Rape involves total disregard for the autonomy and worth of the person assaulted, reducing the victim to the status of a malleable object. Something of the same attitude obtains when it comes to the deconstruction of history and literature. Historical facts or the integrity of a piece of literature are approached with only the desire to make them conform to the violator’s druthers--no dialogue allowed.
Whatever one thinks
about the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, for most Americans their
thoughts are likely shaped more by Oliver Stone’s mendacious film, JFK, than by the most rudimentary facts
of the case: Lee Harvey Oswald worked at
the Texas School Book Depository; he bummed a ride to work that day holding a
long object wrapped in brown paper that he told the driver contained curtain
rods; Oswald had created a shooting blind with book cartons on the sixth floor
where he worked; three shell cartridges and the aforementioned brown wrapping
paper were found there after the assassination; several parade attendees saw a sixth
floor shooter and one, Howard Brennan, provided a detailed description; Oswald was the only person who left
the building after the assassination; Oswald then jumped on a bus and traveled
to the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, but before ducking into the movie theater
where he was apprehended, Oswald shot and killed Dallas Police Officer J. D.
Tippit (a fact confirmed by twelve eyewitnesses and ballistic evidence).
These facts only
scratch the surface of what is known about the Fidel Castro loving loser whose “horrifically
spelled Historic Diary” provides all
one needs to know about this mentally unstable individual who had previously
defected to the USSR, attempted suicide, and seven months prior to Kennedy’s assassination tried to kill a
prominent conservative Texas politician, General Edwin Walker. A concise overview of these and other facts
are still obtainable via a 1992 Commentary
article by the late American Studies Professor Jacob
Cohen, a piece composed in
response to Stone’s assassination fantasy. Gerald Posner’s Case
Closed (1993) goes over much
the same evidence and also provides information about Jim Garrison that’s 180
degrees opposite the heroic portrait acted by Kevin Costner. In short, Oliver Stone’s deconstruction of
history treats his subject matter like a completely malleable object.
Literature, of
course, is a different animal from history, but if one treats it with respect,
a Shakespeare play, for example, will be read and acted giving primary attention
to the integrity of the work itself—a task that involves familiarity with the
language, customs, and beliefs of the time.
Dr. Gideon Rappaport provides just such an example of this Herculean
task in his work, Hamlet, a book that displays both his dramaturgical
experience and scholarly expertise vis-à-vis
the works of Shakespeare. (Cf. also his Appreciating
Shakespeare, which provides
an eye-opening description of Shakespeare’s significant education.)
Like most non-experts,
what I knew of the play was pretty much on the same level as what most
Americans know about the Kennedy assassination, uninformed observations concerning
the Prince’s inability to act. If, however, one pays attention to the words and
ideas articulated in the play itself and takes seriously what both Shakespeare
and his audience doubtless believed (namely, a Christian view of God and the
afterlife) a much different drama emerges.
As Rappaport often mentions, quoting Hamlet’s words in the play, the
actors “cannot keep counsel, they’ll tell all.” And what confronts a modern audience or reader
when the words of Hamlet and Shakespeare
are taken seriously isn’t an existentialist or Freudian drama but rather a “Christian
tragedy” that exhibits the consequences of exceeding human limits and taking
upon oneself decisions properly left to God.
In Hamlet’s case the usurpation of a divine prerogative wasn’t in
exacting vengeance on the reigning King for his father’s death, but rather in also
seeking to determine his murderous uncle’s eternal destiny.
This exceeding of
proper limits (a theme often repeated in Hamlet
via conversations where various golden means are recommended) is certainly a
concept worth pondering whatever one’s take on matters theological. The hubris involved in, for example,
deconstructing traditional social and political institutions (as
“institutionally racist”) or even manipulating language itself (e.g. a Supreme
Court justice unable to define the word “woman”) is likely to lead to
consequences more tragic than the death-filled final scene in Hamlet (e.g. the French Revolution, the
Soviet Union, Cambodia’s killing fields).
Hamlet’s ill-fated send-Claudius-to-hell
scheming is mirrored and magnified in the hubris exhibited by Davos billionaires who view themselves as demigods capable of
shaping the economic, political, and even meteorological future of the entire
globe. If they could listen with
humility to the lessons of history, literature, or even climatology, their
illusions of grandeur would be tempered. But alas, humility is a virtue that has given way
to private jets and caviar-sated spreads at destinations where outsized egos plot
the future of proletarians consigned to miniature apartments, no private
transportation, and diets consisting of fried insects when solar- or wind-powered
electricity happens to be available.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?" is also available on Kindle
