I Don’t Know 1: Hamlet

I posted a set of five blog pieces on the theme of “I Don’t Know” a while back, and as I recall they seemed to outline my favourite type of fiction, which is explained in detail below. Well, I have a larger audience now and thought new folk might appreciate these if they hadn’t yet seen them :) And thanks to those who read them first time around! Hope they were useful :)

I want to discuss the power of not knowing. Not like Barthelme’s Not Knowing, about the power of writing fiction without knowing where you’re going, but the power of delivering the message of uncertainty. This is something that only storytelling of the highest quality can deliver.

You can spot young-writer-nervousness in our work’s occasional accidental didacticism or its desperation to reveal the entirety of something or to right some wrong. In fact, it turns out the most courageous and the truest and most human thing you can do as a writer is only reveal what you don’t know and admit that you don’t know it: you reveal the problem without solving it.

What is IDK? It’s giving a fair and balanced account of all characters, discursive rather than persuasive fiction, refusing to point the finger by instead showing how characters point fingers at each other, empathising as far as is possible with all of them, refusing to provide a victor or a loser and creating a world full of problems so complex that they defy resolution. (Likely this has some literary term I’ve never heard of.)

I have several examples of “IDK” and will serialise them across “I Don’t Know Month” which starts with this post on Hamlet today and continues for as long as an I Don’t Know Month does, because it’s my thing. Any work mentioned contains spoilers. I hope you enjoy these reflections and please feel free to submit your own, because “IDK” is my favourite brand of storytelling :)

I Don’t Know 1: Hamlet

I did begin my own analysis on this but found the basic effect of Hamlet better summarised by Kurt Vonnegut, so much so that it’s more or less all that remains! Ah, why say it twice though? :D

“[Hamlet’s] father has just died. He’s despondent. And right away his mother went and married his uncle, who’s a bastard.… So Hamlet goes up and talks to this fairly substantial apparition there. And this thing says, ‘I’m your father, I was murdered, you gotta avenge me, it was your uncle did it, here’s how.’ Madame Blavatsky, who knew more about the spirit world than anybody else, said you are a fool to take any apparition seriously, because they are often malicious and they are frequently the souls of people who were murdered, were suicides, or were terribly cheated in life in one way or another, and they are out for revenge. So we don’t know whether this thing was really Hamlet’s father or if it was good news or bad news. And neither does Hamlet. But he says okay, I got a way to check this out. I’ll hire actors to act out the way the ghost said my father was murdered by my uncle, and I’ll put on this show and see what my uncle makes of it. So he puts on this show… His uncle doesn’t go crazy and say, ‘I-I-you got me, you got me, I did it, I did it.’ It flops. Neither good news nor bad news. After this flop Hamlet ends up talking with his mother when the drapes move, so he thinks his uncle is back there and he says, ‘All right, I am so sick of being so damn indecisive,’ and he sticks his rapier through the drapery. Well, who falls out? This windbag, Polonius.”

In attempting to kill his father’s murderer, Hamlet murders Ophelia’s father: he becomes the thing he wishes to avenge.

“Neither good news nor bad news. Hamlet didn’t get arrested. He’s prince. He can kill anybody he wants. So he goes along, and finally he gets in a duel, and he’s killed. Well, did he go to heaven or did he go to hell?… I don’t think Shakespeare believed in a heaven or hell any more than I do. And so we don’t know whether it’s good news or bad news… There’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth…The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”

This dense mixture of action, inaction, reality, fantasy and whether or not we can with our reasoning divine the correct action to take and whether or not this action will lead to the desired beneficent consequences is the stuff of life!

For more info on the shapes of stories from Kurt Vonnegut, check
this out.