George Bush is Shakespeare

[geoffrey]

T.S. Eliot famously argued that Hamlet was an artistic failure. To argue the point, Eliot borrowed from Philosophy the concept of an objective correlative and redeployed it in the service of literary criticism. In its original formulation, the objective correlative denotes the material manifestation of an idea-in-essence. I think this theory is little more than Plato's idea of the forms- that there is an ideal form of everything existing in some supersensory realm instantiated in every occurring manifestation of that form. For example, there is an ideal form of a chair somewhere, in theory, and every chair we see is some watered-down version of that ideal chair. The ideal form is the idea-in-essence, and the material chair is the objective correlative that realizes the idea.

Eliot used the concept of objective correlative to explain the way art evokes emotion from the viewer. Eliot's idea was that a set of objects, situations, chain of events (basically plot) must exist for the prescribed emotions to obtain. The idea is pretty simple, really. You're not going to feel scared at a horror movie unless the girl is sufficiently vulnerable and the monster is sufficiently scary. That's pretty much it.

Eliot applied the concept of objective correlative to Hamlet and decided that the external conditions of the play- the king's death, the appearance of the ghost, the remarriage of the mother, Ophelia's madness, the political plot with Fortinbras- all that is insufficiently moving to generate Hamlet's (the character's) intense emotions. Eliot was saying that the audience should be significantly less moved by the circumstances than Hamlet (the character) actually is, and so Hamlet (the play) is a failure. On Eliot's reading, Shakespeare violated the rule of the objective correlative in depicting Hamlet's response to the circumstances of the play.

Now, it's been said on more than one occasion (most memorably to me by Travis Diruzza) that we are all a bunch of Hamlets these days. The sentiment is not that we are all bad plays, but that modern man is overly contemplative and paralyzed to inaction, like Hamlet (the character). I'm not sure how true that sentiment is. I can certainly see what the idea is getting it, but it's not an idea I would go to the mat for. However, there is one sense in which I would strongly agree that we are all a bunch of Hamlets these days. Keeping to Eliot's reading of Hamlet, I contend that we (in America) are all a bunch of Hamlets in that our myopic fears, stoked and fanned by our government, especially in regards, but not limited to terrorism, immigration, and hostile intent of "rogue" states, so drastically outstrip a reasonable emotional response to the external conditions we face, that it could truly be said that we are all acting like Hamlets in that play which does not support our emotionality.

So what's this got to do with Bush? If my reader will tolerate one more literary reference: Stephen Daedalus argued in Ulysses, at impressive length, that Shakespeare is the ghost of Hamlet's father. But if my reader has followed me on Eliot's reading of Hamlet and my own take on American politics, then I have an even more surprising result than Stephen's. Shakespeare might be the ghost of Hamlet's father, but he might be someone else too- someone very unexpected. Consider a moment: if we are all Hamlets because we are scared when we need not be, then the author of our fright is our present day Shakespeare. Who asks us to fear? Who claims the world justifies such fear? Who promises our fear is legitimate? He who plays the role of modern Shakespeare, who writes a script which does not hold, is he who is most improbable to play such a role. Our present day Shakespeare is, despite all argument to the contrary, one of the most ineloquent men in public life.

In other words, if Eliot is right about Hamlet, and I am right about America, then there is a sense in which today's Shakespeare is none other than our president, George W. Bush. That's right, Bush is Shakespeare. Q.E.D.

[Barry Wynn]

That sound you hear is my brain imploding.

Nicely done.