aesthetic mechanism tragic experience hamlet

8/13/2019 Aesthetic Mechanism Tragic Experience Hamlet

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THE AESTHETIC MECHANISM1OFTRAGIC EXPERIENCE IN HAMLET .

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WHAT ARE the mental, social and aesthetic processesbywhich Shake-speare's Hamlet becomes a different Hamlet for every age? How has hebeen transformed intoaNeo-Classicor aRom antic,aVictorianoranexistentialist hero? Into the Hamlet of VoltaireorGoethe; of Schopen-hauer or Hegel, of T.S.Eliot, Jaspers or of anybody else? W e raise thesequestions in the hope of finding an answer that m ight throw light uponthe impactofHamletin particular and upon thatof the tragedyas aliterary genreingeneral. . t,. W e have two fixed points to start from. One is the tragedyitself,i.e.its immediate impact. The o theris thefully dev elope dHam let-experienceof the spectators. But unfortunately these two points are virtually coin-cident. Direct impact essentially unchanged throughout the centuries1istransformed into a different individual experience in each spectator, andthis with such speed that one inadvertantly identifiesitwith one's ownsubjective experience. This is why in talking aboutHamletwe are fromthe beginning hopelesslyatcross purposes: we always speak about ourown Hamlet experiences andnot about Shakespeare'sHamlet?So wehave to begin ou r w ork of analysis by trying to isolate these two points.Only when we have succeeded in doing so can we examine the processitself in which immediate impactis transformed into fulfilled experience.W e cannot approach the immediate impactof a tragedy unlesswesucceed in switching off the mental mechanisms that operate for assimi-lating and interpreting impressions and unless we record the impressionswe receive immediately, almost asitwereby reflex action. Moreoverwe have to set down each small sensation-unit there and then, separately,becauseatthe endofthe playitwould be uselesstomake the attemptwith the so-called total impactof the tragedy. That is but amirage

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produced-by thousands ofimp'ression-units and soon peters out, leavingin its place only our own subjective Hamlet experience. W e hav e as yetno .instrum ents, o f course, for measu ring the im pact-impulses receivedby our .minds.So al l we can do is to note down quickly.and as far aspossible automatically,1: the sensations, thou gh ts a nd spontaneo us re -actions evo ked by. reading o r w atching the play.3 The survey of suchelementary impact-impulses will be made som ewh at m ore authent ic andstatistically m or e exact b y rep eating the reco rdin g: process several timesand 'by" colla ting it .with sim ilar rec ord s .-made b y ot he r people.'. A'seriesof such experiments4 m ade by a gro up of H ungarian- l i terary' historiansprod uce d a multi tud e "of eleme ntary im pact-imp ulses, such as: alarm mysteriousness ^ illness co rru ptio n nausea friendship love struggle7suicide m elancholy ^-r iron y rebellion vengean ce disloyaltyno stalgia, etc . It appeared at the same tim e "that mos t o fthese heterogeneous stimuli . 'keep


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TRAGIC EXPERIENCE IN HAMLETgenius. We do not know whether he believes in the Ghost or not;whether he loves Ophelia or not; whether his purpose is revenge orsomething else. We waver between the two extremes of sympathy andantipathy in the scenes when his justified grief makes him cause Opheliaunjustifiedgrief,and between horror and comedy when for instance hecalls his father's ghost a mole, or speaks to the King about the wormsdevouring Polonius's body. And so we keep swaying between the con-trasts of recurrent pairs of ideas, like to f ight or to resignoneself;to hopeto despair; to loveto hate; to benot to be. This sense of vibratingopposites is enhanced by minute tensions within the text, such as: 'Withmirth in funeral and with d irge in m arriage', or : 'In equal scale weighingdelight and dole', or: 'A little more than kin, and less than kind'andso on. Itisenough merely to refer to the strange and iridescent vibrationof imagery, metaphors and symbols.6This inner v ibration of themes, m otifs, characters and moods runs u n-broken from beginning to end of the play, and this with such intensitythat even now, approaching the drama after three centuries and ahalf,one is struck by the current of high tension and unabated power.6 Andit is futile to try to reduce this tension and curb the vibration of motifsby saying for instance that Hamletisselfish or Gertrudeisinnocent afterall;or that undoubtedly the play expresses a longing for death. Becausewhether w e like it or not, there are the counter-motifs which argue thatHamlet is unselfish and Gertrude is guilty; and that the play expresses alonging for life; and once m ore there begins theflickeringplay ofmotif-pairs. With what concealed mechanism does the author maintain thisconstant vibration of motifs?In the first place it is the method already referred to of using con-stantly recurring motifs, developing them with variations and associa-tions,and having them run on several planes. It is, for instance, a resultoftheconstant repetition of motifs that one encounters again and againthe negative and then the positive projection of a motif-pair, forming apattern, e.g.man is valuableman is valuelessuntil finally this alter-nation becomes almost automatic. The vibration is rendered even moreintricate by the fact that the play moves simultaneously onseveralplanes:the planes of plot, intellect, emotion, moral virtues, etc. So whereverthere occurs one ofthesepairs of opposites, an echo is elicited on otherplanes. For instance, the response to the motif-pair just mentioned maybe:attachm ent and escape, nostalgia and nausea, fellowship and solitudeand owing to the density of associative tracks even such remote pairsof opposites may respond as, say, hope and despair, pleasure and pain,will to act and lethargy, and so on. All these are constantly present andarc vibrating together in every word uttered by Hamlet and in every

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ELEMR HANKISSscene ofthe tragedy. It would be impossible therefore to try to stop, oreven slow down, this complex sparkling of contrasts because as soon asone managed to eliminate one pair of opposites more would emerge.The tensions are made definitely irresolvable by the variation tech-nique used in the play, i.e. by the fact that each motifis decomposedinto a wide range of shades and variants. If one had to deal with onlybasic motifs,e.g.solitude and companionship, or life and death, it w ouldbe possible to work out w hich of them occurs most frequently and say:this is the pith and the m arrow this is Shakespeare's message andthe tension would be solved at once. However, if it is not simply twomotifs that are opposed to each other but two lines of variants, bothranging from the negative pole to the positive pole (death, for instance,from murder, horror, nauseating putrefaction to weariness, poeticalpassing away, longing for rest, apotheosis) and if one is hurled up anddown these scales of variants and back and forth between themit isno wonder that the eyes of the soberest of critics are dazzled. And whenthe last word has been said and the curtain comes down, the images ofHamlet the coward and the brave, the faithful and the faithless, themurderer and the hero, continue their restless existence in one's mindtogether with contrasts of life and death, loyalty and-disloyalty, deathand rebirth, despair and hope.Is this then the basic impact of the tragedy? Is it this strange vibrationof contrasts? And if it is so, is it the sole function ofthe tragedy to dazeand shock one with this tremendous maze of contrasting emotions,themes and ideas, and to evoke in one's mind the sensation of life's tragicchaos and disjointedness? Is it merely to excite and entertain? No, innertensions and contrasts in the tragedy do not scatter and sparkle aimlesslyinto the void like so many fireworks. The w orld of the tragedy has twofirm poles which draw into a single field of force the entangled mass ofminor and major tensions. And it is to this basic tension, built up to atremendous force, that the mind and heart ofthespectator are exposed.

It will not be difficult to locate the two poles of the tragedy's field offorce. OneisHamlet, the other is the world at large: inner realityversusouter reality. That is in fact all the play is abo ut: Ham let wrestling withall his might with the reality surrounding him, endeavouring to setright a world that is out of join t, trying to bring back o rder and har-mony to life and restore equilibrium between himself and the world.Following this struggle, our consciousness travels over the entire gam utof man's relation to reality from tragic discord to perfect harmony,from frenzied struggle to tender union. We might even say that thetragedy is nothing else but the sum of themes, ideas, and emotions, each



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TRAG IC .EXPERIENCE,IN HAMLETrepresentative of the incessantly changing relation between man and theworld. ; . , - .- ' , ', . . It is no t just an entertaining spectacle thatis.enacted.here but a to oth -and-nail struggle in which we cannot help,but1take part. For not onlyHamlet's efforts, butunless philosophers and anthropologists are mis-takenall human efforts, have,always been aimed at .the creation ofaharmonious life and a social order giving full scope to man's.powers.andtalents. Is it not the desire to create a harmonious and anthro'pocentricworld that in the last analysishas. inspired the great social movements,scientific research and technological revolutions? And what is*theprimary, function of religion, philosophy and literature if not to arraythe world 's phenom ena in,a perfect order,with man at the centre,- and toinspirecfaith in,the existence, or at least in the possibility, of a worldo f h r m o n y , . , - , . , \ . . . , . .

Literature has varied and specific tasks in this respect. There are liter-ary works, such as short lyric poems for instance, which serve only toresolve .social and emotional tensions for just, a brief moment. Othersstill man 's, thirst for harm ony .and .consummation for a longer time;Som e, like folk tales, achieve this by the purest of means, others by lessnoble ones, like trashy :novels.and,best-sellers. Some again rouse andintensify man's nostalgia for harmony, as. was the case .with mostRomantic literature. There are works which serve progress by exposingfalse illusions of allegedly achieved harmony, like the best examples ofcritical Realism, and there are writers w ho incite arid urge to action'byshowing the intolerableness ofagiven set of conditions, like Zola andthe American naturalist writers at,the.beginning ofthecentury.'Yet nomatter how varied the functions of literature, there is one characteristiccommon to all great literary works: unlike trash and the poorer kindsof writing, they never cheat. They never try to deceive by illusions ofharmony achieved. On the'contrary they reveal and expose, or at leastsuggest, the dissonance of the given reality, presenting hu man fulfilmentand harmony at the bestasa potentiality, an ultimate goal, as somethingonly partially achieved. This tension of reality and idealisthe hall-markand essence of all important.literature. It lurks unnoticed in .the mostpeaceful idyll, in the most ethereal song and in the m ost joyful eclogue.'But it is strongest in tragedy. It is as if tragedy's every sentence weredesigned to increase to the utm ost this tension between reality and ideal,between dissonance and harm ony . And thisisparticularly trueofHam let.

In Hamlet the negative and positive poles are drawn far apart and. thetension is raised consequently to ared. heat. On one side, round thenegative pole, the author has accumulated all possible horro rs: murder,7

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ELEMER HANKIS Streason, depravation, death, betrayal, debauchery, despair, escape tomadness and death, the sensation of life's futility. The spectator, whosejudgement and rational resistance have already been impaired by thepulse of iambic rhythm , by the very poetry of the text, by the thousandsof small contrasts and ambiguities, by the mass of mysteriously iridescentimagery, is defenceless in the face of such a tide of horror and is carriedtowards the abyss of existential insecurity, terror and despair. Or ratherhe would be so carried if he were not held back by the forces of attrac-tion at the other pole. But where in the tragedy is the positive pole?Where are the life-giving and redeeming energies? The two poles ofthe tragedy are not to be visualized as existing in space or time; as if,for instance, some of the characters represented the negative forces andothers the positive ones, in the manner of melodrama; or as if negativeenergies dom inated the earlier parts of the tragedy and the positive onescame to prevail towards the end as a form of catharsis. No, the sameelusive iridescence can be observed in the tragedy's total impact as theone we have seen in the individual impact-elements and motifs. Forhowever strange it may sound, both positive and negative energiesemanate from the same constituents of the tragedy.

Let us take them in turn . W e have just mentioned the intoxicatingand weakening effect of rhythm, but surely there is no need to invokeexpert evidence to prove that rhythm is also a great power for relaxingtension and creating harm ony. N or do imagery and motifs only heightenmystery and the sense of insecurity. The mesh of interlocking imagesand the intertwining associations serve at the same time to bring intorelation remote phenomena, to give cohesion to our muddled impres-sions and to offset our confusion by an unconscious sense of harmony.Shakespeare critics have often pointed out this ordering and cohesivepower of imagery.'However, more important than these are the forces concentrated inthe person of Hamlet. He is the main source of despair and horror butalso ofthepositive forces. The sight of despair depresses, to be sure, butiftheflame of despair is fanned to higher and higher temperatures untilit is at last a superhuman, frenzied form of despair, it begins to com-municate an experience of human greatness and no longer one of humanweakness and misery. Itisin this manner that every feeling, tho ught andtrait of Hamlet's is augmented by Shakespeare to titanic dimensions.Strength radiates from the tremendous passion with which Hamlet

confronts the powers of corruption. Strength is gained from the un-quenchable nostalgia with which he longs for loyalty, purity and hum anfulfilment. Strength comes from the universality ofhisintentions: thathe does no t wan t simply to rid a country o f one evil man b ut the w hole373

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TRAGIC EXPERIENCE IN HAMLETworld of sin and corruption. Hamlet's uncommon sensitiveness too hasa twofold effect. It shocks and disheartens by revealing such abysmaldepths as are normally beyond our ken, but at the same time it givesstrength by the fact that he is not lost in the confusion of events butreacts sensitively and rapidly to every change of situation. If he cannotdefeat with deeds the events and emotions rushing upon him, he canensnare them, by putting them into words, in the web ofhisthoughts.The sudden extinction of Hamlet's life, the failure ofagreat humanrebellion, all this is another source oftragic shock. But his tragic fate isat the same time a source of light and strength because heand withhim every tragic herohas not only life, he has a destiny. His path isnot smothered under the myriad detail of daily life but comet-likeblazes into the sky a glowing arc. Its course has an unmistakable pointof origin, a direction, a target; it is driven along by a single m om entu m,by a single motive, purpose or passion from the first to the last. Andeven if at the end his life is extinguished, it leaves behind an impression,an illusion, that human life has substance and purpose. And it stimulatesone to give one's own life too some distinct momentum, meaning andsignificance.N or is that all. Every work of art has an aspect which plays a greaterpart than any ofthosemen tioned so far in producing the illusion of theworld's centring in man and the sensation of human trium ph. T his is thepower to transmute one's life-consciousness into a 'literary' conscious-ness. In other words, the power to invert the familiar and normal rela-tion between man and reality: under the impact of literary experiencewe have the illusion that it is no longer we who are in the world butthe world in us. The world has not created us, we have created theworld.8This transformation takes place in us every time we experiencethe impact ofa literary work, but particularly under the impact of thedrama. The stageisin itself a symbol of this specific 'literary ' conscious-ness. It is a world created by man, a man-sized world. Man is notdwarfed by it as by the real world. The movement ofitsforces can befollowed by human eyes even though it be as swirling as in Ham let.Here everything, even the slightest detail, has weight and consequence:words mesh with words, action inspires action; like a gear, man's willengages with the machine oflife.In drama we walk in a world of denseratmosphere than the one w e are accustomed to . And if in real life thereis hardly anything more disheartening than to know that nothing de-pends on what we think, believe or do, there is hardly any otherexperience more apt to enhance our belief in man's vocation and im-portance than the sense of power and responsibility that is awakened inus when we enter tragedy's world of heightened tensions. Whatever is

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ELEMR HANKISSenacted in a tragedy, even though it be bloodier and more cruel than inlife,we are amply recompensed by having been transported to a worldcentring in man and revolving in accordance with man's laws; a worldwhere, if not absolute masters, we are at least participators in mouldingour fate and our world. So we see in the tragedy immense forces ofhuman energy and life-harmony lined up against the sensation of deathand decay. The energies at both the positive and the negative poles aremany times greater than the energies we are accustomed to encounterin our everyday lives. To connect the spectator with this tension, withthe field of force between those two poles: that isin our viewtheobject, the function and thebasic impactof tragedy.

If our arguments are valid and the basic impact of tragedy has beencorrectly defined, we may pass on to the second part of our task. It stillremains to clarify by what intellectual, aesthetic and social processes thishomogeneous basic impact is changed in the minds of audiences intohundreds of different Hamlet-experiences. And to begin with we mustfind the key to a strange phenomenon, the fact that there is practicallyno trace of the basic effect, of the tremendous tension we have justfound, in the Hamlet-experiences as registered in the Hamlet literature.It is simply not there. It is not tension but rather a relaxed and staticcondition that is characteristic of them: so much so that the questionmust be asked whether the tensionisno t resolved somehow even withinthe tragedy. Did Shakespeare not resolve it himself within the text andthe slowly unfolding plot? He did and he did not, and by this paradoxhe brought about a further tension, one no longer withinthe tragedybutbetween the tragedy and the spectator.He resolved it by building into the last scenes of the play a master-fully constructed catharsis-machinery. This mechanism begins operatingas earlyasAct IV, Scene5and its effect is felt more and more strongly asthe play moves towards its end. W e feel how the struggle abates and thetension relaxes, and we seem to be on the verge of dissolving into somehappy and sweetly plaintive harmonywhen we suddenly realize thatwe have been deceived W e have been deluded into believing that thetormenting tension of the play has been resolved; but this is not the caseat all. It is notsobecause from the very beginning Hamlet was wrestlingwith life, he wanted to bring harmony to life, harmony between himselfand the world at large. And we are to be cleverly deceived by thesuggestion that this great reconciliation has come true, while actuallyin the last Act Hamlet becomes reconciled to death and not tolife. Themuch coveted harmony he has created is not with life but with death.The change is subtly concealed, yet critics have often noted that thereappears to be a rift as we tu rn from Act IV to Act V. Until then Ham let

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TRAGIC EXPERIENCE IN HAMLETfought desperately against the world and against life and people; andnow, after his broken-off voyage to England, we find him a completelychanged person. There is almost no trace of passion, or of scourgingbitterness: in fact there is hardly any trace of life in him at all. Itis asif hislink w ith life had been brok en: his whole attention is now riveted upondeath. And this inaway thatisvery different from his earlier preoccupa-tion with it. It is no longer with the suicidal passion of one rebellingagainst life, or recoiling from the horror of the world beyond, but withthe gentle sorrow of one gradually resigning himself to death.As I have said before, the transition is superbly done. Relaxationbeginsasearlyasthe end of Act IV w ith the tw o scenes of Ophelia losingher m ind and the one about her death. Here fearful and nauseating deathbegins its m etamorphosis into gentle, poetic passing aw ay, into a wither-ing of flow ers, languid submersion in the sparkling waters of the streamsymbolic of both life and death. This peaceful and soothing mood isaccentuated by the nostalgic tone of the recurrent question, 'Wherebe . . .?', by the repeated references to the ephemeral nature of life andby Hamlet's wistful serenity in anticipating inevitable death with quietindifference. Resistance to death is further lowered by the gravediggerscene which makes light of its horror and resolves it into grotesqueridicule, and by the fact that Act V suggests with conscious insistencethe experience of life's futility. Earlier Hamlet saw the world and peopleas diabolically evil and corrupt and this spurred him to rebellious protest.Here, in Act V, these motifs are replaced by the themes of futility, andthe vanity of life, ofallhuman endeavour. He no longer sees the deadlawyer's past cunning and the land-buyer's eagerness as repellent 'inso-lence' and 'greed', but merely as ridiculous and vain officiousness. TheLady's vanity in painting her face is no longer disgusting, just futile;Osric's obsequiousness no longer fills him with bitterness as Polonius'sservility did earlier, just with wry disappointment over the worthlessnessof man and human life.

Life, then, is futile and unworthy comedy, death is gentle and poeticpassing hence. Once this suggestion has been implanted upon the specta-tor's m ind it w ill suffice to resolve hastily one or tw o remaining tensions;for instance the ones between Ham let and Gertrude, H amlet and Laertes,or the dramatic tension by giving Ham let at lastachance to run Claudiusthrough with his sword; it will suffice to hint at some strange mysteryand 'silence' that comes after death, at 'flights of angels' singing Hamletto rest; it will suffice to have young Fortinbras, clad, say, in white andwith a shining helmet, march on to the stage with banners gallantlyflying, have Hamlet exalted to noble prince and great king, have himborne off the stage with military pomp, amidst salutes ofgunsand the

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E L E M R H A N K I S Sflourish of trumpets and the roll of drumsdo all this and it will sufficeto consummate a catharsis. It is a superbly built up catharsis, a masterlyimposition upon the guileless audience, in fact upon us all. Admittedly,it is deception and illusion. But let us add that it is a life-giving andanimating illusion, no less important than the experience transmitted bythe positive energies of the tragedy we have mentioned earlier: thegreatness of the tragichero,the pathos of an awareness of hum an destiny,the literary magic of form and structure radiating the sensation of aworld centring in man. It is a life-giving illusion because it heightenspeople's energy, their vigour and their desire for and faith in a fuller andmore harmonious life.How ever, the thesis remains valid even if inverted, as itisequally trueto say: 'All these are life-giving illusions but only illusions after all,because the contradictions and tensions of the tragedy are only appar-ently resolved by them.'9Once free of the tragedy's direct impact, onefeels in oneself the rising tide of hidden forces and harmonies. But ifone wants to understand what one has experienced and how the newlygained energies can be turned to good account, it is no use to go backto the tragedy for an answer. The misty emotional state ofthecatharsisquickly lifts and more and more episodes of the play show through it.There arise questions which have never been answered. The halo of thehero's tragic fate wanes and through the heroic mask there appear out-lined the features ofa suffering man, and sooner or later the cruelty ofthe events enacted before one's eyes breaks the spell cast by art. So thatbefore one has fully recovered one is plunged right back into thetragedy's field of force, into the world of vibrating contradictions. IsHamlet guilty or not, does the play incite to fight or does it encouragecompromise? Does it advocate sacrifice or greed and unscrupulousambition? Is man free or is he a captive of his fate? Does the tragedyradiate hope or hopelessness, does it celebrate the trium ph of life or thatof death? So willy nilly one must face the contradictions, come to gripswith tragedy in the same wayasthe author himself wrestled with realityin his time; and if the tragedy resolves the tensions only emotionally,we have to resolve them also intellectually and to integrate the tragicexperience into our own picture of the world. One might perhaps evensay: 'W e have to pro tect ourselves against the destructive radiationissuing from the tensions of the play, and transform them if possible in tovital and useful energies.'

Protection and transformation. These words appear, indeed, to bedescriptive of the zealous activity with which critics have ever tried tosolve the Hamlet enigma,i.e.to resolve, neutralize or convert the tragictension into positive energies. And if so, the whole body of threeE 377

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TRAGIC EXPERIENCE IN HAMLETcenturies of Hamlet criticism might be defined as the sum of protectiveand transforming devices invented by the critics for their own and theirreaders' use.10And further,asthere are almostasmany ways of resolvingone and the same tension as there are critics and readers and spectators,we may have found here the answer to the second question raised bythis essay, i.e. to the question how the same tragic impact has beenchanged into so many different experiences and opinions, how Shake-speare's Hamlet was transformed into the H amlet-experience of aVoltaire or Goethe, a Schopenhauer or Hegel, into the Hamlet-experi-ence of every several reader.

There are people who completely shut their minds to the effect of thedramatic tension. Today the only way to do so is never to read or seethe play. In the eighteenth century, however, people were in a morefortunate position. They could seeHamlet or any other Shakespeareplay, without risk of exposing themselves to any 'unwholesome' influ-ence.They were protected by the prophylactic practices in vogue withthe dramatists and directors of the period: plays were simply adaptedbefore staging. And independently or not of the motives actuating theadapters, the upshot was invariably that the disquieting inner tensionsof the tragedy were resolved.11This does not mean, of course, that the impact of Shakespeare'stragedieswasno t felt at all intheeighteenth cen tury.Hamlet for instance,though only in England, was played in its original form (Garrick'sattempt at adaptation remained without much success), the unexpur-gated English texts of the plays were available, and even the mostpainstaking adaptations failed to immunize audiences completely againstthe impact of tragic tension. Traces of such effect, and the forms ofprotection used against it, are clearly evident in eighteenth-centuryHamlet criticism. However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,when a grow ing sense of history forbade alterations in the original textsof the plays, the energies swelling within the Tragedies were ever moreasserted, eliciting ever more effective protective efforts in audiences,readers and critics.It may be worth considering what are the most frequent protectivemechanisms and how they work. There are people who try to removeHamlet's fearful world as far as possible from themselves in time andspace. They say, for instance, that Hamlet is a typical man of theRenaissance and his fate and tragedy are conceivable only in that age,or that Hamlet was the victim of an era of historical transition, so thattoday his fate has no other meaning than as a relic of the past withoutrelevance for modern m an. So it is only the harmless and pleasant radia-

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ELEMR HANKISStions ofHamletpushed back into the remote past that eventually reachus: the beauty of the words, the excitement of the plot, the pathos ofthe heroic struggle, the brilliance of Renaissance pomp, and so on.Others neutralize the effect of the tragedy by depriving it of its uni-versality,13saying that Hamlet's is not man's tragedy in general (as theythemselves must have felt while watching the play) but only that ofaparticular type ofman.So are born the melancholy Hamlet, the phleg-matic Hamlet, H amlet the introvert or megalomaniac, the hypersensitiveor superinteUigent, destructive or decadent, andsoon through the wholegamut of character types. Now as one or the other trait of these con-trasting types is actually or potentially inherent in Hamlet, identifyinghim with one single type and ignoring all the others means resolving theinner tension of his character. This is done also by people who identifythemselves with one of the types of a contrasting pair: either withHamlet's opposite (in such cases their tone is one of condemnation anddisapproval) or with H amlethimself.This kind of protective mechanismis particularly conspicuous in the cases of people who paint politicalHamlet types. TheirHamlet criticism often assumes the characteristicsof political pamphlets reflecting their own convictions.14Others again protect themselves against the tragedy's impact bydehydrating it into an abstract philosophical problem: an illustration ofsome metaphysical precept.15This way Hamlet has been known as thetragedy of idealism and of realism, of individualism or altruism, ofabstract reflection and imagination, etc. There are some who do noteven take the trouble to build up such involved theories but simply beatthe retreat at Hamlet's onslaught and bombard him from behind thewalls of their own moral and ideological convictions, censuring himno w for idleness and now for rashness, for unbelief or for naive idealism,for egotism or for a nigh sinful selflessness. They say he has brought allthe suffering upon his head; the fault lies with him and not with theworld, not withour world.16A different approach is that of people, particularly at times of greathistorical crisis, who themselves live under so great a strain of social andideological conflictasto be unable or unwilling to resolve tragic tension.They only try to resolvethe paincaused by tension and to convert it intoanimating energy by heightening pathos and exalting themselves to thestatus of heroes wrestling with the great contradictions oflife. Or theymay sublimate their own life tension into something universal and cos-mic. Let us recall Romantic literature full of heroes beset by greatcontradictions; even Shakespeare was then celebrated as the poet ofextreme conflicts. Or let us remember young Friedrich Schlegel, andlater Schopenhauer, who glorified in Hamlet the hero escaping from

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TRAGIC EXPERIENCE IN HAMLETthe apparently insoluble contradictions of life into suicide, or Grillparzer,who recognized in him with deep sympathy the archetype of scepticismand of the tragic conflict with theself. Later, in the middle decades ofthe nineteenth century when this first great crisis of modern Europesubsided, the apocalyptic vision of conflict disappeared from Ham letcriticism, only to reappear later in the crisis-ridden twentieth century.

Action and reaction, impact and protection against it: we have brokendown into these two movements the process by which tragic tension isresolved into life-giving energy. W e have defined the basic impact oftragedy as the power to create within itself a field oftensions intensifiedto the extreme and essentially unresolvable. We have seen howbyusing a great number of motifs, and developing them with variationsand associationsthe author managed to charge this drama of no morethan a few thousand lines with a great mass of emotional and intellectualenergies, and how he succeeded in preventing the tragedy's inner con-flicts from being resolved. W e have finally established that it was in theinterest of shielding themselves against the impact of the tragedy thatpeople in successive generations and different societies have developedtheir Hamlet experiences and Hamlet theories. Further investigationswould throw light on the social and psychological factors which causeddifferent people to seek different means of protection against the impactof the tragedy, and to draw from it different incentives and energies.

R E F E R E N C E S1 See for instance A. J. A. W ald ock 's wusstseinsoperationen einerseits undargument in hisHamlet(1931) conclud- idealen eindeutigen Gegebcnheiten an d-ing with the following statement: erseits und idealen eindeutigen Geg e-'. . . an ordinarily well-educated and benheiten anderseits zu suchen ist*.intelligent Elizabethan . . . was im - ('Dich twerk und Literaturgeschichte* inpressed in much the same way as the Vetenskaps-Societetens I, Lund Arsbok,ordinarily well-educated and intelligent 1950.)Englishman of today is impressed.' sOurs is not the first attempt, of course,1 The re are critics w ho maintain that at registering the elementary impa ct-work s of art exist only in their impacts. impulses of a wo rk of art. MuchhasbeenF. Schubel, a disciple of Husserl, as- done in this field by experimental aes-sumes, for instance, that they are born thetics(see,for instance, studies by B uer-in the very mom ent of their being read meyer, M unro , Dufrenne, BirkhofF,by people 'lrgendwie neben oder etc.) and experimental linguistics (see,unter oder uber den mannigfachen for instance, the so-called 'Russian form-Konkrerisationsversuchen der deutenden ahsts' and the publications of the 'Cerc leSubjekte, und zwar in einem eigena rti- Linguistique de Prague'),gen Sein das zwischen den realen * The results of these experiments wereZeichen sowie den psychischen Be- partly published in my 'Th e Hamle t-

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ELEMR HANKISSExperience. An Attempt at Measuringthe Impact of the Tragedy.' (Lesprob-Ihnes des genres litteraires, Wroclaw,1961.)6The works of Wolfgang Clemen, Caro-line Spurgeon, Una Ellis-Fermor, E. A.Armstrong, D. A. Stauffer, J. E. Hank-ins, and others, dealing with Shake-speare's metaphors and symbols, are fullof references to the ambivalences of hisimagery.

The idea oftensionas the essence of thetragedy, and of all important works ofart,is,of course, not new. ItlurksbehindAristotle's double-concept of pity andfear; it is implied in the contrast ofreason-imagination in classical rhetoric;it inspired the eighteenth century specu-lations about 'unity in variety', etc. Theaestheticians of the Romantic era, theSchlegels, Solger, Jean Paul, Coleridge,Hegel, were completely imbued by the'Erlebniss' of tension. In our own cen-tury, I. A. Richards, William Empson,Allen Tate, John Crow e Ransom , thewhole school of New Criticism, andexperts in aesthetics and literary criticismlike R. Ingarden, S. E. Hyman, E.Staiger, M. Kommerell, R. Wellek,W . K. Wim satt, Jr., M . Krieger andothers have succeeded in discovering arich pattern of inner tensions animatingworks of art.

7W olfgang Clemen states, for instance,that: 'Imagery, in lending a unifyingcolour and key to the tragedy, helpsto create an organic unity which makesus forget the lack of theclassical unitiesof time and action.'(ShakespearesBilder,ihre Entwicklung un d ihre Funktionen imitamatischenWerk 1936.)

8Schiller's 'Schein', Lipps's 'em path y',recent critics' 'semblance', 'transparency*and similar concepts all refer to thisstrange metamorphosis of the work ofart and the reader's mind.8 See,for instance, Grillparzer's pessimisticcomments on the impact of the tragedy,or the analyses of the 'tragic fallacy' byJ W . Krutsch and others.10Asfaras Iknow , itisSir W alter Raleighwho first mentioned this self-protectingmechanism of theatre audiences.(Shake-speare, 1907.)11For seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuryShakespeare adaptations see the standardworks of A. Nicoll, G. C. Branam, A.Lirondelle, J. J. Jusserand, etc.12 See, for instance, the studies of L. L.Schucking, F. P. Wilson, W . Stroedel,L. B. Campbell, L. Wmstanley, andothers.18See, for instance the psychologicalHamlet-criticism of Otto Ludwig, F.Th. Vischer, F. Paulsen, F.Gundolf,etc.14 See T. S. Eliot's attack on these Tory,Whig, Anglo-Indian, Anglo-Catholic,Protestan t, socialist, etc. Shakespeares inhis 'Shakespeare and the Stoicism ofSeneca', Shakespeare Association Lec-tures, 1927.16See, for instance, the Hamlet theories ofHegel, Schopenhauer, H. Ulrici, G. G.Gervinus, and so on.15See, for instance, the so-called VictorianHamlet-criticism in the second half ofthe nineteenth century, though moraliz-ing trends have survived ever since andhaveanew boom in our own days.

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