James Hollis : Hamlet's Stuckness

James Ensor - Hamlet (1880-1890)

Extract from :

James Hollis

Living Between Worlds

HAMLET: FIGHT, FLIGHT, OR FREEZE

"(...) I think it is fair to say that Hamlet is the first truly modern text, and Hamlet the first truly modern person. Despite the passage of four centuries, Hamlet is so familiar to us because he knows, really knows, that he is his own worst problem. (As do we.) He knows he is stuck with himself. (As do we.) No amount of blaming others, no whining, no petitioning the gods will spare him from himself. While Shakespeare called the play a tragedy, it seems that it may more accurately be considered a work of irony. In tragedy and comedy, redemption occurs, whether through the insight that suffering brings or the release that laughter brings.

In both tragedy and comedy, the cosmic order is restored. In the ironic sensibility, there is recognition and insight but without redemption, without restoration, without growth. In Hamlet, each character sees, understands, and is face to face with his or her own limiting contradictions, and yet they are each unable to convert that suffering into action, into change, into transformation. They remain stuck, as so often we remain stuck, so often deepening the hole in which we find ourselves.

As we saw earlier, psychoanalysis works with people trying to get unstuck by surfacing the internal “psycho-logic” by which they are stuck. So too, we must also remain stuck unless and until we find the secret logic of our stuckness and face the anxiety that getting unstuck will bring to us when the resistance is overcome. At least we have a shot at moving from

psychic paralysis to action. Learning from our brother Hamlet is one way to reflect more deeply on our common dilemma.

Let us look more carefully at Hamlet’s context. The Danish kingdom has been rocked; the king, murdered; and the queen, remarried to the dead king’s brother. While one may praise the speed of reassurance of a firm hand on the helm and the continuity of government, such a tumultuous event will be more than disconcerting to Hamlet, a college student summoned home from his frat house in Wittenberg, Germany, a city that Shakespeare’s audience knows full well has also been shaken by the challenges to the accepted order by a young monk named Martin Luther. In addition to sophomoric angst and hormonal turbulence, young Hamlet is dismayed. Not only is he orphaned by his father’s death, but his mother has quickly transferred her allegiance to what he considers “incestuous sheets.” He dallies with the thought of ending his turmoil out of loss, guilt, and shame, were there not Divine prohibition against suicide.

Other disturbances are afoot. For one, the guards have witnessed a ghostly presence on the ramparts of the castle, an itinerant spectral presence whose agitation is evident. Hamlet joins the guards at the castle walls, where the ghost of his father appears and reveals that, in fact, he was murdered, poison poured into his ear, and that his wife has married the murderer. (This may prove even more disconcerting to a student than having Dad’s check bounce on registration day.) Shaken as he is, Hamlet knows the ghost and his testimony are authentic. It is up to Hamlet to avenge his father’s murder and his mother’s betrayal. All of Denmark would support and approve such righteous revenge, and yet for him, understandably, the whole earth has shifted. Nothing he knew or took for granted is the same or stable. He says, as we might,

The time is out of joint —O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right !

Resolute as he is, Hamlet understandably is aswarm with conflicting emotions, wishing personal escape from the conflict even more than he wishes justice. In his most famous musing, we hear echoes of the sort of misgivings, rationalizations, evasions, and resignations that we all know so well in our own lives.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

That is, do we enter the terrible tumult of this world, or do

we find a way to evade its painful demands on us?

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

That is, to roll over, go with the flow, and

slip slide away into another day.

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—

No more, and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d.

That is, to slip back into the sleep of childhood, to get stoned, to

feel no pain. But, what if we are not left alone even then?

To die, to sleep—

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. . . .

Ah, the dream of modern America: all is well, all is well, did we

not have bad dreams. If only we could escape to fantasy land,

embrace a blissful afterlife, make America great again, but. . . .

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

The Devil you know is better than the Devil you don’t know.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, . . .

And lose the name of action.

From four centuries ago, this is a perfect description of a complex — a part of ourselves dissociated from the ego, operating autonomously, that has the power to shut us down. All of us have some primal fear, some archaic terror, some forgotten but still-carried memory of the powerful, traumatic Other that shuts us down, stops us dead in our tracks, generates the archaic “fight or flight” patterns that we lament but that never leave us. “The pale cast of thought” is Shakespeare’s way of describing the ethereal yet palpable presence of an energy that removes our executive agency; freezes us in the same old, same old; and leaves us stranded on the desolate beaches of familiar stasis.

(....)

Who among us has not dallied, compromised, postponed, rationalized, blamed another, or distracted ourselves from the bloody business at hand ? Who among us has not recognized that what is most wrong in our lives rises from us ? Who among us is armored through life’s daily collisions with unwavering selfesteem, ready talents to take it on, and the resolve to push through what life throws in our face ? Who among us has not known resistance, inner division, swirling and contradictory motives and agendas? Who among us has not turned away from what we knew in the depths of our soul we were summoned to do ? Who among us has not turned away from what we knew in the depths of our soul we were summoned to do ?

That Hamlet does all those things so familiar to us, that he knows he is accountable for how it turns out, and that he is a prisoner less of outer circumstances, though they may be many and powerful, than of himself, his own personality — all of this makes him our contemporary. If Hamlet screws up his life, so do we. If he gets up off the floor and tries to take it all on again, so do we. It is not much of a stretch to say, then, that Hamlet is our brother.

Hamlet’s plight is much like ours. We never fully have the real story, never achieve crystal clarity about what is going on, but we are still called to act as if we know and understand. And if we mess it up, then we are part of the same human club. All Hamlet asks of us is that we remember him. So, let us then hold him in our hearts, hear his story, and be recalled to our own unfinished business at the same time.

* * *