It is extremely difficult for art to go beyond or behind “Thou’lt come no more,” Lear’s cry over dead Cordelia, without insulting our humanity. Artistic representation of suffering tends to become kitsch or worse the instant that it exploits the belief that death is not final, irrevocable, immitigable. Hopeful characters in the drama may express what everyone hopes: that the universe, in some unseen dimension, is indulgent toward the hopes and fears of the dying; but the artist and his art are ultimately bound by what we see, which is that death is “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.”
That line from Hamlet may seem ironic in the context of his father’s ghostly apparition, but I think that Hamlet, the theatrical connoisseur, knew better than many of his modern critics that ghostbusting is the stuff of cheap melodrama. He is, among other things, a man of artistic refinement who knows that he is trapped in a popular-formula revenge tragedy. It is Lear’s repeated “never”s that set the true tone for tragedy. Or Macduff’s reaction to news of the slaughter of his wife and children: “Did Heaven look on and would not take their part?” Art itself is founded on the unanswerability of that question. Heaven remains silent on the subject.
The British Wunderkind Martin Amis is naturally less discreet.
The British WunderkindMartin Amis is naturally less discreet. His latest novel takes on no less a subject than the Holocaust, that swamp where
