Nurturing the Inner Anarchist

Last week, while visiting Utah over the holidays, I met with three other members of the blogger community for what my Brother-in-Law has termed the first annual Exmo Expo. There were a few threads of discussion (we talked for over five hours!), but only two that I want to give more time to here: the issue of whether Christopher McCandless (the young man who inspired the book and movie Into the Wild) was being inconsiderate to his parents and the issue about whether “anarchism” is a realizable goal.

In an essay on Shakespeare’s most famous play, the poet TS Eliot makes the claim that the only way of expressing emotion in art is by “finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” He goes on, using the objective correlative as a fundamental criterion for successful artistic expression, to condemn Hamlet as a failed play, a play in which Hamlet’s emotions are “in excess of the facts” and the dramatist’s emotions unconverted by his artistry.

To his credit, Eliot later denounced the objective correlative as being too rigid and dogmatic, conceding that “it does not necessarily exhaust all the emotional overtones, which are conveyed, as far as they can be, by the incantation of the verse”. But he didn’t denounce the concept entirely, insisting that it “must satisfy the reader or theatrical onlooker that it is the equivalent of the author's feelings, and thus as far as necessary communicates and renders intelligible these feelings”.

To a certain extent, as I’ll explain shortly, I agree with Eliot’s insights, but I strongly take issue with his final judgment. Hamlet is a great play, and it’s precisely because Hamlet lacks an objective correlative for his emotions that the play works. It’s the failure of the play—the failure to force experience into language and a familiar story—that makes Hamlet the indisputable success that it is, both in terms of its impact and its longevity.

Eliot is right on one account, though. The play is, ultimately, a dramatization of failure—a failure, in this case, to create a set of facts capable of reproducing the intensity of the artist’s inner experience. For that reason, Hamlet is not a play for everyone. It’s not a play for the vast numbers of people who have deadened the intensity of their emotions by trimming them down to fit the circumstances of the world that they live in—for those who, because their careers and their domestic lives insist on it, have put their feelings to sleep. For that audience, art has to be jarring and unpleasant. It has to awaken.

But Hamlet is not for that audience. Hamlet was written for those already awake, for those too much awake, for those too much alive, or, to use Hamlet’s words, “too much under the sun”. Hamlet is a play for the other Hamlets of the world, for the person of sensibility, who, as Eliot deftly articulates, has maintained the life within him (and the intensity of feeling normally only felt in adolescence) by his “ability to intensify the world to his emotions”.

Such a person was Christopher McCandless. By fleeing “into the wild”, McCandless was not merely attempting to escape his parents and society’s expectations, he was trying to keep his emotions alive and to intensify the world he lived in to match his inner awareness; he was seeking an objective correlative, an objective correlative that would not limit and tame his inner feeling but would enhance and nurture it. He was trying to avoid domestication. McCandless sought the kind of relationship that he couldn’t have with his parents or with anyone who has “trimmed down her feelings to fit the business world”; he sought a relationship that only an artist can realize and a relationship that can only exist in the raw, in primitive conditions, a relationship “between two solitudes that protect and greet each other”, a relationship between two autonomous and equal entities. For McCandless, as with Hamlet, the thought of reducing his passions to accommodate society’s expectations was unthinkable. For the Hamlets of the world there is only one way to interact with society, and that’s by elevating society, by intensifying the world, even with cruelty, to match their inner passions, passions as yet undiminished by the threats and tyranny of civilization.

For these people there are two choices: suicide or revolt. They cannot cow their emotions to suit those who love them. They cannot be imprisoned, except by bad dreams. Instead, they must create the conditions for cohesion by not merely escaping into the wild but by importing the wild into civilization. They must act to embody their passions. Otherwise, the life within them will be extinguished. Though they direct their actions onto others, it is their own fullness, their own life and freedom, at a minimum, that is being preserved.

For the anarchist who has not forsaken his feelings and authenticity, the question of whether anarchy is a realizable goal becomes secondary; the real question is Hamlet’s question, the question of whether “to be or not to be”, the question of how life itself, in all its freedom and wholeness and reality, can be perpetuated. Whether the anarchist dream can actually be achieved is merely an intellectual question, a question asked by the prisoner in order to tolerate his incarceration. It isn’t a question asked by the animal in an effort to stay alive or the mother instinctively acting to protect her child, and it isn’t a question asked by the anarchist.

But it is a question that every civilized human, even the Hamlets of the world, have to wrestle with at one time or another. While most of us deal with the problem by putting our hopes to sleep, others, the intellectuals, deal with it through exorcism, by finding an objective correlative that will petrify our yearnings rather than nourish and broaden them. In Hamlet, we witness such an effort, the effort, as described by Herman Muller, “to articulate a despair so it can be left behind.” Art provides a means to articulate that despair and to consequently escape it, but, as Hamlet shows, it is an effort doomed to failure—to failure and to isolation and to existential impotence.

The ghosts of our fathers, the ghosts that speak to us from the grave and from the mouths of our parents and our teachers, must be listened to but they don’t have to be obeyed. The past does not have to be exorcised or to determine us. That attempt at determination, that social programming, in fact, must be resisted, just as Hamlet and McCandless resisted it, by insisting on one’s non-meaning and wildness—by refusing to become an objective correlative that can be owned—by maintaining one’s solitude and one’s otherness in the face of a reified world attempting to tame, largely by shaping our desires into fetishes, our natural passions.

Both Hamlet and McCandless succeeded in their resistance (or would have succeeded, I’m presuming, had they lived). They learned that the only way to preserve their solitude and their authenticity was by engaging the other as other—by relating creatively to the life around them rather than imposing their will or being imposed upon. In a sense, both learned to become artists—post-modern or Zen artists, in a way, who attempt to relate to others through experience, through untamed and unlimited experience, rather than through dogma and conceptualization. They learned to engage the world rather than symbolize it. In that respect, Hamlet’s and McCandless’ quest becomes the quest of the artist—the quest to find self-expression through poetry, through “the incantation of the verse” instead of through the manipulation of concepts and language that would define and thereby minimize rather than intensify the experience of the audience. By not identifying a clear objective correlative, by not defining or minimizing Hamlet’s experience in any way, Shakespeare manages to engage the audience without condescension, without determining them or allowing their preconceptions to determine his expression and his actions. By altering traditional expectations of meaning and structure, the audience is allowed to experience the play afresh, without instruction. As a result, the theater experience is intensified in a way that enables the audience to relate to the play, and to the artist and characters who help create the play, in all its terrible beauty and horror--as "the thing that it is that can be no other thing". The viewer is forced then to look life head on, in all its wildness and ineffable mystery, and to choose either to ignore or to exorcise it, but not to control it, not to make of it a possession. In other words, the artist insists on being related to honestly. At times, such an insistence might be seen as cruel (“I must be cruel, only to be kind: Thus bad begins and worse remains behind”--Hamlet Act III scene IV.), and at times, because the stipulation isn’t honored, it can be seen as evasive, but in truth it is neither.

And the struggle to realize anarchy, to strip experience of all that defines and limits it and in that way to create a space wherein honest and equal interaction is possible, is no different than the artist’s struggle to reach an audience. One does not embark on such a struggle out of feasibility but out of self-preservation. And the artist’s public struggle cannot be divorced from the private struggle. One’s private revolt, one’s efforts to preserve a healthy solitude and to avoid domination, becomes realized only through action, through public and conspicuous resistance. In an interdependent world, the self cannot exist except through relationship, which means that one cannot exorcise the problems of the world away or cast them outside of one’s self. The past cannot be left behind, but, by engaging the world as a creator, as one who magnifies possibility instead of coercing it into oblivion, the past can be transformed. And by transforming your conditioned self, the self imposed on you from patriarchical ghosts throughout the centuries, and by simultaneously transforming all your relationships and preserving your authenticity, you are also transforming the world; you are attempting to realize the anarchist both within and beyond you. In that sense, the artistic and the anarchist struggle, the struggle to achieve self-liberation, is also the struggle to achieve communion and a struggle that isn't avoidable, a struggle to love and to be loved without restraint.

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“I believe that reading, in its original essence, is the fruitful miracle of communication within the midst of solitude. [To read (and, I might add, to honestly relate)] is to receive a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately.”
Proust

http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw9.html