Crisis 22
Vicarious Experience
Overview - In a Dream of Passion - Pianoman - Cameraman
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Overview
This page uses Hamlet and two scenarios (in Russia and Indonesia) to illustrate how drama engages us and urges us to sympathize with the struggles and hardship of others. Whether it’s the death of a legendary queen in Greece, a Russian pianist who protests Putin’s war, or an Australian cameraman who documents the slums of Jakarta, literature allows us not only to understand, but also to indirectly experience the tragedies faced by others.
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In a Dream of Passion
Hamlet comes up with his plan “to catch the conscience of the king” by recalling how skillfully an actor played the role of Hecuba (the Trojan queen who witnessed the killing of her husband Priam). He recalls how powerful the performance was. He asserts that only a person without emotions could fail to be moved by it: “The instant burst of clamour that [Hecuba] made — / Unless things mortal move them not at all — / Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven [Would have made weep the sun and stars].” Hamlet marvels at the ability of an actor to almost become another person:
Is it not monstrous [shocking] that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?
When we see moving scenes, we too are moved. These scenes can of course be real scenes — say, of a child’s coffin outside a Kiev hospital — yet they can also be fictional scenes, for we sense that whatever realistic fiction depicts could be real somewhere else, or at some other time.
While journalistic scenes are invaluable, the unique feature of literary scenes is that they’re embedded within a larger superstructure of narrative and meaning. Hamlet’s need to verify his uncle’s guilt brings us back to the opening scenes in which the ghost of his father walks the ramparts and begs Hamlet to avenge his death. Hamlet fears that the ghost may be a demon, urging him to murder. He therefore decides to get “grounds more relative than this.” The this here is a big one, referring not just to a ghost walking around a rampart, but to the very notion of a ghost or soul, and to the connected notions of salvation and damnation, forgiveness and revenge, all of which concern the question of justice beyond the grave.
We see this connection most clearly in the uncle’s attempt to pray and repent, where he notes that in this fallen world one can use one’s power to escape punishment — as Putin has done so far! — and yet, however so much one succeeds here down below, “‘Tis not so above.” That is, the same principle of might makes right doesn’t operate on the higher level of Justice or God’s law:
May one be pardoned and retain th’ offense? / In the corrupted currents of this world / Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice, / And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself / Buys out the law. But ’tis not so above. / There is no shuffling. There the action lies / In his [its] true nature, and we ourselves compelled, / Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, / To give in evidence.
My point here is that Hamlet’s play within a play tells us much about art, but it also widens into a wider cultural panoply, telling us a great deal about the beliefs and struggles of real people in the Renaissance world. The superstructure of the play — like that of the novel — takes individual aspects of character and plot and weaves them into a larger canvas. This canvas depicts history, personal development, political theory, critical distance, philosophical meaning, or any number of larger scenarios or themes.
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Pianoman
To illustrate what I mean about literature giving wider and more complex context to human situations, I’ll compare the recent case of a Russian pianist to the cameraman in Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously. Both make their own personal protests against the State they live in, both die, and both evoke pity not just because of their deaths but also because of their minute stature, because of the smallness and powerlessness they exhibit while yet attempting to stand up to the big and powerful. They aren’t so much David who stands up to Goliath as they are a stray cat who gets stepped on and killed in the larger fight. Yet its their smallness, their impotence which moves us so deeply, because perhaps we too feel impotent. We feel their hopelessness and realize what a sacrifice they are ready to make nevertheless.
Recently, short articles in the BBC and NYT told the sad tale of Pavel Kushnir, a pianist who led his own private protest against his government’s war against Ukraine.
His story is heart-breaking, especially the details of how he cultivated a rebel image with a bottle of vodka in his pocket, how he only had a handful of Youtube followers, and how he wrote novels that were unpublished — perhaps because they were too avant-guarde yet certainly because he was writing in Putin’s Russia. This reminds me of Bulgakov, who treats the issue of censorship with a marvellous realism and surrealism. And yet, somehow, Bulgakov managed, under Stalin’s watchful eye, to both publish and not perish.
Despite the news articles, Pavel’s life isn’t given the completeness, the contextual roundness, and the ambiguity it would be given in a novel — or in a TV series like the Sopranos or Breaking Bad, where we see the deeper corners and contradictions in the human protagonists. Yet literature is always a friend to journalism and to all forms of communication. Maybe some day, as a result of an article here or a Youtube video there, someone will write a detailed, realistic, moving portrait of Pavel’s life.
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Cameraman
One might compare Pavel’s sad, brief, inspirational life with that of the character Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously. In the film (based on Christopher Koch’s 1978 novel) we see the despair of the cameraman not just in an abstract sense, but as if he were a real person, stuck in an impossible dilemma.
One particularly moving scene occurs just after Billy finds out that Udin, a boy from the slums who he’s been supporting, has died from drinking canal water. The drama is fictional, yet it has a realistic base, so we’re moved emotionally, especially when Billy despairs because Sukarno, who he once idealized, appears to have turned his back on the poor. We could ask, What’s Udin to the actor, or what’s the character to us, / That we should care? Yet we do care, unless things mortal move us not at all.
This scene is part of a larger fabric, woven from multiple character and plot developments, rising conflicts, intercultural commentaries, mythic and literary narratives, and national politics that are themselves wrapped up in the international drama of the Cold War. The meaning of the individual scene gains in depth from such context, and the viewer can make something of it all because Koch’s novel presents a vision, perhaps even an argument, for empathy, social equality, duty, dignity, etc.
Real world journalistic scenes of course move us too, and sometimes even more because they are shockingly real. Yet there’s a place for the literary scene, embedded as it is in an understandable fabric, one that opens up a world to us so that we can see the relation of part to part, and so that we can advance ideas about what it means.
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Next:🪞Mirrors