While reading, I frequently catch my mind in the act of wandering off. I call it back to the text: Focus! damn you. Self-recrimination is an integral part of my reading experience. I compare myself unfavourably to history’s great readers. Samuel Johnson would never have let his mind wander off like this. Surely Northrop Frye approached his reading with laser-like precision. Why can’t I be more like them?
In moods when I feel more compassionately disposed towards myself, I draw an analogy to the practice of mindfulness which, I believe, is directly applicable to the act of reading. There, I might focus on my breathing, and for the first minute or two I might actually succeed. But the monkey mind intrudes and I hear its paws skittering over the interior walls of my skull. I think of the groceries I need to pick up, the bills I need to pay, old conversations that trouble me. Mindfulness acknowledges that these meandering thoughts are an ordinary part of our interior lives and it invites us to treat them with a compassionate self-regard. By analogy, it’s safe to say that distracted reading is a universal experience and we should forgive ourselves our loss of concentration. Rather than quash this tendency, we should embrace it as an important part of the reading experience.
When I was an undergraduate, it would happen once or twice each year that, as I was eating lunch at Ned’s Café, Northrop Frye would drop in for a bite. I was too intimidated to speak to him, or even to meet his eyes as he passed my table. Even so, I observed that he made a habit of drinking beer with his lunch. Now, as I approach Frye’s age as he was then, I recognize that a beer with lunch effectively guarantees that my mind will wander off if I read in the afternoon. Assuming Frye was a human being and not a robot, I expect he had a prodigious monkey mind hopping around inside his head.
What, you may ask, has any of that to do with Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Hamnet? If you bear with me and my monkey mind, I’ll answer your question soon enough. I promise. Hamnet is an alternate spelling of the name Hamlet which, apart from being the title of a famous play, happens also to be the name of Shakespeare’s son, a twin who died in childhood. It seems fitting that the novel follows the conventions of a tragedy insofar as we already know things will end badly; the historical record tells us so. In fact, tragedy is the one form for which spoiler alerts are not required. So, for example, if we consider Shakespeare’s play, everyone present (including the characters on the stage) knows where the action is inevitably headed. What gives the characters their moral bearing is the fact that they follow the action anyways and embrace the inevitable.
So it is with Hamnet. Maggie O’Farrell introduces us to a rustic youth with no discernible skills who takes a shine to a somewhat older woman. Since no one will approve the match, they choose (one might almost say conspire) to use pregnancy as a tool to manipulate the situation. When the baby is born, they live with the young man’s parents where he is positioned to take his father’s place in the family business making gloves. The young man travels to London ostensibly to expand the family’s trade and contracts to sell gloves to a theatre company. That is his point of entry into the world of theatre and, after that, he rarely returns to his home in Warwickshire, not even after his wife delivers twins.
As O’Farrell points out in her accompanying notes, not once in his entire canon does Shakespeare mention the bubonic plague, and yet we know there were frequent outbreaks in London while he lived there. In fact, during a 10 year period at the beginning of the 17th century, the Globe Theatre was ordered to close for a total of 78 months. While we do not know that his son, Hamnet, died of bubonic plague, it seems a possibility. And so we have an interlude in which O’Farrell describes the journey of a plague-bearing flea from a monkey in Alexandria to a London port and then over land to Stratford. When Hamnet dies, his father cannot bear to linger in the house and retreats to London and the world of theatre there that supports a wandering imagination. Feeling abandoned, his wife is astonished to discover a playbill bearing her dead son’s name, so she journeys to London, driven in part by outrage, in part by curiosity. As the novel concludes, the audience hushes and the wife watches two players discuss recent sightings of a ghost. Despite her skepticism, she finds herself drawn in and realizes that, in an oblique way, this invention bearing her dead son’s name is her husband’s way of giving play to his grief.
Maggie O’Farrell invests (one might even say infects) her novel with a sense of divided consciousness. The young father lives half in London, half in Stratford. He lives half in the world of practical concerns like purchasing properties and collecting rents, half in the world of his own creation. When he stands on the stage, he is simultaneously the character he brings to life, and the grieving father who gazes into the audience hoping his dead son might appear in the crowd.
This divided consciousness is often there, explicit in her words:
“It is evident to Agnes now, as they enter the kitchen, as he stirs the fire and throws on a log, that her husband is split in two. He is one man in their house and quite another in that of his parents.”
Later, the husband plans to move his family to London and decides: “He will no longer lead this double life, this split existence.” It seems, too, that the husband is near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other, giving him a double perspective of the world around him:
”He covers first one eye, then the other, turning to regard the city. It is a game he can play. One of his eyes can only see what is at a distance, the other what is close by. Together they work so that he may see most things, but separated; each eye sees only what it can: the first, far away, the second, close up.”
Consciousness works in the same way, vacillating between the far and the near, the exterior and the interior, blending the two ways of seeing to produce a single comprehensive view of the world. This split perspective is endemic to the tragic form. The hero can see how the machinations of the wider world work to bring about his death, yet the interior chatter goes on. The hero’s soliloquies allow us to eavesdrop on that interior chatter. What we detect beneath it all is a sense of bewilderment: How can this be happening? To me? How can this be happening to me?
In my preceding post, I speculated that “the mark of good writing is the extent to which it creates space for the reader to freely explore matters of the heart, mind, and spirit.” I could just as easily have expressed this in terms of the extent to which writing creates space for the reader’s mind to wander. More particularly, is there enough imaginative space for the wandering mind to bear fruit? In the case of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, the answer is a resounding yes.