Keynote: Gail Kern Paster: Thinking with Skulls: Hamlet, Holbein, Vesalius, and Fuller

Wow. Where'd all these people come from? We're all set for Dr. Paster's Keynote: “Thinking with Skulls: Hamlet, Holbein, Vesalius, and Fuller” and I think we've got our biggest crowd yet. Following some opening remarks by Dr. Cohen, in which he dubs the Folger the “US Department of Shakespeare,” and Dr. Paster as the US Secretary of Shakespeare.

Paster credits Dr. Tribble, who we will be hearing from, a little bit later, for her contributions to her research.

Paster suggests that the presence of the skull goes beyond the traditional symbols of death and absence. In cognitive terms, Yorik's skull is an extension of Hamlet's mind. The four skulls cited in the title suggest a transformation of the skull from a momento mori to an embodied mind. “The skull distracts us from its cognitive role” with its significance of mortality, but it remains “an artifact of the extended mind,” and is not merely “the empty container of what was or what is to come.”

In Holbein's The Ambassadors, the anamorphic skull is traditionally thought to undermine the French ambassadors and human knowledge. The skull is a “third ambassador” from the afterlife, but Paster suggests that the skull is more properly considered in cognitive terms. The signs of the personalities of the two ambassadors are represented by differing complexions within the colors that Holbein uses to portray the ambassdors themselves. The one is redder, becoming the warmer personality of the courtier, the other is darker, becoming the more melencholy disposition of the scholar. “The mind's inclination follows the body's temperature.”

The contrasting complexions are most important in consideration of the bloodless skull, which is emergent in the time as its own “fleshless, bloodless individual.” The skulls of the ambassadors are not dry, white, and bloodless, they are to be understood to posess the colors of the characters that have them. The presence of the skull is only activated as a symbol of death by the active imagination of the viewer, motivated by the curiosity and will of the viewer to see the skull. “We remember death by moving closer to an emblem of memory itself.”

“In volunteering to witness the skull, the viewer” volunteers to confront the death that awaits him all, by moving away from the skull to view the ambassadors, the viewer chooses to see death in a symbolic context. Paster poses the question if narratives that we construct are canceled by the skull, or whether the skull becomes “a sign of the mind pouring itself into symbolic containers and doing its own characteristic works of extension.”

The tall skeleton of Vesalius' plate uses posture to stand in for meditation. Bone stabilizes bone, and the lacking flesh is not missed. The humours needed to create the melancholy of the skeleton are missing, but the effect is plainly visible. The messiness of fleshy emotion is note eradicated by death, and the skeleton, resting his skull on his hands, clearly communicates through touch, and perceives through his gaze. The skeleton, lacking flesh, meditates on a skull, lacking a body, and having removed pieces of the skull, makes it a fragment of a fragment. Vesalius shows us a “grim irony” of a “fragment of a fragment,” with “the skeleton as our mirror, and the skull as his.” Paster proposes we are invited to put our flesh onto the skeleton's bones rather than to see the skeleton as our bones stripped of flesh; it therefore becomes an externalization of the observer in celebration of the longevity of the human frame.

A cognitive dynamic occurs between images of skin and skull, and in Vesalius between skeleton and skull. In Hamlet, Hamlet imagines the flesh and bones that the skulls had once had. In the context of early-modern grave yards, a complete skeleton might have seemed even more fascinating than they do to us, but the skulls, which Hamlet is most interested in, are unmistakingly human. The grave digger, in his pride of being able to identify the skull, is able to establish a social relationship with it, but it is worth note that the grave digger's assertion remains unverified. The cognitive prop of Yorrick's skull turn into memories of a specific individual, memories more specific than those of Hamlet's own father (who, as a side note, lacks all flech), but these memories are only conjured by the assertion of a memory that may be faulty.

In their remembrance of Yorrick, wether or not the skull is really his, the gravedigger and Hamlet engage in cognitive processes similar to the viewer of the Ambassador's, and to Vesalius' skull. “The skull is a reminder of the self mocking that is the exclusive province of the living brain.”

From these more famous skull, Paster turns to Fuller's painting of Sir Williem Petty. The skull is one of two objects in the painting. Petty also holds a folio in his lap, “a more or less conventional accompanist to the skull,” but the folio is an anatomy text turned to a diagram of the skull, which subverts the usual presence of the book as a moral authority. Instead, ghostly subjectivity is replaced with scientific objectivity. The skull thus gives over its “imperfect actuality” to the diagramtic perfection of the ideal. The skull cedes to the book both its power to represent mortality and to represent itself.

That was probably the most intense thing I've heard here so far. Still, I have a few questions. For Hamlet, the skull represents both. It is the embodiment of the dead Yorrick, but the also embodiment of an idealized memory. I was going to muse on the skull in the Revenger's Tragedy, but Gary Taylor asked the question much more intelligently than I am able. It would, of course, have been the same skull from the prop box. Following the reality of the fragment of Yorrick (preserved in the extended mind), the skull of Vindice's wife creates her physical pressence throughout. Maybe Vindice isn't so insane after all: he is perhaps so grief stricken than he simply does not want to let go of the fragment of the externalized self of his wife.

Time for a little bit of a lunch break. We'll be back after the next paper session.