Introducing “Hamnet” (2020) a novel by Maggie O’Farrell

 

ABSENCE / PRESENCE

AND THE MAKING OF “HAMNET”

The novel opens up with a dirge, Ophelia’s mourning words to the loss of a loved one.

He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone,
At his head a green-grass tuft;
At his heels a stone.

Hamlet Act IV, scene 5

By using Ophelia’s voice, Maggie O’Farrell introduces us into the novel through a woman's voice as well as the theme of absence. Counteracting historical absence through fictional presence will be the forceful centripetal vortex of the novel. This is a narrative of an extremely sensorial and pictorial quality which transports us, undoubtedly, to a careful portrait of countrylife in Elizabethan times and reclaims the lost voices of literary and historical chronicles.

Absence and presence will indeed be the axes around which the novel revolves: the blatantly articulated absence of the bard, and the necessity to claim the presence of the forgotten “Hamnet,” Shakespeare’s son. The novel opens up in an empty house, and a frantic desperate search on behalf of Hamnet to find his mother so she can aid ailing Judith, Hamnet’s twin sister. The narrative voice claims Hamnet’s position center stage. We will use the podcast below as a point of departure to understand the brewing process of the novel in which Maggie herself explains how the novel attends to both, thorough research of country life in Elizabethan times as well as her enthralling creativity.

In this podcast (click here to access podcast or see at the end of the entry), Maggie O’Farrell explains how “struck she was about how insignificant, Hamnet appeared to be to scholars.” Shakespeare used his son’s name for a play, a ghost, a hero,” and he would have suppposedly listened to the name, “Hamnet” /”Hamlet” (both the same in Elizabethan times), a myriad times. She also adduces that “Hamnet has been ... downplayed by history. He has been consigned to the margins, to the literary footnote, to the bottom of the page,” and (she wanted to ) “put him center stage, give him a presence, a voice and say this child was important, he was grieved, and without him we wouldn’t have had Hamlet.”

The novel depicts “ a multi-generational living” with careful brushstrokes that attend to the minutiae of detail in creating the setting. Maggie comments that there are hardly any documents that may inform about the life of children and women of the Shakespeare’s household. Skin-deep into this world, Maggie says that she learned how to cook Tudor bread herself, learnt falconry, planted a garden of medicinal plants, went into Stratford asking hundreds of questions to everyone and went into archeological digs. These and other details about her making of the novel you can learn about in this podcast.

Where lack of documentation ensued, Maggie comments that characterization was fuelled by her imaginative powers and her knowledge of Shakespeare and his plays from early stages of her life. We had the feeling that the tutor’s perception of Agnes, for example, in her jerkin and unidentified gender could be part of that historical background in which female roles were played by men in Shakespeare’s times. John, Hamnet’s grandfather is depicted as an aggressive man, and of this, she has no documented knowledge, she argues. Contrariwise, there are documented sources about John’s background: he was an alderman, a glove-maker who ran into debt and moved onto wool-business. Let us think of the novel as yarns of wool, bales of wool that are used to knit and entangle the nets on which characters will be inexorably trapped into unchangeable destiny. Agnes thinks:

Later, and for the rest of her life, she will think that if she had left there

and then, if she had gathered her bags, her plants, her honey, and taken the

path home, if she had heeded her abrupt, nameless unease, she might have

changed what happened next.

 Wrapping fabric will trigger tragedy...

More entries on the analysis of this enthralling and captivating work to come by members of our reading club . Do not miss them. Different perspectives, moments and themes of the novel will be analysed.

 

 

"Evil Robot Monkey" by Mary Robinette Kowal

The Hellish Limbo 

"Evil Robot Monkey" (2008)

Samson and Delilah by Caravaggio (source for painting)

 “He just wanted to make pottery”//  “He held the world in his hands” // living..." in a hellish limbo” // “...too smart to be with other chimps, but too much of an animal to be with humans.” (Evil Robot Monkey by Mary Robinette Kowal)

The creative process

The swishing of a spinner on the act of creation “oozes” calm and quietness. Sly slids his hands over the clay to turn raw matter into an artifact of his creative mind. The malleable nature of clay as a metaphor that catalyzes Sly’s anger into therapeutic performance and a challenging act of artistic creativity can be traced back to Genesis. Marcial precisely brought forward this idea of clay as the matter out of which God shaped human beings. Let us think of Pygmalion’s myth or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The search for being perpetuated through one’s progeny and the power of creating life through liveless matter lie at the core of this constant pursuit of humankind to look for posterity. Art is undoubtedly a way of perpetuating oneself. Sly’s concentration on shaping the clay is not only a way to channel his emotions but it is also presented as a defiant act of empowerment that frames him as a life bestowing creature in a story in which borderlines between animals and humans are blurry.

Surveillance and Commodification

A bang on his pen, a thunk of his own metal robotic head agaisnt the window… abruptly mean the ceasing of his activity, a caesura in the creative process. This moment of indulgence, of artistic creation is institutionally interrupted by a group of children and a teacher who bother him through their clatter and disrespectful attitudes, acting animal-like: “one of them swung his arms aping Sly.”Sly’s act of creation turns into organic ordure as he angrily thrusts his feces against the window pane. This incenses the teacher’s embarrassment and self-awareness...against whom? Sly’s aggressive display? Or the children’s mischief? Or her own embarrassment?

The title of the short story lacks an article: “Evil Robot Monkey,” which is evocative of children’s chatter, or robotic-like language. Furthermore, the title appears in the short story when Vern, Sly’s handler, reports back on how the teacher felt as if Sly needed some rebuking for misbehaviour:

“The teacher was upset about the “evil robot monkey”” (the title appears in between inverted comas embedded in the narrative as words reported by the teacher)

What does it mean to be human? who is more human, who is animalized? Who is robotic? Who is subjected to being programmed, or to act accordingly? The children ape, the teacher (Delilah) feels embarrassed when norms are not fulfilled on either side of the animal-human divide, and Vern is referred to as “having manners” with Sly:

“You should have told them that I was not an animal”

Mary Robinette’s story certainly questions the hazy borderlines between animals, humans and robots. Sly lives in a hellish limbo.

Delilah, Sly's antagonist in the story, threatens to take the clay spinner away from Sly and thinks that he should be disciplined.  Her name might have not been randomly chosen.  Delilah and Samson’s story (click here for background information) deals with strengths and weaknesses, as well as power.  Biblical Delilah "beguiled" Samson to know the secret of  his strength and power so she could deprive him of it (his hair).  Delilah, in Robinette's story,  weakens Sly by depriving him of his clay, and, therein, of the power to channel his creativity and anger. However, Sly still manages to scoop up some of the clay leftovers: “Sly sat down at his wheel and began to turn again,” the world is back in his hands, as a “deus ex machina.” The vase on the wheel is described as “its walls held the shape of the world within them”.

What are the secret strengths that lie at the core of the animal, human and robotic? Where do weaknesses lurk?

"The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal

CREATIVE WRITING BLENDING SCIENCE FICTION AND TALES

BASED ON

 "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" (2012) by Mary Robinette Kowal

Don't miss this powerpoint presentation with wonderful creative writing by members of 

"The Word Depot" plus

an overview of the main motifs of Mary Robinette's short story "The Lady Astronaut of Mars"

BOOK RECOMMENDATION

 

“Trainspotting” (1996) by Irvine Welsh

A Review by Cándido Pintos Andrés

Almost as ever, I walked the way back...from the film to the book. I remember vividly the first time I watched “Trainspotting,” because two scenes were imprinted in my memory (no spoilers: the public toilet and the baby in the cradle) and, I felt that, before me, there was not just another film of junkies but a powerful depiction of a lost generation, quite similar, in spite of the apparent differences between Edinburgh and our city, to those youngsters of the 80s in Vigo dealing with the aftermath of Industrial restructuring.

It is neither a plea against drugs nor a story that pretends to convince us of the evils of this underworld. In fact, its protagonists are aware of what they are living and, although, it may seem impossible, their addiction is not the cause of all their problems and misfortunes. Drugs are just another companion in their journey through loneliness and indifference, just like drinking, fighting or sex.

“Trainspotting” is four people together but alone. Four charismatic and auto-destructive troublemakers, socially rootless, but extremely connected to the darkest Edinburgh and the borough of Leith, in fact another character itself. All the stories are told in first person by its four protagonists, habitual offenders, addicted, abandoned, loved, hated but mostly ignored: after all, they don’t live in the same world as us, because we are on the trains leaving Waverley Station while they are there... “trainspotting.”

“Trainspotting” by Scottish author Irvine Welsh, gives voice to an entire and disappointed generation with irony and bitterness but above all with realism and lucidity. I do not dare to say (as Rebel.Inc magazine) “The best book ever written by man or woman… Deserves to sell more copies than The Bible” although the fact that it is worthwhile is undeniable.

And last but not least. 

Even though it requires a slower reading path, the fact that it is written in Scots should be more of an incentive to follow the story and feel it, rather than an intimidating challenge.

By way of example one of the most well-known speeches:

“Ah don’t really know, Tam, ah jist dinnae. It kinday makes things seem mair real tae us. Life’s boring and futile. We start oaf wi high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re aw gaunnae die,withoot really findin oot the big answers. We develop aw they longwinded ideas which jist interpret the reality ay oor lives in different weys, withoot really extending oor body ay worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things.

Basically, we live a short, disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up oor lives wi shite,things like careers and relationships tae delude oorsels that it isnae aw totally pointless. Smack’s an honest drug, because it strips away these delusions. Wi smack, whin ye feel good, ye feel immortal. Whin ye feel bad, it intensifies the shite that’s already thair. It’s the only really honest drug. It doesnae alter yir consciousness. It just gies ye a hit and a sense ay well-being. Eftir that, ye see the misery ay the world as it is, and ye cannae anaesthetise yirsel against it.”

Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Philip K. Dick’s Douglas Quail: Marooned in memories

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged …

 Source for photos: here and here

 No longer dressed in cuirass and helmets, current heroes and heroines pertain to the terrain of the ordinary. As eyes linger on the first page of Philip K.Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” Henry James or Jane Austen come to mind with their quarry of common universalities about the human being and the immanent substract that lies behind certain types of writing: “the novel should hold up a mirror to life” (Henry James) or Jane Austen’s famous beginning “it is a truth universally acknowledged…” Equally, Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in “Ulysses” comes to mind with a forceful visionary similitude that has drawn me to establish comparisons between these two writers which are in opposite sides of the imaginary and literary divide: ennui, ordinary heroes or anti-heroes, socially marginal employees, dreams to be fulfilled, amorous apathy, uncontrived or contrived memories ...

No matter whether it is Dublin, 16th of June 1904, or a New York of the future in which people live in conapts, look forward to wearing “gill-outfits,” commute in hover-cars through traffic runnels and whose brains are fiddled with to get fake memories implanted….both main characters, Leopold Bloom in Ulysses and Douglas Quail in Dick’s short story, strive out of the dullness and ennui of their average lives through the turmoil of their brains.

Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses has been described as “a socially marginal middle-class ad salesman” (click here for source), and Douglas Quail in Philip K.Dick’s short story describes himself as “A miserable little salaried employee.” Another curious convergence, the title of Philip K.Dick as Cándido has stated is evocative of an ad’s catchy phrase “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” which Bloom himself could have sketched in a paralell reality so to speak. The aquatic nature of Calypso that bears the title of Chapter 4 in Ulysses extends tendrils to the dreams of Kirsten in Philip K.Dick’s short story: her escapism drives her to the ocean rather than to her husband’s desires to go to Mars: “The bottom of the ocean –our ocean is much more, an infinite of times more beautiful. You know that, everybody knows that”

Let us compare the beginning of both narratives, “Calypso” (chapter 4 from “Ulysses” by James Joyce) and Philip K.Dick’s “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale.”

“The fifth book of the Odyssey finds the hero marooned on an island called Ogygia, desperately unhappy and longing to return to Ithaca. Bloom's narrative begins at home, for quite necessary realistic reasons: that is where he begins every day, and Joyce's novel is devoted to representing the course of a single day” (source here). At the beginning of chapter 4, Leopold Bloom -- click here to access annotated chapter –prepares breakfast for his wife, Molly; he feeds the cat, wonders how the cat will see him and he holds a dialogue / monologue with his wife who drowsily and disdainfully answers his requests from her bed upstairs with some inaudible utterances. Leopold dreams of offal, relishes “the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart …” and he, indeed, goes round the corner to get some sausages. Bloom is marooned in Dublin and dreams of offal. His daily routine blends with his stream of consciousness: he recalls his wife’s origins, Gibraltar; his wife’s father “Major Brian Cooper Tweedy;” the talisman that his mother gave him, a “Potato” to remind him of the famine; the Russo-Turco war in his reference to Plevna… Dressed in black, Bloom does not know whether black reflects or refracts light. He braces through the day full of thoughts of the past, present and future, no matter whether the future is a petty thing such as buying a lemon soap bar at Sweeney’s Pharmacy.

Similarly, Douglas Quail is marooned in Earth in his conapt with a "nagging" wife and full of apathy with only one dream in his mind “to go to Mars.” “HE AWOKE-and wanted Mars,” he measures his dream against his pettiness “A clerk like himself? Not likely.” As he has breakfast, he is determined to escape his tedium and fulfill his dream, even if it is through the vicarious experience that REKALL INCORPORATED offers by installing fake dreams in his memory with the promise of not knowing them false, and offering him an apparatus of memento that will be even better than memory itself, second best, but

“You’re not accepting second-best. The actual memory, with all its vagueness, omissions and ellipses, not to say distortions” (page 4).

Quail starts his journey from home as Leopold Bloom. It is not siren voices, nor Calypso, the nymph, but a “shifting-color neon sign” which makes him halt, and, consequently, his destiny gets twisted in as many runnels as the cityscape he contemplates. His desire to acquire memories of a journey he believes he has never done, prompts other memories that had been erased of a journey that maybe has already embarked on and ended. Paradox ensues.

Here you have a possible comparative grid of both these mornings, and the possible similar meanings that these customarily routines may suggest across the divide of history and genre:

Has this comparison triggered your curiosity to read “Ulysses”? I encourage you to read it!