[Brooks is an American critic and educator. In the following excerpt, he argues that in the story "Hamlet" Laforque presents William Shakespeare's fictional character Hamlet as a Decadent artist, with the intention of demonstrating that "the art of the Decadents is a retreat from a reality which they are psychologically incapable of confronting." ]

The Hamlet of Jules Laforgue—one who is aware of his own mythic function: "Plus tard, on m'accusera d'avoir fait école" [Later they will accuse me of having started a movement]—seems a .. . promising figure. A theme which emerges from the verbal acrobatics of all the Moralités légendaires is the quest for purity and eternity, variously pursued by Syrinx fleeing Pan, Salomé decapitating Iaokannan, Lohengrin escaping the seductions of Elsa on his pillow, which becomes a swan. For Laforgue's Hamlet, Ophelia's impurity is not merely the inevitable taint received from a world where whoredom is rife, but a product of her wearing of décolleté dresses: "Or, on le sait, la virginité des épaules, c'est tout pour moi, je ne transige jamais là-dessus" [And it is well-known that the virginity of the shoulders is everything for me; I never compromise on that]. Ophelia is all too human: the sacrifice of the virginity of her shoulders is a prefiguration of her inevitable deflowerment by Fortinbras. She is a symbol of the corruption which has descended upon all womankind with Gertrude's fall, and this Hamlet, in imitation of Shakespeare's "Get thee to a nunnery," cries out that the "Categorical Imperative" must be replaced by the "Climacteric Imperative," a wish that seems to call for the androgynous state Stephen Dedalus [in the "Saylla and Charybdis" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses] finds predicted in Hamlet.

Laforgue's and Shakespeare's Hamlets are cursed in not having Saras with whom they can cry, "vierges encore, nous nous sommes cependant à jamais possédés" [virgins still, we have nonetheless possessed one another forever.] The corruption of their women, however, is itself symbolic of the more general corruption of a rank and festering earth. Denmark is rotten, the time is out of joint, and Hamlet's refusal to set it right implicates him in the carnage. Laforgue's character does not share the indifference of Mallarmé's to the exaggeration of murder; even more than Shakespeare's Hamlet, he is haunted by blood. In a passage which surely parodies the famous hunting expedition in Flaubert's Légende de St.-Julien l'hospitalier, he sets out on a senseless killing of animals which tends to prove that "tout est permis—et pour cause, nom de Dieu!—contre les êtres bornés et muets" [everything is permitted—and with good reason, in the name of heaven!—against mute and narrow-minded creatures]. His remorse for the act is quickly overcome in a consideration of the universality of blood and corruption: "Bah! ai-je été assez ridicule! Et les guerres! Et les tournées d'abattoir des siècles du monde antique, et tout! Piteux provincial! Cabotin! Pédicure!" [Bah! I am being thoroughly ridiculous! And wars! And the slaughterhouse circuits of antiquity, and all! Lamentable provincial! Clown! Chiropodist!]. But the hantise du sang, the revulsion by morality and decay, remain. The theme is stated at the outset, in the description of the stagnant bay below the castle walls, and approaches the point of agony in the graveyard scene, which is as highly wrought as Shakespeare's. Yorick's skull moves Hamlet to search the world over for "the most adamantine techniques of embalming"; he concludes that all's well that has no end at all.

There is, in Laforgue's Moralité, a real sense of a person unhinged by the brutality and uncleanliness of the world, and by the fact of death itself. Hamlet's incapacity to live is that of the man who has discovered the world is all either slaughterhouse or charnel house, and its pathetic expression is "Où trouver le temps pour se révolter contre tout cela?" [Where can I find the time to rebel against all that?] This response goes beyond the ennui of an Axël [the protagonist in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Axël] and rejoins Shakespearean tragedy; yet it is transmuted by the Decadent sensibility in such a line as "Stabilité! Stabilité! ton nom est Femme . . . J'admets bien la vie à la rigueur. Mais un héros!" [Stability! Stability! thy name is Woman .. . I admit life as a last resort. But a hero!]. It is the stability of fragility that tortures this Hamlet: the monotonous omnipresence of corrupted and enslaved women, of corrupting and murderous men, of ignoble ends and means and passions, finishing in the absurdity of death. Life is tentatively, tenuously livable, but the idea of acting a hero's role in such a world is absurd; merely to reflect upon action is to go the way of madness. He has discovered that the realm of transcendent reality in which Mallarmé's inviolable Hamlet moved is an illusion, and his answer is to quote "Words, words, words." "Ah! que je m'ennuie donc supérieurement!" [Ah! how superiorly bored I am!] is the cry of a self-mocker who has come face to face with nothingness. In his rejections, Laforgue's character resembles the intellectual Hamlet dramatized by Valéry after the First World War—one who sees all Europe as a vast "terrasse d'Elsinore," an enormous graveyard where the skulls thrown up turn out to be those of Leibniz, Kant, Leonardo, and other major thinkers of Western civilization.

To both Laforgue and Valéry, Hamlet is a figuration of the nihilistic philosopher revolted by what man has done to his civilization. Further, to Laforgue—as, perhaps, also to Mallarmé—Hamlet is an author, a Decadent artist of a developed symbolizing faculty, an unwilling man of public affairs who would prefer to quit Elsinore for the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève where a school of Neo-Alexandrians flourishes. Whereas the original Hamlet inserted "some dozen or sixteen lines" in the players' text, Laforgue's character is author of the whole production, his "immaculate conception." One of the passages he quotes for the benefit of Kate and William expresses the essence of the problem of Hamlet the artist:

Un coeur rêveur par des regards
Purs de tout esprit de conquête!
Je suis si exténué d'art!
Me répéter, quel mal de tête! . . .
O lune de miel,
Descendez du ciel!

[A heart, dreamer by glances / Pure of any will to conquest! / I am so worn out by art! / To rehearse, what a headache! . . ./ O honey moon, / Descend from heaven!]

Being "exténué d'art," Hamlet cannot rehearse his part, cannot act, but only record. In the pleasure of writing his play, he gradually forgets the murdered father it commemorates, and the vengeance its subject matter demands. His fondness for repeating "Words, words, words" indicates both his rejection of metaphysics and his retreat into literature as an escape from the necessity to act. This has scriptural authority:

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,

Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words . . .

(Hamlet, II, ii)

The cabotin, poor player as monologist, pays himself off with words; acting replaces action. Verbalization becomes his sole effort, and when the play clearly reveals the guilt of the King, Hamlet decides, "Enfin, ils sont assez punis comme ça, c'est mon avis. Moi, je file!" [In any case, they are punished enough like that in my opinion. I'm clearing out!] And his deathery of "Qualis artifex pereo! " shows that his unrealized artistic talents are uppermost in his mind at the last. Laforgue, like Edmund Wilson, here seems to suggest that the art of the Decadents is a retreat from a reality which they are psychologically incapable of confronting.

But this, as always with Laforgue, is only half the truth; to conclude that he is invalidating the Decadent withdrawal from life would be a mistake. The cocasserie of his hero—brother of Yorick and spiritual cousin of Pierrot—and the irony to which he is subjected, are first of all means of putting into sophisticated perspective the non-essential attributes of a Decadent ethos, so disassociating himself from the claptrap of its sensibility. Laertes—man of action and hence villain—becomes a social worker who interests himself in subsidized housing projects; the gravedigger announces that the decadence of Denmark has caused him to put all his money in Norwegian bonds, anticipating the arrival of Fortinbras and the barbarians; on the next-to-last page the narrator realizes—too late!—that Laertes, not Hamlet, should have been his hero all along. This modernization and parody of Hamlet have, further, the more important effect of bringing to the surface—and only sometimes ridiculing—submerged suggestions Laforgue found in the Hamlet myth. When at the outset he suggests that Hamlet's aberrations have their origin in the discovery that stones dropped from the castle windows into the moat might just as well (given the reflection) be said to be dropped into the sky, Laforgue is both mocking and affirming the essentially metaphysical interpretation given to Hamlet by his century. Irony, parody, and comedy accomplish what Villiers, with his abstract rephrasing of Hamletic problems, sought unsuccessfully: a remarkable lucidity, a play of light which permits Laforgue to examine not only Hamlet himself, but the whole range of interpretation of the myth. When Hamlet cries, "Mais ce soir il faut agir, il faut s'objectiver! En avant par-dessus les tombes, comme la Nature!" ["But tonight I must act, I must objectify myself! Onward with Nature across the graves"], a wide spectrum of interpretation and self-interpretation is suggested. The Hegelian language of the first sentence reminds us of the Mallarméan view of Hamlet as the "latent lord" who cannot become an objective being, while it also, in its contrast to "O from this time forth / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!," reemphasizes the pallid quality of this modern hero. The second sentence, echoing Goethe, sounds like mock-heroics—until we realize its pathetically literal appropriateness to the vast graveyard Denmark has become.

The original Hamlet was a man who saw, too clearly, all the aspects of his situation; Laforgue's is a Hamlet who sees too clearly all the aspects of the myth which he dramatizes. He suggests that a lesser lucidity, a surrender to instinct and the unconscious, might be the cure for Hamletism:

Dans les Jardins
De nos instincts,
Allons cueillir
De quoi guérir.

[In the Gardens / Of our instincts / Let us go gather / Something to cure us]. It is impossible for a Hamlet to follow this advice; he understands all, even that "Ma rare faculté d'assimilation / Contrariera le cours de ma vocation" [My rare faculty of assimilation / Will thwart the course of my vocation]. A Hamlet who refers to his "scruples of existence" is disarming: while acting his role, he sees himself in the light of three centuries of criticism. The charge of solipsism that can be brought against the inhabitants of Axël's castle does not apply here.

As used by Laforgue, or by his personage, irony and comedy are, then, modes of apprehending what is, in a kaleidoscopic light. The devices may create the pose of moral and psychological realism when we are fully aware that Laforgue's allegiance is not to such realism; irony then becomes a means to indirect statement which increases, rather than "undercuts," the felt pathos, as in the closing judgment of this Moralité: "Et tout rentra dans l'ordre. Un Hamlet de moins, la race n'en est pas perdue, qu'on se le dise!" [And everything returned to order. A Hamlet the less, the race isn't lost: indeed!] Or, irony can be complexly applied to the stage properties of Hamletism, as when Laforgue apostrophizes, "Pauvre chambre tiraillée ainsi au sein d'un inguérissable, d'un insolvable automne!" [Poor room thus battered in the midst of an incurable, insolvent autumn!], where, despite the ridicule, a sense of this immense ennui remains with the reader. These are examples of a stylistic lucidity which enables Laforgue to examine all Hamlets, Shakespearean, Romantic, Decadent, and to encompass that which is mythic in the figure.

In each of Laforgue's Moralités, the style is adapted to the myth recreated. In "Persée et Andromède"—possibly the most successful of them all—a simple, childlike, lyric prose is created to maintain an attitude of amused sympathy toward Andromeda passing through puberty to her introduction to love. Laforgue captures all the comedy and pathos of Andromeda's insecurity and mystification before Perseus: "miraculeux et plein de chic, Persée approche, les ailes de son hippogriffe battent plus lentement;—et plus il approche, plus Andromède se sent provinciale, et ne sait que faire de ses bras tout charmants" [miraculous and full of chic, Perseus approaches, the wings of his hippogriff beat slower—and the closer he comes, the more Andromeda feels herself provincial, and doesn't know what to do with her ever-so-charming arms]. Such a style, apposite to this fairytale, would be inappropriate to the essential mythic sense of "Hamlet," for the essence of Hamlet is contradiction, self-ridicule, cabotinage, metaphysical bombast, agony, and poetic creation. Laforgue's is a style truly intimate, even in its most cocasse moments, with its subject matter.

His subject matter, in the largest consideration, is myth, defined as that which is most essential and most persistently compelling in a personage and a story. The monologue of Hamlet, acted in the sole theatre of our mind, finds in Laforgue its most exciting expositor, and his Moralité remains fresh where Axël and even the tantalizing "Igitur"—which were certainly intended to attain the status of myth—remain limited by their fin de siècle air. Paul Claudel remarked that Hamlet was born three centuries before his time; his appropriation by Decadent writers was inevitable. Claudel understood that Axël and "Igitur" represented the crisis of nineteenth-century metaphysics, the finest and last flowering of a Decadent monologue without future. Similarly, Max Jacob claimed that the nineteenth century invented the cult of genius and elected Hamlet its representative. He saw himself and his contemporaries as working to strip the black tights off this figure, an attempt ultimately successful, since "the World War dehamletized avant-garde literature."

For by the time Valéry's intellectual Hamlet had ended his soliloquy over the ideological skulls crushed at Verdun and the Marne, the School of Paris was at its most active, exploring primitivism and myth within modernism. In a sense, the sophisticated juvenility of the douanier Rousseau is a counterpart to Laforgue's style in the Moralités, and Jacob's clowns and Apollinaire's Tiresias have the same mythic resonance as Laforgue's Hamlet. For the Axëls and Igiturs, the rest was silence; the theatre of the first half of the twentieth century was to develop more under the influence of Ubu Roi. The circus succeeded the theatre of the mind, and the terrain explored by Laforgue was fully exploited: irony and clowning were used to arrive at the mythic. That Laforgue's monologue already partook of the circus was to grant it a future denied to those other Decadent works which deployed a greater abstraction of metaphysics, but less self-criticism, a single rather than a multiple vision. Hamlet, superseded, came to be regarded as the symbol and myth of an age; yet Laforgue's Prince, because his original embodiment was inclusive and mythic, transcends the age.