Mythical-anthropological portrait of the protagonist of one of the most paradigmatic Shakespearean plays: reflections on the Dionysian Man in front of Mælström and non-sense, on the "border" where Hamlet reigns as "Fool", on the existing dichotomy between visible-tangible and invisible -intangible.
di Daniele Capuano
image: Pedro Américo, “Hamlet's Vision", 1893
According to Nietzsche, Hamlet is akin to the "Dionysian man" who, having penetrated the nature of things, known the truth, when he returns to the multiple, to time, to the everyday, he cannot act, overwhelmed by horror and nausea [1]. While the Athenian playwrights offer the cup of Dionysian intoxication, breaking and bleeding Apollonian, heroic destinies, the chuzpa [2] of the modern, of Shakespeare, lies in representing directly the Dionysian as supreme impotence and supreme power - of the intellect, of the sensitivity, in the end also of an "action", of a gesture-drama catastrophic, a Final Judgment precipitated with indirect, semi-accidental acts, capricious inspirations and very lucid indolence.
Man penetrated by the infinite contaminates all his acts with the infinite. Il delay of Hamlet is the limitless who drags everything to its infinite consummation. The divine, titanic task of the original Amloði [3] it is felt and experienced by Shakespeare's prince as a disastrous knowledge of wholeness, an irruption of wholeness that does not break or dissolve but daimonically broadens the boundaries of the individual. Hamlet entered the Mælström [4], the vortex that makes and undoes worlds: it comes out young-old, alive-dead, like the character of Poe [5].
Hamlet knows that the ghost of his father is calling to himself, to death, the entire generation, the entire Danish court. He also knows that a vision is a phenomenon of the imagination, which goes verified, made true. His melancholy - hypocritical in a profound sense and not mere instrumental simulation, but a hermetic-Dionysian mask - it is precisely the abyss of dazzling indolence that moves everything towards its limit, towards Judgment. The ambiguity of each event (death of Polonius, of Ophelia, discovery of the letter to the English court, pirates, exchange of cups and poisoned swords, etc.) it is the dark clarity of knowledge that broadens the limits of human actions.
The speech in the cemetery, aroused by the skull of the Fool, reveals, on the edge of a pit, of a world [6], the perception of samsaric relationships. The white depth travels on the border between the skeptical-Dionysian mysticism of a Khayyām, of a Ḥāfeẓ (the dust, the barrel) [7] and the "chronic lucidity" of the man without qualities. On that border the Prince is the fool of the universe, son of Yorick (according to Harold Bloom's excellent suggestion) [8] and of Hades. To be or not to be it does not speak of suicide - not essentially - but of samsara. The consciousness of the dream, of the non-extinguished desire that is projected beyond the threshold of death, makes us rewardsparalyzes the heroic impulse of the Apollonian, pagan man.
Büchner's Danton sees Nature as the womb and tomb of revolutionary action. The disgust of him, his satiety and fatigue as a conscious victim place the historical masquerade against a background of Dionysian horror-voluptuousness. Nothingness is the god who must be born from the chaos of the temporal, historical world [9]: theepidemic of a Dionysus unmasked and therefore annihilated. Nihilism as the unhappy Dionysus of the Christian apocalypse. Who knows if Marx was faced with a reflection of the Dionysian lucidity of Hamlet and Danton when he "quoted", modifying it, the "Well said, old mole» [10] of the oath of vengeance, at the beginning of the tragedy.
" The word God disappeared with the word louse. God died with the louse and for the same cause: a spray of insecticide. For this Death of the Louse, humanity sinks into hygiene and ruin. "
In this aphorism [11] Guido Ceronetti grasps the link between hygienic extermination and nihilism. Ivan Illich spoke, in a different and similar way, of the changed relationship of man with his parasites: we have lost the idea that the skin, the borders, are habitable, we have destroyed the mediation of commons, of what is neither purely private nor purely public [12]. Enigma that the children proposed to Homer, about lice [13]. Heraclitus observes: even the foolish man, like the great poet of the Hellenes, dies because he does not know how to untie him.
“What we have seen and taken we lose, what we have neither seen nor taken we carry. "
The visible-tangible escapes towards death, because it is death, entropy; we carry the invisible-intangible, in us and on us, we show it with our features, with our existence. Lice are called phtheirai, from the root of phtheiro, destroy, consume: the archai hidden consume us, drain us. The unlimited failing is compensated by the invisible that we carry within us / upon us, and man dies / fails when he is not whole, that is, when he does not take on the entire cycle as the initiate does. Homer had to let himself be guided by the blindness he "carried within himself", instead of trying to solve the riddle with his mind: his blindness is in fact, symbolically, both the state of the uninitiated and, on the contrary, the blind vision of the initiated, his "extra eye" (Hölderlin) [14] tactile and acoustic, esoteric.
Enigma-koan: I'ethos anthropōi daimōn di Heraclitus ("character is for man the daimon", he genius, and viceversa) [15], in the light of Schopenhauer's philosophy [16], it would be: the acquired-phenomenal character is, for man, (not different from) the intelligible character. That is, perhaps: man approaches his archetype-angel placing himself hermetically, against the light, with respect to his character-face: "reasoning" for speculum, backwards and forwards, knowing that it is a puppet-mask of the Other-Self. This game, an erotic, narcissic and Dionysian struggle, is the love story between the Sun and the Moon.
Epicurus links the freedom-contingency to the clinamen, the oblique motion of atoms, akin to the obliquity of the ecliptic [17]. The precession of the equinoxes is a catastrophe in which astral-celestial necessity and terrestrial anguish are intertwined. Amloði is the fool redeemer, Horus child of the new order, of the new time cycle. Shakespeare, humanizing her madness, makes it more essential: il time out of joint [18] it is the clairvoyant melancholy-anguish of the Prince, who takes on the epochal transit within himself, generative corruption («Something is rOTTEN in the state of Denmark ") [19] of the historical passage.
So it was, in every sense: Hamlet is the myth of modern man, as Bloom still observes. Her madness is the dawn of the era: the renunciation of Ophelia is perhaps that of the previous era, when she dies drowned in a nostalgic dementia, full of incestuous, regressive resonances. But Hamlet, Christically, is not destined to reign on earth: his homeland is death, or rather a space of possibility between life and death, a tertium habitable only by heroes like him. This is why he is such a dynamic, ironic, dialectical figure: he creates nothing, dying in the fulfillment of revenge for an instant breaks the cycle.
In Florensky's youthful essay [20], Hamlet's indecision is that of his age, embodied by him as a tragic hero, in which one experiences the uncertain and anguished transition between the pagan vision, centered on the honor of the lineage, the solidarity of blood and revenge, and the Christian one, founded on the forgiveness of offenses, personal love for the enemy, the overcoming of the unity of ghenos in the uniqueness of the individual as a member of Christ. In some way the dilemmas of the Danish prince are thus transferred from the scene of the split and suffering individual consciousness to the wider sphere of the archetypal, hierhistorical, daimonic collective consciousness: this is the direction indicated by George de santillana and by von Dechend in study on the celestial "mill" of Hamlet-Amloði.
"Time is out of the way (out of joint). O cursed fate, that I was born to put it back together! " [21]
However, the weakness of the courageous Florenskian perspective is betrayed in the scarce importance it assigns to an essential aspect: in the passage, the pagan conscience perceives the new, the nascent and imminent Christian conscience, only as a dissolution of the known, as an unhinging, precisely, of the order. ancient, like the prodigious weariness of the Time-titan in front of a landscape of ruins and its agitation, its inane fever of initiation that does not begin, of impossible distillation of the eves. In the tragic crucible the contrasting lines are canceled, a void opens on which a metaphysics, a secret liberation could also stand out, a silence of fate and irony that could also impregnate itself with a seed that is still unheard of and inaudible.
It is one of the great ironies of history, as lucid and pungent as salt, that the symbol, the myth of modern subjectivity, the passionate and sarcastic saturnine, the abysmal humorist, the Ur-dandy, the Dionysian who overflows from the hemicycle of the Attic theater - may he be the prince of an obscure Viking chronicle, fluctuating between two eras, between two worlds. What is more modern, ever anew, arises in and from the putrefaction, dissolution and disintegration of what is most archaic.
Note:
[1] "Knowledge kills action, to act one must be wrapped in the veil of illusion: this is the doctrine of Hamlet [...] It is not reflection, no, it is true knowledge, the vision of the tremendous truth, which crushes every motivation of 'to act, in Hamlet as in the "Dionysian man" "(FW Nietzsche, The birth of the tragedy.
[2] Hebrew ḥuṣpah, "Insolence", a kind of hybris Semitic, took over in Yiddish a positive nuance: or rather it is charged with it from the beginning, just as audacity is also recklessness.
[3] For references to Amloði and its archetypal significance, see the fundamental The mill of Hamlet, G. de Santillana-H. von Dechend, Adelphi, Milan, 2003.
[4] “Mill of Amloði (Hamlet)” is the kenning which indicates the marine Maelström and (as its model-archetype) the celestial millstone of Time.
[5] See EA Poe, A Descent into the Mælström.
[6] Reference to mundus Cereris Roman, the pit that connected sky and subsoil, living and dead, and was opened three days a year (mundus patet).
[7] In Persian poetry it is a topos that of the dust of mystical annihilation on the threshold of the tavern, where the wine of gnosis is drunk: Khayyām in some of his quatrains makes the wine amphorae speak with a human voice, because their clay is taken from the dust of the dead (as is well known , in his art the nuances Gnostics merge with skeptical-hedonistic ones, according to the delicate and arrembante code of esoteric antinomianism).
[8] See H. Bloom (ed.), William Shakespeare's HamletChelsea House Publishers, 1986.
[9] "Die Welt ist das Chaos. Das Nichts ist der zu gebärende Weltgott"(" The world is chaos. Nothingness is the cosmic god who is about to be born "), G. Büchner, Dantons Tod, IV. 5, Danton's last words before being guillotined.
[10] "And when the revolution has completed this second half of its preparatory work, Europe will leap from its seat and shout: Well dug, old mole!" (K. Marx, On 18 Brumaio by Luigi Bonaparte): as you know, this is a modified 'Hamlet' quote ("Well said, old mole!», I. 5: the words of the Prince to the Phantom who invites him to swear revenge).
[11] G. Ceronetti, Thoughts of tea, Adelphi, Milan, 1987.
[12] Ivan Illich, Hair and the History of the City (https://danielaterrile.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/hair-and-the-history-of-the-city/).
[13] Fragment B 56: «Men are deceived, with regard to the knowledge of manifest things, in a way similar to Homer, who was the wisest of all the Hellenes. In fact, children who killed lice deceived him, saying: The things we have seen and taken, we leave them; the things that we have neither seen nor taken, we carry them ». [The legend of Homer's death and the esoteric interpretation of Heraclitus will be developed in an as yet unpublished article, Homer, Heraclitus and the riddle of lice, forthcoming on AXISmundi.]
[14] "Der König Oedipus hat ein Auge zu vielleicht"(" King Oedipus perhaps has one eye too many "), F. Hölderlin, In light blue.
[15] Fragment B 119.
[16] See A. Schopenhauer, The freedom of the human will, Laterza, Bari, 1981. The empirical, phenomenal character is required to act from the motifs that arise in the deterministic causal intertwining; but the intelligible character, which is the will itself, is beyond / above the phenomenon and motives and therefore free. It will be so freethat, "I serve" theoperatives.
[17] The Epicurean doctrine of the parenchysis (clinamen in Lucretius), according to which the rectilinear fall of atoms into the void undergoes a random deviation that leads them to meet and combine, should save both the idea of chance (in physics and cosmology) and that of free will (in psychology).
[18] Hamlet I. 5: "The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!».
[19] Hamlet I.4.
[20] PA Florensky, Hamlet, Bompiani, Milan, 2004.
[21] See note 18.
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