The Prompter's Box: Back to the Future: One-Hundred Years after Ibsen

[T]he man suddenly began to speak to me. He was traveling to Boston, he said, to visit his grown son who was in the hospital. A disease had, among other consequences, impaired the son's speech, so that he could only mouth words soundlessly; still more seriously, as a result of the illness, he had lost his will to live. The father was going, he told me, to try to restore that will, but he was troubled by the thought that he would be incapable of understanding the son's attempts at speech. He had therefore a favor to ask me: would I mime a few sentences so that he could practice reading my lips? Would I say, soundlessly, "I want to die. I want to die"?

Taken aback, I began to form the words, with the man staring intently at my mouth: "I want to . . ." But I was incapable of finishing the sentence. "Couldn't I say, 'I want to live'?" Or better still (since the seat belt sign had by this time flashed off), he might go into the bathroom, I suggested lamely, and practice on himself in front of a mirror. "It's not the same," the man replied in a shaky voice, then turned back to the window. "I'm sorry," I said, and we sat in silence for the rest of the flight.

-Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (255)

Stephen Greenblatt's comic-tragic, autobiographical parable for his New Historicist project, "to explore the ways in which major English writers of the sixteenth century created their own performances, to analyze the choices they made in representing themselves and in fashioning characters, to understand the role of human autonomy in the construction of identity," is marked by a radical and irremediable alterity, a sense of difference between self and other that is impossible to overcome (256; emphasis added). It also indicates a tension between writing and orality (or performance); the "impaired" speech of the son here is silent and leads only to more silence, the difference in the text, as Michel de Certeau describes it in The Writing of History, like "a missing precious stone" waiting for a "writing to circumscribe it" (213, 210). The role-playing proposed by the father on the airplane leads not to communication but to isolation, even to a form of pathetic (sorrowful) solipsism. Of the two men borne together in (a return) flight, it is not an angel of history but a historian who turns "lamely" back to his book (Clifford Geertz's Interpretation of Cultures). The father, "an isolated, needy individual," his face to the window, looks into a vacant exterior space or into himself (who knows?), as both are propelled forward by a jet engine yet also back to another figure of history - this one not a heavenly vision but a speechless son, an emblem of descent, wrapped in a quotidian, decaying, and incommunicable reality (256).

This tragic-comic quality, elsewhere described, in similarly paradoxical terms, as a "lightly ironic piety," haunts Greenblatt's enormously influential critical practice (Greenblatt, "Prologue" 9). In one of his most vivid and intimate, yet also hilarious and publicly oriented, anecdotes, the literarily entitled "Prologue" to Hamlet in Purgatory," Greenblatt describes his own father's obsession with death, a fascination characterized by a blend of wonder and denial informed by a tension between the theatrical and the anti-theatrical, that appears ironically to have been transmitted across the generations:

The wonder had a specific origin: my grandfather had died in New York. . . .My father then had to bring back the body to Boston by train. The coffin was in the baggage car; and my father was sitting quietly weeping in the club car, when in New Haven, Connecticut, the entire chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies climbed on board. The chorus girls, leggy, buxom, bejeweled, bedecked in feather boas and wide-brimmed hats, sweetly crowded around my weeping father, kissing and hugging him and trying to cheer him up. It was perhaps my father's purest encounter with the wonderful power of eros over...