Session Two: Time--Counting the Moments/
Making Moments Count

Michael Witmore, Ph.D.
Department of English, Carnegie Mellon University

Today, I'm going to talk not so much about technologies that preserve life, but technologies that preserve memory in the words of the dead.

I'm going to talk about Hamlet. Hamlet is the focus of the book I'm writing on accidents and accidental death in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. And the theme of my talk is going to be suddenness. I want to talk about accidental death that offers the opportunity for one to disappear in consciousness immediately, without premeditation; and I want to look at what the particular fear of suddenness might be, the degree to which we share it today, and the way in which it animated early modern discussions of death.

I'll start with a book that I saw reviewed about a year ago, while I was writing a chapter on Hamlet. It's entitled The Black Box, and it's edited by Malcolm McPherson. This book contains transcriptions from flight data recorders of airliners that have crashed. The descriptions are arranged in sequential order. There's very little narrative provided; all we have from these "black boxes" are conversations between pilot, copilot, sometimes the crew, and the tower. The book is unsettling because it gives us a transcript or a recording of a moment that somehow promises to reveal a mystery, the mystery of what one thinks and does in the last moments of life. Some of these descriptions are absolutely flat-footed--we have technical discussions of altitude, tactical decisions about whether to land, whether to circle. Once in a while, a pilot will realize that he's going to crash and will say something to a loved one. The recording will end with, "I love you, Amy," or it will simply be cut off.

I think these recordings are an artifact of our own interest in death, and our attempt to understand it using technology. In a way, the black box is like a passive observer that survives the encounter with death. It speaks when the bodies are no longer there to speak. It survives a fatal crash. It submits voices to an audience that has already anticipated it. Why put the box in the airplane in the first place? Because you expect that someday you'll need it. So the addressee is anonymous; the messages are usually there for their evidentiary value, telling us us what may have happened in the last moments of a particular flight.

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I became interested in this particular book because I was thinking about the voice of the ghost in Hamlet, about what that voice brings by way of memory to the son, whose father has been famously dispatched while sleeping in the garden, about the way that voice can speak to the living, even though it has no body. I think the ghost would have been intriguing to early modern spectators precisely because it didn't have a body, yet somehow memory is transmitted even if you don't have a material link to the person who is dead. The ghost, in effect, reveals the secret of what happened to Hamlet's father, and it's that secret that sets the plot in motion.

The play itself focuses studiously on moments of ending, the endings of life. For example, when Hamlet gets the letter that Claudius has written to the King of England, describing his plan to put Hamlet to death, he rewrites it for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and instructs the king that "Šon the view and knowing of these contents, without debatement further, more or less, he should put the bearers to sudden death, not shriving time allowed." That phrase, "not shriving time," is important because it suggests that Hamlet wants to preempt an ending for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and specifically make it impossible for them to make some kind of final accounting to God. In a way, it's a kind of parallel revenge to the one that's been taken on his father.

This sense that death was something that you needed to prepare for, that it was something that could be done with an art, is one that appears in religious literature throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whether Protestant or Catholic. In some sense, the difference between the human and the animal, for example, is the way in which humans can make an art of dying, whereas animals merely expire. Animals don't have souls, they can't deliberate. Unlike humans, they do not have to atone for life, make some accounting for it, and prepare for death. That art of dying is one that is underwritten by a variety of theological prescriptions. And one of the things I noticed in this morning's panel was the way in which our discussion takes place in a very different cultural moment. The continuity between this life and the next one is not necessarily assumed, and this in turn changes our sense of how one prepares for death, what kind of action should be taken, what practices are necessary.

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Another moment in the play, another ending that seems to be subject to very careful manipulation, is the elegy that Gertrude gives for Ophelia. The elegy is, in a way, an attempt to cover over both the history of Ophelia in the play and the specific circumstances of her death:

Here as a willow grows a slant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There on the pendant bows her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indu'd
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

The event which places Ophelia in the water is the breaking of an envious sliver. Her own agency in her death has been erased, and the elegy seems to tilt the entire scene, so that gravity itself is conspiring with her to send her into this naturalized ending. It is a gradual death. We don't have any access to the secret behind it, but we can infer it. But again, I think, language and poetry are being used to provide a shield. We were talking this morning about the ways in which art might either make the experience of death manifest or it might hide it. And I think here it's clearly doing the hiding.

Early modern spectators of Hamlet would have paid careful attention to these moments, since in the ending of any life could be found the reflection of life as a whole. Mortal endings were best when they were scripted deliberately, when one prepared for death as if one were going to welcome it as a gift. Certainly, you shouldn't discover it like some kind of serpent in a garden, something that sneaks up on you. I think that's really the heart of anxiety.

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While death was clearly a journey into something else, the unknown country which Hamlet refers to in his soliloquy, the preeminent early modern anxiety about it concerned suddenness. However, when it speaks, like the voice issuing out of the black box, it can reserve some of its terrible finality for the living.

This is the voice which speaks to Hamlet when he meets the ghost in the parapet, the voice of a father who died suddenly "with his sins on his head, his belly full of bread." This is the voice which speaks to us as well. Hamlet, the play, is like one of those black boxes. In it one can hear the echoes of something that has been captured from oblivion and brought back to life. We may not share its audience's anxieties about having time to unburden ourselves in anticipation of a final accounting. But it's clear from our fascination with situations like the ones recorded in the cockpit that the suddenness of death has retained its full measure of power.

All this became clear to me several months ago while I was teaching the play Hamlet to some undergraduates. A few weeks before I had been involved in a serious car accident in which my compact car struck a cargo van on the Interstate. I had been teaching in order to give myself something to do while I was recovering. I had a broken ankle and broken hand, and could move myself around with something that looked a little bit like a glorified skateboard. I would get in front of the class and we would do readings of the play. We were reading the scene in which Polonius meets Hamlet and tries to draw the prince into his confidence. Hamlet is being evasive. He points to a cloud and says, "Doesn't this look like a camel?" Polonius agrees. "How about a weasel?" Polonius agrees. Suddenly, Hamlet switches, "Or like a whale?" These words, I realized, described exactly what went through my mind as I looked ahead on the highway and saw the white cargo van fishtailing across the passing lane into my own, weeks earlier. As one of my students read the line aloud to the class, I could not help but feel uneasy. It was the first time that I had remembered what I had been thinking before the crash.

Hearing those words again while I was supposed to be directing a discussion made me feel helpless, disoriented and angry. Later, in my office, I tried to replay the scene in my mind, those weird moments of delay before the impact. The image of the van in the rain seemed almost playful, unreal, not very far from Hamlet's description, actually. But the memory led to an odd question, and this was the question that really made me realize what had happened. What if this had been the last thought of my life? Couldn't memory have supplied a better image in this last split second than a minor remark from a play so full of exalted poetry? Why not the face or voice of someone that I love? Why not some feeling of summing up, or just plain terror? I felt cheated.

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When I saw the images this morning, Jim's photographs, I thought about the way in which he had become a spectator at the death of his father. And that was the feeling I had as I was waiting to hit the van. I don't remember the impact. I remember the sound of the impact. And I remember being pulled out of my car on a spinal board, and put into an ambulance and taken to an emergency room.

What's traumatic about that experience, I think, is that I wanted to put a certain value on that moment and I couldn't. There was a specific way in which the story of my life should end, and that wasn't it--thinking about a whale.

I want to reflect on a few things, and then I'll end. I think there is a lot of continuity between our own fascination with the moment before death, our attempt to prolong it, to enhance it, to stage it, or to cut it short, and the sense of death as interruption in the early modern period. We too have the desire to retrieve something from that moment, and to place it in a narrative. We have technologies to pull meaning out of these moments. Photography is one of them, poetry is another, and so is memory. And, in effect, many of these different devices help us approach that experience and tell a story in which that particular moment will be rendered meaningful. And being able to tell that story so that it leads naturally into that moment is very important to us, and it is certainly important to the spectators of Hamlet.

Here are two thoughts. First, what is the difference between recording, as done by the flight data recorder, and understanding? There's a way in which the flight data recorder can tell us what was said in that last moment, but it can't tell us how to tell the story of the lives of those people who died or who survived. That particular job isn't done by an individual; it's done by an entire culture. And in order to tell that story, we have to draw on the resources that our culture gives us.

The second: What's the difference between privacy and a crowd in this last moment? If death entombs a secret, is it a secret that has to be told to someone else? We talked this morning about the woman who says, "If I have to tell that story, it will hurt me." Why is it that death holds a secret, and who is the proper audience for that memory?

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