlds vivid as the reality I inhabit seem nothing short of godlike. Even conducted in a spirit of respectful inquiry, intrusion upon the ineffable wholeness of Hamlet's domain by inventing action its author never depicted registers at least as presumptuous -- and even a bit dangerous in some obscure Promethean fashion. One lacks the cheek of the downtown impresario whose playbill for a Yiddish production announced:
Hamlet
Schauspiel von Shakespeare
Verandert und Verbessert!!
("Hamlet/Drama by Shakespeare/Changed and Improved! !").My youthful reverence for Shakespeare came to encompass the famous critics, past and present, whose diverse interpretations of Hamlet's irresolute melancholy is to ground my imaginary piratical "solutions" to the sea change. Contemplating august figures like Coleridge, Samuel Johnson, A.C. Bradley, and Harold Bloom, one feels like a pygmy amongst giants (and let us not forget founding father Freud, either). As a result, I've become preoccupied with accurately reprising their judgements -- and have waxed ever more dilatory lest I fail.
My rumination over scrupulous redaction of the celebrated critical sources has lead in turn to an obsessive pursuit of less well known (and well regarded) opinions. With an almost oneiric inevitability, I've been drawn into a Shakespearean scholarship dauntingly Talmudic in scope; from thence, into related subjects whose highways and byways seem to bifurcate endlessly: the wind and weather of the North or Baltic sea lanes Hamlet's vessel may have navigated; Elizabethan beliefs about spirits and hauntings; the exploits of Sir Frances Drake, so forth. One must cry halt at some point, but as one agonizes over the potential assailability of one's research that point threatens to recede into infinity. (The problem is further compounded by that hint of Attention Deficit Disorder I've always suspected in myself.) One experiences at first hand how the courses of even an unpretentious critical venture can turn awry, "and lose the name of action."
I must now own up to a conflictual shadow side to these professions of modesty before Shakespeare's genius, and the accomplishments of his critics -- regarding which my redactive frenzy takes on the stamp of a reaction-formation. I will not cite chapter and verse of relevant intimate dreams and associations. Suffice to say that these have revealed that a genuine diffidence masks a conflicted competitiveness which I had thought to have worked through years ago -- here, competition with scholarly predecessors both quick and dead. The consuming ambition my project has kicked up, with its implicit Oedipal overtones, has contributed to its stall -- under the rubric that no son really wants to win the battle for supremacy with his father, only to go down fighting.
Harold Bloom has written persuasively about the oedipally inflected "anxiety of influence" which dictates a young poet's disavowal of an older poet's vigorous work and the consequent "swerve" of his own radical innovations. In time, these fruits of youthful rebellion often become canonic and then rather poignantly constitute the spur of the next generations's anxiety of influence. "Don't be so modest, you're not so great," Golda Meier once gibed at a colleague. Even as I avow that my pirate study crucially depends upon the prominent forebears who have plumbed Hamlet's psychological depths, I must acknowledge my anxiety about their influence, articulated with an overweaning fantasy of surpassing their accomplishments -- "pirating" these in a spirit of neurotic ruthlessness so that I may score my own critical triumph. I may not have unpacked yet another reason for Hamlet's despairing procrastination. But, surely -- or so my cutthroat alter ego would like to believe --I've staked the authoritative claim on the site where Hamlet's healing commences -- the pirate captivity, nowhere else. From the wider world's perspective, Hamlet scholarship constitutes a small pond. Yet one absurdly persists in yearning to be one of its big frogs.
Further reflection yields a sobering insight: my vaulting ambition has also been spurred by a Grail-like "myth of origin" of the type David Carroll shrewdly discerns to be a significant underpinning of the psychoanalytic enterprise -- in that case, the primal fount of neurotic suffering, whether it resides in oedipal or pre-oedipal conflict, in the sway of Jungian archetypes, so forth. Such essentialist constructs pale before the convolutions of the psyche and the external world's complexity. At origin, Carroll asserts, there is no origin, only a seductive hope one can be found.
As in life, so in art. Act I, Scene I, of Hamlet begins upon the battlements of Elsinore where a sentry, Francesco, is braced by another soldier, Bernardo, as the latter emerges out of the darkness.
Bernardo: Who's there?
Francesco: Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.Ordinarily the sentry's challenge would be given by Francesco to Bernardo, issuing from watchman to intruder. Their reversed exchange contains the first question and paradox of a drama replete with inquiry, fraught with ambiguity, whose hero is arguably the most enigmatic character ever to appear on the stage.
Shortly after the play-within-a-play exposes Claudius' guilty conscience, Hamlet defies Rosencranz and Guildenstern's clumsy attempts to probe his purposes:
"...You would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass....
'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me..."
Hamlet's provocation of his untrustworthy friends may be construed at another level -- as a challenge this most open of Shakespearean texts thrown down before the critic about the inherent limits of its interpretation. I submit there will never be a definitive explanation for the sources of Hamlet's melancholy; for the status of his affection for Ophelia; for the nature and causes of the sea-change; and -- to the point of this discussion -- for the events of the pirate captivity, and their significance to the drama's tragic, strangely liberating denouement.
With a bow to Carroll, there can be no original "onlie begetting" of these major issues (and many minor ones, e.g. Hamlet's age), only the seductive illusion that the sundry paradoxes and obscurities within the drama can ever be tidily resolved; that answers will ever be yielded up, within Hamlet's time or our own, to the knotty questions Shakespeare and his princely stand-in propose about the human condition. Even the certainty of death itself seems to melt away before the undiscovered country from which the Ghost has traveled.
The uncertainty, indeed the impossibility of conclusive interpretation pervades Hamlet, from particularities of plot to the general issues of being in the world, uncannily informing its construction and intentions as in no other Shakespearean drama. This central insurmountability of explanation, conflated with a tantalizing promise of elucidation which Hamlet/Hamlet holds forth on so many material and philosophical problems, resides at the heart of Shakespeare's high and mysterious art.
I return to my apprehension that some blissfully unblocked investigator may be busily putting an end to his or her labors even as I am beginning mine. Like Poe's Purloined Letter, Hamlet's pirates have been lying about in plain sight for four centuries of critics to contemplate. My paranoia about being scooped is admittedly a product of the neurotic baggage anatomized above -- my "piratical" competitiveness with scholars past and present, disavowed and projected, a grandiose overvaluation of my "myth of origin", all of which I hope to have relinquished. But beyond helping to resolve the block about "unfolding myself," these notes have also succeeded in placing the essence of my arguments about Hamlet's kidnappers in plain sight -- and thus suitable for scholarly citation. Like the man said, even paranoids have enemies. I have forestalled those who would pirate my piratical idea.
Dr. Greenberg is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and publishes frequently on film, media, and popular culture.Correspondence to: Harvey Roy Greenberg, MD, 320 West 86th Street New York, NY 10024