we have that within which passes show

on the post-literate world, the crassness of language and why Hamnet was always going to be hard to film. plus! what is 'just enough internet'? and the stationery renaissance

Hamlet Reproaches His Mother, Delacroix. Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/342875

a quick note before we begin. I have had wonderful responses to last week’s conversation with Dr Benjamin Ellis about chronic pain and fatigue. He has offered to answer questions if you want to send them anonymously. I know not everyone fancies being on a podcast themselves so I’ll do one just with him for this. If you’d like me to ask your questions, just send them to me in a private message here.

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language. it is a problem.

Language, says Flaubert, is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, all the while hoping to move the stars to pity.

This is worth bearing in mind.

When we express things in words, we are always using an imperfect tool. I’m using it right now. The words we have are always failing us, meaning seeps into the cracks. Language is a janky tool we have jury-rigged together over millions of years, each of us doing our bit. There is never time to redo it, we arrive on the scene with language already there and we add some bits to it to get it to fit our immediate needs then we learn to live with it before passing it on to the next lot. Our actual feelings are wordless and vast and beautiful and when we try to fit them into language it’s like cutting up the Mona Lisa to get it to fit inside a frame we bought from IKEA and happen to have lying around.

I’m “good with words” and I think that means I just feel the ways that words fail more than average, actually.

On the other hand, it’s the only tool we have and it does the job of communicating and expressing the inner landscape better than anything else we’re aware has ever been invented anywhere in the universe. It’s all we have, we have to use it, and yet and yet, it fails. Even Flaubert, apparently, felt it as a failure. Even Shakespeare.

a lot of Shakespeare plays are about characters not being able to express what’s inside them

Shakespeare is often worrying in his plays at the problem of language, of what can be spoken and shown. In King Lear, the old king asks his three daughters to express their love for him out loud, so he can decide what portion of the kingdom to give each of them¹. Cordelia cannot do what her unpleasant sisters do - speak the words of praise the old king longs to hear. The other sisters don’t really love him, so it’s easy for them to mouth the words. Whereas Cordelia does love him. She is acutely aware of the gap between the depth of her feeling and the cracked kettle of language. She says to herself (to us. to herself.) “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.”²

In Coriolanus, the victorious general seeks election in their democracy which means abasing himself to talk to the common people and explain what he’s done in battle. Coriolanus is so disgusted by the demand that he should speak of his experiences of war that he’d rather destroy Rome than do it. “I cannot bring my tongue to such a pace. ‘Look, sir, my wounds! I got them in my country’s service when some certain of your brethren roared and ran from th’ noise of our own drums’.” Coriolanus is repulsed by the idea of having to speak about who he is, what he deserves. He’s a snob for sure, and not as admirable and sincere a person as Cordelia but he’s grappling with the same question. These boors want me to say out loud what is beyond saying.

And of course there’s Hamlet. Perhaps the central figure in Western literature of not being able to say what you’re feeling and not being able to act on it either. A man stymied by his own depth of thinking and feeling.

His father has died - murdered by his uncle Claudius, or perhaps Hamlet has only imagined that, as he imagines the ghost of the Old King who brings the message? Either way, he is deep in grief. His mother Gertrude however has immediately married Claudius. So it’s supposed to be time for a wedding party! As the play opens, Hamlet is already ripped in two by grieving, disgust, impotence. He is perhaps the first interior character in English literature, that is a character who insists again and again that the most important things are what’s happening within him.

why is Hamlet so important? a brief diversion

I would argue that what makes Hamlet a turning-point in English literature is that for the first time we see a character really change during the course of the play.

Nowadays this is something any screenwriting course would tell you to do - make sure there is a character change between the first scene and the last. But Greek tragedies don’t do this. They’re about a playing-out of pre-existing character, the unwinding of fate perhaps through the tragic flaw - the whole point is that they can’t change anything, not what fate has in store for them nor who they are³. The actors onstage in Greek tragedy would have been wearing literal masks which would not change. They are who they are. This is their face and their role, for good or ill.

Medieval mystery plays don’t do that either. These were religious plays, stories about how to live. Adam and Eve, Passion plays, a living tableau of religious tales for people who couldn’t read. In Everyman, characters are called things like “Beauty”, “Knowledge” and “Good Deeds”. You don’t get a character called Good Deeds suddenly having a change of heart. They are what they are.

You can definitely argue back with me about this. You could say for example that a conversion story in the Gospels is a story of someone changing⁴. I might point to the story of Joseph and his brothers in the Torah as a story where they’re horrible to Joseph and then after a while have learned to be nicer to Benjamin. But again these aren’t stories that focus on what is happening when a person changes, or how they change themselves. I think at least Hamlet is the first famous really good version of a story centring on how a character truly changes.

Over the course of the play Hamlet thinks and talks himself into becoming a different man, a man who can act with great ferocity, who can take the revenge he’s been wanting since the first scene. We witness it happening. The change is the story.

back to the main point, Hamlet is about what’s going on inside Hamlet

Early in the play, Gertrude tries - crassly - to get Hamlet to give over about his grief for his father and just get on with celebrating her marriage. “Good Hamlet,” she says, “cast thy nighted color off”, that is to say stop wearing this black and mooching around miserably. She goes on: “Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.” Everyone dies, she’s saying, come on get over it⁵.

Hamlet replies that his black clothes and gloomy face aren’t the half of it. These, he says, “are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.”

This is the problem that Shakespeare strains at constantly. He’s writing plays, an expression of outward “show”. We literally call a play “a show”. But the things he wants to draw our attention to are “that within which passes show”. How can we put that on a stage? There are feelings that are too deep for words. How are we going to express them in words that a character could convincingly utter out loud without absolutely breaking our belief that we’re watching a real person?

Hamlet and Cordelia are both correct. It cannot be done.

The soliloquy is Shakespeare’s partial answer. Hamlet speaks, but his words aren’t directed to another character, they are the representation of his inner life.

Later on in English literature Jane Austen’s free indirect voice is another answer to this question - this is a narrative style in which the narrator’s voice becomes very close to the character’s voice, and then can move to another character. This gives the effect in the writing that you see the world through the character’s eyes, swooping between different eye views. This is what she’s doing in that line “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” It’s not universally acknowledged at all, this isn’t the omniscient narrator telling us the way of the world. It is a voice that is close to Mrs Bennett, the woman who wants to get her daughters married off, and perhaps the voice of the local community, excited about the arrival of a wealthy single man. Austen doesn’t have to stick to that voice, she can take us flying into another mind whenever she wants.

The free indirect voice was a brilliant technical innovation. It enables novels to do what they are best at of every artistic medium ever invented - to get inside the minds of characters, to understand how other people think.

You can’t do that in the same way in drama, because none of us say out loud everything we are thinking and feeling. We all have that within us which passes show. When we see a novel we loved filmed, this is often why it feels flatter and less good. Because a film cannot access that inner world in the same way. It is being able to step - in imagination - into someone else’s inner world which is the thrill of literature.

the film of the book

My best ever reading/film experience was when I was 21 or 22 and I won a competition⁶ to go to a pre-screening of The English Patient film and they sent me a copy of the actual physical novel. I only had three days (or it might have been two) between the book arriving and the screening and I devoted every spare hour to make sure I finished the book just before I saw the film.

It was wonderful. Having just finished the book, all the character notes and the inner worlds were fresh in my mind. And of course the film could do things that the novel could never do. Films don’t have the stuff in that passes show, but they sure do have the stuff in that you can show. Lush Italian fields, glorious arid desert, perfect acting performances, the actual scene of the plane crashing. But it is obvious when you experience both forms within a few days what film cannot do. It cannot give you the inner voice of the characters, their fleeing thoughts and moods and secret fantasies⁷.

Essentially, the experience of watching a film is on some level always an experience of ‘comparing your insides to other people’s outsides’. Film is a medium which is about how things look, and the surfaces. How things look is very interesting and enjoyable to experience, and beautiful magnificent works of art can be made this way. It’s just not native to the form of movie-making to be able to address the question of “that within which passes show”.

the post-literate world

This is central to the worry about what we are doing to our brains and our society in this time when we are doing a ‘second pivot to video’. We are reading fewer books and watching more video. I don’t think it’s stupid at all to be concerned about what that does to us. A ‘mixed economy’ of many different art forms will feed all the different parts of the human self. But if reading novels and autobiographies and memoirs and reflections and essays is giving way to a form which tends us away from “that within which passes show”, there is a danger that we lose touch with that essential inner life which Shakespeare spends so much of so many plays worrying over and reflecting on the impossibility of portraying properly.

I’ve been privileged to read an early version of James Marriott’s forthcoming book on the Post-Literate Society - a much-extended and deeply-researched version of his brilliant Substack essay. In the book, James makes the point very convincingly that “watching is simply less hard work: more passive, more entertaining (superficially at least) and less cognitively demanding.” It is reading that demands the attention and empathic leap that enables us to get inside the mind of a character or follow someone else’s complex and challenging argument. It is reading that enables minds to touch.

What James is writing about there - and other people who have written with worries about the post-literate world - is precisely the feeling we get when a novel is translated into a film. Power and intensity and spectacle and beauty are all added. But internal richness is lost. It is the written page that lets us encounter the things within us that pass show. They cannot, literally, be shown; but they can be written about.

Being who I am, I immediately want to complicate this picture. Actually, I think a lot of TikToks are solliloquies. (A lot of them are utter, utter garbage, but I also think that humans strain toward each other and toward meaning and that the ridiculous ease of making a short video today is enabling a kind of confession of the inner self that would have been unthinkable even a few decades ago.⁸)

so let us come at last to Hamnet

I really like Maggie O’Farrell’s writing and I want to meet her and tell her so in person. Her words have force and wit and intelligence and insight. I loved her memoir I am, I am, I am so much. Hugely. Also it is bloody brave to write a novel about the central play of English literature, and I admire and adore writers who are brave and write their hardest idea not their easiest.

This was always going to be a hard novel to film. In the first place it is difficult for a drama to set itself up such that one is constantly mentally comparing it to the central play of the Western canon. Anyone’s dialogue and characterisation fail to look well compared to Shakespeare writing at his best. But it is also hard because the question of Hamlet is the question about the things that pass show. And the question of Hamnet is about one of those things. “What can we make of the fact that Shakespeare called his greatest play the same name as his dead son?”

The answers to that question aren’t obvious, how could they be? I felt Maggie O’Farrell - who has experienced multiple pregnancy losses herself - grappling with the unsolvable questions of what amount of ourselves is in our fiction. I love these questions. No one wants to know the truth about novel-writing (and making all art, I think) which is that in a very real sense it is not done by us. We, the sensible people who take the car in for a service and do the laundry - we, the suffering people who lose a pregnancy and bleed and cry - we are not the same people as what emerges when we sit down to write fiction. There is a relationship between us but it’s not a clear and direct one.

What on earth was he doing, calling the main character in that play after his dead son? AN Wilson (a brilliant critic, it goes without saying) says that the twins were named after their godparents and that is very interesting but still doesn’t answer the question. There are a million names. If you write a play where you breathe such life into a character that he manages to change onstage, something that has never been done with such skill and intensity before in all the literature of England, and you call the man you have breathed life into the name of your dead son, one may be forgiven for thinking that means something.

I found the first half of the film beautiful but… unsurprising? It looks gorgeous, with all the richness and lushness that a visual medium can bring. But in terms of character, a couple fell in love, the parents predictably objected and then predictably relented. The woman gave birth, the children became sick. The son dies. I knew all this was going to happen. They felt all the normal things about it. I felt at times that the movie was out for my tears, which is not a feeling I enjoy. I remained dry-eyed. I am aware from my own experience that losing pregnancies is relentlessly difficult, but it is difficult in internal ways that cannot simply be shown by having a character cry or even speak about it. It is a thing that passes show.

I know people who have tragically lost children. I feel I must leave it to them really to say how much the film speaks to this experience. For me I felt the film ended up using screaming and sobbing in place of the intense internality that can be explored in a novel. There are things where, as Coriolanus and Cordelia might want us to notice, trying to show them cheapens and tarnishes them. This is the difficulty with bringing the tender and sacred inner world into a ‘show’.

But the second half of the film, about how Hamlet comes out of Hamnet. The question of how an artist can go on from personal tragedy, can keep working and writing, the question of how much one can use from one’s own life. How much of this tragedy is mine to write about? These are questions that fascinate me. There are no answers, and yet it is thrilling to witness Maggie O’Farrell looking to find out how a person can keep on making work after this kind of loss - how the work is a necessary part of one person’s grief, and may feel deeply insulting to another. I feel her finding inspiration in the fact that Shakespeare did it, seeing that you can crack yourself open and pour it onto the page. You don’t even have to conceal it. You can literally call the play by the name of your dead son.

And in the split between Agnes and William, I feel too the cruelty in it, the hardness of going on and surviving and making it into work, rather than being pulled down into the vortex by the sorrow. Hamlet as a piece of writing that a writer makes instead of lying down in a puddle of mud and dying.

O’Farrell and Zhao’s suggestions in the film - that Hamlet is a way for Shakespeare to see his son grow to manhood, to give him the thing the little boy never had, a chance to change - I don’t know if I agree with them, but I loved the working through. The thinking through. I like to see and understand someone else’s understanding of a great work, what it has meant to them. I don’t have to agree with their analysis to enjoy exploring it. I don’t think this is a question a person can be right or wrong about. Why did he call this great play the name of his dead son? What is the relationship between Hamlet and Hamnet? He himself, if we sat him in front of us, might not be able to answer those questions. I can’t answer it about my own work.

the work of showing

If there is a dishonesty in the film, or something that niggled at me, it can be summed up like this: Maggie O’Farrell the writer and Chloé Zhao the director are in fact BOTH Agnes AND William.

The film divides the world into the woman’s work - the work of the world, the labour of blood and bearing, the understanding of nature - and William’s work, the work of making art, the work of show. In the film it is Agnes who is close to nature, who screams and suffers, who cares for the sick children and finds her son dead and it is William the urban man of intellect who draws that suffering out into art. William who relentlessly asks the actor playing Hamlet to deliver the line again, again, again, not seeming to know what note it is he is looking for or how to find it.

Of course, this was how things happened in the 16th century. Virginia Woolf’s imagined story of Shakespeare’s sister makes it clear why women at the time of Shakespeare did not end up making plays out of their lives. (If you haven’t read this, please please stop reading this essay and read that immediately. Go here and search for the name Judith. Wait, actually, it’s intolerable to me that you might not go and read. Here it is in the footnote⁹)

I find the suggestion that women didn’t want to make art or even understand art in the 16th century because they were eg close to nature quite difficult. That’s what the Virginia Woolf (go and read it! it’s in the footnote!) is about - many many many women wanted it and were drawn to the places where drama was being written or to people who were writing it because of their ‘poet’s heart caught and tangled in a woman’s body’. I frankly find it easier to imagine an Anne Hathaway who was attracted to William Shakespeare because she loved literature and the world of books and because he gave her access to them. These are stories I know about in my immediate family. Women who yearned for education and in order to get it had to marry a man who was a teacher or a writer¹⁰. That is of course my imagination not O’Farrell’s and if I want that book to exist I should write it. I understand that this movie is only about the women who are in this movie and not a claim about all women.

But now, in the 21st century, women do make plays and novels and films out of our lives. Zhao will have been the one prompting the actor to read the line again, again. O’Farrell is the one who sat and wrote, pulling that within which passes show out into the world, word by word. We are all of these things: the selves that work, the selves that suffer, the selves that write. If there is an untruth in this work, it is that what is positioned in the film as happening between Agnes and William in fact happens within every artist.

The person inside me who writes says: “we must write about this”.
The one who suffers says: “no no, not that. Try something less painful, less strange, more commercial.”
The one who writes says: “no. This. This until it is done. Suffer again for me, in your mind. Do it again until we get it right.”

Get your cracked kettle out. We might move the stars this time.

If anything gives me hope about the post-literate world, it is this. Humans are desperate to connect with one another. We all have that within us which passes show. But if we do not find a way to be understood, we are lost. So we pull it out, always imperfect, never quite what we meant to say. We do the disgusting work of turning it into prosaic, ordinary words. And we try to breathe it into life.

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