Longitudes: A Collection of Essays, Ideas and Writing in Progress

Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground attacks the enlightenment’s claim that freedom and happiness are synonymous by showing that in reality these two concepts stand in opposition to one another. Happiness, Dostoevsky seems to say, is the absence of freedom. He introduces us to the underground man, a mean and spiteful individual who, in a relentless quest to maintain and exert the integrity of his personal freedom, systematically destroys every chance he has for happiness by irrevocably alienating his peers and brutally shunning his only chance for love; he suffers from a disease of the liver but refuses to see a doctor, proclaiming “let it get worse!” Dostoevsky takes on the enlightenment myth which claims that rationality and freedom can be structured as an equation for human happiness and the creation of an ideal society: “2+2=4″ the underground man mutters, “as if that is what is most important to us.” Dostoevsky poses the following dilemma: if it is our personal liberty that we cherish above all; and, if the freedom of the will is to be understood as our most precious and humanising characteristic, do we not render ourselves, in some sense, inhuman when we blindly adhere to a role as part of the grand plan for the ideal society?

Dostoevsky makes it eerily clear that by going along with the enlightenment schema that which is “our most advantageous advantage” is, in fact, paradoxically left out of the equation, only to be replaced by an subverted concept of freedom that is all but meaningless. If the enlightenment’s myth of liberty twists the notion of freedom––consciously or otherwise––into something resembling its antithesis in order to create social contentment, the underground man responds to this subversion with a resounding “No!” For him freedom is the very foundation of being human, to sacrifice it in order to acquiesce to society is impossible; true individuality, wretched and miserable though may be, is the highest good.

Although he is tempted from time to time to resolve himself socially, the underground man would rather face the depravity of a life of spite than submerge himself in what he considers to be disingenuous social conventions and artificial hierarchies. But of course, from the perspective of the underground man, there is no depravity––his position is only understood as perverse from the point of view of the enlightened rationalists who value social cohesion over the richness of true individuality. Thus, Dostoevsky presents the emotion of spite, not simply as an emotional disorder, but as a philosophical principle which allows the underground man to exercise freedom even in the face of his own personal interests. Indeed, even the expected course of action his physical ailment would seem to demand presents a challenge to the freedom of the will and is therefore rejected by the underground man in an affirmation of his existence.

In the final analysis, the underground man is rendered impotent, incapable of any kind of coherent active engagement with the world. Making choices manifest in action involves making predictions and judgements which are value laden, often involving moving or changing one’s self––physically as well as psychologically––in relation to the Other; the underground man finds that he cannot realise the simplest decision because in doing so he would have to relinquish his freedom by recognising the Other or the group. This terrifies and disgusts him above all else. Understanding, choosing and acting are highly emotionally charged activities which involve some sort of compromise, acquiescence or coming to terms with the position of an Other, or situations which are beyond the immediate control of the self. The emotions associated with such circumstances are pushed aside by the underground man with disgust; he regards them with horror and allows himself only spite. But when spite cannot protect him; when he must face his emotions in the waning moments of the story when he his finally confronted with the possibility of love and happiness––not only his own, but also that of the young prostitute whom his decision will profoundly affect––he collapses in tears. In the end, the underground man refuses everything except his own will; ironically rejecting his only real chance to make his existence meaningful to another, he chooses to remain in the misery, and wretched safety of spite.

Dostoevsky’s critique of the Western european concepts of freedom and happiness echoes throughout his work. And, when we consider the way in which he extends this critique of happiness and freedom to the Roman Catholic Church in the Grand Inquisitor, we begin to understand that, for Dostoevsky, freedom, happiness and self affirmation rest in the realm of a personal and spiritual understanding of God and Creation. Like Augustine, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky asserts that true individuality has a profound spiritual element which transcends the ‘herd’ mentality of popular religion, rational rhetoric and the material distractions of daily existence.

Dostoevsky’s underground man also offers us a subtle critique of the relationship between emotion and reason. As the underground man makes so painfully clear, the concept that emotions can be negated rationally, or that they can be made to take on predictable or instrumental roles is a questionable claim. But, on the other hand, can we really understand our selves as being completely controlled by our emotions like Goethe’s Werther? Both young Werther and the Underground man live at the limits of their subjective existence. But where the Underground man is capable of retreating from the unyielding social and physical world that surrounds him into his disgusting metaphysical burrow of spite and resentment, Werther’s only escape is death.

Werther’s suicide, however,cannot be properly understood as a simple evasion. While the Underground man asserts his existence by lacerating himself from the world through rational denial, eventually coming to rest in spite; Werther can only exist at the extremities of feeling. For Werther, the world itself transforms according to his emotions. When he is happy he sees only beauty; even the hard life of the peasants in the village seem charming to him. But when he is sad the world becomes cold and indifferent. Although joy and sorrow are his only proper domains, Wether’s narcissism transcends all. His infantile longings, coupled with his need rationalise his reality around his extreme emotive states dooms his chances of contentment in the working world of bourgeois society; and the possibility of a reasonable friendship with Lotte is rendered impossible. Dostoevsky and Goethe offer insight into the profound contribution of emotion to subjective experience. Psychologically speaking, emotion seems to both protect us from the world and allow us physical engagement with it; emotions allow us to form understandings of the world which permit us to act according to some rational schema. However, as the pathological cases of the Underground man and Werther make clear, the relationship between emotion and reason can be a dangerous one when it creates an understanding of the world in which the individual cannot properly integrate himself physically or socially. How then are we to understand this relation ship between reason, emotion and the mind? Are emotions simply products of the mind, or are they integrated responses to the world? Are emotions in some sense chosen, or are they biologically determined? Are emotions purely subjective experiences or do they adhere to some set of social, biological or psychological determiners?

this essay is not yet finished

The Science of Desire and the Dream of Reality:
Flaubert and the Modern Novel

”I would like to write a book about nothing,
a book without external links,
which would be held together by the internal force of its style …
just as the earth without being suspended moves in the air,
a book which would have almost no subject matter
or at least whose subject would be almost invisible
if that is possible.”

If we are prompted to describe Flaubert’s text as a ‘science of desire’, it is not to discredit his imagination or literary skill. Although the “emancipated student of Balzac” was acutely aware of his own literary tradition, he managed to transcend the massive figures that constituted it to forge a new conception of the novel and left behind him an incredible lineage of writers which include Joyce, Sartre, Kafka, Chekhov and Kundera among many others. This enormous achievement was singular not only in that he was able to compete with the likes of Balzac and Victor Hugo in a literary sense, but also in the way in which he managed to recontextualise old and introduce new literary devices and extend the role of literature beyond its well worn niche into the modern world of critique and science. The moeurs and mechanics of post Enlightenment Europe were changing radically and it is out of this environment that Flaubert’s aesthetic emerged.

By 1821, the date of Flauber’s birth, the French bourgeoisie had become rich and fearfully conservative; interest in the arts and literature stagnated and the the children of Flaubert’s generation grew up in an environment of commercialism where there was a general distrust for any kind of imagination or artistic creativity let alone deviation form the accepted social norms. The wealth that had been gained by the passionate revolutionaries of 1789 and the Napoleonic conquerers that followed them had turned the dynamism of french society in to a dull, lifeless monotony that left little place for artistic expression. There was, however, a group of young writers who began to turn out a steady stream of works that became increasingly bitter towards the bourgeois. Chief amongst the ranks of this new literary movement were Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. Their works could not have contrasted more sharply with those of Corneille or Racine in tone, content and in the harsh social criticism they put forward : if bourgeois society would not allow true literary imagination, literature would have to put itself in opposition to society. Motivated by the desire that this generation had to feel some of the passion that their parents and grandparents had experienced during the Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests as well as the disgust that they felt with the lifeless society in which they found them selves, the youth turned to the exotic and the passionate; the romance novels of George Sand2 became very popular and a romantic movement among the youth began to glow. Wives took lovers, people took to travelling and suicide became almost fashionable; perhaps warmed by Rousseau some 75 years earlier, Romanticism had caught fire in France.

As much as the young Flaubert felt himself to be a part of this new romanticism, he was also very critical of it and felt only scorn for those he heard ignorantly deriding the classics. Romanticism, for Flaubert, came from the awareness and cultivation of a deep natural drive and not simply from the act of mocking Montaigne or Rabelais. Although he greatly admired Hugo and Dumas, Flaubert was faced with a problem : the mode of this romantic expression itself was in the process of becoming stale but it seemed as though there was nowhere else to turn. There was a general mood among Flaubert and his contemporaries that the end of the road had been reached and that the form of the novel, such as it was, could no longer offer a medium for innovative expression. Flaubert realised that if he was to continue as a writer he would have to recontextualise the novel - both technically and conceptually - and as a result he began look to other disciplines for models by which he could frame and inspire his work. Above all, he seemed most interested in mathematics and the social sciences.

What then do we mean by this allusion to science as a method in the writing of Flaubert? How was this modern novel created and what does it tell us about the human condition? Flaubert had a clear understanding of the fact that he was living in a time that was approaching rapid change : the railroad and the increased access to the printed word via the steam driven printing press are only two examples of the many forces that were changing communication, economy, morals and life in general in the France and Europe of the mid 1800’s. These were the days of Hegel, Marx and Darwin and Flaubert wished to approach the novel with the appropriate geist :

“traiter l’ame humaine avec l’imparialité que l’on met dans les sciences pysiques.”3

Flaubert was suspicious of the ‘inspired artist’ and inspiration in general :

“méfions-nous de cette espèce d’échauffement qu’on appelle l’inspiration…”4

“Ecrire froidement”5

and:

“C’est pas avec le cour que on écrit, c’est avec la tete”6

Rather than rely on inspiration, he preferred to use a technique he called “la linge droite”7 , a kind anchor which would allow him to dig, “comme une taupe”8 , deeper and deeper into the work finally allowing him to emerge into a ‘reality’ of words and ideas. For Flaubert the work of writing was not founded on inspiration or genius but rather relied on an “apreté”, a kind of toughness or rigour that would allow him to create a work in which one would feel:

“une longue énergie qui court d’une bout a l’autre et ne fablit pas.” 9

As one would expect, the book did not come easily for Flaubert. For fifty-three months he agonised over every word - he poured himself into this book and when it was finished he declared: “La Bovary, c’est moi.” Flaubert wished to apply a new set of standards to the novel so that it could become a means by which one could examine the human condition from a point of detachment. Although Flaubert believed that literature should not be confused with the physical sciences, he hoped that what he called the “moral sciences” could take their place with the rest of the physical and emerging social sciences :

“Si les science morales avaient, comme les mathematiques, deux ou
trios lois primordiales à leur disposition elles pourraient marcher de l’avavnt. Mais elles tâtonnent dans les ténèbres…”10

Whether we can call Madame Bovary an object of science as much as we can call it a work of literature is open for question but Flaubert’s interest in science and scientific rigour does give us valuable insight into his motivation and crucial key insights into the construction and significance of his work.. There is no doubt that what Flaubert created was something new and mysterious, even viewed from the contemporary perspective; it is at once detached and passionate, cold and sensual. It is unlike anything that came before it and to this day continues to amaze and confuse readers who delight in its virtuosity and struggle to interpret its meaning.

As one digs deeper and deeper into the book, like Flaubert’s mole, one is struck with a strange sensation that becomes increasingly difficult to shake off. Flaubert seems have been to be able to ‘embed’ a kind of determinism into the very fabric of the text; the relations of the characters to each other and to their social and physical environment are dominated by it. This sensation seems to go beyond the mere fact that one might have read the text once or twice before - although this does seem to be a book that one should read at least once before reading it ‘for the first time’. Initially we can feel it more than we can intellectualise it, but as we get on this determinism, paradoxically, becomes the living pulse of the novel and as we approach the end it is this terrifying drive of self-realisation that dominates the story.

There are several letters exchanged between Flaubert and his friend Alfred de Poitteven11 discussing the deterministic nature of the universe and free will that are quite telling and, indeed, there are many references to the monotonous and deterministic nature of life within the book itself. If there is a certain machinal quality here it is certainly that of the highest order, like a magic clock or some other mysterious creation of the like. It is in this way that the book brings to mind the phenomenon of the Paper Theatre of the 1800’s12 , albeit in a very complicated and refined incarnation. While the characters in Flaubert’s story do seem to be limited to ‘two dimensions’ - created as they are almost entirely out of stereotype and cliché - the natural background is hyper-real and rendered with breath taking complextity and detail. As the novel progresses the initial pseudo-romantic expression of the physical environment is occasionally traded for an existential vision that touches the Sartrian.13 This existentialism is important because it represents the finest resolution of Flaubert’s gaze. In what amounts to a special kind of Flaubertian existential materialism, we find ourselves liminally bound on one extreme with the indifference of nature and on other - in the grandest image - a neutral, cosmic determinism. Flaubert moves us around in this world with staggering virtuosity : here we are looking down dispassionately on this world from above; there we find ourselves starting out inside someone’s’ private thoughts and feelings only to end up in the garden with the wood lice :

“Au fond de son âme, cependant, elle attendait un évévnment. Comme les matelots en détresse, elle promenait sur la solitude de sa vie des yeux déspérés, cherchant au loin quelque voile blanche dans les brumes de l’horizon…”14

and a page later :

“…dans le jardin… tout semblait dormir, l’espalier couvert de paille et la vinge comme un grand serpent malade sous le chaperon du mur, ou l’on voyait, en s’approchait se traîner des cloportes à pattes nombreuses…”15

Sometimes the very fragmentary descritptions of his characters physical attributes become almost indistinguishable from their surroundings. Flaubert shows us a natural world that is as strikingly beautiful as it is indifferent; one in which his creatures find themselves both interposed with and abstracted from their environment. He engages us in constant and subtle shifts of perspective which create a plurality of view points that make objective judgements very difficult. Additionally, the social environment in which the characters relate to each other is rendered in such a way that reference to it does not always need to be made in print although it is always clearly present.

This abundance of perspective and the ability to make understood what is not said is derived from the way in which Flaubert combines literary techniques and applies them towards the characters and events. Like lenses in a microscope or perhaps in a way analogous to how radioscopy allows us discern what lies under the surface, these techniques allows us to observe the events of the book on multiple levels. Three of these techniques are outstanding : Irony, Cliché and Free Indirect Discourse.

Cliché is the ‘material’ out of which all the characters are constituted and it shows itself both in situation and in the sparse dialogue. It is by this use of cliché that Flaubert is able to make clearly defined social and psychological objects out of his characters; it enables him to be categorical with them and to play these categories off of one another.

Charles Bovary opens the book with his emergence as the idiotic school boy and closes it with his pathetic death : he is the average bourgeois every man. Everything about him is mediocre and every desire that motivates him ends either in comfortable complacency, as is the case with his desire for Emma (at least in the short term), or disaster as is the case with his failed attempt to make a name for himself in trying to cure Hyppolites leg. He is the product of a nervous, nagging mother and a father who, although full of all kinds of grand statements, is as essentially complacent and mediocre as Charles himself. The final revelation of Emmas’ licentious activities and her death are impossible for him to comprehend as is everything that exists out side of his small sphere of comprehension - the Marquis’ ball for example. He seems completely oblivious to Emma’s passions but when he is finally made to face them they destroy him.

Homais is the incarnation of bourgeois values in the afterglow of the revolution : reason, ‘republican anticlericalism’, science and the printed word, all faded to empty rhetoric. He is the master at using the social ideals of the revolution (progress, humanism) to hide his lust for personal wealth. He is the empty ideologue and idealist and, as a result, is an abundance source of self-important nonsense. He is the spirit of Yonneville and epitomises the empty arrogance of the provincial Bourgeois.
Rudolphe - with all his contempt for the bourgeois - initially seems to stand in contrast to Homais but is, in the end, the other side of the same coin : he is the empty romantic and spouts out his own rhetoric as a result. His bold statements are completely self serving; he is the cliché of the fashionable romantic who uses romanticism as guise for lechery and self aggrandisement. Léon, Emma’s other love,r also shows these romantic tendencies but lacks the courage to act upon them decisively. He is just as empty as Rudolphe; where Rudolphe is brutish, Leon is timid. The cure and the merchant make for are equally stereotypical. Curé is completely useless in spiritual matters his existence is completely profane and completely useless and ignorant of all things spiritual. The draper Leureux masks his greed in obsequious, servile phrases and is completely shameless in his quest for money because in his world there is no shame in it.16

Cliché is also used in the description of Yonneville itself; it is the perfect stereotype of a backwards provincial town rendered with meticulous detail. Our arrival in Yonneville is like that of a lone spirit surveying a ghost town ; not a person is seen. As we begin the first chapter of part two, we fly in over the surrounding area moving over the beautiful landscape towards the centre of town which is described in intimate detail - we are even made aware of its backwards agricultural practices. We travel through the grave yard, through the church, the market in the main square until we reach the ‘Lion D’or.’ It is only then that we encounter the shadow - or rather the possibility of the shadow - of the pharmacist Homais bent over his desk. At this point the trip is over and we are taken directly to the cemetery where we encounter the sexton who has, in addition to burying the dead, taken to growing potatoes just next to the graves. We are then made privy to a fragment of a conversation in which the Curé says to him : “Vous vous nourrissez des morts.”17 We are then informed that:

“Depuis les événments que l’on va raconter, rien, en effet, n’a changé à Yonneville … les foetus du pharmacien comme des paquets d’amandou blanc, se pourissent de plus en plus dans leur alcool bourbeux…”18

There’s a sense in which Yonneville is a kind of eerie place out of time, a kind of 19th century ‘Pleasant Ville.’ Indeed, towards the beginning of our lonely flight into Yonneville we are told how, despite the construction of the construction of new roads in the area (ses débouchés nouveaux) the town has stood still and that from a distance it resembles a snoozing herd of cows.
Perhaps the most startling is Flaubert’s use of free indirect discourse or style indirect libre. moving the first person in and out of the third, creates a vertiginous effect and must have been very confusing for readers of the day who were not used to it. This effect seems to have been largely responsible for the moral confusion about the book. Certainly at times one can find oneself quite rightly asking : who is thinking this? the character? Flaubert? myself? He does it by maintaining the narrative in the third person but he puts <<<>>>

To this we must add Flauberts’ mastery of irony, which he uses equally well in the context of comedy as in pathos. <<<>>>>

Flaubert’s masterful and unrepentant use of cliché descends from the dialogue to permeate the very beings of the characters - it also creates the village Yonneville. Irony collides with these categorical characters moulded out of cliché and compel us, often subconciously, to move from our complacency into the position of critic. It is at the grand events of the novel that these elements of technique come together in all their majesty : the wedding, the ball, the agricultural fair and the cab ride though Rouen. Flaubert is always working his critical lenses and some of the most magical critical moments can sometimes be found hiding in the shadow of some larger event. What are we to make of the last phrase of part one, chapter two :“Elle l’avait aimé après tout”19 . Easily passed over, this sentence refers to Charles’ first wife - after her death - and begs the questions what? and who? : What kind of love is this - if it is love at all? Who is thinking this? Charles? Flaubert? Are we supposed to think it? Flaubert keeps us moving incessantly and often in multiple directions often snagging us on little hooks. All this is played out on a physical landscape that is at once the natural beauty of Normandy delivered to us with proper 19th century romanticism and the nausea of existential realism. In Flaubert’s world the material and the psychological ally themselves in a continual give and take….. join ….>>>>>

But what about Emma herself? What are we to make of her? What does she represent and where does she come from? As Flaubert’s own statement suggests, she is indeed none other than Flaubert himself but, like Charles’ hat “d’ordre composite”, she is a bizarre mix. She is Flaubert as he identified himself with his mother and his mistress, Louise Colet. His own transgressive drives mix with the domination his nervous mother had over him, the bourgeois society of which he was inextricably a part and his his bizarre relationship with the demanding Colet. After the death of Charles’ father and his sister - which occurred in rapid succession - Charles was left with his mother and his sister‘s baby daughter to care for. His mother was extremely nervous and hated for him to be away. He never broke with her, even after meeting Colet and went to great pains to keep them apart. After infrequent trips to Paris, or elsewhere, he always returned back to the tiny provincial town of Croisset where his family moved him after he began to be afflicted with bizarre epileptic attacks. Invariably he found his mother pacing nervously on the train platform, waiting for him to arrive. Flaubert showed almost no desire to leave or alter his situation and it seems almost as though he felt himself to be a willing prisoner to his circumstances.

The three Madame Bovarys - mother,first wife and Emma - that appear in the book are themselves a strange mixture of Flaubert, his mother and Colet. The patriarchal voice of Homais is, in part Falubert’s own father as well as the parochial voice of the bourgeois society. Léon is vaguely reminiscent of his admired friend, Alfred Le Pottevin, for whom he had so much hope and who in the end turned out to be a disappointment for Flaubert - as Léon was for Emma. There obsession with literature and the impossibility of escape for Emma (as for Flaubert himself) from the shackles of her environment and who she is - the escape into romantic literature was as endemic for Emma as it was for the youth of Fluabert’s generation. Everything in the book is an image or an artefact, a person or melange of different aspects of people and places that made up the physical, social and psychological material of Flaubert’s existence. With scientific rigour, he creates out of this material the most exquisite dream : instead of turning his gaze outwards, as his predecessors had done, he turns his focus inwards and lays his soul bare for examination. It is through the axial point of Flaubert that the characters and locations touch reality; that “linge droit” is dug inwards and the ‘reality’ of words and ideas it opens up exists deep inside Flaubert himself. He removes the outside world and creates (or finds) objects, from within himself, that resemble human instruments and activities; these objects become the loci of aesthetic contemplation : a critical dream of reality with each element perfectly placed to act out its part in the machine with exquisite precision. Still, there is something Emma that sets her apart. Her complete lack of conscious intentionality arouses something in us that is difficult to define in words. She finds her self in the middle of the most bizarre and self destructive activities often without seeming to know how she arrived there:

<<>>

She becomes increasingy estranged from the reality of her environment. Our conscious, rational minds are at pains to come to terms with her.

If, however, we consider that this object of Flaubert’s narrative is portrayed as a woman20 in parochial and patriarchal provincial France and, as such, is perhaps the perfect incarnation of subconsciously repressed desire - a desire with no chance of survival or full expression in the ‘conscious world’ that Flaubert presents to us and one that must constantly deny itself - we may be able to find some clues in deciphering the meaning of her character. Viewed in this light, Emma reveals herself as the incarnation of the psycopathological phenomenon of subconcious desire as it intrudes into the repression of everyday existence.21 His critique is of the society which, in its immaculate homogeneity, has raised reason to the status of religion; but this is a religion of profanity where transgression is not considered and the sacred no longer exisits : life and passion in the raw is repressed and expression of desire is channeled neurotically through the rational constructs of society. Desire manifests itself in other places and characters in the book but it is always restrained or is directed instrumentally towards the profanity of ‘reality’- towards money, status or sex : the drives of Rudolphe , Léon and Homais fade rapidly or change focus as they lose their practicality. Emma’s limitless passion is completly alien to them : even immediately after her gruesome death, the pharmacist and the curé continue with with their pointless and age old arguments over church and state and the characters continue as history has determined them showing little or no real sentiment over what has just happened - with the exception, of course, of Charles and the baby who are effectively destroyed by it but have absolutely no understanding of the situation. Emma’s desire is singular : it’s manifestation is transgressive to the extent that it removes her, quite literally, from the reality of society. It has no real tangible goal other than it’s own self realisation. Emma is passion that cannot or will not be mediated by society, made manifest in a society so repressed that understanding is impossible. She is all pathos, all Dionysian drive with no true Aplollonian vision to guide her - her romance novels will not suffice. All the while, as distubing as this all is, we recognise that there is something fundimental about Emma. Perhaps Flaubert is showing us that it is not reason or thinking that is the essence of being - as Descartes postulated - but rather desire.
Flaubert is pshycological in a way that was almost completely alien to the readers of his generation and Madame Bovary was put on trial for crimes against morality. He was aquitted after a lenghthy process that, by all accounts, Flaubert seemed to relish. <<>>Surrealism…

Questions,Other Notes and Ideas on Madame Bovary and Flaubert:

1. The Emotional Intelligence of Emma

“You must beware of turgid speeches
masking themselves as common
place passions”
Rodolphe p.177

Emma lives in a world apart which she has cobbled together from the language of romance novels. She uses romantic clichés – which have no grounding in reality – as the foundation of her thought and identity. Increasingly, this becomes all she sees and understands. When her world is challenged, her fear manifests itself as rage or retreat into piety; there’s an element here that’s almost bestial. Her self-delusion and laceration from the world reach such an extreme point that she is literally removed from existence. Although this is literature and Emma represents an extreme pathological case, her character does raise certain important points regarding the relationship between language and passion (as desire and emotion), and the ways in which we engage with the world through them.

– How is the nature of a given emotion dependent on the language we have to describe it? (metaphor etc.)

– If we had different language tools (or if our language functioned differently) would our experience of emotion be different?

– Are emotions in the mind or are they “in the world” (Decartes’ cogito vs. Heidegger’s Dasien) ? (passion/reason vs the ideas of mind and heart… chi)

– How do our assumptions – mind/body, inner/outer (dualism) or, our ideas of how love or anger “should be” – affect (or emerge from) our language and therefore influence our emotions?

– How are the passions related to personal and social narratives, and the drive to complete these narratives (consciously or sub-consciously) ? What’s the relation of the expression to the emotion?

– How does this narrative get out of control as it did with Emma?

How much choice (or control) do we actually have in deciding when and how we express our emotions? (Sartre’s mauvaise foi) Is it possible to change the nature of our emotions by changing our language; is our situation in it’s own way just as deterministic as Emma’s?

2. “Madame Bovary, C’est Moi” : What does this mean?

– Flaubert talked about burying himself in the work so that he could find the “straight line” (linge droit) which would allow him to dig “like a mole” (comme une taupe) and eventually emerge or open up a reality of ideas and words that was hitherto concealed.
– Flaubert detested the subject matter of this novel. Why did he write about it ?
– “méfions-nous de cette espèce d’échauffement qu’on appelle l’inspiration…” Flaubert was suspicious of inspiration and said, “write with the head, not the heart”, “…écrire froidment”
– “The highest point in art is not to make us laugh or cry, but to act in the fashion of nature and make us dream”
– “Treat the soul with the same impartiality that one uses in the physical sciences.”
– “ Don’t judge, show!”

What is he showing? Is this really – as it seems on the surface – a critique of french bourgeois provincial life (les moeurs de province) or something altogether different? How does Flaubert implicate us (our emotions) in the book? How does he set us dreaming?

– The novel raises issues about gender and the possibilities open to women with regards to self determination (Vargas’ bad girl). Is there is something deeper and more perverse going on here?

– Is Flaubert just making a statement about the plight of women or is he using this sexualization instrumentally to deal with a personal issue?

Baudelaire : “To accomplish this tour de force, it remained only for the author to divest himself of his sex, and to become a woman. The result is a marvel; for despite all his zeal as an actor he was unable to keep from infusing his male blood into the veins of his creation, and Madame Bovary, in the most forceful and ambitious sides of her character, and also the most pensive, remained a man.”

A Fragmentary Conversation About Emma Bovary with Myself:

– How do we interpret this book and Emma herself?
is it a critique of society?
do we sympathise with Emma for being caught in this situation, Do we detest her?
What is this book saying politically?
Is Flaubert making any kind of judgement at all or is this a kind of sadistic game?
What exactly is he playing at?
What do we think about Flaubert use of a female charater?

– Well, this is a complicated book and it’s made all the more difficult to access becuse of subtil way in which presents itself and the prejduces we might have in approaching it

– … that’s to say, how we might impose our own understanding of how a novel from this period should present itself and , in the grander scheme of things, what the role of litterature istelf should be in moral and aesthetic terms.

– Some still call this book as a “realist” novel or claim that it was a breakthrough because of the realistic way in which it describes mid 19th century society in Normandy.

– Certainly, this is part of it, and the novel – on the surface – does present itself in this way.

– And, without doubt we are reading something that has it’s basis in lived experience and obsevation… the very social material that makes up the charaters, thier motives and dialogue is taken from this environment that Flaubert knew so well

–I’m reffering to the social conformity, cold intrumental pursuit of wealth , fashionable romanticicm , the bougeois marriage (which was more about money and estate than love or passion), the place of women, the restrictions of class, social hypocrisy, blind allegience to the social doctrine of the day and the like .

– and certainly in his descriptions of the material world, Flaubert’s depth of detail can only come with a mode of obsevation that borders on the scientific in terms of its rigour.

– So I don’t think it to be entirely innacurate to call him a realist… However, I do think that this is just the begining with Flaubert and we know from his letters that he was interested in moving beyond this realist style of which he was obviously such a master..

– I think, we can say that actually that it is through of this masterful use realism that Flaubert takes us somewhere else all together , a place that litterature had not explored up until then or at least no in this way …

– and presents us with something that is so subtile that at first we have no idea what we’re dealing with, just perhaps and odd feeling that there is something unusual going on.

– So Let me see If I can roughy outline what I mean here

– Flaubert presents us with a kind of disconect between his characters and the natural world that surrounds them , this is most extreme in the estrangement of Emma’s inner voice and the reality of the natural world to which she has no emotional conection.
P34 …Convent Bginning of PT2 enrty into Yonneville

– in this way Flaubert accentuates of the evolving passionate narrative of Emma by posing it against, or lacerating it from the natural world, which is described with this breathtaking realism..

– Emmas passion is increasingly directed away from reality, towards her fantasies fuelled by romace literature P58 After the Ball , Trapped Etc … Down in her soul…

– as her passion reaches it’s peak, she becomes dislocated from society and even her lovers themselves. PAGE 100 (playing the virtuous housewife)

– now what’s interesting to notice here is how Flaubert paints these characters in relation to that of Emmma’s : they are categorical in a way, they fit into these very real social stereotypes that Flaubert detested somuch… they become almost 2 dimentional, unvarying, cliche and almost comic at times

– wheras the range of emma’s passion and the prodigious and uncontrollable nature of it’s evolution increasingly terrifies … these suppporting characters, pale in comparison to her.

WHERE DOES ALL THIS LEAD ?

– BY the end of the book she’s really is like a caged creature, desperate to maintain control, desperate to keep herself disengaed from the others…. she is tormented and killed, by her own desire…surrounded by all these pathetic and demonic creatures ….this is NOT Balzac . this, by the end, is like some kind of dream… seems more like a nightmare than anything else

SO what I’m Getting at here

– There’s a sense in which this realism is merely the surface of something or as Flaubert put it the “scaffolding” which “would allow him to dig like a mole , and to eventually emerge into a reality of ideas that was hither to unknown”

Explain … But Madame Bovary is, in a sense, his authorial judgment on such human frailties, a revelation of the fatality and fultility of living out such romantic dreams in the modern world.

– But Flaubert doesn’t stop there

– the accuracy and detail of Flaubert’s realism as well as his understanding of science allowed him to recognize that reality, or at least our understanding of it, could be brought into question by the change or suggestion of even the smallest things. And so we see him laying out these hooks for us – and sometimes they are very subtile. He’s drawing us into this “reality” he’s discovered – sometimes forcing us to question our very understanding of the things that make us most human, the very understanding of our emotioanl language PP…19 “She Loved Him, After All”

– In this way he Implicates us in the novel, forcing us to weave in our own thoughts and feelings, our own emotional “Mythology” with that of the book. He puts us in the thoughts of the charaters and forces us to make our own judgements

– Irony + Free indirect discourse 271… “But as She was Writing…”

– the combination of Flaubert’s nautural realism, the lacerated internal voice of Emma, the almost symbolic supporting characters and the ways in which Flaubert pulls us in to the book creates the sense that what we are dealing with is some kind of reality abstracted from itself … somekind of critical dream in which we the readers, are expected to play a crucial critical role. In this way Flaubert is realist in his technique, modern in his depiction of bourgeois values the kind of moral relativism he implies but, in a sense, also surreal in the way he engages us with the book PP …152 She Would Explore his room ….

– What then, if anything, does this book provide… what does it show us???

– Well I think for me the most striking thing that came to mind is the way that, personal and social narratives are created, accepted or used… and become accepted as truth or become (or create) objects of obsession

– It seems to me that dominant issue here is that of the relationship between language and emotion. I’d like to speak about this briefly, not in an attempt to offer somekind definitive of model as to how this relationship plays out but rather to open a path for investigation and discussion. I’ll then move on to examine a few points in the text that I found to be of interest in this regard

––Rousseau, sturuggling with language in his attempt to expess these feelings he had; to define them into something that we (or he for that matter) could understand as some kind of recognisable emotion.

––– how difficult it was for him to do this given, among other things, the bizarre nature of his relationship with Mme De Warrens and the unstable nature of his family life. I for one, felt quite sympathetic towards poor Rousseau in this regard, contantly striving as he was to pull emotion out of raw feelings, never able to constitute for himself the common narratives that define Mother, Lover, Protector, Father etc…

But, as sad as it was for Rousseau it’s also very interesting to think about how fragile our ideas about our emotions actually are, and that they might not be always exactly what we assume them to be. So, let’s pause here for a second and try to understand what we mean by this idea of a narrative as it relates to emotion.

–– Emotional Intellegence… We are linguistc creatures and we use language to understand and describe our world, to each other and to ourselves. Metaphor is one of our chief devices in this regard

– However, in a nutshell I think we can begin to undertstand it if we are willing consider the ideas that our emotions are engagement with the world, and that our emotions, such as we understand them, are in large part percived as they are due to accutulration and the language that goes along with it. A few points

– We engage with the world through emotion

– Emotion tends to involve desire which moves –sometimes in very complicated ways – within a narrative and compells the individual to engage with the world. (there’s always somekind of object or direction)

– This is Intentionality

– Emotions can be false. (physiological response just is but the understanding of the narrative may be misunder stood or it could change)

– Our langugage and acultration has a lot to do with the nature of the emotions we have. Metaphors we use the cliche’s we live by etc…

– The ways in which the subject responds to the pressures of these narrative can be intelligent depending on how the story of this narrative is pursued.

– Active engagement with these narratives can affect not only our behavior or our way of engaging in the world but also the world itself

Now, on one extreme one might not engage at all, it might not even come to mind that such a thing would be possible; on the other, one could neurotically over think the narrative. Like Hamlet for example: the locus of his desire lies in direct, clear , action, and is never questioned: he must, and will kill Claudius to avenge his father. However, Hamlet is so busy engaging, questioning, tweaking the narrative of his revenge and missing opportunities for satisfaction as they present themselves, that we begin to wonder if he’ll ever get around to actually doing the deed that honour demands of him. There is also this extreme case, as suggested by Flaubert, where the subject (or rather ltterary subject in Emma’s) attempts to completely replace one set of narratives for another which has been completely fabricated out of books , these romance novels etc

… I should also point out
this idea of narrative as it relates to our emotions is itself a kind of metaphor : If we took this idea litterally we’d be living in some kind of novel … so I’m not saying it’s definitive by anymeans as a model of how our emotions work, thing are more myserious than that. However, I think it’s quite helpful as a tool for litterary critique in trying to create a relation between the lived and the written.

SO , with all of this in mind I’d like to have a look at few parts of the book where we can see this emotional narrative taking place, being formed or manipulated. And also, more interestingly point out line here and there where Flaubert implicates us, the reader and our own narratives into the book and into the characters them selves.

Anger and Resentment – There’s this perverse way in which Emma seems to savour all her Emotions , Anger and resentment are no different P94 … Dirested against Charles, P101 she’s almost frustrated that her “narrative” of resent ment directed towards Charles is missing some of the elements it needed to make the narrative itself complete “ she wished that he would beat her…”

Ideas of Love – Emma, Leon, Rodolphe … 177 this contrast between Emma and Rodolphe’s ideas

Friendship – Homais P81

Passion In Manacles:
Hamlet, Orestes and the Crisis of Knowledge

Deprived of a rational foundation on which our understanding of the order the things can rest, our emotional engagement with the world is either held captive or is reduced to incoherent acts of barbaric violence and destruction. I believe this to be the central theme of Shakespeare’s Hamlet1 and the driving force behind the trial of Orestes in Aeschylus’ The Oresteia.2 With the intention of developing a deeper understanding of the nature of emotion in times of epistemological crisis, I offer here an analysis of Hamlet’s delay which will begin with a brief look at the three most common theories of explanation. Following this, I will introduce a fourth, less common view, that not only incorporates the themes and inconsistencies of the previous three, but also expresses an historically consistent condition in which reason, knowledge and understanding are in a state of disunity. Then, in order to add depth to the understanding of this theme, I will look briefly at the character of Oedipus as we know him through Sophocles’ Theban Plays.3 Finally, I will introduce for comparison the plight of Orestes which – as it comes through the trials of slaughter and madness and finally emerges into the light of reason and hope – mirrors the despair of Hamlet’s irremediable condition in a remarkable way.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599-1601) is one of the most examined, criticised and discussed works in all of Western literature. And indeed, perhaps the most debated topic of the play is the Danish prince’s agonising hesitation in exacting revenge for the murder of his father. In searching for potential avenues – and there are a great many of them – by which one might arrive at some explanation for the prince’s inability to act, we find three basic theoretical themes dominating the field of inquiry: the theological, the moral and the psychological.4 Although they all hold positions which contribute to an understanding of the play in someway or another, it is my view that they are also incomplete because they adhere blindly to a restrictive assumption about the nature of art.

Hamlet is an intelligent man. He’s an intellectual, a philosopher and a lover of the theatre. He is also a protestant; he went to school in Wittenburg, home of Martin Luther and centre of Protestant intellectual life late in the 16th century. While this much is clear, what is not clear is the religious affiliation of the Ghost claiming to be the immortal spirit of Hamlet’s father: is the Ghost Catholic or Protestant? This problem is the crux of the theological approach to understanding Hamlet’s paralysis. In act 1 scene 4, Hamlet and Horatio consider the two protestant alternatives with regards to the nature of the Ghost: either it is a demon sent from hell to torment and corrupt Hamlet, or it is an angel come from heaven to instruct him. Neither of them consider purgatory, as this would have been a purely Catholic concern. The Ghost, however, describes himself in purely Catholic terms; he states that he comes from purgatory, which arouses confusion and raises questions about the credibility of his claims. Hamlet, being the rational, intelligent fellow that he is, decides that validation is needed; and, after proof of the Ghost’s claims are provided by Claudius’ reaction to the play within a play, it seems that Hamlet can act with a clear conscience. And he does act, killing Polonius by accident, mistaking him for Claudius. Hamlet then goes off to England and has no way of getting to Claudius until the end of the play. This theological perspective seems to neatly resolve the problem, showing that there is no real hesitation after all, and that Hamlet acts as expediently as conditions permit once sufficient evidence has been given to verify the claims of the Ghost.

But what of this instance just before the death of Polonius, where Hamlet approaches Claudius at prayer with a drawn dagger? He already has his evidence, which is confirmed by Horatio – his peer and most trusted friend – and yet he hesitates out of theological concerns which are purely Catholic. This confusing situation is then accentuated later in the play by the impassioned words of Laertes, Polonius’ son, come to seek revenge on Hamlet for the death of his father and sister:

To cut his throat i’th’ church. (IV, VII, 125)

Additionally, Hamlet himself speaks continually of his delay, questioning it again and again, from different perspectives; he is painfully aware of it until the waning moments of the play. Even after the truth of the Ghost’s claims are assured, we are still left with the problem of Catholic/Protestant confusion as well as the distinct impression that Hamlet is yearning for satisfaction but is restrained by something almost metaphysical. This approach, while explaining the delay in a superficial way, does not deal effectively with the deeper and more confusing questions it raises.

The theory that Hamlet’s hesitation is brought on by a certain moral repugnance aroused by the anachronistic nature of the conflict between 16th century Christian doctrine – whether it be Catholic or Protestant – and the essentially pagan act of revenge which he is asked to perform, only leads to more confusion. While it does, in a sense, render the Catholic/Protestant quagmire essentially moot by replacing it with the larger issue of Christianity vs. Paganism, this moral perspective is ultimately rendered impotent because it cannot find support in the play itself. Nowhere in the play do we find any real objections from the characters themselves with regards to the moral implications of revenge. We’ve seen Laertes’ response on the subject of revenge and, indeed, Hamlet himself seems quite satisfied after killing Polonius, all the while thinking it was Claudius that he was running through:

Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell.
I took thee for thy better. (III,IV, 31-32)

Hardly the words of someone who is incapacitated by the moral implications of revenge.

The psychological perspective, most famously posed by Ernest Jones in his book Hamlet and Oedipus,5 meticulously develops Freud’s interpretation of the play which asserts, as the title of Jones’ book suggests, that Hamlet delays because he is in the grips of a repressed Oedipal complex. Jones asserts not only that Claudius is an usurper politically, but that he has usurped Hamlet oedipally; in effect, Claudius has done what Hamlet desires to do: kill his father and sleep with his mother. This, according to Jones, explains Hamlet’s inability to act as a psychological problem: Hamlet cannot kill Claudius because of repressed Oedipal guilt and because, sub-conciously, he views Claudius to be nothing less than his own alter ego. Given that Claudius has usurped Hamlet both politically and psychologically, killing Claudius – according to this interpretation – would mean killing himself. This explains, perhaps, the frequent mixed references to suicide and revenge as well as the fact that it is only after the Queen is dead and Hamlet knows himself to be dying, that he is finally able to move swiftly and decisively in exacting his revenge; the restraint of Oedipal guilt is dissolved and Hamlet is now free to act.

This perspective is given some credence in the play by the frequent instances in which Hamlet expresses his disgust for what he views as an incestuous relationship between Claudius and Queen Gertrude; the anger Hamlet displays over the murder of his father is often overshadowed by the horror aroused in him by the the union of his uncle and his mother. However, on closer inspection we are confronted with certain facts which compel us to recognise that this Oedipal point of view cannot be accepted as a definitive solution to our problem either. This perspective does not address the theological problems we have just examined and, furthermore, it does not deal in a convincing manner with the very proof that the theological position gives in arguing that Hamlet’s paralysis is, in fact, a non issue. Hamlet kills Polonius accidentally, mistaking him for Claudius. His intention is without doubt: in the moment of action, it is Claudius that Hamlet thinks he is killing. It just so happens that it was not Claudius concealed behind the curtain, but rather Polonius.6

In addition to the internal inconsistencies that these three positions are encumbered with and the omissions they make in order to prove themselves, we have seen that they also contradict each other in fundamental ways. The psychological perspective takes the position that Hamlet cannot act because of a psychological restraint: the Oedipal complex. The theological perspective shows that, although he does hesitate because of the uncertainty surrounding the providence of the Ghost, once proof of the Ghost’s statement is attained Hamlet does act but kills the wrong man. We have also seen that a moral explanation with regards to a religious or personal repugnance that the act of revenge might present is unsupported by the text, and brings to the surface additional conflicts with regards to how the play mixes general Christian values with those of a pagan or barbaric nature. The Catholic/Protestant confusion is never resolved and the text is full of passages that are both supportive and contradictory with regards to the perspectives we have just examined.

This brings us to the very crux of the problem: all of these points of view demand a kind of coherency that is not always commensurate with reality. They deny art the ability to be, on some level, incomprehensible. We cannot understand the mystery of Hamlet in purely rational terms – as some kind of localised system of cause and effect – because the very nature of play lies in the unravelling of reason itself; the innate incoherence of the play is, in fact, the vehicle of its meaning. However, by addressing the myriad of inconsistencies we find in the text directly – by deconstructing them and putting their elements into play – Shakespeare’s drama begins to show itself as an expression of late 16th century neurosis brought on by a large scale changes in the foundations of Western thought.

When viewed from an historical perspective, the apparent inconsistencies in the play begin to reveal elements that are consistent with of the kinds of changes that were undermining the epistemological foundations of European thought late in the 16th century. The Protestant reformation begun by Martin Luther in 1517, criticised the Church and the Pope; the most controversial points in Luther’s thesis centred on the practice of selling indulgences and the Church’s policy on purgatory. Although Protestantism was established unequivocally in England under Edward VI, on a popular level religion in England was still in a state of flux. Following a brief Roman Catholic reaction during the reign of Mary 1553-1558, Protestantism was restored by Elizabeth I but remained on shaky ground for sometime. With this in mind, it seems very likely that Shakespeare’s audience would have understood the significance of the religious confusion as it was presented in the play as the issue of Christian factionalism would have been front and centre in the social psyche of the day.

Politically things were also changing at this time. The conception of ruler as a divinely ordained entity was being challenged by new conceptions of power acquisition, not the least of which being those found in Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince7 (posthumously published 1531/2). Machiavelli delivers a cold, relativistic pragmatism with regards to the role of the prince and the manner by which his power should be acquired and maintained; a universal understanding of ruler is exchanged for a conception based on contingency which leaves no space for moral absolutism. The old pretensions of Christian morality and divine right of kings – as well as the traditional conception of lineage – were being challenged. In Hamlet, the amoral nature of Machiavelli’s politics is perfectly incarnate in Claudius who plays the benevolent uncle/king while his dark soul bubbles with ambition. In his very person, he strips away the conception of royal lineage and family cohesion. The fact that Polonius is killed in his place depicts poetically the old rationality unknowingly going off to slaughter; its outdated rhetoric rendered useless, it is put down by Hamlet’s blade.

Additionally, we can site the paradigm shift away from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens introduced by the Copernican Revolution as well as the discovery of the New World late in the 15th century as contributing factors to this general mood that everything that had once been understood as immutable was now breaking apart. Church, state and family, as well as geography and the heavens, were no longer able to be conceived of in their traditional guises. And this was only the beginning, the Scientific Revolution of the 17th Century was to completely reform mankind’s understanding of himself and his position in the universe, culminating in new ideas about subjectivity such as Descartes’ “Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum”, which treats perception of the external world with scepticism.

Hamlet is caught in the centre of all this. There is nowhere for him to rest, nowhere he can find a foothold in this world that seems to dissolve into irrationality at every touch. While Ophelia literally drowns in her own madness, Hamlet is reduced to philosophical games to keep himself from slipping into dementia; and, even then, his hold on sanity seems tenuous at best. Philosophically this is a very different world from the clear spiritual and social track offered by pre-Reformation Catholicism and a far cry indeed from the Aristotelian claim that the universe itself is based on clear immutable laws and that aesthetically, poetry should be an image of this coherency. In Hamlet’s world nothing is as it seems: Rosencrantz and Guidenstern’s friendship turns into treachery, a lover (Ophelia) becomes a spy and an uncle becomes a father.

We now have an alternate conception of the nature of Hamlet’s delay in which it is viewed as an expression of the angst brought on by epistemological uncertainty. With the intention of reaching a more profound understanding of this timeless theme, I will now turn to look briefly at two of Hamlet’s tragic predecessors, Oedipus and Orestes, as dramatised by Sophocles and Aeschylus respectively. In addition to the psychological similarities we considered above, Hamlet and Oedipus resemble each other in a contextual way as well. Both struggle to confront the impossible complexity of their situations in an attempt to understand the nature of their emotions and the meaning of action already manifested in the world. Hamlet constantly agonises over what it means to act and, when he does, he kills the wrong man. Oedipus is confronted with the results of his own actions – the significance of which were unknown to him, or rather, misunderstood by him from the start. Both Hamlet and Oedipus are tyrannised by their emotions; the actions aroused by their feelings do not result in rational effects of clearly understood causes, but rather, finish in confusion, or, as with Oedipus, the horrific revelation that all that was understood to be true was an illusion and that he himself is the agent of his own deception and the cause of the curse on Thebes.

Both are, in effect, imprisoned by a crisis in the relationship between emotion and knowledge; the link between intention, understanding and the manifestation of action is broken. Both prince and king are polluted (miasma) by their situation; but, while Oedipus exiles himself to Colonus and receives a purification (catharsis), Hamlet can receive no such absolution: he must take the remnants of family and state with him to the grave, welcoming Fortinbras and his conquering armies with his last breath.

While Oedipus shares a great deal with Hamlet in terms of psychological angst, it is the plight of Orestes that mirrors most remarkably the epistemological concerns that we uncovered in approaching Hamlet from an historical perspective. Aeschylus’ Oresteia is the story of mankind’s emergence into reason and democracy; and, although it moves in a direction opposite to that of Hamlet, the fundamental problems confronting us here are almost identical to those we have been examining up to this point. The Greek term ate8 sums up the conditions of crisis, both in the rotting state of Hamlet’s Denmark and in the cursed house of Atreus. Ate, as generally defined by E.R. Dodds,9 refers to a condition distinct from that of rationality, often involving a curse, some kind of supernatural conflict, the intervention of daemonic forces or some such situation that either tempts a mortal character, or group of characters, towards irrationality or renders conditions such that rational understanding and coherent action are rendered impossible. We see this force cursing the house of Atreus from its mythological inception; Cassandra, at the moment of her arrival from the conquered Troy, senses this dark power in the house of Agamemnon and Clytamnestra and recoils in horror. E.R. Dodds writes:

Cassandra sees the Erinyes [Furies] as a band of daemons, drunken with human blood; to Clytamnestra’s excited imagination, not only the Erinyes but ate itself are personal fiends to whom she has offered her husband as a human sacrifice; there is a moment in which she feels her human personality lost and submerged in that of the alastor [avenger, passer of sin from parent to child] whose agent and instrument she was.10

As in Hamlet, the characters in Aeschylus’ play move through an atmosphere thick with ate; their very beings are permeated with it, emerging as they do from their polluted history of infanticide, cannibalism and blood vendetta. Agamemnon is infected with it as he confronts the meaning of Chalcas’ interpretation of the omen of the eagles and the pregnant hare; he must face the impossible conflict between the action demanded by Zeus and the sacrifice demanded by Artemis. Pressed into action that goes beyond any rational instinct, he kills his daughter, committing the most heinous act in order to appease a religious conflict, thereby stimulating the ate that lurks in the house of Atreus. These religious conflicts do not go away with the forcing of Agamemnon’s hand; rather, they intensify as the drama progresses, invigorated by the confusion created around irrational acts.

Agamemnon’s deed committed, the power of the ate gnawing away at the house of Atreus swells and empowers Clytamnestra, not only to take her revenge on Agamemnon, but also to corrupt the existing monarchy into a tyranny, thereby eroding the political status quo. In killing Agamemnon, she facilitates the destruction of the family as well as the lineage between father and son; it shatters the expectation that the son should not only receive the father’s throne, but also his guilt. In this respect she is very much like Claudius – an usurping mother rather than an uncle – and becomes the locus of Prince Orestes’ desire for revenge. Orestes, like Hamlet, hesitates before acting on his desire, but Pylades – who brings to mind Horatio – reminds him of his oath to Apollo and revenge is enacted. This action shatters everything and Orestes now sees before him the terrifying incarnation of the Furies who claim justice for this violation of the ancient chthonic laws which tie the psyche of mankind with the rites of nature. Haunted by these ancient daemons, he falls into madness, unable to understand the meaning of his bloody action and the passion that drove it on. It is only through the intervention of the younger gods – Apollo and Athena – and by the consensus of the polis in the newly incarnated Areopagus, that these conflicting forces are controlled, subsumed and given a rational context in which to function. The guilt born out of the bloody chaos of the past is annulled. The religious incoherence between the old gods, the young gods and the Furies is balanced, and Orestes can be acquitted by the deciding vote of Athena. The curse on the house of Atreus is lifted and family, tribe and state are redefined in rational, civilised terms; mankind is purified and the ate that so polluted his reason is washed away.

Both Shakespeare and Aeschylus offer us profound insights into the effects that epistemological failure and massive upheavals in the foundations of understanding have on the human psyche and civilisation itself. By addressing the fundamental institutions of mankind – religion, justice, family and politics – as well as the relationship between barbarism and civilisation, both dramatists touch at the very heart of the human process and the foundational elements that constitute knowledge and understanding. Both Hamlet and the Oresteia present the interconnected nature of reason, passion and action by placing it in crisis. They both show the impossibility of freedom when mankind is deprived of consistent rational structures on which to base his knowledge of the world. They also demonstrate the inability for passion to manifest itself as coherent action when fundamental elements of understanding are in conflict. The fact that both plays are born out of myth speaks to the timeless power of this recurring theme and brings to the surface the danger and hope implicit in the process of humanity.

Aeschylus traces western man’s emergence out of barbarism and blood vendetta. He depicts the awakening of the ancient Greek culture into the light of civilised democracy, religion and social contract which is backed by law and and the gods. The trial of Orestes creates the very foundational understandings by which the passions themselves are defined in a civilised environment and their engagement with the world secured, albeit tenuously, within the rational boundaries of civilised institutions and common social psychological constructs.

Shakespeare, inversely, presents us with a situation in which the erosion of these foundational understandings is all but complete. This is a nightmarish world where only incoherent fragments remain of the rational foundations of the past – an eerie, enigmatic environment in which everything Hamlet touches falls away from him. Shakespeare shows us that, far from freeing passion, this failure of reason leads the individual and society into the chains of neurotic confusion, the tyranny of madness and irrational acts of barbaric destruction. While the final optimism of the Oresteia contrasts sharply with hopelessness of Hamlet it is clear that both plays demand their audience to consider the fragility of the relationship between rational thought and coherent emotional engagement with the world.

November, 2007

NOTES:
1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Arden Edition, London: Thompson, 2003
2. Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles, London: Penguin Classics, 1977
3. Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles, London: Penguin Classics, 1984
4. I have chosen to ignore the aesthetic perspective – put forward by Voltaire in the 18th century and T.S. Eliot in the 20th – which postulates that the glaring inconsistencies in the play are not purposeful and that Hamlet is simply an artistic failure.
5. Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus, New York: Norton Library, 1979
6. Jones does address this issue obliquely, offering a complicated theory which presents, among other things, Polonius and Claudius as a kind of mythical bifurcated father figure. See Jones p.133-150
7. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, London: Penguin Classics, 2003
8. Ate is often seen in in more recent publications with a circumflex: Atê. I retain Dodds spelling as he is my reference here.
9. Dodds, The Greeks And The Irrational, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968 p.28-50
10. Ibid p.39-40