The End of Everything: When Science Becomes Fiction (Part 1)
How Hamlet, Klara, and Mary Came From the Future
What isn’t ending? What isn’t on the verge of extinction? It’s a short list of exemptions these days, and we, us human beings, aren’t on it.
Neither are bees, bipartisanship, butterflies, capitalism, childhood, coral reefs, democracy, elephants, empire, facts, families, frogs, gender, glaciers, higher education, (the) humanities, love, male supremacy, manatees, men, morality, (the) middle class, minibars, national borders, Nature, objectivity, patriarchy, religion, science, sex, soil, tigers, whiteness, work—and these species are endangered according to activists, journalists, and writers of every political persuasion.
What Frank Kermode glimpsed in The Sense of an Ending (1967, 1999) is now on display for all to see. When he stood at the heart of the profound changes that convulsed the late-twentieth century, trying to tell us where they might lead, they were still evident yet unknown, measurable but unmapped: he studied their fictional premonitions. By now we know exactly where they led—did I leave anything off that list?—but we don’t know what to do about all these expiration dates.
Or rather, like Hamlet, we know what is to be done, we just can’t figure out how to do it.**
His example is a good place to begin reading for our ending, and to decipher contemporary science fiction as rendered by Kim Stanley Robinson and Kazuo Ishiguro, if only because, like us, and like these writers, his loyalties were divided between a disintegrating past and an impending future—in his case, between a decaying feudal society that lived by traditional hierarchies and received wisdom, and a precocious bourgeois society that thrived on a new individualism and its novel truths.
The prince of Denmark hesitated, if that is the right word, because he had a stake in both worlds, and knew that the choice of one over the other would prove deadly. So do we. Like Robinson and Ishiguro, we’re caught between a decaying capitalist society that still lives by the “somewhat disgusting morbidity” known as the profit motive (that’s John Maynard Keynes talking) and a barely sentient socialist society that thrives on new kinds of solidarity and their novel truths—or is it a moral wasteland where the only futures on offer are the junkyard and the meritocracy, both determined by prosthetic intelligence?
Hamlet embodies an epistemological crisis equal to our own. He arrives at Elsinore from Wittenberg only to learn that he can’t explain what has happened. His father is dead—how? His mother has married his uncle—why, and so hastily, violating every protocol of mourning and remarriage? Who is to be believed? His mother? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? The “old mole,” his father’s ghost? Everywhere he turns, there’s another, different interpretation of the same events, utterances, or behaviors, and each of them yields an account of what really happened which is incompatible with the others.
Not only that. He’s a part-time prince but a full-time student, just back from the university at Wittenberg, where, by all accounts, Martin Luther and other firebrand intellectuals of the 16th century had been discussing Machiavelli, Erasmus, Boccaccio, Copernicus, Petrarch, Chaucer, Dante . . . . He’s a Renaissance man, in other words, equipped with the most advanced knowledge of his time. He can view the local accounts of events at Elsinore from the intellectual distance afforded by this world elsewhere. So he doesn’t have to assume that taking revenge for the murder of his father—if that’s what really happened—is the only way to end the story he’s learning to tell. (Shakespeare was taking a big chance here, because his audience expected just that, a revenge tragedy that reiterated the Orestian cycle; in violating this expectation, he liberated his own imagination and embarked on his radical revision of the genre.)
Notice that nobody seems to understand Hamlet, not even Horatio. Why is that? Why is everyone in the play befuddled by his utterance, thus enabled in their eccentric interpretations of his behavior? Why are we, after all these centuries, still confused by his persistent deferment of his urgent desire to make things right—to repair a time that is out of joint?
There are three ways to answer, I think. You can say that in dissembling, in pretending to be on the verge of madness—where everything is a product of “as if,” a performance in progress—Hamlet disrupts the transparent relation between “seems” and “is” which makes him legible to his interlocutors, then as now, and vice versa. He divides and observes himself, establishing an ironic detachment from himself, and from those around him, who must then ask themselves, Do I know this person? Is he talking to me?
Or, you can say that because he’s merely the register—the receptacle—of competing narratives of what happened at Elsinore, he never becomes a completed character, someone whose words and deeds become predictable by, say, Act II (Ophelia matches up with Hamlet in this respect, but nobody else). “Hamlet accepts everything,” as Jacques Lacan put it, so he’s “constantly suspended in the time of the Other.” That is why he seems the mirror of whoever looks at him after the fact, after the 17th century, even unto our own time.
Or, you can say that Hamlet comes from the future, where one’s life chances won’t be determined by one’s birth, title, family, or estate, but will instead be functions of individuality, of one’s natural talents, learned skills, and past effort. And where revenge doesn’t exhaust the meaning of justice because tribe and family no longer mark the outer limits of social solidarity and moral standing. Hamlet refuses to play by the rules of his still medieval time, which expected him, as heir to a dynastic succession, to avenge his father’s murder by killing his uncle and banishing his mother. That is why he seems so anomalous to his peers, and so close to our notions of personal judgment and comportment that we appoint him the first modern man.
These three answers are actually the same, aren’t they? The resolute moderns in Shakespeare-—Romeo, Juliet, Cordelia, Edmund, Caliban, and notice the “diversity,” as we now say, of these characters—-are mysteries to the rest of the cast, who see them, correctly, as violations of received tradition because they simply won’t abide by anything inherited from the past.
“The time is out of joint”: the prince is slightly ahead of his time, in but not of the world he inhabits. That’s why nobody understands what Hamlet is talking about, not even his best friend, although Polonius and Claudius have enough of an inkling to suspect him of treachery and send him off. He might as well be from another world, this man of too many words, a visitor from a different moral universe.
To test this conjecture, ask yourself what those famous soliloquies are for. Put it this way: Who is Hamlet talking to? Not to himself—Elizabethan culture, especially its theater, is too dialogical for that conceit: even non-fiction was then typically organized as a kind of Q & A. No, he’s addressing us, the audience. The more ponderous renditions of the play forget this attitude of address, on the assumption that an expansive interiority, an “inner self,” is what makes us modern. But Hamlet never turns inward—he never turns away from the constituency that Shakespeare, like every other writer, hoped to create among those who came after his time, which is to say among us spectators, readers, and actors, interpreters all, of later centuries.
By this accounting, Hamlet is the prototype of the science fiction writer and his (or her) characters. He brings news from nowhere that actually exists except in his own imagination; he is the register or receptacle of competing narratives, one from the disintegrating past, one from the impending future; he is misunderstood by his contemporaries because he can’t or won’t make himself intelligible by speaking the local dialect: he’s slightly but significantly ahead of his time, a stranger in a strange land.
His mission is to bring these centrifugal temporal elements into alignment, where they might be treated as commensurable moments, not the terms of an either/or choice. He was born to “put it right,” he says, to repair an incongruent relation between the past and the future, so that the time of the present becomes actionable or malleable, subject to human purpose rather than Fate as decreed by God(s). That is what makes Hamlet modern, this idea that historical time is neither discontinuous nor, what is the same thing, impervious to human intervention. That is also what makes Shakespearean tragedies so novel. the sense that the ending doesn’t merely conclude the chronicle of a death foretold.
Historical time is necessarily out of joint in science fiction because the past just is the present—but we know it’s not over and done, not even when the scene is post-apocalyptic and morally desolate, because the visitors from the future, writers and their characters alike, are here to warn us, to encourage us to change what has been into what might be.
At any rate this is how I read the two novels that made all the “Ten Best” lists for 2021, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.
(Part 2 to follow.)
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**My reading of Hamlet here amplifies and complicates arguments I made in “Reflections on ‘Romeo & Juliet,’” Marxist Perspectives 7 (1979): 50-61, and “‘Hamlet,’ James, and the Woman Question,” an essay of 1997 that became chapter 5 in Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy (2001).