68
PARTISAN REVIEW
the directness and candor tend to be shockingly impersonal. The way I
write about myself or anything else is, I'm afraid, personal or it's noth–
ing. This means I must always find some appropriate forlll. One relation
of being personal and finding an appropriate form can be seen in Ham–
ler's famous soliloquy where he thinks about suicide. He says, "That it
should come
to
th is." As opposed
to
Ha mlet, a contempora ry in the
same situation would say, "Incredible," or some version of incredible,
which is a cry of me-feeling.
The difference between the contemporary speaker and Hamlet isn't
simply in the loss of the subjunctive mood, but rather the loss of a sig–
nificant intervening form between speaker and audience. When Hamlet
says "That it should come
to
this," he is noticing the convergence of ter–
rific forces outside himself. One force is justice. The other is necessity.
A grammatical form, the subjunctive mood, makes it possible for the
reader and Hamlet
to
convene in the understanding of his personal sit–
uation. This convening is the experience of the personal. In order for it
to
have happened, Hamlet absents himself in the sentence as definitively
as Miles Davis turning his back
to
the audience.
You might argue that Hamlet isn't using the subjunctive. He is stat–
ing a fact; so his comment has indicative force. I'm not a grammarian,
but insofar as what Hamlet says implies that it could have come
to
something other than this, he is using the subjunctive in a peculiarly del–
icate and personal way.
When the contemporary says "Incredible," we are forbidden
to
con–
vene in any understanding and obliged merely
to
notice a figure of emo–
tion, all of which emotion is locked within his cry, "Incredible." This
kind of expression in which all meaning and feeling are at once sensa–
tionally apparent and completely unavailable
to
you, which I take
to
be
emblematic of contemporary writing and much else that is contempo–
rary, resembles greed. It's probably somehow related
to
the culture of
capitalism, where we are constantly assaulted by images that demand
attention
to
what we can't have, mainly beautiful faces and bodies, but
also a lot of other things-vast fortunes, celebrity, power, love-almost
anything you might suppose people want.
The haiku, a poem of three lines and seventeen syllables, which is
usually about nature, offers a form in which writer and reader person–
ally convene. I can't write haiku, but when writing about myself, I feel
the impulse
to
write in that terse and essentializing way. This should be
apparent in my book,
Time Out of Mind,
a selection of journal entries
made over thirty years. In these entries [ say more about myself person–
ally than in any other place. I also say less since the entries contain far
