According to your ethical stance, suicide is either a deliverance or a mortal sin. Hamlet’s girlfriend, “the fair Ophelia” drowned in a river, apparently by choice. According to the priest who presided over her funeral, she should “in ground unsanctified [have] been lodged till the last trumpet.” He disapproves of giving her the dignity of a Christian burial, which he believes should be reserved for “peace-departed souls.”
Earlier in the play, Hamlet himself reminded the audience “that the Everlasting had… fix’d his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter,” which, translated into modern English means “God outlawed suicide.” For centuries Christian Europe considered suicide a particular case of homicide. Today, things are very different. A wide-ranging debate exists concerning the right to end one’s life through medically controlled procedures. A significant number of countries now permit some form of assisted dying.
Was Shakespeare engaged in that debate? A mistaken tradition, aggravated by the creativity of Laurence Olivier in his 1948 movie, maintains that Hamlet’s meditation beginning with “To be or not to be…” is a meditation on suicide. Olivier tracks Hamlet climbing up a long series of stairs to a rampart poised above a cliff overlooking the sea’s waves that relentlessly pound against dark jagged rocks as he intones in a voice over his famous soliloquy. Will he leap to his death? At one point, as his meditation develops, he draws a sharp knife (a “bare bodkin”) apparently tempted to stab himself in the heart.
Olivier — Britain’s most celebrated Shakespearean actor and a genuinely brilliant director – was, at least in this instance, betraying the Swan of Avon. That scene overlooking the Baltic’s threatening surf definitely is not the one Stratford’s Bard had imagined. A glance at the play’s text informs us that Hamlet is in one of the main rooms of the castle when he launches into his soliloquy. It ends when Hamlet is interrupted by the entrance of Ophelia.
“To be or not to be” is indeed Hamlet’s meditation on death and the extinction of consciousness and identity. But it is clearly not an expression of a suicidal wish. Translated into modern English – and specifically today’s geopolitical English – Hamlet’s awareness of the effects induced by “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” took the form of what we would call today an “existential crisis.” He felt overwhelmed by external threats, not his own emotions.
The new existentialism
Hamlet’s existential crisis makes the Danish prince a modern hero. Who hasn’t remarked that European nations no longer have simple border disputes, sovereignty issues or even armed conflicts? The problems they worry about are now systematically framed as “existential threats” requiring the suspension of all our critical faculties to support a massive military response.
Earlier this year, Europe’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas – the woman who admitted that “it was ‘news’ to her that China and Russia were among the victors who defeated Nazism and fascism.” As a student of history (principally via Hollywood movies?) Kallas was convinced that it was the Yanks and Brits who won the war pretty much on their own. That gives an indication of how seriously we should take her when she declares: “”Russia poses an existential threat to our security today, tomorrow and for as long as we underinvest in our defense.”
Let’s give her some slack. Even though she has no understanding of the past, we can’t yet prove she has no grasp of the future. She was, after all, expressing an informed consensus, the established UE talking points clearly laid out in the script she has dutifully read and memorized. French President Emmanuel Macron provided an even stronger version when he insisted:”Russia is an existential threat to us. Not just to Ukraine, not just to its neighbors, but to all of Europe.” Lisbon and why not, Compostello are in Putin’s sights. (After all Putin is a Christian, not a communist).
Who should be more sensible to existential threats than a leading existentialist? Most people remember Jean-Paul Sartre as the leader of the influential existentialist movement that for several decades held a dominant position in European philosophical circles. Sartre personally adhered to Marxist economic and political theory, though in his later years he fiercely criticized the Stalinist culture of the Soviet Union. He deplored the USSR’s aggressive actions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and supported self-determination as a matter of principle. It worried him that the Soviets’ actions provided bad PR for Marxism. But for all his hatred of the Soviet regime, Sartre would have laughed at the idea that Russia, even under a despotic Stalin, posed any kind of existential threat to Europe, political, military or otherwise.
In contrast, Hamlet had good reason to be alarmed. His truly existential crisis was immediate and personal. It existed at the core of his own family. He knew it would inevitably lead to a showdown and the stakes were mortal. His uncle Claudius had murdered Hamlet’s father, the legitimate king of Denmark. To consolidate his claim to the succession, Claudius hastily married Hamlet’s mother. The usurper turned out to be more interested in “swagg’ring upspring reels” at his nightly “wassails”– the modern equivalent would be rave parties – than good governance. Hamlet himself should have been a candidate for succession to the throne, but the young man had been away studying at a German university, and in any case lacked his uncle’s unbridled ambition. The prince also expressed his convinction that something was rotten in Denmark, and worse than that – on a more “existential” plane – that “the time is out of joint.”
Later in the play Hamlet fortuitously encountered Fortinbras, the prince of Norway, Denmark’s enemy, who was calmly leading a powerful military force into Poland “to gain a little patch of ground.” A Norwegian captain explained to Hamlet that the oblast in question, far from being existential for Poland or Norway, “hath in it no profit but the name.” Hamlet appeared legitimately bemused by Fortinbras’s decision making. He describes the prince as a man “whose spirit with divine ambition puffed” is ready to expose “what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death, and danger dare, Even for an eggshell.”
Europe’s fascination with eggshells
What was Shakespeare trying to tell us? If he were around today, I expect this might offer the following explanation. After analyzing the facts available to him, Hamlet failed to understand the deeper logic of Norway’s military-industrial complex, an institution that needed to make a show of exercising its muscle in foreign lands to justify his kingdom’s disproportionate allocations for the nation’s army. If the soldiers buy into it and the population backs it, go for it. Some eggshells have hidden value.
In the play’s final scene, with his “dying voice” Hamlet casts his vote to elect Fortinbras king of Denmark as the entire power structure of the nation lies bleeding on the floor at Elsinore. It’s worth noting that the name Fortinbras translates from French: strong-in-arm. The play ends with the Armstrongs conquering Denmark. Hamlet sensed that military Keynesianism might be Europe’s future.
Hamlet achieved his “quietus” in Act V but he did not commit suicide. The logic of a literally rotten and murderous state ended his life and lives of his loved ones. It was Claudius – aided and abetted by his chief of intelligence, Polonius – who suicided his own nation, leaving it in the hands of the heir to Norway and future King Strongarm of Denmark.
To sum up, Hamlet was a precocious critic of the latest “existential” trend observable in European politics in the 21st century: military Keynesianism. John Lanchester pithily summarized its workings with this description: “However little money there is for anything else, there’s always enough money for a war’.” It’s a system that generates economic activity monopolistically, to support the cause of present and preferably future war, while effectively keeping the population quiet about the austerity measures imposed on them in the name of patriotism and national solidarity.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 surprised everyone outside of Washington’s State Department. The event had been carefully choreographed by a series of US administrations, but most actively by the Biden White House when, in late 2021, it refused to discuss a framework for European security on the grounds that that issue could be summarized in four letters: NATO. The Russian invasion provided what appeared to be an ideal framework for a new wave of military Keynesianism that could now engulf all of Europe.
As NATO members, eager to maintain a strong relationship with the US that Trump 1.0 had threatened to weaken, European leaders quickly bought into the new conflict, faithfully following Washington’s lead. Their incapacity to think independently about Europe’s and the nations of Europe’s interests, they remained blind to an essential reality, that unwinnable wars in which one has no direct stake bring austerity and potential collapse without providing the deep psychological satisfaction that a “patriotic” and truly “existential” war can bring.
It isn’t because Kallas and Macron are now promising us that a future existential war launched by Russia is inevitable that Europe’s population will begin believing in the value of eggshells. Especially after losing so many of one’s own eggs in the process. Kallas may be regularly featured in the media, but she remains an unelected ignoramus and Macron has an approval rating of 11%.
In contrast, Hitler and Mussolini were wildly popular, capable of producing rhetoric and the right kind of kitsch symbolism. They had the talent to get away with it. US Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower had the political and to some extent the moral prestige to get away with it, especially after their nation had become unified by the experience of World War II and the exceptionally favorable outcome it produced for a nation designated as “leader of the free world.” Military keynesianism was a recipe for success, which they refined by transferring its monopolistic ethos to the consumer market thanks to technology.
Europe’s Black Friday
Today’s European leaders are lost. They believe that the postwar US model can be applied to Europe, but there is so little resemblance in their respective situations that it appears closer to a clown show than a Shakespearean tragedy. Unlike Hamlet, Europe today has chosen to “take arms against a sea of troubles,” largely of its own creation, though with some significant input from NATO’s overlord, the US.
But what has that produced in the way of action or spectacle? Last week, Macron put on the stage one of his character actors, military chief of staff General Mandon, charging him with instructing the nation’s mayors to stop worrying about the minor question of austerity and prepare heroically to “accept the loss of your children.” Ironically, at the very moment that saw Mandon strutting and fretting “his hour upon the stage,” Europe’s overlord in Washington was cooking up the peace plan that risks piercing every illusion about the holy war these leaders are counting on just to keep themselves in office.
It is Europe that has climbed to the top of Olivier’s ramparts, surveying the waves crashing upon the rocks, and wondering whether suicide isn’t a “consummation devoutly to be wished.”
*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition Fair Observer began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself – political and journalistic rhetoric – to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of The Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. The news always we consume deserves being seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
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