I went to see Hamnet last night and left feeling absolutely mesmerised by the power of interpretation. Maggie O’Farrell and Chloé Zhao’s reading of Hamlet’s father’s soliloquy (as a letter to his son Hamnet, rather than merely a premonition of Hamlet himself) reoriented the entire play for me. In this telling, Hamlet becomes something like a gift to a child who will never grow up enough to receive it; a play written for a son by his father, rather than a play written about a son’s inability to act for his father.
What struck me wasn’t whether this reading was right. I have no idea whether it’s a standard interpretation at all. What it revealed instead was how fixed my own reading had become. Shaped by a heavily psychoanalytic background, I had long understood Hamlet through a familiar lens: the obsessional dilemma; the oedipal echoes; the father’s injunction becoming the very site of Hamlet’s paralysis. It is a reading that explains a great deal. It may well open us up to certain ways of thinking about subjectivity. But in doing so, it also closes the play down. I had fixed its meaning. I had decided: this is what that means. There was no space left for it to move.
Hamnet did something else entirely. It didn’t replace one explanation with another. It didn’t say: this reading is wrong, this one is right. Instead, it loosened my grip on explanation itself. It created space for the play to breathe and for something I hadn’t anticipated to appear. It reminded me of how utterly un-fixed meaning is, especially when it comes to art. And most uncomfortably when what is unsettled is something we hold dear, like my own sense that I am someone who gets Shakespeare.
Once I noticed this, I started noticing how rarely we allow that kind of space elsewhere. In particular, in the ways we close down each other’s experience. I’ve found myself articulating issues I might think I have, only to be met, again and again, with a close-down solution: this is what you must do. This is the answer. There is no room left for not yet knowing what the thing even is. The frustration I’ve felt in those moments has made me increasingly aware of how often I do the same thing. Why must I feel like I know what another person should do with their divorce? Or their mortgage? Or their friend?
At risk of oversimplifying, I think it comes down to this: I cannot bear the nausea that comes with not-knowing. Take an argument with someone. They arrive with their interpretation of events. You have yours. And a part of you knows you’re both equally as right as you are wrong. There is no clean apology available. There is no space in which both accounts can sit without cancelling each other out. And so, rather than tolerate that, you do what we all want to do: enter into a game of moral one-upping – who did what right, who did what wrong.
What’s intolerable in these moments is not disagreement, but the gap beneath it. The fact that you do not know who they are, or why their experience of you is so utterly far from who you believe yourself to be. They must be wrong because otherwise, God forbid, you might simply be too different and there might not be a resolution. But in trying to force one, so much gets closed down and so much gets decided. When we seek relief from the nausea by rushing to fill it with certainty, so much is lost. To withstand not-knowing, and to bear the idea that something might emerge from it, feels almost unbearable.
Which brings me, inevitably, to now. We are living in frightening times and the pressure to decide what everything means feels enormous. The urge to close things down, to compress the world into something manageable, is everywhere. This is not to say hear someone out when they support some of the violence we are seeing emerge. But it is to say, we need space before interpretation hardens into certainty, and before meaning becomes fixed.
We do not know how the world got to where it is. Worse, we don’t know where it’s going. And in that sense, not-knowing, when we think of it as holding a space open, could be thought of as an ethical act. That is not to say don’t act. But it is to resist the part of us that wants to pretend we already understand. We don’t, and when we convince ourselves we do, we risk losing not only what is actually happening, but the possibility that something else, something not yet imaginable, might still be able to emerge.
Written by Molly Fitz