a nightmare from which I am trying to awake

Ulysses, episode 2, Nestor

I had decided to do Saturday updates on Ulysses until I finish it, except today is Sunday, so let’s say weekend updates. An episode a week? We’ll see if that continues. I actually finished episode 2 last week, but spent this week rereading parts of The Odyssey and watching for the first time an adaptation of Hamlet I’ve never seen. I think I’ll come back to The Odyssey at some point, maybe in an episode with Leopold Bloom, our Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus, in his own mind, is Hamlet, so this is mostly about the adaptation I watched.

In episode 2 of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus goes to work, teaches a bunch of middle schoolers first about history and then poetry, privately tutors one who is bad at math and has to listen to his boss, Mr. Deasy, rant about Irish politics while he waits to be paid. He gets paid and then goes on his way.

I knew the nickname of episode 2 of Ulysses before I started it, but I’m pretty confident that I could have picked out Stephen Dedalus’ boss, Mr. Deasy as a (corrupted?) stand-in for Nestor, the wise king of Pylos. He also is neatly a Polonius, a father figure that doesn’t dovetail as nicely as he would like into a young man’s crisis and need for guidance. Stephen is preoccupied with his theories about Hamlet, to the point where he is putzing over them, daydreaming while teaching in a rote fashion. And Deasy is mostly interested in defending England (boo!) and complaining about women and Jews (more booing). Deasy’s Nestor reference becomes most clear when he mentions the story of Helen and Menelaus.

Deasy also lectures Stephen about his debts, essentially recommending that Stephen basically try the envelope method of budgeting, showing himself as much of a blowhard as Polonius, when Stephen is so deeply in debt¹ to so many people (he thinks of them and the amount as Deasy is lecturing him.) Deasy and Stephen also discuss their battling conceptions of history and God, which reminded me of Tolstoy spending much longer trying to figure out the answer to the same questions.

—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?

—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

—That is God.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

—What? Mr Deasy asked.

—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

---

I won the copy of The Odyssey (trans. Robert Fagles) that I still have at a summer camp for knowing the answer to a trivia question about Hamlet (where did Hamlet go to college? Wittenberg) when I was 13. This is illuminative of both the types of summer camps I went to and what I was like when I was 13. But the seemingly random linkage between Hamlet and The Odyssey seemed like a cosmic coincidence that Stephen Dedalus would find funny. This week I revisited both some of The Odyssey and Hamlet to have them front of mind as I keep reading Ulysses.

I think it makes sense to keep checking back with The Odyssey as I read, and I’ve only gotten through the Telemachy (the first four books, which correspond to the first three episodes of Ulysses), but I did finish an outstanding filmed version of Hamlet.

This year, I saw The Motive and the Cue in London, so I came home and watched the Richard Burton² Hamlet. But I hadn’t seen a film adaptation of the play since high school (Olivier and Branagh’s version), so I thought I would rewatch one of those to re-familiarize myself with the characters and plot. Once I saw that there was a Russian version from 1964 with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich, I thought “oh yeah, that’s the one.” The whole thing’s on Youtube.

This ended up probably not being the best adaptation to watch if the goal was “brush on my Shakespeare.” Lots of scenes and lines are excised in screenplay, including things that we might of think of The Big Ones, based on a Boris Pasternak translation (Polonius gives his advice speech to Laertes, but doesn’t say anything equivalent to “To thine own self be true.”) There are whole scenes done without any dialogue. For all my tethering to Joyce through little repeated phrases and his word choices, what was the point of watching an adaptation of Hamlet that doesn’t even have the words (that I could understand) in it?

Anyway, it turns out a whole lot. I’m sort of surprised that more people haven’t watched this, especially considering its availability on YouTube (just under 4k views on Letterboxd). The film is directed by Grigori Kozintsev and stars Innokenty Smoktunovsky as Hamlet. I’m not the biggest Russian film head (outside of Bondarchuk’s War and Peace), so these names meant nothing to me when I started, though I’m now really really interested in watching Kozintsev’s adaptations of Don Quixote and King Lear as well as Smoktunovsky’s performance as Tchaikovsky in a biopic from 1970.³

Most striking to me on first watch was what was externalized and what was internalized of the retained language. Many of Hamlet’s lines are given over to voice over, so particularly as someone watching with no Russian understanding at all, all I had was my own knowledge of the speech and Smoktunovsky’s wonderful face. The internalized speech here also meant that Hamlet is not alone nearly as often as he is in other adaptations. You can watch the “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt” soliloquy stagings in Olivier and Kozintsev below (the videos are cued to the speeches). You can also see that Kozintsev’s starts on the line “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable” !

But while the language inside, the action is outside. And it’s an outside that is grounded and real. Olivier stages “To be or not to be” on craggy rocks, but once his speech gets going, it’s clear that the actor/director is sitting on a fake rock in a studio. To be clear, I don’t mind this artifice! It recalls what a stage version would look like and there’s value there.

Still Kozintsev borrows the setting (he was a fan of Olivier’s adaptation), but has Smoktunovsky amongst actual rocks and waves.

The setting and the costuming is also unlike anything I’ve ever seen. There’s a collapse of Western Europe and Medieval and Renaissance that abandons any specific time or place, not in a way that feels “inaccurate” (though what is “accuracy” of Oliver’s Tudor get up for a play set in Denmark), but in service of a narrative.

My favorite costume was Ophelia’s in the first of her “Mad Songs” in Act IV, scene v. A mourning costume that she uses to do a corrupted version of a dance we saw her practice earlier (in the background of Polonius giving Laertes advice). Anastasiya Vertinskaya’s choreography with her veil just had me floored—I ended up watching the scene twice.

Beyond the costumes, Elsinore itself is highly decorated with tapestries and murals, but Kozintsev’s camera is always reminding the viewer just how much the castle (and its accompanying hostile environment) serve as a prison of decisions to be made for Hamlet. There are shots through windows with iron bars and layers of doorways that seem inhospitable and a looming portcullis.

This is to nothing of why I watched this adaptation! Shostakovich’s score! Incredible—he has two opuses related to Hamlet, but I believe the earlier one (from 1932) is from a staging of a play, whereas 116 is for the film.

I’m probably going to end up watching the Branagh Hamlet soon anyway, because I do think it would be good to be reminded of more of the lines from the play, but I’m really glad I landed on this adaptation first.

1. Fred Vincy alert!!

2. I thought maybe Richard Burton would be a full blown 2024 obsession, but uhh, he is in a lot of bad movies. I can recommend The Spy Who Came in from the Cold though!

3. The same year The Music Lovers by Ken Russell came out—I bet a Soviet film about him is very different though!