The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm Read online

  As the Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate notes, Shakespeare “has a more practical mind than Prospero [and Hamlet]. His dramatic art translates a theme of ancient books from the vita contemplativa to the vita activa by virtue of his very medium of production: unlike the private contemplative space of the library, the public sphere of the theatre belongs to the active social life of the citizen. The humanist defense of theatre against Puritanism was that theatre had the capacity to bring to a wider public the kind of moral edification that was available privately and selectively to elite humanist readers by means of their book learning.”⁵⁰ For Shakespeare, who was not a university man, the concept of the ivory tower from which Hamlet refuses to emerge was one to be scorned.

  And yet, as A. D. Nuttall has asserted, “It is hard to think of anything in Hamlet of which one can be finally sure.”⁵¹ For the successive generations, Hamlet’s refusal proved difficult to accept, perhaps because it reflected other uneasy refusals that his audience was unwilling to recognize. From Coleridge’s reading onward, attempts were made to rescue the Prince from his tower, to show that the scornful confinement had not, in fact, fully seduced him.

  On 23 April 1940, the German drama critic Wolfgang Keller addressed the German Shakespeare Society with these words: “Outside, in and over the wild North Sea, our brave forces, in fearless vessels or in roaring planes, are attacking the British warships and their hiding places. The British who, allied with our indefatigable enemies in the West, are waging a war of annihilation against us. ... We, however, celebrate Shakespeare, a son of English soil. But can we?”⁵²

  Two centuries earlier, Johann Gottfried Herder had noted Shakespeare’s roots in Nordic poetry and proposed the idea that, born in England “by mistake,” Shakespeare was in fact German. Following on Herder’s claim, Keller boasted that Germany had been the first European country to translate Shakespeare (Caspar W. von Borck translated Julius Caesar into German in 1741). With this act, Keller argued, the Germans first rose to claim their right to Shakespeare. Furthermore, Keller went on to say, two centuries of German critical work on Shakespeare had given Germany the right to rate “the greatest dramatist of the Germanic tribes as a German classic, which no British policy can ever steal from us.” To justify this claim, Keller pointed out the similarities he perceived between Elizabethan England and the Third Reich. “The sense of life of the Elizabethans,” Keller wrote, “was heroic, military, young and striving for progress, hungry for actions and adventures.” But the reason Germany itself had so far failed to produce a Shakespeare of its own, was clear: Shakespeare’s England had been “free of Jews for 300 years.”

  Hamlet was the Third Reich’s favorite Shakespeare play. Between 1936 and 1941, the Berlin Staatstheater staged it almost two hundred times. One of the most noted productions was directed by Lothar Müthel, with the celebrated Gustav Gründgens in the title role. Gründgens was perhaps the most famous actor in German theater history: he became known for playing Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, and later was the subject of the novel Mephisto, in which Gründgens’s brother-in- law, Klaus Mann, depicted Gründgens’s collaboration with the Nazi regime. Gründgens played Hamlet against the traditional expectations. Instead of the uncertain, reflective intellectual, Gründgens depicted Hamlet as brave and determined, and anything but hesitant. In the words of Gründgens’s biographer, Curt Riess: “A new Hamlet is born, one that had not been seen before. A Hamlet full of responsibility, a Hamlet ready to act, and not afraid to play the fool.” To achieve this, any lines that suggested passivity were cut, and scene 4 of act IV was deleted in its entirety. For Riess, “other Hamlets could ask themselves whether they should act or not. For Gründgens, there was no such question, as long as the regime of terror existed, as long as criminals ruled.” In a startling paradox, the actor with Nazi sympathies depicted his hero as a resister against tyranny, Danish in the text, Nazi in the eyes of a discerning audience. No contemporary costumes were needed to signal the comparison: Gründgens wore a wide-collared cape and a hat with a vertical brim, more a foppish Wittenberg student than a warrior prince. And yet the effect was that of powerful action. “When the curtain rises,” Gründgens himself wrote to one of his critics, “I don’t want to play Hamlet, I want to go back to Wittenberg. It is against my will that I am burdened with a truth I cannot withdraw from. . . . I want to act but I must know. Otherwise I cannot act.” Philosophical reflection is, for Gründgens’s Hamlet, not a self-serving indulgence but an intellectual function that leads forcefully to action. In Gründgens’s interpretation, the ivory tower becomes not a sanctuary but a watch tower.

  The Watch Tower

  Let the masses read morals, but for goodness sake

  don’t give them poetry to spoil.

  —Stéphane Mallarmé, Proses de jeunesse

  The notion of the retiring intellectual was likewise derided, for different reasons and with different arguments, by Marxist thinkers. Antonio Gramsci, more vigorously than others, saw the intellectual’s role as the opposite of Hamlet’s, not waiting and reflecting, but setting out, exploring and deciphering the intricate problems of society, and having an active hand in the passage from capitalism to socialism, and in the running of a socialist state: not only a revolutionary elite but the whole reading public, consciously exercising its intellectual talents.

  Gramsci was deeply interested in the role of the intellectual in society. He attacked the idea of culture as mere encyclopedic knowledge, and saw in the attitude of certain students and professionals an excuse to differentiate themselves hierarchically from the masses. “They end up seeing themselves as different from and superior to even the best skilled workman, who fulfils a precise and indispensable task in life and is a hundred times more valuable in his activity than they are in theirs. But this is not culture, but pedantry, not intelligence, but intellect, and it is absolutely right to react against it.”⁵³ For Gramsci, “all human beings are intellectuals but not all have in society the function of intellectuals; that is to say, not everyone has a social intellectual function.”⁵⁴ Each existing social group creates within itself strata of intellectuals that give it meaning, help to bind it together and help it function: managers, civil servants, the clergy, teachers, scientists, lawyers, doctors, and so on. For Gramsci, the intellectual does not belong to a separate social class but acts within a specific class, according to that class’s needs. Thus Hamlet acts within the circles of the intellectual royalty and cannot conduct himself according to the manners of the military aristocracy (like Horatio) or the political bourgeoisie (like Laertes).

  Franz Kafka’s drawing of a figure on a balcony.

  In his Prison Notebooks Gramsci distinguished between “organic” and “traditional” intellectuals, both seen by society to belong to two distinct categories. The “organic intellectual” seems explicitly to be part of a particular social class, allied to and assisting the ruling class, a product of the official educational system taught to perform a function for the dominant social group. It is through this organic intellectual that the ruling class maintains its hegemony over the rest of society.⁵⁵ Following this definition, the social theorist C. L. R. James observed that in Shakespeare’s time “the intellectual was an organic part of rationalist society and Hamlet is the organic intellectual.”⁵⁶

  The “traditional intellectual,” instead, is defined by Gramsci as independent of any specific social class. As literati, religious thinkers, essayists, and poets such as Erasmus and Shakespeare, intellectuals of this sort appear as autonomous and independent individuals, part of a lineage unbroken by strife and social upheaval. In the hands of these was the task of countering the official “common sense.” Since for Gramsci “there is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded,” it followed that everyone, in some form or another, performs an intellectual activity, “participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain
a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought.”

  “Is it better to ‘think,’” asked Gramsci, “without having a critical awareness, or is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world?” Gramsci’s words unconsciously echo Hamlet’s more famous question, still unanswered. The verb “to be” carries in English a double meaning, rendered explicit in Spanish, for instance: “ser,” meaning to exist, and “estar” meaning to be in a certain manner or place. Gramsci’s dichotomy offers Hamlet two distinct possibilities: to reside in his library tower, as a reader for whom the limits of his reading coincide with the margins of his books; or to take his reading out into the open, to confront the book in his hands with the book of the world, as Augustine suggested.

  At the beginning of one of his posthumously published notebooks, Franz Kafka wrote: “Every person carries a room inside himself.”⁵⁷ That room, which Democritus and the Christian hermits, Montaigne, and Virginia Woolf externalized, others, such as Hamlet, never fully left. Here the world played itself out for private contemplation, allowing itself to be rebuilt according to the sitter’s pleasure, imagination, ambition, patience, will.

  In Shakespeare’s time, the yet unnamed ivory tower, praised as a sanctuary (albeit fraught with danger) by the scholars of the Middle Ages, was commonly derided as a refuge for cowards. Centuries later, after Sainte-Beuve had invoked it to praise the poetic craft that deals only with inspired words, the ivory tower became once again an object of ridicule, the egotistical choice of inaction over action, which neither the Third Reich’s attempt at recuperation nor Gramsci’s inspired call to intellectual arms was entirely successful in overturning.

  Today, the reader in the ivory tower has become emblematic of yet another position. At a time when the values that our societies put forward as desirable are those of speed and brevity, the slow, intense, reflective process of reading is seen as inefficient and old-fashioned. Electronic reading of various kinds does not seem to encourage prolonged sessions with a single text but rather to encourage a pecking process of short fragments. Communications historian Nicholas Carr, in The Shallows, speaks of certain digital-media scholars who suggest that “we shouldn’t waste our time mourning the death of deep reading—it was overrated all along,” and who went on to judge War and Peace and In Search of Lost Time as “too long and not so interesting.” While not taking these postures too seriously, Carr identifies such declarations as important signs of the shift that is taking place in society’s attitude toward intellectual achievement. “Their words,” says Carr, “make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift—to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, [these critics] provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably into the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.”⁵⁸ In fact, to bind themselves in nutshells, and count themselves kings of infinite space.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE BOOKWORM

  The Reader as Inventor of the World

  “Now I declare that’s too bad!” Humpty Dumpty cried, breaking into a sudden passion. “You’ve been listening at doors—and behind trees—and down chimneys—or you couldn’t have known it!”

  “I haven’t, indeed!” Alice said very gently. “It’s in a book.”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter VI

  The Creature Made of Books

  I have sought for happiness everywhere, but I have

  found it nowhere except in a little corner with a book.

  —Thomas à Kempis

  At a table made of huge books laid flat and borne on legs of parchment scrolls, a wizened man with large spectacles turns the leaves of a thick book with his chin. He cannot use his hands: his body is cocooned in a sheaf of printed paper, poised on an open treatise. The back wall is covered with huge pages and a shelf full of books. He is the bookworm, mocked in an 1842 caricature by the French cartoonist Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, known as Grandville. The meaning of the jest is clear: here is someone literally made out of print, so absorbed in the words on the page that nothing else seems to exist for him. In his book-centered world, the flesh has become the word.

  Does this metamorphosis grant him special powers? According to Grandville, it would not seem so. All the reader can do, bound by his strange fate, is peruse with his eyes the book in front of him, page after page; he is helpless in every other sense. He has no effect on the world around him: even his own body, swathed in paper, seems not his to command. And though his cocoon-like appearance suggests that a butterfly might be born from his captive state, no indication is given of when, if ever, this rebirth is likely to happen. In Grandville’s depiction, the bookworm seems condemned to his cloistered fate for as long as there are books to be read.

  Though this caricature of the reader’s fate illustrates the negative aspects of the ivory tower, it is not, thankfully, the overriding image of the reader in our world. Images of readers in every conceivable situation have been produced since our earliest literate civilizations, endowed with complex symbolic meanings of identity, power, and privilege. Whether holding in their hands something sacred, something dangerous, something instructive or entertaining, whether dipping into a trove of memory and learning, whether listening to the voice of their contemporaries or ancestors, to the Word of God or the words of those long dead, readers are depicted as engaging in a mysterious, numinous act. Implicit in the act are the reader’s capacities: to rescue experience, transgress physical laws, translate and reinterpret information, learn facts, delight in lies, and judge.

  J. J. Grandville, “A bookworm.” From Vies Publiques et Privées des Animaux (1840–1842).

  Courtesy the Granger Collection, New York.

  Also implicit are the rules by which the reader engages with the writer, establishing territories of responsibility and obligation, as well as borders that must not be transgressed, unless by an act of subversion on either side. Depending on what the text is supposed to be, on its agreed-upon identity, reader and writer have different duties and expectations. According to convention, fiction demands one set of rules, biography another, and generations of readers and writers have endeavored to break, undermine, and renew these basic preconceptions.

  Three centuries before Grandville, the scholar Nicholas de Herberay prefaced his translation into French of the first volume of the chivalry romance Amadis de Gaula with a sonnet in which he asks the readers to content themselves with the story the writer has presented for them, and not inquire about its truth.

  Kind reader, with keen judgment gifted,

  When you discover the refined invention

  Of this author, be with the style content

  And ask not if what takes place is true.¹

  It is a curious invocation. To warn the reader not to compare too closely the facts of the books with the facts of reality carries the implicit acknowledgment of textual untruth, transgressing the rules by which both reader and author agree to undertake the romance, the former suspending disbelief, the latter lending verisimilitude to the story.

  The contract that writer and reader enter when the one closes the book and the other opens it is a contract of self-deception and mutual pretense, in which limits are set to dismissive skepticism and unbridled trust, establishing what Umberto Eco called “the limits of interpretation.”² There is, lurking at the core of every reader’s engagement with the text, a double bind: the wish that what is told on the page be true, and the belief that it is not. In this tension between both, readers set up their tenuous encampment. Bruno Bettelheim long ago noted that children do not believe in the Big Bad Wolf or in Little Red-Riding Hood as such: they believe in their narrative existence, which, as we all know, can have a greater hold on us than many characters of blood and bone.³ For most
readers, however, engagement with a text does not go beyond passionate daydreaming or wishful thinking.

  And yet, there are readers for whom the world on the page acquires such vividness, such truth, that it overrides the world of the rational senses. Outside clinical cases, every reader has felt, at least once, the overwhelming power of a creature of words, falling in love with a certain character, viscerally loathing another, hoping to emulate a third. Saint Augustine tells us that, in his youth, he wept for the death of Dido. Robert Louis Stevenson’s neighbors in Samoa begged him to show them the bottle containing the evil imp. And still today the London Post Office sorts letters addressed to Mr. Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street.