----- Original Message ----- From: "Shane Mage" <shmage at pipeline.com>
>
"his life has been a quest with no object except his own endlessly burgeoning subjectivity."
Sense or nonsense? __________________________________
...a certain kind of sense except I would not cast it in a negative light: "no object except..."
What strikes me about Hamlet is how, he too, hovers ghost-like around the play, never being able to cast himself in the right role or occupy the right space. And thus, this most scholarly and intelligent of characters winds up basically acting out or acting impulsively whenever the need for action arises.
The first embodiment of a free-floating individual in westrn lit.....and all the shortcomings and limitations thereof.
Eliot was wrong that Hamlet has no objective correlative. He does and it is shown at the very beginning of the play in the figure of the guards. The guards are guarding the carousing of murderers and thieves, of the new king, of Polonius, and of Gertrude, and so by doing their "job" in a failed society, they are betraying their reason for being. Hamlet faces a similar paradox in having to carry out a revenge plot; his ambivalence about the right of succession has to do with his realization of what he is succeeding to...a world of Poloniuses, of friends ever ready to betray him, of grownups (like Gertrude and the King) without conscience and without consciousness. What would be the point of that?
He is free-floating because there is no longer an ethical order to anchor him, there is no longer any kind of co-ordinate system that he can inscribe himself in. This is a new post-medieval, self-made fate, and Hamlet the play succeeds in portraying its anguish and chaos.
In that sense, achieving a "subjectivity" outside of a failed social nexus is his quest and the impossibility of that quest is what we take away from the play.
Joanna