Who Are I & Who Am You?
The opening words to Shakespeare’s Hamlet are, “Who’s there?” This is a question which echoes throughout the whole play. For three hours (give or take) characters either intentionally or unintentionally play a role whilst at the same time try to understand who they are. Hamlet himself puts on his famous ‘antic disposition’ where he uses a guise of madness in order to better observe the ‘truth’ of the characters around him. Many critics have suggested that this pretense of madness tips into the real thing at certain points in the play. Perhaps if you play a role well enough, it becomes who and what you are. Of course the whole thing is further complicated by the fact that the character of Hamlet is just that; a character being played by someone whose words and actions have been given to them. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead brilliantly deals with the idea of how characters in a play deal with being characters in a play; living lives scripted for them by an unknown author.
It’s one of the reasons that we write about Literature in the present tense. Whenever we open a literary text, the character is always doing what they are always doing at that point in the story; locked into a kind of eternal present of dependence. Hamlet is always alassing over poor Yorick, Chaucer’s pilgrims are always sharing their stories on their way to Canterbury and Ishmael is always telling us to call him Ishmael.
It’s also one of the reasons why an actor stepping out of their role or breaking the so-called fourth wall is often an interestingly effective thing to happen. And can be very funny. I am minded of a story recounted by Peter O’ Toole of the great 19th Century actor, Edmund Kean, who, with his fellow actor George Cooke, had been drinking heavily before a performance of Richard the Third. I shall let Mr O’ Toole tell the story in his own words:
Kean was to give his Richard and Cooke his Buckingham, both, in the written words of the stage manager at the time, were ‘very wide’. When uttering Crookback’s soliloquy, ‘Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York’, Kean, it seems, was having a little difficulty with his diction. Someone in the audience, evidently disapproving of such irresponsible slurring of the dickie birds, words, loudly suggested that Mr Kean was drunk. Kean accepted this information, looked into the wings where Cooke in an attempt to remain upright was draped around the prompter, looked back in the general direction of the audience and said: ‘If you think I’m drunk wait till you see the Duke of Buckingham.’
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan is a book I started recently. Between you, me and the gatepost I don’t think I’ll be finishing it. I have never been able to get on with him, although I bow to the popular opinion that he is a masterful storyteller and anyhoo, quite rightly, he undoubtedly wouldn’t care what I think one way or the other. But anyway, it’s another story which deals with questions of identity and who we are, in this case in the face of the existence of the synthetically human. In fact, come to think of it, you’d be pretty hard pressed to find any work of literature which doesn’t deal with the question of what it means to be a human. It’s clearly something which has exercised us and continues to do so.
There is an often used metaphor which suggests that Art holds a mirror up to life. Indeed Hamlet himself explains to a group of actors that the “purpose of playing” is “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature…” And I’m certainly not going to gainsay that, but what does it mean?
I don’t know, but for French psychoanalyst Lacan, looking into a mirror was the start of everyone’s problems. He has an idea called the ‘Mirror Phase’ which describes the discovery we make for the first time (sometime between 6 and 18 months) of ‘ourselves’ in the mirror. Here a sense of self is arrived at externally, by a reflection. Identity and the sense of who I am therefore comes from a misrecognition of a false ‘self’. And because what is reflected back to us is not us, thinking that it is, imprisons us for the rest of our lives. I often think this is why vampires do not have reflections in mirrors. I never met one who didn’t have a pretty clear idea who they were.
The thing about reading is that books reflect multiple versions of who we are. None of us is only one thing. German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote that “Art is not a mirror held up to society but a hammer with which to shape it.”
But you can still hit society with a mirror, I suppose…
Until next time Happy Reading/Reflecting and Being Reflected
Director’s Tip #11
Musty books?
A musty-smelling book will come out fresh if left overnight in a frost-free freezer. This applies to many other items, including Tupperware. Why not experiment and let me know how you get on?