Perpendicular Work: Growing Middle-Aged with Unvented Weenieaphobia

(For a PDF version of this essay, go to The Worldview Annex.)


“…a friendship which probably is not the least of the riddles in Kafka’s life.”

Walter Benjamin on Franz Kafka’s friendship with his biographer, Max Brod

Sooner or later, any halfway dedicated aficionado of the great and long-deceased Canadian piano-player-cum-musicologist-cum-comedian-cum-documentarian Glenn Gould is bound to hear of Tim Page, and to get to know him after a fashion.  To satisfy his curiosity about Gould’s writings, for example, such a fan must seek out The Glenn Gould Reader, a collection edited by Page, and from its editor’s introduction he will learn not only—and most saliently—that Page and Gould were personal friends, but also that Page is (or used to be), like Gould, something of a night-owl; for otherwise he could not have endured very many of the midnight phone calls Gould made to him “as he [Gould not Page] sipped on an omnipresent cup of tea and prepared to begin his nocturnal workday” (GGR xv).  If his Gouldian researches lead him to You Tube and an excellent 1998 Canadian television documentary called The Life and Times of Glenn Gould, he will learn that unlike Gould but like (according to him) most people, Page “accepted” (or used to accept) “give and take relations” with others “as a matter of course.”      

But even if he never ventures outside the Gouldian musical discography proper, the Gould fan will have a hard time avoiding Page’s 1982 audio interview with Gould, as it is appended to both currently in-print releases of Gould’s 1982 rendition of his signature, career-framing piece, Bach’s Goldberg Variations.  Here, one really hits Pagean pay dirt, in the form of either 6 or 37 minutes (half the length of, respectively, the abridged 12-minute version included in the one release, and the full 52-minute one included in the other), of Page in the vocal flesh.  The prevailing impression left by this interview is that Page was, and presumably still is, something of what Calvin “Bud” Trillin has called in the parlance of his 1950s college peer group, a weenie, an argoteme that I employ in preference to its latter-day quasi-analogues “nerd” or “dork” by way of avoiding the ineluctably parochial connotations of these two terms, of avoiding their inevitable conjuration of specific latter-day subcultures, notably computer programming and science-fiction fandom.  It is perfectly possible to imagine a weenie, for example, having absolutely no interest in computers or science fiction but instead having an overweeni(e)ng passion for, say, student government or grassroots political activism, and manifesting his weeniehood by constantly pitching up with a petition for one’s signature to some proposal for or against the widening or narrowing of this or that thingamajuggernaut, and presenting it to one with a contumacious flourish suggestive of “you should be out there doing this too.”  To summarize this impression via another route: back in ’05 a six-foot friend of mine was both visiting me and looking for a job.  As he was a fellow Gould fan and had not heard the Page-Gould entretien, I played it for him; later the same day, he asked if he could borrow a jacket to wear to his job interviews, and not having anything more serviceable in my wardrobe[1], I let him try on a navy blue two brass-button blazer, some mid-80s hand-me-down that I myself had (I swear by this hand) never worn, and that would have fitted even my 5’8” self rather snugly.  In answer to the obvious question posed as he stood before me spot-welded into the thinglet and with a good square half-foot of shirt-cuff showing on each side, I replied, “You look exactly as I imagine Tim Page would want to look,” whereupon he doffed it as quickly as though I had said its previous borrower had perished of ebola.  So what was it about Page’s presentation of himself in this interview that exuded such a gamily Viennese, too big for his preppie blazer-esque, stench?  It’s hard to say.  Part of it is certainly owing to something he could have had but little control over, namely his native speaking tessitura, a reedy countertenor at times verging on the nasal and vulnerable to being thrown into the ridiculous and feeble background by Gould’s consistently plummy if occasionally rhoticism-engloutinized baritone.  But a good deal of it comes from the substance of his utterances; for example, his “I did take the pulse of this recording, if you don’t mind a metaphor.” 

In 2002, twenty years after Gould’s death, a so-called team of neurologists resident in his native Toronto announced their “discovery” that Gould had served as a lifelong abject catamite to an overmastering pederast[2] of a brain condition called Asperger’s syndrome.  Licensed for general release to select neurological auto-diagnostic retail outlets in 1994, since the turn of the millennium, Asperger’s syndrome has sold like an infinitely cloneable hotcake among non-celibate weenies looking simultaneously to carve out some extra cave time[3] and to imbibe a dram or two of spiritual succor for not having patented that “software platform I invented that was just like Facebook only a million times more synergistic,” or been on that (so-called) team of geneticists who invented the mouse that grew bull’s testicles instead of ears.  You see, old-school autism—a.k.a. autism tout court, a.k.a. your grandfather’s autism of ca. 1960—failed to make much of a splash in the neurological auto-diagnostic scene, even among weenies, because of the mandation of round-the-clock surveillance that came with the diagnosis.  Sure, it might have been cool (from a weenie’s eye point of view) to be able to memorize your local telephone book and thereby equip yourself to greet total strangers by reciting their telephone numbers, but not at the cost of having a minder with you when you shopped for underpants.  For the kinds of people (i.e., weenies) who regard Deep Blue-esque feats like memorizing telephone books as proofs of unsurpassable intellectual prowess, Asperger’s has been a godsend.  It lets them off the (non-telephonic) hook of actually having to attempt such feats while at the same time presenting them with a neurological pedigree proving their inalienable affiliation with the tribe of phone-book memorizers, and exacts nothing more constraining in return than a foreplay-session or two of lip-service to the Winfreyean- feminine pseudo-virtues of “emotional intelligence” and fashion sense (i.e., practical knowledge of the formula F = B * O / A[4]).  The inappositeness of attributing such a weenie-friendly condition to Gould can perhaps be most succinctly expressed in the statement that Glenn Gould had not a whiff of weeniehood about him, that indeed if any person ever had a just title to the sobriquet of Antiweenie it was he.  But in the interest of both upping the anti (sic) and accentuating the positive for a change, I prefer to refer to Gould by way of another handle, the Archurbanite, which is to say, the person who most nearly perfectly embodies and exemplifies that by-now almost universally unintelligible quality known—or, rather, mostly unknown—as urbanity.  Where the weenie is incessantly importunate, the urbane man is a paragon of tact who takes the most exacting pains to avoid either mentioning or seeming to elicit mention of any state of affairs that his interlocutor would prefer to be passed over in silence.  (For proof of Gould’s mastery of the virtue of tact, one need only refer to his corpus of interviews of fellow-musicians and others associated with music; to those with, for example, Arnold Schoenberg’s widow Gertrud, a dourly shy woman obviously unused to holding forth at length on demand; and with the flamboyant octogenarian conductor Leopold Stokowski, brimming over with affected foreignisms and fatuous speculations about the solar system at which Gould manfully forbears to smile.)  Where the weenie is pedantic, the urbanite is judicious, making and citing distinctions only when they are needed for the purposes of the discussion, and gently, tactfully dismissing gratuitous distinctions made or referenced by others.  In short/at last: if weenies, the antitheses of urbanites, are at best dubiously autistic, then the very notion of autistic urbanity is positively oxymoronic, and one might as well talk of emasculating Don Juan by rechristening him Don Piccolocazzo, or cutting the ISM Meter Rod in Paris down to size by calling it “the Inch Rod,” as of “humanizing” the archurbanite Glenn Gould by bestowing on him a posthumous diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome.

In 2005, in a Washington Post article commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Gould’s first U. S. gig, Tim Page found occasion to allude to the Gouldian-Aspergerian diagnosis. “It has been suggested,” he wrote, “that Gould may have had a touch of autism—he was profoundly uncomfortable with most physical contact and demanded, throughout his life, the psychological safety of unbroken routines whenever possible.  But we live in an era that has placed too much emphasis on diagnosis. Perhaps Gould's first biographer, Geoffrey Paysant, came closer to the truth when he called Gould an ‘exceedingly
superior person, friendly and considerate. He is not really an eccentric, nor is he egocentric. Glenn Gould is a person who has found out how he wants to live his life and is doing precisely that.’  And it is that person—with his “exceedingly superior” artistry—that we celebrate today.”  In spirit and gist this passage is roundly dismissive of the notion of Gould as Aspie.  But the careful eye will detect a fair amount of hedging.  Page writes that “our era places too much emphasis on diagnosis,” thereby leaving open the possibility that while this particular diagnosis does not deserve as much attention as it has received, it is nonetheless accurate.  He writes that “perhaps Geoffrey Paysant came closer to the truth,” thereby leaving open the possibility, however remote, that the diagnostic suggesters have come closer to the truth than Mr. Paysant; not to mention the more proximate possibility that, although Mr. Paysant has come closer to the truth, the suggesters are still within measurable distance of it.  Lastly, Page repeats Paysant’s attributive “‘exceedingly superior’” in front of a new noun, “musician” in place of “human being,” thereby leaving open the possibility that while Gould undoubtedly excelled as a certain sub-type of human being, he was merely average or inferior as a human being overall.

The necessity—or, at least, utility—of all this prevarication became more intelligible in hindsight with the appearance in 2009 of Page’s Parallel Play: Growing up with Undiagnosed Asperger’s.  Here, Page revealed that he himself had been diagnosed with Asperger’s in 2000—in other words, five years before the date of the above-quoted article.  Between 2000 and 2009, he had refrained from discussing his own Aspie-ism in deference to the wishes of his son, a fellow Aspie who released the elder Page from the gag order only on turning eighteen.  Naturally this gag order had precluded his saying certain obvious things by way of repudiating the Gouldian diagnosis, for example, something to the effect of “for proof that our era has placed too much emphasis on diagnosis, you need look no further than yours truly, an Aspergerian diagnosee who is both a successful journalist and a minor media personality.”  Be that as it may, Parallel Play hardly constitutes a continuation in spirit or letter of those brief remarks on Gould; to the contrary, it is very much a traditional neurological auto-hagiography, with Page himself as its subject and Asperger’s the key to his life history, a key made to bear generically mandated unlimited emphasis as an insatiable soul-devouring daemon that has left him at the age of fifty-three “with the sensation that my life has been spent in a perpetual state of parallel play, alongside, but distinctly apart from, the rest of humanity” (PP 3).   As for Gould, he receives only a few passing mentions, none of them incorporating a sub-mention of the diagnosis.  The closest Page comes to spilling the Aspiean beans on Gould is on Page 67, where he reports that “[a]ccepting the inevitable and looking for guidance” in his early teens, “I fixated on the lives of accomplished loners—Bobby Fischer, Glenn Gould, Howard Hughes, J. D. Salinger—and I read everything that I could find about them.  They were all greatly gifted men who seemed to share some of my paralysis but had also managed to make the world accept and acclaim them on their terms.”  This is perhaps metonymically charged enough to prompt an occasional Gould-curious reader ignorant of the diagnosis to Google “Gould Asperger’s”; but the Gould-incurious reader will not likely derive from it the faintest suspicion that Gould had Asperger’s.  Why has Page suddenly become so voluble about his own Asperger’s and so close-mouthed about Gould’s?  The most charitable explanation is that in true Gouldian fashion he is being tactful—that while he is comfortable enough airing his own dirty neurological laundry he is not about to presume that his friend would have been equally comfortable having his set of knickers in that pattern so aired.  But this begs the question, for if Page can be tactful enough to Gould not to besmirch Gould’s posthumous reputation, why cannot he be tactful enough not to besmirch his own living one?  More cynically, one might conjecture that in this one-time sidelining of Gould Page is trying to have it both ways, by jealously safeguarding the capital he has accrued courtesy of his association with an Aspie-proof urbanite and yet keeping it well to the background for the nonce lest it give rise to scruples over the legitimacy of his own weenie-ishly-certified claim to the title of genius.  In any case, whatever the efficient and final causes of this Gould-shaped lacuna may be, for a Gould admirer-cum-Aspien skeptic such as the present writer it clearly constitutes both a substantial debt to be discharged and a windfall to be exploited.  The present writer owes it to Glenn to preempt or counteract any such metonymic damage to Gould’s reputation as may be (or have been) done by Page’s self-outing as an Aspie, yet insofar as he can demonstrate—as I hope to do, using Parallel Play alone as my casebook—that an Aspergerian diagnosis is by no means apposite even to a full-blown weenie such as Page, he will have proved the a fortiori inapplicability of such a diagnosis to Gould, and to urbanites in general, in richer detail than has yet been attempted, let alone achieved, in the scant dozen or so pages so far publicly devoted to the Gouldian neurological habitus.

So legion and manifold are the registers of incoherence in Parallel Play that its exegete is hard-pressed to know which way to have it, to get a purchase on only one of its shortcomings at a time in the interest of speedy and intelligible demolition.  The first and last chapters present in scattershot fashion the symptomatology of the condition, interspersed with exempla drawn from Page’s biography.  In between, one mostly gets a straightforward chronologically-governed memoir of childhood and early adulthood almost completely devoid of references to Asperger’s or indeed to any other etiological bogeyman.  The symptoms themselves—whether described by Page or by some cited authority—are difficult enough to reconcile with any existing or hypothetical state of human affairs; and the pertinence of the biographemes as manifestations of these symptoms is often debatable, even when the connection between symptom and Page-ism is explicitly drawn; to say nothing of the relevance of the biographemes in the middle chapters, which must be inferred by analogy or induction.  The only remotely practicable way of approaching this gallimaufry of a morass, it seems to me, is to itemize it by symptom-cum-conjectural manifestation(s), and hope against hope that one of the feeble gleamlets comprising the internal incoherence of the symptoms will occasionally illumine some corresponding gleamlet in one of the manifestations (and vice versa, natch).

The first Aspien symptom I shall thus itemize is “ignorance of or indifference to social norms” (PP 6). For Page this symptom is best exemplified—not in his own person, to be sure—by the case of the little girl who says “Nine times nine is equal to 81” instead of “Hi, you want to play!” (ibid.).  The two nearest approaches to an actual manifestation of such anomalous and off-putting salutational behavior chez Tim occur, respectively, during his early teens, when his fellow youngsters are “discovering each other’s bodies” and he “could merely stand there anxious and untouched, looking at the ground and hoping somebody would approach that I could tell all about the actress Lillian Gish (‘The World Almanac says that she was born in 1896, but now it turns out that she might have been born in 1893 –isn’t that fascinating?’)” (PP 66), and during his mid-forties, when occupying “a senior administrative position at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra …I laughed out loud when one trustee suggested that we’d sell more tickets if we put Ravel’s Bolero on every program.”  As for the miracle that his indurate antisociality has not manifested itself in any tic more reprehensible than an occasional untimely titter (remember: he only wished he could talk to somebody about Lillian Gish’s birth year), he attributes it to his all-too timely perusal, as an adolescent, of Emily Post’s Etiquette, a book that, he says, “helped pull me into the human race” by “suggest[ing] ways to inaugurate conversations without launching into a lecture, remind[ing] me of the importance of listening as well as speaking, and convinc[ing] me that manners, properly understood, existed to make other people feel comfortable, rather than (as I had suspected) to demonstrate the practitioner’s social superiority” (PP 74). 

To begin with, in the very formulation of this symptom, one is confronted—as one so often is in the world of pop-neurologiana—with a jaw drop-inducing ignorance of the established meaning of common English words.  By its very nature, a norm is not innate; hence one logically cannot but be born ignorant of a norm and remain ignorant of it until one has been taught it.  “Hi, you want to play” may very well be the normative—which is to say the most customarily prescribed—child-to-child icebreaking formula, but it is certainly not the most empirically common one among actual American children, the majority of whom in their presumptively non-neurologically inflected social-normative ignorance will tend to advert to much less propitious material than “Nine times nine is equal to 81,” for example, “Hey Chinese” and “You’re ugly” to name just two of the many dozens of kiddie-phatemes I have collected over the years on the hyper-average pavements of Tim Page’s (and my) Baltimore.  The majority of this majority do of course eventually attain greater social fluency, but only courtesy of the very rote inculcation of mechanically applicable rules that Page received from Miss Post; and certainly the proportion of them who learn how to “inaugurate conversations without launching into a lecture” cannot be very large, to judge by the earfuls of unsolicited advice I receive day in and day out from Average Joeish total strangers—taxi drivers, fellow bus-passengers, barbers, and the like.  Perhaps all of these people were Aspies after all; if so, it is a decidedly tiny non-Aspien minority who are the authentic parallel players.

   

Now let us move on to Aspien Symptom No. 2, “a great ability to maintain masses of information.”  This is the most patently autisticekesque of the Aspien symptoms in its unmistakable evocation of the phone-book memorization trick.  But to judge by Page’s performance in this department, the threshold of requisite massiveness would appear to be much lower for Aspies than for Autisties.  Page’s presumptive pièce de resistance herein—after all, he excerpts it as the opening passage of the book—is a second-grade composition exercise on a school field trip to Boston, in which, rather than writing about the historical sites of the city, he concentrated on the roads (Route 44A, Hunting Lodge Road, Separatist Road) and modes of transportation (Gray Line 43, “made by the Superior Bus Company Like School Bus 6” (PP 2) that had taken him there.  This is admittedly both quite impressive for a second-grader and fairly weird for anyone not in the employ of a regional transportation planning quango.  Still, it must be remembered that just as ordinary kids out of not knowing any better will say the darndest things (don’t forget “Hey Chinese” and “You’re ugly”) they will also for the same reason take an interest in the darndest things, transportation networks by no means being the most darndest of them, and young Tim Page’s transportation-network obsession being far from the most darndest example of that obsession that the world has yet witnessed.  Did you know, for instance, that we are blessed to be contemporaries of an English lad not a day older than six who can tell you how to travel between any two points in Greater London (England not Canada) using the local bus service?  Throughout the half-dozen minutes of a radio phone interview I heard with him, he seemed a perfectly well-adjusted and amiable little tot with typically tottishly heterogeneous interests: the only thing he liked more than riding London buses, he said, was “maybe eating salami.”  Isn’t that cute in an incredibly unautistic sort of way?  And equally to the point, isn’t this kid’s achievement more impressive than any mass-storage exercise that Tim Page has publicly proved himself capable of?  The field-trip essay is the only concrete, detailed, and even marginally impressive testimonial of his hoarding prowess furnished in Parallel Play; the remainder are either general, equivocal, unexceptional, or all three.  At the age of eight or nine, he brags, he would “read random passages from [college] students’ textbooks aloud” (36).  For the love of fudge, these were textbooks pitched at semi-literate American teenagers, not Ciceronian orations or Cartesian meditations; and naturally from the mere fact that he was able to read them we are hardly entitled to assume that he understood so much as a word of them.  Underwhelming in exactly the same way is his boast that at about the same age he would amuse himself by “basically”—i.e., certainly not perfectly—memorizing articles from the World Book Encyclopedia, a children’s reference work with entries clocking in at a few hundred words apiece.  A truly snoozeworthy proportion of Parallel Play consists of a self-regarding account of Page’s so-called career as a so-called boy filmmaker, which is to say a “director” of silent Super-Eight home-movies “starring” his family and schoolmates.  Granted, these home movies were apparently more ambitious in scope than the average reel of 1960s Disneyland vacation footage, in featuring characters and plots and spliced-in pre-talkie Hollywood–style intertitles.  But isn’t this the least one should expect from even a modestly inventive and mildly curious child living in a house with filming and editing equipment on its premises?  And is there any reason for supposing that any of Tim Page’s cinematic pseudo-opera was any less prosaically unremarkable than the average spiral-bound handwritten “novel” produced during the same period by Page’s less technologically well-endowed contemporaries?  Page makes not so much as a hummingbird’s rib-bone about the fact that his films were thoroughgoing imitations of pre-extant films.  At no point does he hint, let alone state, that he actually discovered any new cinematic technique, some new application of the medium after the manner of, say, Chaplin’s use of montage to establish point of view or Murnau’s omni-ambulant camera on wheels.  I am sorry if I seem unduly party-pooping in bringing this up; but after all, Page is the dude trying to prove that he is a neurologically organic genius here, and discovering rather than imitating is the sort of thing that bona fide geniuses actually do (or did).  In Page’s idolatry of his boyish self’s purported filmmaking prowess, I am dismayed to descry proleptic shades of today’s You-Tube rugrat-auteurs, frenetically shopping the ninth sequel to their feature-length “masterpiece” The Shit I Took This Morning, “filmed” on a state-of-the-art digital camera with storage space amounting to a century or two of recording time; shades, in other words, of a state of affairs in which the universal aesthetic consensus reflexively translates—at a one-to-one horsepower-to-brainwave ratio—the engineering infrastructure of a given technology into “creative energy” chez every odd dimwit who happens to have this technology at his service.                 

Now it’s on to Symptom No. 3: “difficulty with transitions.”  This is probably the most contestable of the Aspien symptoms qua symptom, and it is certainly the one most sparsely documented in Parallel Play.  “Learning to make connections with people—much as I desperately wanted to—was a bewildering process, for they kept changing, and I felt like an alien, always about to be exposed” (PP 7).  Only in an age such as ours, the first age in which change plain and simple (not to be confused with progress, or change qualified by improvement) has figured as a positive good, could resistance to change plain and simple have acquired a suspicion of pathological significance, or an indiscriminate spreadeagled-buttocked acquiescence to changes in one’s fellow humans be construed as a de facto virtue.  In a more rational age, it would go without saying that one was within one’s rights to be bewildered and indeed injured by such changes when they were violent, for the worse, and deleterious to qualities that one had come to count on the other person to supply.  In such an age, one would have to show that one had been repeatedly at minimum bewildered by changes chez les autres that were subtle, trivial, for the better, or harmless to one’s interests.  But as this is not such an age, examples of such changes in the Pagean Lebenswelt are not adduced within the covers of PP, and the sole human metamorphoses recounted therein—the descent of both his parents into senile dementia and his wife’s out-of-the-blue abandonment of him—are such that only a god or a monster in Page’s position could have failed to be severely discomfited by them.  I do not think it likely that Page wanted us to regard his misery in face of these events as preeminently Aspergerian in provenance.  But in the absence of more freakish instances of metamorphaphobia in Parallel Play, what choice do we have?  Page does, to be sure, dwell more than long enough on instances of his enamorment with non-human stasis as manifested in “music that was nearly changeless, unfolding slowly and inevitably, with few surprises—Ravel’s Bolero, the ‘Carol of the Bells,’ and the ‘Sunrise’ movement from Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite” (PP 11), and he seems to regard his thirty-year-old assumption of the style of (in Glenn Gould’s words) “Most Dedicated Champion and Ardent Propagandist” of that most monotonous of all musical schools, minimalism, as a kind of vindication of his montomaniacal neurological essence.  But here, as in the case of “Nine times nine is equal to 81,” demographics tell against Page.  Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and John Adams, the leading minimalists, are by far the most commercially successful composers of allegedly serious music since 1950; their record sales and concert commissions handily outsrip those of their more rhythmically and harmonically dynamic contemporaries; and the Bolero—as Page’s philistine St. Louisian trustee well knew—is possibly the most popular piece of classical music of all time.  Indeed, “the more monotonous, inevitably-unfolding, and unsurprising the better,” would appear to be the watchword of the vast record-buying and concert-going public, all three billion of whom I hereupon urge to run not walk to their respective general practitioners to claim their Asperger’s diagnosis before this condition goes the way of neurasthenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Tell him or her that Tim sent you.

Symptom No. 4: a lack of interest in other people’s clothes.  This symptom I cannot manage to regard in any other light than that of a sop to the female sex-partners of the Asperger’s male target demographic, specifically to their anorakish version of fashion sense, which I have already touched on in Paragraph Two above.  Page obviously regards it as especially worthy of pathos, because he mentions it at the very beginning of a Parallel Play-plugging interview (with NPR’s Terry Gross) as the con half of a one-sentence pro/con précis of the condition: “I can remember all sorts of trivia, but I don't notice what somebody has on.”  In PP proper, it is graced by a more specific phenomenal setting: “I can have lunch with somebody and come away with no memory of what she was wearing” (PP 179).  Here, the gender of that second personal pronoun, in tandem with the word “memory,” conjures up an entire sitcom scene centered on a fattish woman on the verge of menopause—one who quasi-literally lives for compliments on her personal appearance—catechizing her poor henpecked husband on “whether he noticed anything different about me on the Tuesday before last—you know: that day we had lunch at Soandso’s.”  Call me old-fashioned (or worse), but it seems to me that the most momentous particular one should “come away with” after having lunch with anybody is what one ordered, so that next time one may either enjoy it again or avoid it; followed at a distant second by what (if anything) the other person said; with what this person was wearing lying at about No. 145 of the Post-Prandial Momentousness Chart, just above the brand name of the ketchup offered at one’s table.  Seriously, guys and gals, can we not all pull together as one gender-neutral mass and provisionally agree that the wardrobes of our past lunch-partners constitute a certifiable sort of trivia, towards the noble end of granting poor Timmy a passport through at least this one risible checkpoint en route to Normalia?            

Last and certainly not least, we have Symptom No. 5: an “ability to think outside the box,” or “actually, a struggle…to perceive just what these boxes [are]—why they [are] there, where their borderlines might be, how to live safely within and without them”, manifesting itself in an “imperious contempt show[n] to people who [are] in a position to do [one] harm” (PP 3).  With a bit of paraphrastic license that I daresay Page himself would not resent, we may rechristen this symptom “an obliviousness or impatience of authority and hierarchy.”  There is no denying that little Tim Page was an obstreperous tyke, or that he matured into a far from docile adolescent.  At the age of two he “already found naps impossible” and reveled in “ruining phonograph records,” as his “mother had tacitly agreed to let him do,” “by playing them over and over, lifting and dropping the big brown tonearm with my tiny, clumsy hands” (PP 10).  By his late single-digits he was snacking on “a steady diet of horehound drops” and insisting on “thread[ing] a rabbit’s foot through each buttonhole of my shirt”; “nobody could have persuaded me to abandon these quirks, and any attempt to do so would have been taken as a physical threat and reduced me to hysteria” (PP 52).  As an early teen, he fell foul of the administration of his school on account of a “fuck”-including graffito directed at the principal, and not even a plangent four thousand-word letter from his father touting the youngster’s “extreme verbal ability” and “pure creative talent” (PP 87) could save him from expulsion.  And one day at high school he took enough LSD to send him on a picaresque rampage that culminated and concluded with his screaming “Please let me in!  The sun is melting my eyes!” on the front doorstep of the house of one his mother’s friends, whence Mrs. Page dutifully conveyed him to the nearest hospital emergency room.  Taken together these events add up to a respectable, if hardly spectacular, pre-adult up-cutter’s curriculum vitae.  But they are far more impressive as a case-history in soft-touch parenting.  Why, they prompt the product of sterner child-rearing styles to ask, did Page’s mother allow him, even “tacitly,” to ruin all those phonograph records, each of which in those vinyl-only days must have been worth on average as much as a mid-priced dress or piece of table china from the Sears-Roebuck catalog?  Or why was this hypothetical fit of hysteria never suffered to become an actual one, as a regrettable but inevitable preliminary to weaning little Timmy off his godawful horehound-drop diet?; why, toward this same end, was his face never gently yet firmly shoved into a plate of meatloaf or tuna casserole at dinnertime?  Why instead of addressing to Tim’s principal that novella-length screed in his son’s defense did Page Sr. not dash off to him a telegram reading simply “EXPULSION TOO GOOD FOR LIL BASTARD”?  Why, as far as we know, upon fetching Tim from the emergency room did Mrs. Page not tell him that “the next time this happens I’ll leave you there for the men from the loony bin to pick you up”? Regardless of their age, children in their native state are like housecats: they assume that every adult human in their vicinity exists for the sole purpose of serving them.  And for all their diminutive proportions, they will indeed consistently, dependably evince “imperious contempt to people who are in a position to do them harm,” until this position is filled by someone who can cause them to believe that he actually intends to do them harm, regardless of whether any harm is actually intended.  Unless Page is holding back something, we may conclude that such a position was never filled by any adult in young Tim Page’s life.   

From the above catalogue, it should be clear to the reader that I am skeptical not so much of the empirical reality of Asperger’s syndrome as of its practical determinant-ness, its tenability as an efficient cause trumping all other efficient causes.  In other and more specific words, I am perfectly willing to grant that whatever so-called battery of so-called tests that was administered to Tim Page on that glorious day in 2000 registered some neurologically-extant state of affairs, but I am strongly averse to conceding that a biography that was in its essential points identical to that presented in Parallel Play could not have been written by someone of a neurological constitution radically different from that of Tim Page.  In its essential points, Page’s story is that of a clever but by no means brilliant child who, because his parents were not interested in teaching it to him, was compelled to learn on his own the lesson that his intelligence did not exempt him from pleasing other people, including, perhaps especially, people less clever than himself.  It is a story that has been lived by and told of countless clubbable, unautistic individuals long before Bob Asperger was ever born, and it will doubtless continue to be lived by and told of legions more long after all flavors and magnitudes of autism have been banished by international legal fiat from the human genetic code.  If Tim Page had seen fit to make Parallel Play follow the lineaments of this classic plot (which was, after all, good enough for the likes of Sophocles and Shakespeare), it might have made for an absorbing and instructive read.  Instead, strapped as he is throughout into the driver’s seat of the brand new Big Wheel that is his Asperger’s diagnosis, he is obliged to divide his time unequally, exclusively, and offensively between serving as his own full-throated and enthusiastic (albeit nominally apologetic) Stentor and fulsomely (albeit less convincingly) mopping, mowing, and scraping to the community of the stupid.  In my capacity as someone other than Tim Page, I am merely entitled to yawn without comment on the first of these performances; but in my capacity as a fellow clever person I am not only entitled but positively obliged to demur at length to the second of them, as I am whenever someone shits (please forgive me, reader, for shifting to a coarser metaphor) ad libitum on the intellect. I am obliged, for example, to rush to the defense of the intellect of Page’s father, when Tim disparagingly writes that his old man “found it easier to convey deep feeling in carefully crafted words than in any sort of spontaneous verbal expression” (PP 25), knowing full well as I do that every human being I have ever met or heard tell of has been troubled by an equally perceptible inferiority of his powers of expression in the so-called heat of the moment to those he subsequently enjoys in the so-called coolness of deliberation.  If—and this is a highly debatable “if” anyhow—stupid people seem be more spontaneously eloquent than clever ones, this is only because the gap between what they are capable of saying off the cuff and what they are capable of saying when they are afforded the leisure to compose their thoughts is much smaller.  Pressed to defend his son at a PTA meeting, the actual intelligent Ellis Page, like his counterfactual stupid counterpart, might have screamed nothing more articulate than “You done done my child a heap o’ wrong, Mr. Principal!,” but in a four-thousand word letter the stupid elder Page would have been unable to do anything but iterate this sentiment 444 times.  Similarly wrongheaded is (young) Page’s hand-wringing confession that “to this day, if you put me behind a busy sales counter, a meltdown would be imminent, for I can’t easily read new faces and shifting attention from one unfamiliar person to another overwhelms me,” (PP 176) implying as it does, as a kind of sop to the stupid, that customer service requires a specific kind of genius different from but equal in merit to that needed for literary production.   The aforesaid “meltdown” is not only an “imminent” but an actual experience for every supermarket cashier or call-center or fast food drive-through attendant, however garrulous and people-loving he she may be, during his or her first hours at the job; but with time, as a greater and greater portion of the job becomes habitual, even the surliest and most unclubbable people in such positions manage to recover from this purportedly cataclysmic event.  It is not the quasi or even fully autistic who have the most trouble holding down customer service jobs, but the lazy, the unpunctual, and undependable—those most signally lacking in the Aspergerian virtues, such as they are.  Thus, the typical customer service worker is someone of no specific neurological complexion who either lacks the aptitude, experience, and patience to engage in some higher-brow occupation; or who, in spite of such qualities has not managed to produce anything that people are willing to remunerate him for—at least not for more than, say, 1.4 times the minimum wage.  If Tim Page elected to become the music critic of the Washington Post rather than Cashier No. 478 at the Storrs, Connecticut Wal Mart, it was presumably because the job at the newspaper paid at least a bit better than the one at the discount retailer and bade fair to eventuate in something a bit more gratifying than a crate of Cashier of the Month certificates and a case of terminal lumbago; and I daresay if the newspaper job hadn’t panned out—as I suspect it would not have done had he not had the good fortune to meet both Glenn Gould and Philip Glass—he would have had no trouble either filling that crate or coming down with that case.

Lest the reader assume that I am one to talk, as they say—that I am blithely holding forth on the legerity of customer service grunt-work from the comfort of my “air-conditioned cell at Kennedy” where I am pulling in ninety thou a year by keeping some “bastard” of a dead poet “on the skids” of a biography or critical study—let me inform him that I, like Page, had my Jeffersonian turn at the bat of remunerative brainplay, during a period when I, too, flattered myself that I was organically not cut out to work in customer service; and for all that turn I have now been earning my tägliches Brot in the CS industry without a single interruption of employment (touch “would”) for over a decade, an interval that has left me with the melancholy certainty that my life is being spent in a perpetual state of perpendicular work, athwart, but distinctly amidst, the rest of humanity.  In my case, the turn took the form of a half-baked theory that the anus rather than the vagina was the natural kipping-out spot for the tensed yard or erect penis, and that accordingly every last man, woman, and child who had ever lived was the product of incompetent marksmanship.  I had matriculated at the preeminent institution for the inculcation and dissemination of this theory, and if I had been able to persuade myself that it was fully baked, I would not improbably at this date be the ninth-most eligible bachelor in Bismarck or Las Cruces or whichever sub-provincial trouette hosted the fourth-tier college or university at which I would be assistant (or perhaps even associate) professor of English.  To be sure, it would not have been half as romantic a position as that of music critic for the Washington Post; but on the other hand, I imagine traipsing through the inexhaustible entirety of the western literary canon armed with a pair of anus-spotting binoculars would become tiresome less quickly than alternately eulogizing one indistinguishable autotympanectomy-inducing Philip Glass opus after another and trotting out the same butcher’s half-dozen mothballed Glenn Gould anecdotes on every Gould anniversary year.  Not that I even suspect that this journalistic bichromaticism is the best that Page is capable of, but that the whole Aspergerian gambit constitutes a pretty piss-poor departure from it, although the same cannot quite be said of Parallel Play in toto.  What do I mean in those last two gnomic and irritatingly coyly potentially mutually contradictory clauses?  Why, merely that occasionally in PP, Page lets slip some fragment of prose that obviously bears no relation to his Aspergerian case history—that cannot, indeed, be assimilated, however willfully to a case history of any kind.  This is not to say of such fragments that they are always unassimilable to some other, equally scornworthy, genre of history; indeed perhaps the better part of them would have creditably served as voiceover tracks to The Wonder Years or any other audiovisual treatment of the by-now quadragenerean topos of growing up in the quietest, tranquillest town in America during the turbulent, troubled sixties.  But even these passages, for all their superbanality, at least bespeak a desire on Page’s part to find a more redeemable telos for his experience than self-affiliation with a neuronerdial subculture.  Better are the moments when, insouciantly heedless the of pop-psychiatric demand for matoority, Page evinces a kind of Rabelaisian earthiness of humor, e.g., “I can understand why you don’t take [LSD],” she said, with the tone of someone who had just been handed a warm turd” (PP 107); and a parody of the Brady Bunch theme song containing the tercet “All of them had hair of gold/like their mother/The youngest one had balls” (PP 119).  Equally meritorious are two occasions on which he is free-spirited enough to give a hearty two-finger salute to the medical anathematization of chemical dependency, first in praising “the liberating effects of alcohol” (PP 109) in his capacity as “an enthusiastic drinker” (PP 110), and then in including Valium in his list of acknowledgments.  But the best bit is unencumbered by any intrinsically Pagean baggage whatsoever, and reads as follows:  

Mine was the last generation to inhabit a time when old films, old photographs, and old recordings inescapably looked and sounded just as old as they were.  Setting aside any fashion considerations, pictures of my grandparents or even my parents in their youth seemed to originate in another world—the big, cardboard-like prints, the formal poses, the mezzotints.  Snapshots from the 1950s and the 1960s looked somewhat better but were mostly over- or underexposed, and home movies were brief, silent, fuzzy, and fragmented.  But I grew up as media grew up, and by the time video recording was easily accessible to consumers, in the 1980s, life could be preserved pretty much as it happened (PP 47).

This single half-paragraph could serve as the germ of a book five times the length of Parallel Play and worth every strike of the multiplication key, a book that I myself (moderately clever minds think alike!) have thought about writing, a book on the evanescence of technologically-induced historical decay.  Naturally enough, my own thoughts on this phenomenon have not corresponded letter-for-letter with Page’s: I am inclined, for instance, to quibble with him over the notion of anything’s looking or sounding “just as old as it [is]”—for surely the old-lookingness of a given representation increases or decreases with the historically variable transience or relative permanence of the representing medium; such that, for instance, whereas any silent movie would have looked hopelessly antediluvian to any five-year-old earthling of 1932, the figures in a well-preserved Byzantine mosaic of 1150 would probably not have seemed particularly old-fashioned to a Constantinopolitan of 1350.  (We can discuss this at length over Resurrections at the Brewer’s Art sometime if you’re still residing in the area, Tim.)  I would also move back the moment when life began to be “preservable pretty much as it happened” by at least a decade and-a-half, to the advent of purely digital home video recording; but this may be because, being eighteen years Page’s junior, I am not quite old enough to remember a time when Super 8 was the state-of-the-art recording medium and therefore to mistake VHS’s improvements on it for perfections of it (just as for all I know I am equally mistaken in attributing mimetic immaculateness to high-definition digital video [the question of the extent to and manner in which one’s perception of technical improvements is mediated by one’s historical position is not the least exigent one facing the would-be author of such a book]).   As the reader will have perceived, I could go on for hours on this subject, but unfortunately I can’t go on about it for a minute longer here because it happens not to coincide with the subject of Parallel Play, i. gratuitously e., Asperger’s.  But when all is said and done, in the final analysis, am Arsch, Asperger’s is simply not a very good fit, as they say, for Tim Page.  The very identity of his arch-pet obsession, the cinema, bespeaks an orientation to the world that is far too social to be more than quasi-autistic, inasmuch as more nearly inevitably than any other artistic medium, movies are about people.  On the other hand, of course, it should be evident from what I have said of it already that the book that I hope Page still has it in him to write—the book not so much outlined as hinted at, in 90%-conjectural Australopithecus-skeletal fashion, by the best parts of Parallel Play—could hardly ever turn out to be a retread of Hollywood Confidential, indeed that it could hardly ever turn out to be a classic of any version of cinema-buffery.  It would perforce be difficult to classify, and require Page to plumb the whole oilfield of his interests—from cinema to music to literature to history to you (i.e., Tim) name it—at the hazard of being called pretentious, dilettantish, chicken-thieving, or downright incompetent; require him, in other words, to be a bit more like a certain famous dead Canadian who was neither Raymond Massey nor John Candy.  It would also, in appealing to neither professional academics nor amateurs of any given cultural field, be most unlikely to sell well, or even to attract much in the way of a so-called cult readership.  What, then, would be the point of writing it?  Well, were I in Tim’s shoes, the answer to this question would be simple: It would have done Glenn proud.  But I suspect, alas, that the idea of Glenn held by the Tim who is actually in Tim’s shoes has precious little in common with my own.                        

  

[1] Of course, if he had asked to borrow a suit I would have offered him the usufruct of my weenie-pellent charcoal-and-black houndstooth late-90s three plastic-button two-piecer.

[2] “Served…pederast”: a necessary ironic intensification of the obvious but cavalierly overused “suffer,” which legitimately governs only objects of which the subject would unreservedly wish to be disburdened.

[3] Now is as good a place as any in which to mention (as if it needed mentioning) that weenies are all men.

[4] “F = B * O/A,” where F= findworthiness, B=brand name prestige quotient, O=original price, and A=actual price

[5] Now is as good a place as any in which to mention (as if it needed mentioning) that weenies are all men.

A Translation of Two Essays on Shakespeare by Ludwig Börne

For Michael Goldfarb

I

Shakespeare's Hamlet

Among those of the English poet's plays that do not unfold within the context of British history or legend, Hamlet is the only one set on northern soil and under northern skies.  Qua natural historian, Shakespeare fully understood and paid due heed to the matter of pairing each nation he treated of with the climate best suited to it.  To the parti-colored sallies of mirth, to the streaming effusions of joy, to peremptory passions, to clear and sharply circumscribed actions, he bequeathed the sunny, azure-vaulted south, where night is but a dormant day; the wistful, brooding, dreamy Hamlet he set in a land of fog and long nights, under an overcast sky, in a region where day is but an insomniac night.  From the beginning, this tragedy holds us captive as inmates of the dank prison of nature, and we are refreshed, as by a ray of sunlight shining through a chink in the wall, when we encounter in its course—as we do on one occasion apiece—the warmth of the name "Rome," and the brightness of "France."

The most exacting connoisseurs of the drama, together with the Bard's most ardent champions, have maintained that Hamlet is his masterpiece.  We must test the limits of this assertion.  Hamlet is not the most admirable of Shakespeare's works, but Shakespeare is at his most admirable in Hamlet.  To wit: we marvel at exceptional ability not when it begins to become effectual, but when it ceases to remain so; for it is from its persistence alone that an ability derives its greatness.  Such is the case here.  We travel the full length of the poet's shining path and, having reached the goal of our admiration, we turn round and make our weary way back towards our starting point, only to encounter Hamlet en route, to our great surprise.  Shakespeare was obliged to redouble his steps; he was obliged to step outside himself in order to call this play into being, and in so doing he overtook himself.  I say this not in the hyperbole of encomiastic rhetoric, but rather in the coolness of deliberation.  Hamlet is a colony of Shakespeare's mind that is situated at a different latitude, possessed of a different natural history, and governed by completely different laws from those of the mother country.  Shakespeare is a nature-worshiper, a shaman of nature-worship.  His God is a manifest God; the reflection of the world in the mind of man is his shamanistic wisdom.  Whatever he may show us—heaven and earth, hell and paradise, life and death—he allows it to take the form of a genial human face.  Everything breathes, everything lives, and death is merely the ledger wherein are recorded the credits and debits of life.  Hamlet is completely different; in it everything is mystical.  Everywhere else, heroism is at center stage; in Hamlet dim-witted ingenuity remains in the background.  In Hamlet resides the nocturnal side, the feminine essence, of life; the receptive, the parturient; in Hamlet we hear the labor pains of creation.  Elsewhere in Shakespeare philosophy appears on the scene and takes shape as experience; in Hamlet, experience vanishes, and philosophy ascends to the cloudy skies as vapor.  All other characters are concave and constitute points of focus; Hamlet is the only convex character, the only one whose rays diverge.  Elsewhere everything, however abominable, however execrable it may be, appears in the light of day.  In Hamlet even the jokes appall, for they are blenched by moonlight.  The ghost of the murdered king is hardly the most terrifying apparition in the play; he shows himself at night, in that tenebrous residence of spirits, where we are but unassuming guests.  Much more shocking is the daytime ghost at large in our own house—the ghost of young Hamlet.

Shakespeare is a king, and he is not subject to laws.  If he were like anybody else, one could get away with saying, "Hamlet is a lyrical character, he resiles from all dramatic structuring; Hamlet is the Unthing that is worse than death; he is the Unborn."  But this is Shakespeare!  We must obey him and hold our peace.

Over the canvas hangs a veil.  We would like to pull it away to contemplate the painting more closely, but the veil itself is painted.  The proximity of the eye must compensate for the dimness of the light.  We first take a look around the neighborhood of our hero of suffering.  Hamlet is not the central point, we must make him into one; we intend first to trace his circle and only then to set him inside it.  But above all we shall manfully fortify ourselves against the error that so often worsts us in life as it does in the theater.  In life we judge people by their reputations; in the theatre we believe in the figures portrayed there without scrutinizing everything said and thought about them by the virtuous members of the dramatis personae.  This is not the right way of going about it; we must observe them and analyze then on our own.  Hamlet is hardly as noble and likeable as he appears in the eyes of his sweetheart; the king is not by a long shot as worthless as Hamlet's aspersions against him suggest; indeed, we cannot but be seriously mistaken in our preference of the good nephew to the evil uncle.

The scene is a northern court, half clad in the unwrought iron of ancient times, half in the ordinary cloth worn by the heroes of our own day, who use their swords to cut quills backstage.  The rust of politics is already beginning to mottle the army's stable.  Straight flights of stairs and tortuous passageways [are laid out] in parallel; barbaric rudeness converges with civilized flattery.  The courtiers have already caught the scent of the eighteenth century and know where the rub is.  We have intelligence enough, but are lacking in spirit, in wit, and in breeding.  The two students, Hamlet and Horatio, are [oral] oracles, and their book-learned erudition is bottled up inside them.  The jokes are somewhat loutish and bawdy; the pricking out of the meter is characteristic of the jousting exercises of the literati of that age.  The people are revolting: the queen addresses them as "You false Danish dogs."

The king has murdered his brother, married his brother's sister, and crowned himself.  He is uncommunicative; we cannot see into his breast, but it would appear that he is sincerely devoted to the queen, and we are allowed to believe that his love is older than his ambition and his crime.  He has done the deed; he has sold his soul to the infernal powers, but he is aware of how much he owes; he knows how much he has spent and also how much he has obtained.  The king is just like the rest of Shakespeare's villains, in that—to put it in good, old-fashioned pedestrian terms—his morals are none too sound.  It is hard to hold a proper grudge against any of Shakespeare's villains; they are not bad for their own sakes alone; they bear on their foreheads the mark of Cain, the title-page of mankind's book of sins, which page is not answerable for the contents that are betokened by it.  The king, after his great offence, does no further evil than is needful to his own self-interest and security, and even that not until he is as close as can be to both danger and the means of avoiding it.  Even when he is harmful, he is unmoved by untoward suspicion of being done harm to by others.  He is extremely patient, extremely forbearing, towards Hamlet, whose true frame of mind he and he alone manages to discern, the first time he observes him in secret.  He is a noble spirit who allows his ignoble conscience to confide in him only at moments of silent seclusion.  On one occasion, he is overwhelmed by this conscience and bends his sinewy knees before God; we are moved, and it pains us that he cannot manage to pray, and that his sense of guilt is not outweighed by his capacity to repent.  He is a grand seigneur, both awe-inspiring and politically shrewd, both eloquent and good-natured.  He treats the old and no longer-serviceable Polonius with genuine respect, Laertes and the other courtiers with ingratiating consideration.  Like his countrymen he drinks heartily; it comes naturally to him, and for political reasons he makes no secret of it.  He has a truly miraculous presence of mind that never fails him.  It is not because he cannot quell his inner tumult that he abruptly walks out of Hamlet's play, for if that were the problem, he would have left immediately after the dumb-show, which could not but have made an overwhelming first impression on him.  He withdraws only to save himself, for he fears that this play will have a very serious ending, and that Hamlet's unstinting sentence will be all too summarily executed.  In this he misjudges Hamlet; he fails to consider that a man of strength who has firmly resolved to do something never makes threats.  His pacific equanimity and regal bearing are unruffled by Laertes's invasion of the palace at the head of a rebellious mob; by Hamlet's unexpected homecoming and frustration of his plans; by the slumping to the floor of the poisoned queen, whose unconsciousness he explains away as an attack of nerves induced by the sight of blood; and even by his own descent into death, whose irremediability he dissembles in calling for help.  In this final, terrible moment, on the verge of death, the king does not forsake his fellow human beings, grateful as he is for the sacrifices that they have made.  They escort him across the border into the next world, and aloft into the presence of that eternal judge, before whom he must attempt to vindicate himself.  We are suffered to hope that our gracious Lord will forgive the king his trespasses; it was a crime to be king, but it was a crime committed not by him but, rather, by his nation.

The queen is frail; she is Hamlet's mother.  Her share in the crime is twofold: she purchases cheap stolen goods, and she never even asks whether there has been a theft.  The king's manly comportment has overpowered her; the lamp of conscience within her, lit for the first time by her son at midnight, burns out before dawn, and she awakes flush with the sins of the day before.

In juxtaposition with the heir apparent the poet has circumspectly placed Fortinbras and Laertes, Hamlet's contemporaries, so that his shadow may have some light thrown on it.  With wonderful impudence Fortinbras reaches out his hand towards Hamlet's patrimony, and being caught in the act, placidly wends his way to a more pillageable purse.  He keeps up an almost laughably steady tattoo throughout Hamlet's otherwise silent slumbers, and when Hamlet wakes up and dies, he is once again ready to hand, primed to ascend in broad daylight to that throne towards which he had formerly been obliged to creep furtively in the darkness.  Laertes, the reckless youth, precipitously forsakes the flagitious debauchery of Paris to avenge his father's death and is more than happy to have the interest of his impatience repaid in the form of a crown; while the serious, virtuous Hamlet, whose father has also been murdered, who has been deprived of his kingly birthright, slinks on to the scene from out of the pristine chastity of Wittenburg, and creeps forth and dreams and ponders and accomplishes nothing.  With Laertes's vociferous lamentations over Ophelia he strives only to compete; he has no desire to share his silent sorrow with any fellow-mourners.

Horatio has also studied at Wittenburg and has returned thence with a willing spirit and weak flesh.  He has been molded into a perfect Latinist and can retail all the famous stories about Rome and the mighty Julius Caesar.  The younger courtiers will surely have poked a great deal of fun at him behind his back.  In a world bereft of Hamlet, Horatio avers, he would not be a Dane, but an antique Roman, and follow his friend into the grave; but in the end he does nothing of the sort.     

              

Polonius in his youth was a clever fellow.  In his old age, he has come to find thoughts heavy and unwieldy things, and he can no longer manage to unsheathe them at will.  He is fond of displaying them, as if he still had them at his command, and he delights in brandishing the tried-and-true, combat-tested weapon.  Only unseasonably sarcastic natures will find it in their hearts to laugh at this poor old man.  He is admittedly none too well acquainted with love, madness, or enthusiasm; for his practical experience of life at court has not presented him with any cases of these maladies.  But he is equally unacquainted with underhanded maneuvering, and in his gullible integrity he allows himself to be struck dead in place of his master the King.  The much-lauded wisdom of old age he possesses in abundance.  He gives his son excellent rules to live by during his travels; he is a loving father and has nothing about him of the cantankerous oldster.  He remonstrates sternly but not unkindly with his daughter regarding her association with Hamlet, and he is never tempted by ambition to countenance a liaison that offends his sense of the decorum of political hierarchy.  And yet this liaison would certainly not have been an inauspicious one, for as we learn from the queen, she has seriously entertained the thought of her son's marrying Ophelia.  Polonius is a loyal servant of his master, an honest fellow, and no mean courtier.  If he humors Hamlet's spleenish meteorology, he does so not out of fatuous sycophancy, but because he thinks he is being mocked by a madman.  We are glad for his sake that he does not live to see the demise of the royal dynasty and the attendant extinction of his own family line.

Ophelia is sweet-tempered and as unsophisticated as the average middle-class girl.  She has been neither spoiled by the court nor refined by it.  Hamlet seduced her, and she never noticed what she had lost until, with the murder of her father, she lost all possibility of recovering it.  Luckily for her virtue, the etiquette of piety, the policy of morality, came to the rescue.  She loses both her mind and her life without knowing why.  The little creature was trampled underfoot in one of fate's broad strides; the tiny violet was crushed by the mighty oak felled by the rainstorm.

Is the ghost really as sublime as it is so often made out to be? It enters togged out in a complete suit of armor, but it seems to me that all this iron-plating is but skin-deep; the ghost's inner soul is tender and pure. The ghost's familial resemblance to his son Hamlet is downright uncanny. He is a weak, philosophical, winged ghost most at home in the sky. Such beings are like birds that sing a song whose words have no bearing on the flesh. Hamlet's father talks willingly, at length, and with great rhetorical artistry; one almost fancies one is listening to a transfigured actor. The time granted him to wander is so very brief, and he almost completely wastes it. Instead of beginning with the most important things—with the facts of the case, with his murder—he first tells of the infernal torments he is obliged to endure, and evinces immense delight in producing a lengthy poetic description of them. He wants to build to a proper dramatic climax and end with the fratricide, but this is a mistake. The most nightmarish thing about a ghost is the fact that it appears and talks; next to this, what it says and does, be it ever so terrible, is mere childish tomfoolery. This ghost seems, moreover, not to have improved his knowledge of human nature a jot in the next world; otherwise, he would have chosen anybody but Hamlet as his avenger. Perhaps this was not even his reason for appearing. He roamed around haphazardly in search of someone to avenge him, but unfortunately Hamlet was the only Sunday's child in the entire court. The ghost is desperately keen to have Horatio and his fellow witness sworn never to speak of what they have seen, but he neglects the much more needful task of advising his son to keep his secret. This son gabs and blabs about the whole thing, and thereby confounds his father's desire and his own enterprise. To be sure, the king eventually perishes, but he is targeted as his nephew's murderer, not as his brother's. The old mole was blind.




Back into this country, into this court, into the midst of these people, comes Hamlet, still warm with the air of Wittenberg, and instantly catches a cold complete with the snuffles that so often afflict tender souls. He is plucked from the school playground and set down in the great wide world, whereupon he begins to waste away. Having been brought up for a soldier and a hunter like every king's son, once at Wittenberg he did nothing but practice disputing outlandish theses and marshalling hare-brained sophistries. To be sure, the nimble-minded prince wears this heavy German philosophy gracefully, but only to his own detriment: whereas a simple and inflexible philosophy blocks only the principal veins of life, a subtle, pliant one works its way into the pettiest artures and impedes the circulation of the most eager blood. Among the arts he has picked up at the prestigious university, the only one of any use in dirty everyday life—that of fencing—proves his bane. He is farsighted enough to perceive the danger that menaces him in distant England, and yet he fails to see the glint of the sharply honed rapier-point only an inch away from his eye. Hamlet is a man who lives for holidays only, and he is entirely irreconcilable with this working-day world. He lampoons the vain hustling and bustling of human beings, who in turn reprehend his vain inactivity. A night-watchman, he observes and announces the time when other people are asleep and wish to have nothing to do with him, and he sleeps while others are awake and going about their business. Like a Fichtian, he thinks nothing but "I am I," and does nothing but position his ego. He lives in words, and as the historian of his own life he keeps a notebook in his pocket. He is all feeling, and the heart that ought to warm him incinerates him. He is well-acquainted with humanity in the abstract; individual human beings nonplus him. He is far too philosophical to love and hate. He cannot love other people, and he cannot hate them; accordingly, he feels neither sympathy towards his friends nor antipathy towards his enemies. As for courage, that bailsman of immortality—for who but a man who believes himself immortal can be courageous?—he, the son of the king, is entirely lacking in it. Because he descries the supergargantuan human race in every human being, he is timorous, as others are not because with their beady little eyes they can discern only particulars in particulars. In his mother's guilt he perceives the frailty of woman; in his uncle's misdeed the smiling villainy of the world. He is expected to involve himself in this dangerous and foolish strife; he is trembling. He is not wanting in intellectual courage, by which a doughty master of ideas is engirded; he is wanting in the courage of the heart, that heart in whose cause only its own blood fights. This is why he is audacious in devising schemes and timid in carrying them out. Hamlet is very well acquainted with the exorbitance of corruption, and his tragic flaw demoralizes him all the more because he is aware of it.

Hamlet is a philosopher of death, a student of the school of night. When the night is cloudy, he stands there irresolute, unbudgeable; when it is clear, it never serves as anything but a moon-dial indicating the shadows of the passing hours; he acts at untimely moments and wanders erringly by the light of a deceptive source. For him life is a grave, the world a churchyard. Hence the churchyard is his world; it is his kingdom; in it he is king. How likeable he seems there! Elsewhere sorrowful, there he is cheerful; elsewhere murky, there he is clear; elsewhere agitated, there he is calm. How penetrative, ingenious, and witty he there proves himself to be! Otherwise dejected by thoughts of death, when standing amidst the graves he becomes our consoler. While he scoffingly belittles life as a dream, he also scornfully disparages death as nothing.  In the churchyard he is not weak—[and] who[, after all,] is strong in the face of death? In the churchyard, all power, all merit ends; there all calculation, all appraisal, all contumely, every comparison, ceases. There Hamlet is suffered to forget his father’s command without rebuke; there he need not avenge his father’s death. Is he required to drag on to the scaffold a felon who is in the midst of the last throes of a mortal illness? How barbarous! To slay a man who is within sight of death—how risible, and what a manifestation of childish impatience! One might as well expect a snail to overtake a windward squall!

In this iniquitous world, virtue must be forceful if it is to be effectual; it must be presumptuous enough to take on presumption, and to fight for heaven’s sake using the weapons of hell. Hamlet’s virtue has none of the vitality of violence. Such a tender youth with such an eternally youthful heart can never flourish in a royal castle, where people are born old. Hamlet has the titled pride of nobly-born souls, and he is incapable of stooping to the level of anyone of base spiritual constitution. Nimble-minded and exquisitely polite as he is, he will never be comfortable in a nation of drunkards. As he has shown himself to be of a gloomy and dreamy disposition, he despises and derides everyone who happens to be cheerful; he will even be a full-time derider, which goes unpunished by anyone; but on the king, against whom such weapons may not be openly brandished, he avenges himself in secret, and in the most perilous manner. Hamlet upbraids the court for its bibulousness, makes a mockery of Polonius’s loyal obsequiousness, and scoffs at the abject mopping and mowing of the courtiers. He finds his uncle insufferable, and would hate him even if he were not his father’s murderer. Intellect without character is squared off against character without intellect, with the latter being ever inimical to the former. Hamlet feels overwhelmed by the silent, placid, authoritarian demeanor of the king. He knows full well that he is pitted against nothing more material than empty fencemanship, but he is incapable of engaging with it; he has never even taken a stab at learning how; whence his savage animosity, that animosity by which self-conscious weakness is invariably attended. In the king’s presence he is shy and ill-at-ease, and out of the entire horde of scorn and spite encamped around his heart, there seldom emerges one of those mighty words by means of which Hamlet is so hell-bent on provoking the pacific king. How merry Hamlet will be upon discovering that his uncle is a villain; how relieved he will feel when his hatred acquires a rational pretext, when his aversion is transformed into an obligation! The murder of his father is not Hamlet’s true affliction; it is merely the receptacle of his suffering; now he grasps the source of his torment. But even otherwise, he would have been unhappy.

Hamlet is summoned homeward by the death of his father. In the midst of his mourning, he takes in the news of his mother’s marriage. If Hamlet knows anything better than anyone, it is that all men are mortal. But the realization that feelings—which the youth has always regarded as eternally durable entities—are also mortal, that love can end, that it is possible for a person to love twice, and to decline from loving nobly to loving ignobly—this realization grievously overwhelms and bewilders him; even his broad circle of despondency is too narrow to encompass this new discovery. Hamlet’s imaginative faculty is intrepid; it overcomes everything in its path. His uncle has received a crown from Hamlet’s mother’s hands; he has profited from Hamlet’s father’s death; he wished him dead; he murdered his brother.  Hamlet suspected all this before the ghost revealed it to him. The ghost appears and says aloud what his son has already said silently to himself, and he calls upon this son to avenge him. Hamlet is horrified—not by the murder, but by his obligation to avenge it. Accustomed to thinking and feeling completely ad libitum, he is now obliged to cogitate purposively and to act; nature has made him transparent, and he is now obliged to practice artifices and to conceal them; he was born to forbear and to suffer, and now he is expected to act. Crammed between his father’s sacred prescription and the exacting proscriptions enjoined by his own nature, he is repulsed hither and thither; all freedom of movement vanishes; and so we witness him being dragged along by schemes that make a mockery of his powerlessness, by attempts that miscarry, by mighty words that render him laughable, and trivial acts that render him contemptible; and so at length we witness him perishing in a common brawl, and all and sundry around him perish not at the hands, but, rather, at a single thumb and forefinger, of fate.

The direful moment is when Hamlet is waiting to see his father’s ghost. And if he had a thousand souls, they would not suffer themselves to stir; and if he had a thousand hearts, they would be obliged to fall silent and pay heed.  But in the midst of this disquietude, in which even we, the indifferent auditors of a fairy tale, are blind of eye and deaf of ear, what does Hamlet do?  He pads out the interval with pointless twaddle.  He delivers an anthropological lecture, inveighs like a preacher against the odiousness of sinful habits by which the primmest of goody-goodies are routinely tainted, and retails banal observations on excessive drinking.  The ghost startles him; he had quite completely forgotten about him.  The ghost utters words of fire; Hamlet burns; he is an ember.  A minute later, the ember has burnt out, and the ashes of his enthusiasm are blowing in the wind.  He plans to attend to his fair deed with expedition; he wishes he could fly; the way back to the palace is too long by a world’s breadth.  But in advance of taking so much as a step in that direction, he has discovered the means of uniting his vendetta with his deliberative habitus, his duty with his frailty.  He plans to use wit to begin what can be initiated only by intelligence and completed only by courage.  He plans to act subtly, to be politic, to feign madness.  What does he expect to achieve by this?  Is madness meant to facilitate his access to the king?  It will only make him more vigilant.  Is he trying to conceal his dejection?  He must lay it bare; he must avenge it.  Is Hamlet playing dead?  He is dead.  There are some lunatics who have periods of lucidity, and there are others who have spaces of lucidity within which they confine themselves at all times, and from them they are able to contemplate their own lunacy.  Hamlet is a lunatic of the second type.  He fancies that he is toying with his lunacy, and his lunacy is toying with him.

Hamlet begins his mad game and makes his first test move against the most innocent person in his circle, the affectionate and credulous Ophelia. There is something ineffably loathsome about such conduct. Earlier on, he should have let the girl in on his secret instead of imposing its outward manifestation on her. Hamlet’s derangement does not go unnoticed; the observant king sends Hamlet’s boyhood friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern after him to descry the cause of his dejection. Hamlet is conceited; he is playing dumb, but at the same time he wants to show off his fancy brain and let it be seen that he is only putting on an act. He will not allow himself to be pumped for answers, but he is happy to let everyone know he has a secret. The spies are naturally obliged to return from their mission empty-handed, but this is only because as courtiers they are not particularly good at interpreting visionary ramblings. Hamlet stays his course of ignominious inactivity; instead of mounting counteroffensives against attacks from without, he resists them by digging himself in and staying put. Although he is a man and a son, he may not on any account forget that he is also a prince; in punishing the murder of his father he must also punish the murder of his crown. He is determined not to kill the king by stealth like an assassin; he is determined to make a loud and clear announcement of the king’s crime and to set himself at the head of the mass of the people, that same mass that is so ill-disposed to the king and so ductile to leadership by other powers, as the example of Laertes’s rebellion proves. But Hamlet peaks like John-a-dreams. He realizes this upon seeing the players; he wakes up; he lives again. He is a sound judge of the art of acting; he is an aficionado of it. One of the actors declaims a speech about Hecuba; he works himself into a lather reciting this fustian rubbish, and turns color and weeps. Hamlet is abashed, overloads himself with abusive reproaches and gets drunk on words to give himself courage. It does not last long, and he talks himself back into a skeptical frame of mind so that he can keep deferring the moment of action. Perhaps he has been deceived by a damnèd ghost; perhaps his uncle is innocent. He will administer to him a psychological test; he will carry out a chemical experiment; the players shall reveal the king’s true colors. He gives them a play in which a murder takes place; he writes original lines for it, and he evinces less worry about his father than about the possibility of the players’ defacing his fine verses with lousy elocution. He tutors them with such placidity, with such circumspection, with such ceremoniousness, as though he were all set for life and had not a care in the world. The king is caught; Hamlet is positively delighted that his cunning has paid off; he gives not a thought to making any use of the knowledge he has just acquired. His mother sends for him; on his way to her he makes a lengthy stop in the antechamber; there, he philosophizes. He recites a soliloquy that, for all its beauty, sounds atrociously amiss in the mouth of a prince. Life is odious to him, not on account of its suffering, but on account of the things that it requires one to do. There is no other means of defending oneself against the vexations of the world apart from flight, suicide; the fear of death must be healed by death. He happens upon the king unobserved; now he could cover him in crimson, but he is praying. Hamlet intends to be inhumanly ferocious; he will send him to hell when he is in his cups; now he has a talk with his mother; in her company he is contented and comfortable; there duty and pleasure are in harmony. The ghost himself evinces some consideration for him: he is permitted to speak daggers, but to use none. Something is stirring behind the arras; Hamlet is courageous; he cannot see his adversary; he stabs the soft, defenseless tapestry and alights on good, old, worthy Polonius.             

Hamlet’s lunacy mounts; half of his player’s mask falls away, the other half he pulls off himself. The king has been brought to an extreme pass; he must either perish himself or destroy Hamlet. At this point he resolves to send him to England, where he is to meet his end. He gives him an entirely friendly account of the necessity of his removal to such a distance. Hamlet is quite content to go along with the plan; that niggling little word “no” is not in his vocabulary; he says, “good,” and allows himself to be sent off. He is thinking of nothing; he distances himself from everyone. Aboard ship, he plays a rascally trick, commits a poltroonish outrage, against his escorts, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. These young men simply want to make their fortunes; they have shown themselves to be complaisant to the king, but they are oblivious of his perfidy; they know nothing of the contents of the message that they are bearing to England. Like a petty fraudster, he forges letters with new instructions, substitutes them for the originals, and consigns his escorts and boyhood chums to the end that was fixed for him. He does this not out of depravity, nor out of vindictiveness; he does it out of vanity. So far he has never managed to accomplish a single thing; now he will do something to be proud of twice over; he will indulge himself with a single clever stroke.

Chance wafts him back to Denmark. But now he is brooding over something, the nature of which he does not betray. He is challenged to a fencing match with Laertes. No sooner has he accepted the challenge than all is ill about his heart; it is merely a premonition that he will have to do something that ails him. He shall act; he shall die. Before the match he makes his peace with Laertes in a moving and dignified manner; once again the noble swan emerges from the water cleansed of the grit and grime of this earth. Hamlet fences, is mortally wounded, and finally, when he has nothing more to lose, when he has no more need of courage, he slays the king. This is the audacity of a thief who is already standing at the gallows and calumniates God, the world, and his judge. Thus ends a noble human being, the son of a king! He who cursed the spite that he had ever been born to set right the joints of time, treads the wheel of fortune like a blind horse until he tumbles to his destruction, a poor piece of livestock worsted by the whips and scorns of his taskmaster!

Such is the lot of the fair in this world.

Much has been said on the subject of Shakespeare’s irony.  Perhaps I have not properly understood what [is meant by that], but I have looked for irony everywhere [in the Shakespearean corpus] in vain. Irony is limitedness of conception, or self-limitation. For the latter Shakespeare was too regal, for the former he had too clear a philosophical worldview: he sees no contradiction between being and seeming; he perceives no fallacy there. He often shows up life’s pretentiousness for us with a smile, but never shows up its risible seriousness with a sneer. But in Hamlet I detect irony, and irony of a none-too pleasant sort. The poet who elsewhere unfailingly instructs us in such a friendly spirit, who resolves all our doubts for us, abandons us here amid insuperable dubieties and terrible apprehensions. Those that perish are not the just and the virtuous, but even worse, justice and virtue. Nature rebels against her creator and triumphs; the present moment reigns supreme with the moment to come as its successor; infinity is subordinate to space; eternity to time. In vain our own heart warns us not to respect evil because it is strong, not to despise the good because it is weak; we put more trust in our eyes. We see that he who has endured much has lived little, and we falter. Hamlet is a Christian tragedy.


The world gazes [awestruck] at Shakespeare’s marvels. Why? Are they really as marvelous as all that? Nothing is required but genius; the rest is easy. Shakespeare chooses a seed of a given species, casts it on to the ground; it germinates, sprouts, shoots up, produces leaves and flowers, and when the fruits appear, the poet returns and picks them. He has not done any tending of any sort; the air and sunshine of his spirit have taken care of everything, and the species has to its own self remained true. But at Hamlet I do gaze [awestruck]. Hamlet follows no course, describes no vector, belongs to no genre. It is impervious to inspection, to criticism, to analysis. Just think of what it means never to forget oneself! To be constantly thinking about oneself, so that one has nothing to think about! To let that self be nothing and everything simultaneously! To allow it constantly to temporize and never to act, to allow it to be constantly moving and never progressing! To allow it to be constantly spun like a top without letting it turn! That was difficult. And Shakespeare was an Englishman! If a German had written Hamlet, I would not be impressed by it in the least. Any German with a fair and legible hand could have done it. A German dictates himself to himself, and the result is Hamlet, complete and ready for performance.

II

Shylock the Jew in The Merchant of Venice

When the women got home from the theater, they remarked that the actor from out of town who was playing Shylock had been granted a curtain call, had uttered the usual elegant formulas of thanks, and had said among other things that fortunately one never met with monsters like Shylock in real life. On hearing this, I was sincerely glad that a terrible cough had prevented me from attending the performance. But perhaps the philanthropic gentleman had said this out of mere good-naturedness. In this city live many rich Jews who are hated and chaffed by their Christian fellow-citizens. Because the out-of-towner took it for granted that the Schadenfreude of the Christian segment of the community had been responsible for the selection of The Merchant of Venice as his benefit play, he wished to say something complimentary to the Jews who were helping to fill the house. But the actor had not been permitted to be serious in this whimsical speech of his; if he had been, he would have demonstrated that he had absolutely no understanding of his role. Understanding Shylock requires one not to have an opinion on whether there really are such creatures as Jewish vampires and cannibals, but to realize that the great poet had no intention of presenting us, à la Hundt-Radowsky, with a Pocket-Mirror of Judaism in exchange for a lump [i.e., Jewry en masse? (DR)]. When heaven sends us ignorant men and women a prophet like Shakespeare, it is surely for a greater purpose than simply teaching us how to read. Preaching and teaching is the last thing Shakespeare is interested in doing. But even supposing that in The Merchant of Venice he wanted to be a schoolmaster for a change, he certainly had Christians rather than Jews in mind as his pupils.

To give it its due, Shylock’s Jewishness—this lovely morality that contemns all non-numismatic passions—constitutes despite itself a kind of genuine interior greatness, a kind of sublimity that is suffered to cast a haughty eye down on his abjection. Shylock is a spiritual Jew, an avenging angel; he has felt his way up to a height at which he is capable of doing something besides breeding interest in his own purse, of doing something for everybody. He intends to avenge his abused, downtrodden people by attacking its tormenter, Christendom. We abhor Shylock’s moneybags; we tolerate Shylock the long-sufferer, but we adore and marvel at Shylock the avenger of the victims of inhuman persecution. Let it not be supposed that it is a trifle to cut a pound of flesh out of the breast of a worthy Christian gentleman! It is admittedly a trifle for a wicked Christian, but not for a Jew. The Jew can be ferocious in spirit, but he can never be ferocious at heart; he has a pure, weak heart; he is compassionate; he cannot stand the sight of blood.  Who knows whether Shylock would have carried out the act, who knows whether the knife that he whet[ted] so gloatingly on the sole of his foot would not have fallen out of his hand with the shedding of the first drop of blood; Antonio would have been allowed to take his chances.  And what a sacrifice Shylock brings to the altar of his revenge!  Three thousand, six thousand, nine thousand ducats!  And Jews’ ducats are no ordinary ducats; they are worth much more; the Jews’ love for them increases their value in their eyes.  And he ventures not only this bare sum; he ventures more, namely the interest on it, for acquisition is more important than possession for the Jew.  Might not Antonio manage to repay his debt by the appointed day?  But Shylock puts his trust in the furies, in sea-tempests and the destructive winds of spiteful rumors, and they do not let him down.  Moreover, one is hardly deceived by Shylock’s assertion that he hates Antonio because in low simplicity he lends out money gratis and brings down the rate of usance in Venice, and that were he out of town Shylock can make what merchandise he will.  No, this is not the reason why Shylock hates Antonio.  Christian commerce in Venice cannot be sustained entirely by honest, simple, noble Antonio; and one man, no matter how rich he is, cannot devalue the local currency on his own.  Shylock is a Jew; he blushes to sacrifice ready cash to a figment of his imagination, and so he tries to behave sensibly.  The Jew also fancies—fancies, not knows—on one occasion that he is not well.  But Shylock really is unwell; it is not the scourge of trade but the scourge of faith that he is persecuting in Antonio, and in his fevered delirium he remits solid, weighty ducats in exchange for a figment that is as light and insubstantial as air.

Any actor who undertakes to play Shylock will want to get a firm purchase on how to tackle the role.  The Jew’s bloodthirsty hatred should horrify us like any form of madness or religious zeal, but it ought not to arouse loathing and disgust after the manner of a physical disease.  Shylock’s accursed avarice and the convulsions into which his demented selfishness throws him should outrage us to the core, but we ought not to find them laughable: when the Devil appears before us in the flesh, it is certainly no time to laugh.   Simply revealing the divine within the Devil, simply trudging through a desert of sins all the way to the trickling headwaters of love that rise so far away and flow so inconspicuously, gives the expressive thespian plenty to work on.  For Shakespeare, unlike ordinary people and ordinary poets, does not, after the manner of an analytical chemist, dissolve living, multifariously constituted things into their lifeless constituent elements in order to make them more palatable to his sensibility or artistic practice, and thereby produce and present chemically pure characters—some of them specializing exclusively in hate, others in love; some of them wholly attractive, others wholly repellent.  He never takes sides; he grants no legal charter to anything but a morality that never appears in unadulterated form in life; rather, he lets the phenomena of life fight it out amongst themselves and holds himself aloof of their squabbles.  The poet has done everything possible to justify the Christian’s hatred of the Jew, and taken equally exacting pains to excuse the Jew’s hatred of the Christian.  Why should Shylock not hate rather than love Antonio for his nobility?  Antonio is good, noble, and charitable—but not towards the Jew.  He reviles him in public; he maltreats him whenever he encounters him.  Indeed, at the very moment when he has need of his complaisance, of his money, he cannot manage to conceal his hatred, his contempt; and the worthy, noble Antonio, who sacrifices everything for his friend, is not noble enough to speak courteously to the Jew for this friend’s sake.  Then a coxcomb of a Christian runs off with Shylock’s daughter, who steals from and abandons her old father; and it is only upon resolving to become a Christian, only upon her conversion, that she begins to contemn her father, because he is a Jew.  Thus might a dove’s blood very well metamorphose into a dragon’s.  The Christian hates the Jew; the Jew repays him in kind, and in so doing, Shylock avenges derided virtue even at his own expense.  He gives away money to avenge his people, and he learns that gold is not the master of the world, as the Jew believes; that indeed love is more powerful than gold, even for Jews. 

Whenever I read Shakespeare, I am genuinely sad that he is not alive to enlighten us today.  When there is no genius around to narrate historical events properly, it is as if they have never taken place.  An historical type, a relation between such types, that has not been portrayed by this great poet, because he was unaware of it, is like a book without a title, whose contents we are obliged to gather by reading it all the way through.  It often happens that great ages lack great historians, poets, or artists who are capable and worthy of describing them, of portraying or figuratively depicting them.  The most illustrious events are too proud, too restless, or too busy, to hold a pose for mediocre artists.  Such artists can only snatch at their features on the fly, or they must wait until the age is dead, when they can take its death mask, a mask that is as lifeless as the corpse from which it is taken.  But for a painter like Shakespeare the ages sit still, knowing well as they do that nature has art alone to thank for its immortality.   How Shakespeare would have depicted our Shylocks, the Shylockian grandees, with their Christian ribbons and medals pinned to the breasts of their Jewish gowns!  How he would have limned the paper-plying gownless Shylocks, who possess the flesh and blood of entire peoples in semblance and who make, not paper out of rags, but rags out of paper!   How he would have painted the reprobates for whom God is a finance minister, who says, “Let there be a world!”; and a paper world comes into being, with Adam as its first banker; Paradise, a blissful [Pari-Stand] of government securities; the Fall of Man, the first stock-market crash; [a world] in which the pages of history are precious metals, banknotes, shares; in which Judgment Day is the closing trading day of the month; the god Mars, a bearish speculator who [has] sacrificed the peace of the exchange to glory, honor, the happiness of nations, religion, justice, and other such despicable things; Sultan Mahmud, the guardian of the Christian newspapers, a great man, a mightily great man, a second Joshua; the Austrian Observer, the sixth book of Moses!  Oh, how Shakespeare, that great discount broker between nature and art, who barters the specie of one for the paper of the other, would have laid bare the secrets of the hearts of financiers!  How he would have incorporated into his composition our denizens of the exchange, whom the Greeks depreciated as a “race of rags”!  Do you hear Cato’s ashes laughing?  Of what was the Venetian Shylock guilty?  Sacrificing three thousand ducats for a wretched pound of Christian flesh; at least a craving was to be satisfied at such a dear rate.  But our Shylocks, men of the combined Old and New Testament, drown the entire Hellenic world like a blind kitten to obtain one tiny octavo volume!  The Venetian Shylock was a lamb, a child, a worthy soul; and yet the actor [from] up [there] in Frankfurt says that there are no such monsters as Shylock and that Shakespeare is a libeler!  Oh, worthy actor!  History lies if it calls people Christians because their forefathers ate pork sausage, but Shakespeare does not lie.

  

Translation © 2010 by Douglas Robertson