It is the coldest of Februarys, all frozen mud and raw mid-western sleet. Der Wind, der Wind, das himmlische Kind–no matter which way you walk, it blows in your face.
This semester is full of Robert Musil, and you love him. You try to talk in German about the part of human existence that lies outside of words. You fail.
Latin. You start admiring secondary literature for the first time in your life, thanks to the young Classics professor who gives you as much literary theory and crazy feminist interpretations of Ovid as you could wish for. She is new to the department, and the adulation of the female Latin and Greek students is only slightly veiled. An article by Foucault on the death of the author derails the seminar and her office hours for half a week.
What if the author didn’t matter? You are still debating this point days later, with the vanload of bright-eyed 19-year-old Classicists on the way to teach Latin to third graders.
And Eros, from Plato’s Symposium, in Greek, with Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig added in for good measure. Everything is thrown open. There is more here than you ever thought. Eros as possession and procreation. Eros as philosophy and the philosopher together. Eros as the mediator transcendent, halfway between foolishness and wisdom, poverty and wealth, appearance and reality. Eros as a way of being–give and take, presence and absence, the tension and release at the root of all scholarship and of all being-in-love-with. It is the idea of the semester.
~~~~~
Elsewhere. Being a good Nietzschean and nagged by the fear that you just might turn into Hesse’s Steppenwolf, you resolve to learn to dance. You find out that you are more horrible at it than you thought. This is a great disappointment not only to yourself, but also to whatever poor sap ends up partnering with you in Social Dance 101.
Young Goethe from last semester has grown out his sideburns and entirely ruined his looks. You decide that he amply compensated, though, by simultaneously darning his own jacket and reciting Auden last Friday.
The other weekly readers of poetry and singers of songs have fixated on medieval chant. Crucem Sanctam Subiit–there are a dozen verses, and everyone must learn them all so you can sing them thirty-five voices strong, pounding on the floor, the faces of the young men transfigured in some sort of spiritual ecstasy. They all want to be monks someday.
One thing that makes reading Thomas Mann such a toilsome joy is the depth of allusion behind his prose, the resonance that stretches from Antiquity to Mann’s own contemporaries. Dürer and Perotinus in Doktor Faustus, say, or Shakespeare in Tonio Kröger and Homer in Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice)–a thousand references dropped so easily, seemingly casually, demanding that the reader hunt them down and fit them into the larger story of Mann’s opus. They must be hunted down, too, because Mann didn’t write anything accidentally. His allusions always have some pressing import, afford some flash of insight, some backstory that draws out meaning and sets the whole plot of the book in another light.
And so one of the most transfixing allusions in Der Tod in Venedig was Saint Sebastian, whom I had never heard of. He turned out to be absolutely arresting, and here is his story. But first, here is appearance in Mann:
Early on an observant critic had described the new type of hero that this writer [Aschenbach] preferred, a figure returning over and over again in manifold variation: it was based on the concept of “an intellectual and youthful manliness which grits its teeth in proud modesty and calmly endures the swords and spears as they pass through its body”….For meeting one’s fate with dignity, grace under pressure of pain, is not simply a matter of sufferance; it is an active achievement, a positive triumph, and the figure of St. Sebastian is thus the most beautiful image, if not of art in general, then surely of the art under discussion here.
Antonio de Bellis, 1650
Heroism, triumph–the most beautiful image in art? Who was this Sebastian? His life was simple enough, I found. He was an officer in the Roman army during Diocletian’s 3rd century persecution of the Christians. When his own conversion to the faith was revealed, he was sentenced to be bound and killed by the arrows of his fellow soldiers. He miraculously survived his wounds and returned to confront Diocletian, but was recaptured and stoned to death.
In the early Middle Ages Sebastian was still innocent enough, invoked by soldiers and those seeking to ward off the plague, associated with the resilience that had saved him from his first death sentence. His image started to soften in the first years of the Renaissance, however, as his portrayals in art transitioned from bearded soldier to effete young man.
Somewhere in the Renaissance–and here was something closer to Thomas Mann’s saint–Sebastian became the Apollonian ideal of male beauty, all white flesh and thinly-veiled eros. The greatest of opposites were bound together perfectly in him, the physical with the spiritually ecstatic, tenaciousness with ravaged fragility, masculine and feminine at once. Great will and great weakness, beautiful even in torture. Was this Mann’s perfect form?
Mattia Preti, 1660
Of course it was this chiaroscuro Sebastian, and not the middle-aged army officer, that demanded the attention of Mann’s generation of artists and thinkers. He seemed to have been born for the 19th century, all isolation, suffering and desire, overtones of sadomasochism and androgyny. Here was real decadence, the stuff of Romanticism and then fin die siècle. His story fueled a cult, desperately attractive to those looking to push down walls between eros and religion, purity and lust.
And further, perhaps most tellingly for Mann’s own backstory, there was Sebastian’s transition in the 1800s from an image of male beauty to a direct homosexual icon. What had been subtext in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was celebrated and exploited, his isolation and persecution re-imagined as a sort of “coming out” narrative, the perfect form of the Renaissance painters re-drawn as the ultimate homoerotic symbol.
There were a thousand examples of such appropriation in Mann’s own decades, at the turn of the 19th century. Dorian Gray wore a cloak with a medallion of St. Sebastian, Oscar Wilde’s penname was Sebastian Melmoth. Freudian analysts reveled in the imagery of arrows-and-flesh. Early photographers and filmmakers used Sebastian’s story to blur the lines between spiritual and sexual ecstasy.
These are only snapshots from a fascinating history, a 1,000-year narrative of tension between eros, art, politics, and religion. Sebastian’s was quite the story.
El Greco
But back to Thomas Mann. Where did Der Tod in Venedig fit into all of this? Why Sebastian, this creature of Catholicism and fin die siècle, in a work where the other allusions were so rigorously pagan, Classical? He seemed like an odd choice.
But then again, he was perfect. Like Mann’s other allusions, Sebastian’s presence in the narrative was revelatory, throwing hidden motives into relief, reflecting, foreshadowing, connecting to the broader philosophical motifs of the story.
The most blatant thematic tie-in to Der Tod in Venedig were the homoerotic aspects of Sebastian’s story. Mann’s choice of the saint fit in with his own desperately repressed biography and the basic plot of his novella, the love of a male artist for a 14-year-old boy. It matched the work’s philosophic backdrop, too-Plato’s dialogues on eros, Symposium and the Phaedrus, where Socrates sat under a plane tree and taught the workings of love to a boy.
There were ties, too, between Sebastian and Tadzio himself, the child Aschenbach fell in love with on a beach in Venice. In both figures perfect youth and masculine beauty were bound to extreme weakness, even unto death. As Aschenbach said, Tadzio wouldn’t live much longer. And like Sebastian, Tadzio was not really human in the end, but rather consecrated to the realm of symbol and transcendence, the stuff of icon, saint, divinity, Form.
But above all, Sebastian was the perfect hero for Aschenbach, the embodiment of his life’s philosophy and everything he wanted for his art. In his credo Aschenbach spoke of a creator on the edge of exhaustion, overburdened, worn down to the point of annihilation, but still standing tall. An artist holding himself upright through ecstatic feats of will, winning greatness and overwhelming beauty through a heroism of weakness–this is what it meant to create in the 20th century. And what was the art that would come of it? It would be art as Despite, Aschenbach wrote, beautiful and worthy creation despite grief and suffering, infirmity, affliction, passion, terror, pain.
And this–this Despite-philosophy, this heroism of weakness–was Sebastian. He gave Aschenbach’s credo form, and that form was perfect. He had it all, seemingly effortlessly–the exhaustion uplifted by will, the proud modesty and calm endurance, the beauty Despite torture and exhaustion. He was the most beautiful image of Aschenbach’s art because he was the apotheosis of that art. As creator and creation, Sebastian triumphed.
Nicholas Regnier, 17th c.
So there it was. Sebastian’s image in Der Tod in Venedig was an overwhelmingly powerful one, in the end, reflecting the themes of the story and the artistic worldview of the main character, giving form to both the ideal creation and the ultimate creator.
But of course, even that would have been too simple for Thomas Mann. Sebastian was beautiful, yes–but the credo he embodied, Mann informed us with the most punctilious irony, was why Aschenbach failed.
Look again.
Art as Despite–what sort of creation was that, really? It was somehow dishonest, this artistic avoidance of everything messy and painful in life. Creation despite grief? Despite passion? That was art in spite of life itself, and as such could only be one-sided, sterile, destined for the very frigidity Aschenbach found himself trapped in on a May afternoon after his 50th birthday.
And so he went to Venice and cast away all his Despite-philosophy by falling in love with a boy. But still he failed.
This was the unbearable tragedy. There was a balance to be had, and Aschenbach never found it. In throwing off all Despite he swung too far the other way, falling off the edge into delirium and self-abasement. In the place of sterile endurance there was debauchery, indignity, excess–no middle ground, no sign of the covenant between dionysian eros and standing-tall Despite that would have propelled Aschenbach to the creation of real beauty. Instead, the eros he found was criminal. His wish that the world perish in flames so that he could have his way with a child–there was no art in that.
In the end, Aschenbach lost his humanity and his life. By the final scene, is he even an artist any more? The image of Mann’s last page has little to do with Sebastian’s grace and dignity in the face of weakness. There is only a boy in the water and a fevered old man grasping towards something he can not attain.
Roberto Ferri, b. 1978
Anthony Gayton, 2002
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Yes, this was supposed to be published a month ago. I didn’t post it because I didn’t know if it made sense; I still don’t. If you have feedback, please send it my way.
When I took what I had found out about St. Sebastian in to the Professor he said, “Well, those nuns back in Germany certainly didn’t teach me that in 2nd grade!”
Here is an excellent article on the history of St. Sebastian as a homoerotic icon in art. The translation of Der Tod in Venedig is Clayton Koelb’s. Also, Guido Reni is simply astounding. And that is all.
The thing about studying this beautiful foreign language is that it leaves me starving for English. After oral exams and sight translations I want to collapse into familiarity, into the comfort of Shakespeare or Nabokov or Gerard Manley Hopkins. For all the intoxication of foreign languages, there is always for me an underlying level of disquiet, a persistent feeling of having the rug pulled out from under one’s feet. There such a luxury in one’s own speech, really, in the ability to fly through paragraphs unencumbered by dictionary and pocket grammar. The resonance behind the words, cadence and illusion–all there for the taking. English majors are spoiled, I think.
The desire to flee into English was strongest last August when I returned from Germany. I was weary of my own ineptness in the language, of stumbling through small-talk with bus drivers and trying to read between the lines in Kleist, who never meant what he wrote anyway. Petulantly, I wanted beauty and familiarity, wanted to be able to read a hundred pages in one afternoon. So I fell into Nabokov on the iron daybed on our porch, reading, reading, reading, too hot, with my eyes half-shut and the neighbor making hay across the road. Nabokov’s prose was sick and beautiful, and above all searingly good English.
This Christmas break the desire for familiarity was the same, after a semester where the only prose in my language I studied was secondary articles on Cicero. Boring, oder? So I looked forward to a few weeks of literary English, Plato word lists be damned. This time, there was Virginia Woolf–The Waves, on the recommendation of a friend who copied out a quote for me that was too arresting to ignore.
~~~~~~
I finished The Waves in two afternoons in front of the wood stove, moving a bronze bookmark back and back to the last page. It had been three years since I had read Virginia Woolf, and I had forgotten the beauty of her English–heady stuff, prose not as red-blooded as Nabokov but equally as musical.
The first time I read Woolf–To the Lighthouse–I was 17 and a senior in high school, making notes in the margins for a presentation on art and atheism. My recollection of the book had since receded to only a sense of the prose, vague outlines of imagery like the wedge of darkness before the sea.
Memory is funny, though. The book and author are, for me, unalterably bound to another recollection, one still piercingly vivid. It was late March in Vermont–maple sugaring season–and I was reading To the Lighthouse in the tiny sugar house across from the barn. I copied out the quote about the wedge of darkness and wrote a little more.
I am sitting in the sugar house, looking out the white-washed door into the last clean light of day. Luke is on the step, spitting into the yard and melting the edges of his rubber boots on the door of the arch. This is a terrible season for sugaring, and all the neighbors gather to commiserate. Too warm–too early–the sap is not sweet. The Beedes made 9 gallons out of 400 taps, and Jim Curtin burned his new front pan. The Cute Farmer Down the Hill once again drank more beer than he made syrup.
There is something about the light in March in Vermont, like it is filtered through air that is is thinner or sharper or something. As clear as Woolf’s prose, or clearer, perhaps the apotheosis of clarity. And the whole world is flowing, water, mud, sap, everything is liquid flowing downhill. My sister and I scratched Elvish into the arms of the plastic chairs inside the sugar house, raw-cheeked and smelling like smoke. The steam off the boiling sap curled the pages of anything we were reading. The wind was coarse but warm enough for sweaters and no hats. There were lambs in the barn.
~~~~~~
Now reading Woolf again, in January when nothing flows, this memory of sugaring comes back and the vagueness of To the Lighthouse is also filled out. There are the same themes, I think, running throughout Woolf’s entire opus like a symphony.
For instance there is always the sea. The descriptions of ocean and light that run through To the Lighthouse and The Waves are like worded versions of the sea interludes in Benjamin Britten’s opera, I think. Dawn, Morning, Moonlight, Storm.
And time. Time is romanced in Woolf, ebbing and flowing like snowmelt in March, or like music, but certainly not like history or clocks. What was she getting at? Perhaps Wagner had it right in his Parsifal. Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit–Here time becomes space. Or perhaps it was the opening lines of Eliot’s Four Quartets:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
In Woolf one is never certain. A day, a life–which has passed? And was the one as long as the other? And time lets fall its drop. The drop that has formed on the roof of the soul falls. On the roof of my mind time, forming, lets fall its drop. What does that mean?
And one more thing, that struck me as especially oxymoronic, dreadful, somehow misplaced in the clear light in March, and also now in the firelight in January. In Virginia Woolf there is such darkness at the edge of being. The roar of blackness just within consciousness was louder than any spring flood, measureless, burning. I was disturbed, and tried to get at that in the art and atheism presentation. And now, here it was again, writ large in The Waves.Now I say there is a grinning, there is a subterfuge. There is something sneering behind our backs. That was frightening.
And so Virginia Woolf’s sea broke itself, her nights were full of wind and destruction. But the destruction, whatever else it was, was beautiful.
Home! The Sister and I flew in last week, back to wood floors and fireplaces and gourmet pizza, to tramps through the woods in rubber boots and an excess of fuzzy cats. The house smells like moth balls and pine branches and fires and hay. I can discard tailored wool blazers and ironed blouses and dress like a hippie for a month. The Brother has perfected a dozen new yoyo tricks to perform to Rod Stewart turned up too loud. We all have to spend inordinate hours making Christmas cookies and watching Dr. Who. It is simply good to be here.
~~~~~~
Everything is more or less Thomas Mann. He was my independent study topic with the enigmatic German Professor, and took up every spare moment of the semester, as well as many moments that were not spare, to the general bereavement of the research projects. The study was fantastic, one of the best things I have done at the college–a four-month-long discussion of art, music, philosophy, criticism, literature, auf Deutsch, all per Thomas Mann. And he is astounding.
The first half of the semester was Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice)–fin de siecle and classicism, a heady and haunting synthesis of pagan gods and decadence and the music of a dead composer from Vienna. And Plato’s Eros, which may well have been the most thrilling discovery of the semester. Read the Symposium and Phaedrus. Creation in Beauty, possession of Beauty–are they all that different? And why does Aschenbach fall so tragically short of both?
Next came the question of salvation, redemption–Erlösung–in Mann. Where was it? Certainly not in Art, that much was certain. Mann was no Romantic, and those who loved Art in his world strayed towards damnation. What then? I was discomfited.
We ought to look at Irony, said the Professor. That was as much a solution in Mann, as much a redemption, as anything he could think of. So we did, in Tonio Kröger and then Beim Propheten (At the Prophet’s), where the Novelist (Mann himself?) day-dreamed about a ham sandwich in the middle of the most mystical revelations. The Professor laughed until he had to wipe his eyes, and said that–ironic laughter–was as good a redemption as any, Emily, and didn’t I agree? I, being a good Wagnerian and thus rather in love with the idea that Through Art All Men Are Saved, didn’t, really.
And then the women. Gerächt (Revenged/Avenged) was Mann’s feminist manifesto, at first glance. Or was it? Was Mann’s treatment of women–in his other works–really any different than that narrow and laughable view he exposed to such ridicule in Gerächt? It all tied into my general uneasiness with the women in the works we were reading in 19th Century Lit, going all the way back to Goethe’s Ewig-Weibliche…..
I got a little carried away.
“You should write a feminist interpretation of Thomas Mann,” said the Professor. “But that’s boring.” I said. “And sad.” I don’t want to be a feminist, I want to be a humanist. And it is ever so much more productive to love these great artists, through and beyond all their short-sightedness and prejudice. Cynicism, disenchantment, and bitterness get one precisely nowhere, as a student, critic, and human being.
~~~~~~
But there was a broader tension, behind it all, something discomfiting about the discussions. By taking Thomas Mann so seriously, by letting him be so vitally important, by allowing–by even demanding–that he speak in the 21st century, were we not at least a little outdated? Are his artistic, cultural, political questions–the questions of nearly one hundred years ago–the questions of today? Could they be? Have we moved beyond Mann’s Munich, Mann’s America?
After the Doktor Faustus discussions, the Professor asked if anyone can create great art now without the Devil. Where can valid artistic inspiration come from, anymore? I wanted to know if he was posing the questions as Thomas Mann or himself, in 1945 Germany or now, in mid-western America at a liberal arts college that believes in Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. He didn’t know. Neither did I.
I asked if he thought Germany would ever produce another towering, all-conquering Artist, Künstler, along the lines of a Goethe or Wagner or Mann. “Welt-erobernd…” he says. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think they can. That time is long past.” That is heart-breaking, I said. What happened to Faust? What happened to the future?
On the final day of classes, we read the last page of Doktor Faustus, this final book, aloud. Almost impossibly difficult. Is it not a novel for the end of the world? What can follow such final chapters? When art is its own criticism, when the novel as a genre is consummated and destroyed by the very act of its creation–as Wagner did, I said, with Tristan und Isolde–what can come next? It is an end, not a beginning.
But, in differing ways, both the Professor and I came to the conclusion that there is some small hope, some way out. He pointed to the final sentence of the novel, a prayer–one must have hope, he said, one must believe in something, to pray. Prayer, like the question that ends Der Zauberberg, looks towards the future.
And I said, whether blindly and youthfully optimistic or not, that there is often an ending, but always an answer. Mann’s Faustus is not the last ending, nor the first. What about Greek Tragedy, that narrows and narrows and narrows human experience into a dark and endless point? What about King Lear, where they kneel and pray to a God who never comes? Where Howl, Howl, Howl are the only honest words left? Nihilism, denial, renunciation writ large, long before Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Art could have ended right there–but it didn’t, I said, it didn’t. Look at everything that has come since. I’m not going to go through life believing that Western Culture is in decline because Adrian Leverkühn wrote a twelve-tone Lamentatio and went insane.
~~~~~~
And there it was. A wonderful, difficult semester. And best of all, we are going to start all over again with Robert Musil next year–from what I can tell, a very different creature. Lyric to Mann’s epic, perhaps, all sparkling inner-ness and Gestalt psychology, pace classicism and irony.
Scene: 2:30am. A dark, gothic study hall, a sort of Faustian “dumpfes Mauerloch.” Tall black windows, wooden table with half-burned candles and stacks of parchment. Hamlet and Horatio are pulling an all-nighter for their Philosophy exam the next morning.
Hamlet is the worst study partner imaginable.
Hamlet: (emphatically not studying, staring into space in a metaphysical manner) Words, words, words…..
Silence from Horatio, surrounded by stacks of parchment and dutifully color-coding his notes.
Hamlet: (beginning to chew the end of his quill pen, poetic but unhelpful) When midterms come, they come not single spies but in battalions. (silence) –eh, Horatio?
Horatio: (scribbling furiously) Shut up, Hamlet. Study! Or at least let me study.
(silence)
Hamlet: (struck by an idea, gesturing dramatically) But there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy! Let’s go find some food.
Horatio: (shoving a stack of the 16th-century equivalent of index cards in Hamlet’s direction, exasperated) Yeah, well, we need to get all of the stuff we do know in out heads so we can put it on paper tomorrow. Now come on! Quiz me!
Finis.
______________________
The idea of Hamlet and Horatio cramming for midterms appeared rather hilarious to my roommate and myself very late last night. It’s that time of the semester….. : )
Any resemblance to various members of the Hillsdale student body is entirely intended.
It is the brightest of Septembers, all frigid mornings and sun-through-windows and hot tea.
The German Literature course is reading Kleist, who writes like a post-post-modernist out of a permanently fractured universe. In 1811 he shot a woman, and then himself, barely 34. Suicide. “Should we read his works, then?” asks the German Professor on the loveliest of afternoons. “Nein,” says Herr Catholicism, who is currently shredding papers and glaring across the classroom. “Wir können nichts von ihm lernen–we can’t learn anything from him.” The German Professor, immaculately dressed and eternally, intensely enigmatic, comes around to stare from the front of the desk. He takes off his glasses and leans all the way over the first row of students. “But does art always have to teach us something?” Such fervor. You think that this professor, who loves Nabokov and the craziest melismas of Baroque opera, would probably answer no. You suspect he believes in Beauty the way his colleagues believe in God.
~~~~~~
You truck up to the German department and down to Classics, exasperate both and yourself as well. Why can’t I write on that? Who says? And what happened to humanism? All future plans are up in the air.
Philosophy. The professor looks like Aristotle. Socrates is our contemporary, he says–to care for your soul is the most radical thought in Western civilization. You like the Pre-Socratics, too, who thought themselves out of time.
Music. There are dozens of old scores to be memorized– plainchant, Gregorian chant, trouvere, organum, motet. These earliest of Western melodies are utterly strange, haunting, shockingly modern. You think the idea of organum is exceptionally fascinating, this concept of voices in polyphony over a sustained drone. The melodies only had to be consonant with the bass line, not with each other, so the music is sometimes as chromatic and dissonant as modern atonalism. But it didn’t sound that way in 1,200! Then, organum was the most reverent of sounds, written for the Church and the glory of God.
You listen until you are entirely saturated with it all, with pure voices that bring out the echo of ancient cathedrals even through cheap computer speakers.
~~~~~~
The philosophy chap who looked like Poe all last semester has undergone a remarkable transformation (less mustache, more hair) and now bears a striking resemblance to the young Goethe in, say, 1773–bright manic eyes, cravat, waistcoat. You think the change is an exceeding improvement, because the 20-something Goethe pretty much rocked. Ironically, the 2012 version is writing his thesis on 19th-century Germany and the East, and you try to persuade him to include Wagner’s Parsifal.
It’s suit-jacket weather. Goethe, and everybody else, is wearing them, tweed, patched at the elbows, wool, fitted. You are certainly not at all adverse to the fashion, but wear yours with pearls.
On the night before classes started, someone made a gigantic bonfire and read Eliot’s Four Quartets, shouting, standing too close to the flames. Shadow on light.
She was a startling creature in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, utterly alone and unlike anything I had ever encountered. She persisted and pervaded, and will never again be far from my consciousness.
I was sixteen, about to start the Tragedy unit in my online Greek and Roman Literature course. My very wise teacher told us nothing about Aeschylus or tragic theory, but merely told us to open our books and read Agamemnon outloud from line one. I played the Trojan seeress, and the power and terror of her words were like a storm.
Who was she? A priestess, the daughter of the king, cursed by Apollo to speak the truth and never be believed. They say she refused to sleep with the god, and he spat in her mouth.
Aeschylus picked up her story after the fall of Troy, with her arrival in Argos as the war-prize of Agamemnon. Of course we all know now what only Cassandra knew then—the tabloid-saga of the queen’s infidelity, her revenge for a slaughtered child, the murder (in the bath!) that awaited the lord of the house and his concubine. Cassandra was wild to speak of all this, wild to be heard by a Chorus that could not believe until it was too late. Her final moments, in the beautiful translation by Robert Fagles, are all poetry and desperate nobility.
Hamlet came two summers later. He was less freakish, funnier–but equally demanding, asking the same sort of insistent questions. His story was much better known: the prince only mad north-northwest, his murdered king and ghost, poisons, players, letters, nunneries. He arrived when my sister and I determined to read Shakespeare until we loved him, and accordingly spent an inordinate amount of time lounging about on the bedroom floor declaiming soliloquies and not doing chores.
Hamlet was our first play, and the night we got that Danish prince, we danced into our parents’ bedroom to tell them that Shakespeare rocked. And that Hamlet rocked most of all, and we had no idea who he was, and we were in love and in hate.
The following autumn I left for Hillsdale College, and heard things that started the conversation between the two characters: a lecture on tragedy in Agamemnon from a recovering feminist one semester, a rambly study of Shakespeare the next. Hamlet and Cassandra, I discovered, had things to say to each other.
I collected quotes, read with both books open side-by-side, and was astounded. They were separated by 2,000 years, and yet so similar! Both were displaced royalty, and crazy, but also the only sane characters in worlds gone mad. Both were defined by otherness, equally tortured by their capacity for thought and knowledge of the truth. And both learned to die with nobility and perhaps a little wisdom.
~~~~~
It was clear that Cassandra and Hamlet moved in worlds dictated by Fate, or Moira to the Greeks. This Fate was the merciless, faceless entity that hemmed in the edges of the Tragic universe, that dictated that the human condition be full of unjustified sorrow and suffering. In such a world, the measure of a man was in how he responded to such a destiny, whether with truth and nobility or with fear and evasion.
But who could blame Cassandra and Hamlet, really, if their first response was all horror? The seeress’ scream “The agony—O I am breaking!—Fate’s so hard, and the pain that floods my voice is mine alone” (1138-9) echoed in Hamlet’s “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right” (I.5.191). They were young, and life could have been so easy.
There was evasion in the beginning, too. Wouldn’t it have been much pleasanter, neater, to cheat such a cruel lot? To find an easier way out? Indeed—and so Hamlet toyed with suicide and not-to-be, and Cassandra turned to songbirds.
The Nightingale—O for a song, a fate like hers!
The gods gave her a life of ease, swathed her in wings, no tears, no wailing. (1148-9)
Flight was desperately attractive.
But something changed before the end, because Hamlet didn’t kill himself, and Cassandra remained human. By their final scenes both had replaced evasion with readiness, the desire to flee with the understanding necessary to let be. In the end, they told us, it really wasn’t a matter of escape, of flight into madness or suicide, but of facing the human condition open-eyed, with dignity, compassion, and humanity.
It was the harder course, this lucid encounter with Fate, but one fulfilled with ultimate grace. With heartbreaking eloquence, Hamlet drew his conclusions in his penultimate scene: He was finished playing with a bare dagger. The decision for life or death would no longer be his hands. Horatio would not lie and excuse him from the duel.
Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness
is all. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves,
what is it to leave betimes? Let be. (V.2.196)
Cassandra, too, turned her back on evasion and hysteria moments before her death. “My time has come,” she informed the deluded Chorus. “Little to gain from flight” (1324). Like Hamlet, she was no longer willing to cheat her way out. She would face whatever might come with sanity, standing upright.
~~~~~
These resolutions were vital, because death was suddenly the here and now. The readiness gained in their final scenes enabled Cassandra and Hamlet to face their own mortality with clarity and truth.
It would have been easy to lie, because everyone else did. The chorus wanted something glorious, and so smelled Syrian myrrh instead of the reek of blood. But Cassandra was explicit, urgent, clear-headed: “No escape, my friends…. I must go in now, mourning Agamemnon’s death and mine” (1324 and 1335). Two millennia later, Claudius wanted his propriety, and so extended the farce till the moment of his death (“Help me friends, I am but hurt!” (V.2.307)). But Hamlet said simply “I die, Horatio” (V.2.316, 321, 335). Like Cassandra, he met the tragedy of his own death with the dignity and awareness that none of the other characters were able to achieve. All madness, affected or genuine, fell away at last.
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One more question, because one must always ask. What about immortality—did either really hope for a blessed afterlife? I couldn’t find that they did. Hamlet spoke of “the dread of something after death” (III.1.78), and the rest, after all, was silence. Cassandra cried on the steps of the palace.
Oh men, your destiny.
When all is well a shadow can overturn it.
When trouble comes a stroke of the wet sponge,
And the picture’s blotted out. And that,
I think that breaks the heart. (1350-1355)
But in a way, Cassandra and Hamlet lived on. Perhaps it was their very doubt of a neat metaphysical solution that compelled them to so purposefully leave something behind. In so doing, they engendered the writing of their own dramas.
Thus Hamlet to Horatio, in his final moments: “Absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story” (V.2.331). He would offer his tale to a shocked court, and seek to prevent such “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts” from happening again (V.2.364).
Cassandra, too, turned from sorrow to speak to a frightened Chorus: “No more riddles. I will teach you. Come, bear witness, run and hunt with me” (1183). Her final words echoed Hamlet’s:
Friends—I cried out,
not from fear like a bird fresh caught,
but that you will testify to how I died…
That’s all I ask, my friends. A stranger’s gift
for one about to die. (1338-43)
Her death would become part of the Oresteia, to be remembered again with Orestes’ return, with the queen’s death, with the revenge of the man married to grief. As Hamlet was a prince and actor, she was a seeress—and in the face of the greatest personal tragedy gave away her story to the yet-unknowing world.
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So there it is. In Tragedy, death is not a private event, but reflects individual character and becomes a measure of human capability and potential—ugliness and fear for some, wisdom and greatness for others. As the chorus in Agamemnon says, “to go nobly lends a man some grace” (1327). Cassandra and Hamlet found that grace, and the wisdom it granted, in life and in death.
In the end, perhaps what separates the two is aloneness. However estranged he may be, Hamlet is surrounded by familiarity, by those who have known and maybe tried to understand him from childhood. He is a part of his society, whether he likes it or not. After all, he would have been king, without the poison-and-treachery business—and even in the end, he will be buried like a prince and remembered as one.
But what about Cassandra? She was uprooted, kept alive only because she was young and attractive enough to tempt a hero, born away from an immolated city on the chariot of her captor. She had no players to set traps, no Horatio to keep her confidences—in fact, no one had ever believed her, before or after Troy. Her father was murdered on the altar of Zeus, her god cursed her. And now, in Argos, there was literally nothing left.
Of all the finely drawn women in Classical literature, perhaps Cassandra is the most alone. So many of the others—and this is an observation, not an agenda—are bound and remembered by their relation to others, to men. Dido is eternally burning on her lover’s bed, Andromache holding her child and weeping over Hector’s plumed helmet. Penelope waits for her family, Psyche chases after Cupid.
How strikingly does Aeschylus’ portrait of Cassandra differ—she is forever alone, sapling straight, silhouetted against the open palace doors. In her final moments she is not Agamemnon’s war-prize or even the daughter of Priam. She has only truth, and is only herself, and maybe that is why she can speak for us all.
Zeus has led us on to know,
the Helmsman lays it down as law
that we must suffer, suffer into truth.
We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart
the pain of pain remembered comes again,
and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.
From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench
there comes a violent love.
Agamemnon, first Chorus 177-184
Yes, I know I said no footnotes. But I should say that I am most grateful to Dr. Deborah Belt for laying the foundations of these ideas. The concept of the tragic worldview belongs to her.
The picture of Cassandra and the quotes from Aeschylus are from my Penguin edition of the Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin Group 1979). The painting of Hamlet is by William Hunt, 1864. The video is, of course, from Kenneth Branagh’s version of Hamlet, the Shakespeare quotes from The Pelican Shakespeare ed. A. R. Braunmuller (Penguin Group 2001).
Also, for those interested in further reading, I find most fitting that a writer like Christa Wolf should again take up the seeress’ story, in 1984, for her outcry against the oppression of women and censorship in East Germany. Her Kassandra is a beautiful addition to the mythos, I think.
It is the coldest of Februarys, all frozen mud and raw mid-western sleet. Der Wind, der Wind, das himmlische Kind–no matter which way you walk, it blows in your face.
thoughtenchanted 
