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LITTERAE
Multilingual literary magazine
Alexandra Pârvan:
HAMLET AND DON QUIJOTE – THE WISE MADMEN
The work of art is a reduction of the infinite to a single point, a point itself infinite. By its mobility (openness toward receivers), it is inexhaustible: that what it looses from stretch [form], it gains as depth [contents]. The perennial work is that in which everyone recognizes himself, because it is the bearer of a human substance. Hamlet and Don Quijote are such works, at all times present in any being, beyond time, because human is the sum of several contradictions (most of them insolvable), and the tragic hero carries these contradictions to the limit, giving their purest expression, the most terrible. He gathers in himself the irreconcilable opposites, to which he gives the extreme shape and then unifies them. Thus, the tragic destiny is impressive. The tragic hero lives reflected, in two opposite aspects and at the same time coincidental. This inner fragmentation and perpetual oscillation between no concordant identities is ultimate to the human condition (the tragic adds the insupportable tension of motion, the infernal rhythm) and thus at all times actual, but it is pre-eminently representative for (post) modernity, its coordinates being given by instability, dispersion, ephemeral, game, hazard. The post modern literature is concerned by the way in which are interwoven, coexist and interact completely different realities. The answer to its searches is already found in the fundamental books of literature, and Hamlet and Don Quijote give a brilliant illustration of the way in which incompatible worlds are combined by the visionary force of the tragic hero.
Torn between two opposite irreducible trends manifested in him concomitantly and at the maximum intensity, the tragic hero wages a fatal and inflexible inner war. Hamlet is torn between the one who wants to take action (the outraged prince) and the one who avoids action (the madman), and Quijote, similarly, but complementarily, is torn between the one who by essence is inactive (the passionate reader) and the one who wants to take action tirelessly (the madman). Both heroes have a favorite identity (the madman), but this doesn’t mean that the other is absent and not even blurred, it is only no more so evident. In Hamlet prevails the hesitating, the one who falls back before a firm decisive action, at the opposite pole, in Don Quijote prevails the one who makes excess of zeal, taking action in any circumstance, regardless of consequences ("Yo tengo más armas que letras"); for both heroes, these preferential identities borrow the protecting camouflage of madness. The tragical hero is the man who looked in the mirror and discovered another one in him. The madman is the stranger in oneself, the other in the same. The consequence of reflection in himself of the hero is the wish to put also to the others the mirror before them and a first mirror are even them, the madmen, the photographic negative of the others’ conscience. Thus, their madness is demonstrative and declarative, has the carriage of a mission, of a revolutionary program. The madman Quijote is the militant of a missing world (The Golden Age) or a fictive one (the world of fabulous adventures), the madman Hamlet projects a virtual, ideal world, that never existed (the world of absolute justice). Hamlet intensely uses the hiding, travesty, theatre, he is the actor of his own life, but Quijote is also his own character, he builds himself according to a pattern and gives the corresponding representation of it. For him also the madness means a game, he shows himself with disturbed mind only in those that hold by the wandering cavalry, the same as Hamlet is mad "but north-north-west". Just because he is not truly mad, Quijote is not inclined to borrow the phantasmagoric images of anyone (not only that he does not recognize the ‘false’ Dulcinea of Sancho, but he sees exactly what she is – a peasant woman). The madness of Don Quijote is not clinical, it is the fruit of a well done construction, a game of imitation – being in Sierra Morena, he imitates what the love-mad knights do, doing what he knew it’s done, his mad acts are the consequence of an ordered mind, that of a reader, that makes everything by the book, so as it is due. Quijote gives proof of a ‘settled’ madness, controlled by a mental pattern and by this similarly conscious and assumed, as that of Hamlet and similarly wisely procreated (he is "el ingenioso hidalgo") – "ésa es la fineza de mi negocio; que volverse loco un caballero andante con causa, ni grado ni gracias: el toque está desatinar sin ocasión". One that becomes mad having a reason is truly mad, that is not the case of Don Quijote. Creator of the game which all are caught in, he proves he masters it the best, being the only one the game does not deceive; likewise Hamlet, he is the wise madman, that who knows how to be mad, and from this posture he tells Sancho that if he wants to be given credit to those he pretends he saw in heaven, then he also must believe all the quijotesque happenings from Montesinos cave. Here Quijote denotes a cutting conscience much above all possibilities of the others of fraud, he reveals and admits that all is a game, the visions of one are equal to those of another, neither ones are more true or more false than another and all can be believed, but only as a game, and that’s exactly what others fail to understand. Thus, he allows himself to tell the duchess that it is not known whether Dulcinea exists or is only imagined, a shocking assertion if we don’t take into account the fact that the real existence of Dulcinea has no relevance in the hero’s evolution and in the fulfillment of his mission; she exists as an element of his madness, as part of the great theatre that he plays for the others and in which he is the only conscious character. Caught in the theatrical games of the others Quijote remains the same, he plays in the others’ theatre with the same naturalness and the same nature, as though wouldn’t be any distinction between life and theatre. By this he gives them the suggestion that their world is but a theatre, a lesson that is overlooked by them. Being in their own theatre, their ‘true’ world is nothing but a masquerade, and Quijote is the only wise man, because only he plays (himself), while the others don’t know they are the actors of their existence. Similarly, Hamlet is the same ‘madman’ in the others’ theatre (the hypocritical world of reality) as he is in the personal theatre (in the inner play of duplicity), and by the theatre in which he mixes their lives it makes them all the actors of their own existence, it constrains them to this conscience, because "the purpose of playing is to hold […] the mirror up to nature". Hamlet introduces and superposes the theatre in the others’ life, he is the one who catches them, while Quijote, in a reversed strategy, lets himself caught, he is brought in the theatre by the others, he superposes himself to their theatre, but he pulls them all after him in the same illusion. Playing himself, Quijote is the only one that raises over the farce, the game, he reverses the perspective: the others live his illusion, not himself the others’ illusion, and by that he is not less a theatre creator than Hamlet. Likewise, Hamlet is the only one that plays without pretending, while around him are only treacherous, participants to the same fraud: the king and the queen, Polonius, Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, even Ophelia, who accepts at the advice of her father to allure Hamlet so that he would confess his love. If Hamlet would have given free play to this staging, admitting that his madness would be generated by love, as was intended to be proved, it would’ve meant to falsify himself, the madman, to disavow his tragic identity and his entire mission. Would’ve equalized with the acceptation by Quijote of others’ visions for the personal madness, which is lacking meaning, just because the madness of tragical heroes has a meaning, unflinching. The adoption of the others’ illusion is excluded, the tragical hero attracts them after himself, with their visions and all, in his personal fabulation, the only one that can be true, because only the tragic has the force to bring into reality what for others are only illusions. Taking part in the theatre, in complementary modalities, the madmen Hamlet and Quijote have the same intention: waking up the others to conscience. The trial fails, because the tragic hero breathes in a strong air, in which the other would suffocate. The two heroes stir opposite effects: Hamlet shocks, Quijote induces laughter by his apparent naivety. But both live in a world of obnubilated conscience, so that is not Quijote, the naive, all the others are, because they don’t perceive the meanings. By their dramatic or comical theatre, better said tragicomical, the mad heroes set with good knowledge mirror to the world in which they live, and putting as mirror the madness they expose the madness of the world. Mad they’re not, the rest of people are, who live with darkened consciences, don’t see and don’t understand their degradation, their own parody. The tragical heroes are the wise. Quijote, being mad, is the only one with an entire mind, for he knows the secret of double worlds and thus often upsets the spectators, who don’t know anymore "si le podían tener por loco o por cuerdo". Hamlet repeatedly warns that he is not what he seems to be, at court the only ones with whole minds are the madmen, he and Ophelia (who in symmetry with Hamlet becomes mad and only then speaks with more meaning). For Hamlet and Quijote the madness is a theatre, but they take seriously their madness, in that consisting the whole tragism: it is a game, but not a child’s game, they don’t play with their madness, because madness are they themselves.
In their own form of madness Quijote is good, full of noble and bright thoughts, but takes action violently and foolishly, while Hamlet is such temperate that he cannot take action at all, while his thoughts are terrible ("Now could I drink hot blood, / And do such bitter business as the day / Would quake to look on"). The madness makes one excessively courageous, to the other the madness "postpones" his courage. The tragic is based on dazzling contrasts: at Quijote’s death, somebody notices that no knight died in such a non-violent manner, at his home, with family, and on the other hand, Hamlet, such evasive in front of violence, dies so violently. Hamlet is dynamic, because he consumes his inner conflict, progressively bringing it in that stage in which duality is surmounted by a decisive action. The hero’s hesitation and his apparent standstill is due to the fact that the action of an inward opposite is annulled by the other one’s action – Hamlet seems that he doesn’t take action, when in fact he is in a continuous action, but with suppressed finality (self-sabotaged). He appears hesitant, and Quijote determined, but both of them oscillate between contradictory, juxtaposed identities. This comings and goings of the tragical movement are being grosso modo brought evident in the going-and-coming back-walks of Quijote to his village. The excessive outer mobility of Quijote does not indicate a true inner progress, the same as the lack of Hamlet’s proper action doesn’t mean a standstill. In addition, Quijote has times when he just stays, pure and simple, which is in a flagrant contradiction with his nature, he hinders himself even in his haste to take action, tied in the net of tragical contrary trends, which hold him in place. The intermediate position is an optical illusion, when something moves very fast, it seems motionless, Hamlet passes swiftly as lightning from one position to another, with a stunning speed (hence the insupportable tragic torments). "To be or not to be" sums up the spasm of the tragical hero, the high tide and the low tide of its agonizing agonal motion. The tragic limit is the experience of antagonistic self (extreme alteration) in the inner inalterable identity; the reach of this limit and the endurance of it is the ordeal necessary to the obtaining of the philosopher’s stone.
The epitaph of Don Quijote which has withstood the time tells about the hero that he was mad and he is eternal. This epitaph is our memory itself. The wise madmen are undying and as a consequence they will always be modern.
Alexandra Pârvan
