Literature and Discovery

Brian Boyd

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If "To be or not to be" is the most famous phrase of the seventeenth

century, the most famous of the twentieth, again only six syllables,
must surely be "E = mc2 ". What is the place of literature and
literary studies in a world where discoveries such as Einstein's can
transform not just what we know of our world but the world itself? To
what extent does literature involve discoveries--on the part of
writers, readers and critics--that can be compared with those of
science?

Science involves bold questing for explanation and then hard testing
in search of counter-evidence or counter-explanations. Through
proposing its answers and trying to criticize them severely, science
learns where our attempts have fallen short and we need to think
again. Literature involves no rigorous testing of this kind, although
of course writers do test what comes to mind against an imagined
audience's response; readers pit their first hunches about a work's
direction or sense against what comes next; and rereaders or critics
set hypotheses about the part against the whole or the whole against
the part. But in literature the stress is naturally on invention
rather than on selection, on imagination rather than adjudication.

That is one of its strengths. We do not need and would not be able to
test Austen's view of life against Dickens's or Flaubert's or
Tolstoy's or against possible counter-evidence, though we may assay
them all against our intuitions, and find indeed that our intuitions
become richer when we accept, as new windows on our world, Austen's
ironic but scrupulous attention to our actions and reactions to
others, Dickens's celebration of the generosity behind the variety of
things that calls for an answering generosity in us, Flaubert's cool
analysis of the banal illusions we pursue to escape our banality,
Tolstoy's exact calculus of the interplay between [End Page 313]
life's infinitesimals--its usually overlooked minutiae--and its grand
forces.

But the absence of hard testing in literature can mean that some who
specialize too soon in the subject fail to appreciate either the need
to test explanations or the power of negative evidence. There is a
wide-spread and naïve methodological assumption in literature
departments that if someone amasses evidence for an argument, that
suffices, as if evidence against were not so much more decisive. As a
consequence, many in academic literary studies can accept ideas long
discredited, like "the paradigmatic pseudoscience of our epoch," 1
Freudian psychoanalysis, and its Lacanian reflection, which seem
especially welcome because they make it so easy to generate evidence
for an interpretation, and never mind everything that counts against
it. And never mind, too, the extraordinary work being done in the new
sciences of the mind, which one would have thought so germane to
literary studies, both in terms of subject--human experience, and the
reasons why it takes some forms and not others--and in terms of
method--how minds understand and respond to words and worlds.

The very dominance of science in our times has of course produced

reactions like the postmodernist critique of science as "just another
narrative" 2 --actually a form of science blindness since it derives
ultimately from the limited and long superseded linguistics of
Saussure, and the nugatory evidence for relativism advanced by a
Margaret Mead 3 or a Benjamin Lee Whorf. 4 Philosopher Richard Rorty
is at least not blind to science, but he urges philosophy to reject
"science envy" and calls for a return to literature as the center of
philosophy, literature as conversation rather than science's hard
inquisitions after truth: a cosy lounge where we can chat with Austen
and Dickens, Flaubert and Tolstoy, say, rather than a cold laboratory
where the evidence rudely rejects what we propose.

Rorty writes: "English departments can always be made to look silly by

asking them what they have contributed to knowledge lately. But
humanists can make biology or mathematics departments look bad by
asking what they have done lately for human freedom." 5 Rorty is wrong
on several counts: science departments make undoubted contributions to
freedom (like freedom from want or pain or superstitious fear);
English departments make clear contributions to knowledge (more in a
moment), and they can hardly expect to earn their primary
justification from advancing the cause of freedom.

In many English departments, it is true, the sense that we don't quite

[End Page 314] make a contribution to knowledge, the recognition that
neither literature nor criticism advances in the way science does, has
led many to feel the need for another justification, and to find it in
terms of freedom. But we ought to admit that there are far more direct
ways to further freedom in the present than to study the literature of
the past, even the recent past, and that to study literature only to
unmask the prejudices and oppressions of the past robs it of the rich
surprises that reflect its real freedom, the freedom of the
imagination.

I have heard it said in my own Department of English that "the sooner

we get rid of the notion of art the better." I want to suggest that
the sooner we return to the notion of art, the sooner we can rekindle
the excitement of literature's discoveries, and see how they relate to
and differ from, and how they draw on and supplement, the discoveries
of science, the better.

To treat literature as art doesn't require prostrate reverence before

old men on dusty pedestals. Let me offer an example. Twenty years ago,
in a calendar of Auckland city scenes, one photograph showed a beach
front, a scoria embankment, and a man jogging past, allowing us to see
the scale of things. In letters more than two feet high, and in a
message about thirty feet long, someone had spray-painted on the
scoria wall a great graffito, a single sentence: "Ralph, come back, it
was only a rash."

Now we respond to this immediately, we all "get" it at once: it seems

not to need "discovery" by its audience. Unlike the difficult
discoveries of science, it's there in a flash or not at all.

In our worst moments of self-doubt, we literary critics see ourselves

as drudges who spell out slowly what everybody else can read straight
off. Let me play that role for a moment. We laugh because the graffito
seems to imply a lover, probably a woman, has been left by Ralph
because he found out about her rash, jumped to the conclusion it was
some kind of sexually transmitted disease, and knowing that he hasn't
acquired any such affliction and infected her with it, he has assumed
she was unfaithful, and left her. Desperately appealing for his
return, she has painted this message. Or at least that's what the
graffito pretends. Of course if this were the literal truth it would
be a sad little scenario, but we laugh: we instantly read the message
as fiction and therefore as joke. The person who spray-painted this
message knows that we know that if you run into problems with your
lover, especially if they're intimate problems--and you can't get much
more intimate than sexually transmitted disease--then you don't
advertise them in public [End Page 315] in letters over two feet high.
It's pure play: Ralph and his girlfriend and their little romantic
tangle are sheer invention, painted on the wall for the comic gap
between the intimacy of the implied situation and the publicness of
the massive message.

Like our immediate response to the graffito, this critical exegesis

isn't much of a discovery: it is all very obvious. Yet unlike the role
of reader and critic here, the role of the writer involves real
discovery. He or she tells a poignant dramatic story of love,
disastrous misunderstanding and loss, and offers a wry, self-conscious
joke on the story's fictionality, on the disparity between situation
and medium, and all within the space of eight words or nine syllables.
The writer must have carefully weighed and adjusted the wording
against an imagined audience's response in order to achieve that
economy and euphony and pace, where the last word unlocks the story so
that out springs the Jack-in-the-Box joke.

But if for the critic it's ridiculously easy to unpack a joke that in
fact leaps right out at us, it's quite another task explaining why we
get the story and the joke in just an instant, when we are given so
little to go on, not even a cue that this is either fiction or funny.
It's superb proof that the mind is not inductive, as Francis Bacon
suggested the best thinking should be, that it does not patiently wait
for all available evidence before moving on as short an additional
distance as possible to its conclusion, but that it hastily constructs
inferences that go well beyond what can be found in a few bare words,
and that nevertheless, as in this case, thanks to the writer's skill,
can be right on target.

Storytelling is at the heart of literature, yet our ability as readers

to construct a story on meager hints, to fill gaps and infer
situations, is something that literary studies all too rarely explore.
One reason we have not done enough is that we have taken the process
for granted; sometimes nothing is more difficult than seeing what's
just under our noses. Vision seemed immediate and transparent, until
attempts were made to program computers to interpret the visual world,
and artificial intelligence researchers, cognitive scientists,
perceptual psychologists and neuroanatomists then converged to
discover that vision is an extraordinarily complex phenomenon, with
dozens of specialized subroutines that we are quite unaware we need
and use.

Narrative comprehension has proved still more difficult for artificial

intelligence researchers to program, even using the flattest of
stories. 6 I'll believe computers can think not when they can beat a
Kasparov at the rapidly proliferating but after all calculable
permutations of chess [End Page 316] but when they can be fed
something as unexpected as the photograph of "Ralph, come back, it was
only a rash" painted on a wall, and can read the words, deduce the
story, then laugh at the joke they have recognized for themselves.

How do we respond so quickly to a text that offers as few cues as

"Ralph"? Over thirty years ago David Lodge, under the spell of New
Criticism and linguistics, argued that fiction was all in the words.
He has changed his mind since then, and rightly so: fiction is also
the world that we are made to infer from the sometimes spare evidence
in the words. Roland Barthes tried to explain narrative as a series of
conventional codes, and others, in the cognitive science, linguistic
or literary traditions, have sought to explain narrative comprehension
in terms of "scripts" or schemata for different kinds of real-life
activities, or in terms of genres. None seems to account for the swift
and almost uncued apprehension of the implied story and the
undermining irony of "Ralph, come back."

Chomskyan linguistics argues that there is a deep structure, an innate

grammar, underlying all language, and that without it, learning to
generate new combinations of words would be impossible. Chomsky has
opened up a major new problem, but his solution fails, among other
reasons because it makes it impossible to explain how language could
ever have evolved. But as the sciences of the mind are now showing,
human and other animal minds categorize their world richly as they
perceive it; indeed, perception is categorization according to the
needs of particular bodily cast and behavioral repertoire. 7

Consciousness begins to evolve in animals from perception and

categorization as rapid movement requires rapid decision: forward or
back, away from this predator or rival or that, towards this prey or
partner or that. As behavior becomes more flexible, in young birds and
especially mammals, play develops, perhaps at roughly the same time as
the capacity of consciousness to form elementary scenarios, to test
out a course of action before actually engaging in it. As behavior
becomes both more flexible and more social, in dolphins and canines
and primates, animals monitor others of their kind more and more
closely and take into account their shifting reactions and roles
within the group. As neoteny (the retention of youthful
characteristics later into life) in humans prolongs the period of our
playfulness and exploration and experimentation, the human mind
develops still greater flexibility. At some point language develops,
and with it the capacity to take into account not only the perceptions
and intentions but even the beliefs of [End Page 317] others. Language
makes it much more possible to monitor others in one's group
(activities we know as gossip and history), to construct possible
scenarios (projected plans and invented stories), and to factor into
these the likely thoughts of participants, and the thoughts of
participant X about the likely thoughts of Y and Z or of Y about Z and
X. Narrative leads to a cognitive and cultural explosion, and becomes
our primary way of describing and explaining our world, especially our
social world, to the point where we seek to understand things as
narrative if we possibly can. 8

In telling stories, in monitoring those around us, we are particularly

galvanized, for reasons that make perfect sense in terms of the
dynamics of primate groups, by reports of who has power over whom, who
is fair to whom, who has sexual access to whom. Here, in the case of
"Ralph, come back, it was only a rash," we rapidly jump to the
provisional conclusion that this may be a scenario of sexual love, so
that we are primed before we reach the last word, when one detail of
culturally specific knowledge, about the uniquely sexual transmission
of certain diseases, clinches the case, and shows that it's an
instance of jealousy at sexual infidelity, but also a case of one
person's false belief and another's response to her recognition of
that false belief: Ruth, as we might dub her, has recognized Ralph's
inference, and hopes to persuade him to return by convincing him his
conclusion was false. The inferences we need to make are even richer
than we thought, but they arise naturally from the interaction between
culturally available knowledge and evolved human skills and
preferences in behavior, in reading other minds, and therefore in
reading narrative.

We can now ask questions about how we understand what we understand in

literature that thirty or twenty or even ten years ago it had seemed
neither necessary nor even possible to pose--provided of course that
we do not shut ourselves off from what is being discovered in the
sciences of the evolved and embodied mind. (And I should say that this
applies to metaphor as much as it does to narrative.) 9 For the first
time we will be able to interpret the interpretation of art in a way
that places it on a continuum with science. 10

But to come back to Ralph: we still have more explaining to do. Not
only do we understand the story so quickly, the speaker and her
situation, but we also understand the joke, the writer and his or her
intention, and we instantly find it funny. Again, it is no longer
enough just to say that we laugh when we find something funny. Why do
we find [End Page 318] it funny, and why does that trigger smiling or
laughter, and why do these reactions feel so pleasurable?

Smiling seems to derive from a relaxation of the bared-teeth

open-mouth display of aggression in primates. This relaxed open-mouth
display is a signal of submissiveness, of the absence of threat; and
since grooming in primates, partly a signal that the groomer's
attentions are supportive, not aggressive, releases endorphins in the
recipient, making him or her relaxed and mildly euphoric, Robin Dunbar
proposes that smiling and laughing in humans may be a kind of
long-distance grooming that therefore produces the same feeling of
relaxation and release. 11

I would further propose that laughing at humor evolves in the same

way, through relaxation of the tension, the momentary hint of threat,
when an expectation fails to anticipate an outcome, when an
incongruity for a split second remains unresolved and so a potential
risk, only to be suddenly recuperated in a way that after all does not
threaten. Our pleasure in laughter would then have evolved as a reward
for consciously attending to the disparity between anticipation and
actualization, for alertness to incongruity, for openness to
situations where we might need to adjust expectations rapidly, in
short for flexibility of response.

Shared humor is an invitation to inclusion. It shows a high capacity

to read the minds of an audience, to set up our expectations but
nevertheless take us by surprise, and yet do so in a way that, far
from taking advantage of us, not only suddenly removes the threat of
the unresolved but resolves it in a way that celebrates our sensing
and shaping one another's expectations, not as a rule to manipulate
them exploitatively or aggressively but to reaffirm our friendly
intent.

"Ralph, come back, it was only a rash" seems for a fraction of a

second a desperate plea from a woman facing loneliness ahead, until we
realise that she wouldn't really advertise something so private in
such a preposterously public fashion, and that in fact the real writer
of the graffito is not the abandoned woman but someone unknown
appealing to us first to see the fictional situation and then to see
through it to the smile behind.

Which leads to one more question: why did "Ralph, come back" ever get
spray-painted on that wall? The unknown writer has left it unsigned,
hasn't hung around for the audience reaction, and rates no reviews
(except for one academic--typically--twenty years late). Yet the
graffito must have been painted there to be appreciated by others:
after all, if [End Page 319] that were not the goal, the very idea
would have sufficed, without its execution. But while most
storytellers either face their audience directly or at least sign
their own books, the impulse of the anonymous scribe nevertheless
seems close to the drive behind all literature: a thrill that others
you may not know, perhaps even hundreds of years from now, will
respond in imagination just as you meant them to, and know that they
are responding to what another mind has foreseen.

One last comment about "Ralph, come back, it was only a rash." If our
comprehension of literature can be deepened by connecting it with the
human sciences, especially the sciences of the mind, science in turn
can surely learn from literature. Since the best writers are uniquely
gifted at observing the range of human behavior and evoking it with
maximum economy to maximum effect in the minds of others, readers'
responses to their work offer a clear window into the human mind at
its most instinctive and distinctive, in a way that can be approached
neither in laboratory situations (too constricted and unnatural) nor
in ordinary experience (too evanescent and difficult to observe
without impinging on it by the very act of observation). Because
writers know how to activate so much in the mind so efficiently and
exactly, because they intuit so expertly just how much others can be
made to infer and respond to, their work should provide challenging
new tests for the scientific study of the mind. When artificial
intelligence researchers and cognitive narratologists move beyond the
excruciatingly simplified examples they concoct to texts like "Ralph,
comes back, it was only a rash," they will be able to look at the real
complexity of minds that have evolved to be what they are through
their ability to read other minds.

I chose to begin with a piece of graffiti because I think "Ralph" a

first-rate and wonderfully compact example of the literary imagination
at work, and one with no need to rely on the accumulated reputation of
"high art." I wanted to discuss something that as far as I know no one
else has ever submitted to a single public word of critical attention;
and to stress that although I picked an example of "low art," it makes
more sense to me to approach it and other good art as art than in any
other way: not relativising value, as cultural studies do, but
insisting on excellence, and yet finding this excellence seamlessly
connected with the everyday life of the mind.

These few words sprayed on an Auckland wall, an anonymous work from an

unknown corpus in a medium without prestige, can, it seems to me, be
mentioned without embarrassment alongside the best-known [End Page
320] work of the best-known writer the world has seen, and it's to
that I now want to turn: to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Naturally, the kind
of discoveries that have been made and that can still be made about
Hamlet after four centuries in the spotlight are quite different from
the discoveries "Ralph, come back" suggests. In addressing a play that
has so commanded attention and invited interpretation for so long, to
advance a radically new interpretation would be tantamount to
suggesting Shakespeare had failed to convey what he wished for all
these hundreds of years. Yet without rewriting Hamlet or our responses
we can discover more.

Richard Rorty may suppose that English departments do not add to

knowledge, but let me stress that there has been an enormous amount
discovered about Shakespeare and his world. Although a work of art
strives to be self-sufficient, anyone who wants to understand it to
its fullest, especially centuries later, needs to recreate its
context. The most fashionable current critical approach to
Shakespeare, New Historicism, focuses on political and ideological
contexts, on systems of power and even oppression in which,
supposedly, a writer cannot help being implicated. Through this lens,
Hamlet has been seen to reflect the Elizabethan state surveillance
apparatus. 12 This unfortunately seems to me a false discovery, since
the theme of the court's spying on Hamlet is much more dominant and
more serious in the play's pre- or non-Elizabethan sources than in
Shakespeare's play, and since Shakespeare alone invents Polonius and
makes his busybody intrusions comic, no more than tolerated by
Claudius, and parodied by his gratuitous, pompous and absurd spying on
his own son. I do not think we can liberate the present by stressing
the lack of liberty in the past; we would do it much better by
resisting the tyranny of intellectual fashion.

The most relevant part of the context of a work of art seems to me not
the social context of the time but the artist's problem situation, and
that is something that the discoveries of several centuries are making
it possible to reconstruct. In Shakespeare studies even the sequence
and dating of the plays had to be ascertained, as they began to be in
the eighteenth century. Although some dates remain unsettled, we can
say fairly confidently that Hamlet, apparently written in 1600,
followed closely on the heels of Julius Caesar (1599) and was itself
soon followed by Troilus and Cressida (probably 1601), and that
therefore at this time Shakespeare was preoccupied in his tragedies
with questions of the relationship between will and deed, between
profession and performance, and that in Hamlet in particular he sought
to revisit the character [End Page 321] of Brutus, the noble reasoner,
the intelligent and reflective man who finds himself committed by
circumstances to a bloody deed.

If Shakespeare was spurred by such ideas, he could of course have spun

a new story to embody them. But that was often not the way for writers
in his age, and as his theatrical company's main dramatist and one of
its leading actors, he was particularly pressed for time. Rather than
devising a new plot, he could search his prodigious memory for a story
he could adapt toward what he had in mind.

The sources of Shakespeare's plots were mostly identified in the

eighteenth century; in the case of Hamlet, a twelfth-century history
of Denmark by Saxo Grammaticus, retold in sixteenth-century French by
François de Belleforest, and then dramatized in English in the late
1580s, probably by Thomas Kyd. 13 Although this play remains lost,
contemporary witnesses recall vividly one striking scene: a ghost
calling out to Hamlet to avenge him.

Sources are not enough: historical criticism also has to rediscover

lost traditions of composition, performance, and comprehension. Early
in the nineteenth century Byron could write to James Hogg:
"Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high
and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He
took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into a
dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn
his plays back again into prose tales." 14 But of course Shakespeare's
name now stands higher than ever, partly because over the last century
or so we have rediscovered the principles of stage performance and
theatrical composition in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras.
Especially in the last sixty years or so an appreciation of the role
of multiple plotting in the theater of Shakespeare's time has allowed
us to recognize the structure of his plays and the inventiveness of
his transformation of his sources.

We should know enough by now to understand that a Shakespeare play is

neither the animating of an abstract theme nor the inefficient stage
enactment of a story that his undisciplined mind has encrusted with
distractions. A sublime tinkerer, Shakespeare draws on resources
already at hand. A fertile imagination, he explodes into analogy,
developing his plots not so much by cause and effect as first by
dramatic concentration and then by dramatic re-expansion through
parallels and contrasts. A restlessly probing mind, he develops these
analogies to a point of complication that makes them quite unlike the
stark schemata in the multiple-plot plays of even the best of his
contemporaries, a Lyly, a Marlowe, a Jonson, a Middleton. And as I
suggest, he also [End Page 322] developed, out of the Vice figure--the
dominant character in late Tudor morality plays, themselves the
dominant genre on the makeshift stages of his youth--a figure I call
the Verso, a new character he adds as a multiple contrast to the key
characters in the story he takes over. 15

After detailing the scrupulous intellectual's hesitating commitment to

murder in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare turns for his next tragedy to the
story of Hamlet's revenge. As usual, once drawn to a source, he
concentrates, expands, tests, reverses, probes. With the help of the
revenge play tradition, the multiple-plot pattern, and the Verso he
developed out of the Vice, he discovers new possibilities as he goes.

The Hamlet play of the 1580s remains a ghost, but contemporary

references suggest it seemed crude even at the time, and in view of
the utter structural ineptitude of The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd's
surviving revenge tragedy, it seems safe to credit the structural
strengths of the Hamlet we do have to Shakespeare alone. 16

In the surviving sources, in Saxo Grammaticus and Belleforest, Hamlet

is a crafty revenger, a promising prince forced into clever schemes to
avenge his father's death at the hands of his uncle. Surest proof of
his craft is his ploy of feigning madness, which provokes the new
king's court to try to probe what he knows, only for him to outwit
them triumphantly at every turn. Shakespeare deepens this crude story
immeasurably by transforming Hamlet from merely a riddle to the other
characters to a riddle to us and himself, from a clever hero with all
the answers to a hero whose brilliance we see in his searching
questions, including the most famous question in literature, when he
asks himself should he even continue to exist.

In his new book on Shakespeare, Harold Bloom declares with his usual
bloatedly hyperbolic assurance that Shakespeare has invented us, has
invented human nature, and has done so above all in Hamlet, a
character "far too large for his play." 17 Shakespeare did plumb the
complexities of human nature in Hamlet, but by seeing an opportunity,
in the shallow riddle the character poses in old versions of the
Hamlet story, to deepen the already much deeper enigma posed by the
gap between Brutus's deliberations and doubts and his deed. And what I
want especially to stress is that Shakespeare makes Hamlet the
character he is not despite the play but precisely by building him
into the play, by feeling his way forward, through an emerging
structure of parallels and contrasts, by discovering as he goes ways
to represent the complexity of consciousness and the fluctuating
conflict and concord between reason at its most self-critical and
emotion at its most intense. [End Page 323]

As always, Shakespeare condenses what he finds. In the sources, a

woman in the woods is used as bait for Hamlet: if he succumbs to her
temptations, the court hopes, he may reveal whether he is really mad
or not. In a later but unconnected scene, Hamlet kills an
eavesdropping counselor while confronting his mother in her closet.
Shakespeare makes the counselor, who occupies less than half a
paragraph in Belleforest, into the father of the woman used as a lure
for Hamlet, and gives this counselor, up to his death at the end of
Act 3, the largest speaking role in the play other than
Hamlet's--larger even than Claudius's and Gertrude's combined. 18 He
also gives the counselor a son who wants to avenge his father.

Polonius therefore replays King Hamlet: as a father killed, whose

death drives one child to madness and suicide and another to
intemperate and unscrupulous revenge, he becomes a delayed and
diminished echo of King Hamlet, and his two children's reaction to his
death magnifies by contrast the forces driving King Hamlet's one child
close to revenge, madness, and suicide. Whether we realize it or not,
Shakespeare conditions us for the decisive and almost completely
self-controlled Hamlet of Act 5 through our sense in Act 4 of the
contrast between the precarious control Hamlet after all manages to
maintain over himself, despite the strain and the self-reproach, and
Laertes's and Ophelia's unrestrained reactions to their father's
death.

But if Polonius parallels the structural role of King Hamlet, he also

forms an even more striking contrast to the old king. Now, once
Shakespeare makes the woman who in the sources is offered as sexual
bait to Hamlet the daughter of the counselor killed in the closet
scene, he can hardly make the counselor offer up her chastity as a
lure for the prince. If Shakespeare is to use the woman as a trap for
Hamlet--and he rarely rejects such a chance for drama--he needs an
alternative stratagem: instead of bringing them illicitly together,
Polonius will order them apart, wrongly assume that that causes
Hamlet's madness, and seek to prove it by setting up an innocent
encounter.

Shakespeare immediately sees a structural opportunity. King Hamlet

lays on his son an irresistible imperative ("Revenge his most foul and
unnatural murder") that both confirms Hamlet's suspicions and yet
harrows and unsettles his soul, even as he commits himself
passionately to fulfilling his father's behest. But in the immediately
preceding scene, the playwright has Polonius impose on Ophelia not an
urgent command but an interfering prohibition that seems
preposterously unnecessary: that she should see no more of Hamlet. His
intervention seems all the [End Page 324] more gratuitous because in
the stereotype of the blocking father so common in the stories of
Shakespeare's day, the parent opposes a child marrying down (as King
Polixenes in The Winter's Tale forbids Prince Florizel to marry the
Perdita they all think a mere shepherdess), but never a child marrying
up. Yet here Polonius, for all his fawning on power, refuses to let
his daughter return the honorable affections of a prince. And where an
overwound Hamlet charges around the stage after his father delivers
his dread injunction, but soon slows down again to agonized
reflection, Ophelia accepts and meekly carries out her father's
unexpected order, without a word of hesitation, resistance or regret,
even to herself, despite both her love and Hamlet's, and the dramatic
pattern of the young lovers who when blocked by the older generation
find their way round the obstacle to reach true love. Where Hamlet
oscillates between frenzied energy and brooding distraction in
response to a paternal directive that he feels compels his whole
being, Ophelia proves immediately, efficiently, wordlessly obedient to
an unnecessary edict: the very next we hear of her, she has already
returned his letters.

At the same time as he inverts and echoes the awesome King Hamlet,
Polonius also parallels and parodies the new king, Claudius. Claudius
has every reason to want to find out what his stepson knows and
intends, and whether his madness is real or a mask. Immediately after
the first report of Hamlet's bizarre behavior, in 2.1, Claudius opens
2.2 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern already summoned to the Danish
court, and now curtly instructs them to spy on Hamlet. But the
preceding scene opens with Polonius fussily, pompously,
self-admiringly and quite unnecessarily sending someone to Paris with
instructions to spy on his son, even at the cost of Laertes's
reputation (he encourages his envoy to invent charges against Laertes
and see whether they are confirmed or denied), and all this although
there is no hint that the young man is anything but an obedient,
dutiful and sober son, with no depths whatever to hide.

But what is most striking of all in Polonius, what makes him hold the
stage and the attention and expectation of the audience, is the
contrast he makes with Hamlet. He is all comic long-windedness, where
Hamlet's wit is rapier-swift; all self-satisfaction, utter secure
smugness, where Hamlet is tormented by doubt, dissatisfied with
everything including himself. Polonius relies on unctuous platitudes
that he sees as applicable to all, where Hamlet has an acute sense of
the particularity of people and predicaments. Polonius, in short, is
sure he knows all the [End Page 325] answers, including the answer to
the enigma of Hamlet's madness, when Hamlet himself is all questions.
Polonius's busybody shallowness sets off perfectly Hamlet's urgent and
troubled depth. No, Professor Bloom, you are wrong: Hamlet is not
larger than his play, but large because the play makes him so.

One of Hamlet's most appealing traits is his sense of individuals: his

naturally modulated welcomes to Horatio and the soldiers, his eager
responsiveness to different players, despite his own despondency, his
scorn for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when they choose to behave as
Tweedledum puppet and Tweedledee parrot. Indeed these two
interchangeables are apt spies for Claudius, for Gertrude has already
accepted Claudius as a surrogate for King Hamlet, as has the entire
Danish court except for Hamlet--who can only see the difference
between his father and his uncle. Again Hamlet's sense of
individuality stands in stark opposition to Polonius, who follows one
king as readily as another and who feels sure that his ready-made
maxims will cover all cases.

Yet this last contrast between Polonius and Hamlet also points up a
fascinating contradiction within Hamlet himself. His mother's
accepting another man so soon to her bed inspires in him a revulsion
against womankind that leads him to excoriate the innocent Ophelia. So
supremely intelligent, so deeply self-critical, and so appreciative of
individuality, Hamlet cannot see that he ignores Ophelia's
individuality, her difference from Gertrude, in supposing their
similarity merely because they are both women. If his mother has from
his point of view entered a second marriage to someone perhaps rightly
deemed too close, as if in proof of a passion perverse at her age,
Ophelia at the very age for love has quietly renounced someone wrongly
judged too remote from her, yet the very evidence of her youth and
meek innocence, of her sheer difference from his mother, does nothing
to save her from Hamlet's lacerating tirade. In the thrall of his
hysterical misogyny, Hamlet really does totter briefly over the margin
of madness.

Shakespeare feels his way forward to his finished play through a

series of stage-by-stage transformations of his source, and to some
extent we can rediscover his process of discovery. By the time he has
finished, we see further into Hamlet than into any other character in
literature, yet we know how foolish it would be to think, with
Polonius, that we have sounded his depths. So reflective and so
opaque, so scrutinized yet still so mysterious, Hamlet offers us a
richer image of [End Page 326] individuality and of the amplitude of
consciousness than anything in literature before and perhaps even
since.

Hamlet's emotion makes him multiply reasons and plans for action until
other emotions offer counter-reasons and counter-plans; he envisages
with horror his father's "leprous" death or his mother's "rank and
enseamed" life, and flies off in this direction or that, until another
vision of horrors ahead holds him back. The complexity of Hamlet's
personality, the turmoil of his motives, and the interplay of his
emotion and intelligence not only extend our own view of ourselves but
also anticipate the findings of modern neuroscience. Summing up much
recent work, neurologist Antonio Damasio suggests that consciousness
evolved to allow creatures capable of flexible behavior to decide
among alternative courses of action on the basis of past experience
and projected scenarios of possible future moves. Decision-making
depends on the emotional charges attached to our recollections and our
projections, which act as weightings, as "biasing devices," 19 in the
tug-of-war between competing inclinations. As clinical studies of
brain-damaged patients indicate, decision-making without emotion is
therefore impossible. There is no such thing as purely rational
choice: reason and the emotions are not separate faculties but are
inextricably interdependent, and the mind not remotely as transparent
to itself as it likes to think.

Always testing himself and his art, never accepting the normal
boundaries of language, taking over sources and structures readily to
hand but pushing himself restlessly to find new possibilities within
them, Shakespeare ended up discovering intuitively aspects of the
human psyche that science has only just brought to light in its own
more rigorous way, as he created his--and literature's--most
intelligent and reflective character. No one before Shakespeare has
given us such an image of human consciousness at its fullest, deciding
what to do, alternating between urgency and evasion, in a world full
of challenge and choice.

Having moved from the anonymous "Ralph" to the best-known work of the
world's best-known writer, I want to accord some time to the best work
of the writer I know best, the novel Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov.
By way of transition: Nabokov revered Shakespeare and particularly
Hamlet: he has called Hamlet "the greatest miracle in all of
literature"; 20 he has translated the "To be or not to be" speech
brilliantly into [End Page 327] Russian; and he has Pale Fire's poet
say that he rolls upon Shakespeare's purple passages "as a grateful
mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane." 21 But Nabokov was
much of Byron's opinion about the structure of Shakespeare's plays:
"The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world
has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as
plays." 22 Had he known what has been discovered by the
twentieth-century critics on whom I was building, from Hereward Price
to Harold Jenkins, I think he might have changed his mind.

Nabokov, a scientist of note--as a book on his butterfly research by

the leading current specialist in his field has just confirmed 23
--loved discovery and wanted to impart the excitements and surprise of
discovery to his own readers. Now, discovery has been seen since
Aristotle as a central part of literature's effect: in Aristotle's
terms, as a character's sudden recognition of his or her predicament.
But discovery in a new sense began to develop as a feature of Western
literature from the time of such precursors of modernism as Browning
and Rimbaud, and has become increasingly dominant in the works of many
of the most ambitious writers of the twentieth century, from Joyce,
Proust and Faulkner to the nouveaux romanciers and Perec and beyond.
In place of the immediate, conventional pleasures of discovery within
the story, discovery in a roughly Aristotelian sense, readers have
been offered the pleasures of discovering meaning for themselves. This
phenomenon perhaps arises in part out of the competition between
literature and scientific discovery, just as non-realistic and then
non-representational painting arose in competition with photography,
and in part out of the increasing specialization modern life has made
possible in art as in science. But it does run the risk that despite
literature's implicit appeal to what is common in human experience
works written in this vein will in fact reach only a very narrow
audience.
Nabokov has discovered a solution to this new problem more satisfying
than any other I know, a way of keeping the surface of his texts
relatively accessible and immediately appealing (of, in Martin Amis's
words, doing all the usual things better than anybody else) 24 and yet
hiding much more to be discovered beneath the dazzling surface. 25 He
compounds the thrills of plot with the thrill of readerly discovery,
so that in Pale Fire we are invited for instance to guess the identity
of one of the central characters. Now we may succeed in doing so at
various points in our reading, almost certainly by a few pages from
the end, when the plot all but delivers us the answer; but if we are
curious [End Page 328] enough to follow the clues, we can even track
down the character's secret self a few pages from the beginning of a
first reading, just as soon as the riddle of his identity is first
posed.

Nabokov poses all sorts of other problems for us to solve, offers all
sorts of enigmas to untangle if we wish, such as the source of Pale
Fire's title--and in this case too he gives us steadily clearer hints,
so that, unlike the mad commentator who writes most of the book, we
should soon be able to find for ourselves that the phrase comes from
Shakespeare's Timon of Athens ("the moon's an arrant thief, / And her
pale fire she snatches from the sun")--a discovery that then unlocks
another series of surprises and delights.

Nabokov applies to his fiction all that his own research in science
and literature taught him about the logic and magic of discovery, so
that although we can leave a single reading of Pale Fire perfectly
satisfied with its surprises and with discoveries that we cannot fail
to make, we can also see that other problems persist and tantalize. He
can therefore lure us back to a rereading, where new discoveries
become possible that radically tilt the dynamics of the story, and yet
at the same time he can gradually pose a new series of problems, not
visible until a rereading, that we can solve only on a
re-rereading--including what it means that the title Pale Fire derives
not only from Timon of Athens but also from the Ghost's lines in
Hamlet ("The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, / And 'gins to pale
his uneffectual fire"). By the time we can not only make that
identification but see its peculiar implications, we will have
discovered that the plot, the characters, the epistemology and the
metaphysics of the novel have been utterly transformed.

Nabokov has discovered, in other words, new ways to incorporate into

his fiction not only a new solution to the problem of making discovery
central to reading literature but also his recognition of the fact
that what we discover, individually and collectively, can quite
reshape ourselves and our worlds.

Science, like art, needs imagination, but it works by isolating

problems, proposing explanations, and testing them. In fits and starts
it advances to ways of understanding further and further from
humanity's raw hunches, where we sought to explain by storytelling, by
myths that involved human-like agents, but with superhuman powers.
Slowly our notion of causality has moved beyond agency and our notion
of ontology beyond solid objects on a humanly graspable or visible
scale.

Art keeps to the human, which is both an advantage and disadvantage

[End Page 329] in comparison with science. Drawing on experience in
the round, it cannot control for variables, but instead multiplies
them in combinations as unforeseeable as "Ralph, come back, it was
only a rash" and as fertile and full of life and suggestion as Austen
or Dickens, Flaubert or Tolstoy.

Art, indeed, celebrates combination itself. The author of "Ralph" or

of Hamlet has invented a unique new configuration of elements that
itself could never have been predicted, but whose complex effects he
or perhaps she has nevertheless predicted and prepared with care.
Science aims to describe and explain at the deepest appropriate level,
to generate the most powerful laws to sum up whatever it seeks to
account for; but life unfolds moment by moment in terms of new and
inherently unpredictable conjunctions of particulars. Art celebrates
its own novelty of combination, and our capacity to find shared sense
and value even in art's unforeseen new configurations, and, by
extension, in life's own endlessly new permutations. If science
renders the world explicable--and Einstein famously said that the
greatest mystery of all was that the world should be intelligible--art
invites us to rediscover and celebrate something no less mysterious
and no less valuable, the incessantly new combinations to which the
world's regularities give rise.

Art also celebrates what we all share in this world of perpetual

novelty. Encountering "Ralph comes back," we rediscover with a shock
of surprise how much we have in common, precisely because we have to
make such a leap of imagination to see the joke, and yet do so easily,
despite the unexpectedness of the example. Encountering Hamlet, a
figure unheralded in literature, we find ourselves at once with him
and in him. Our savoring what we share, through our common response to
deliberate novelty, underlies our pleasure in art, and is something
that science--even the human sciences that are now beginning to show
us just how much we do have in common as a species 26 --cannot
provide. Each time we rediscover this power, it comes as a rush of
pleasure as we simultaneously realize just how unexpected the mind and
world of another can be and yet just how much ties us all to our kind.

Yet artists work within their own particular problem situations, their
own sense of what their chosen art can do and has not yet done, a
sense that changes as life does, as art does, and even as science
does. A Nabokov can respond to a world where the discoveries of
science alter the impetus to discovery in art, and where the solution
to meeting the challenge of science, by incorporating discovery in a
new way, in turn causes new problems. This in turn makes possible
astonishing new [End Page 330] solutions like those he finds in Pale
Fire, which in turn, of course, become innumerable factors altering in
unforeseen ways the problem situation of writers who follow.

Once when he was asked whether he thought that art might die out
altogether, Nabokov laughed with astonishment: "Art is only in its
infancy!" 27 There is so much, he knew, for the art of literature
still to discover. And the beauty of it is, we don't yet know what.

University of Auckland

Copyright © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
Philosophy and Literature 23.2 (1999) 313-333