Van Gogh’s Ear for Music: Psychoacoustic Deafness in Hamlet and New Individualism

This qualitative study of the psychoacoustic deafness prevailing in Shakespearean tragedy Hamlet applies a Jungian psychoanalytical approach in relation to systematic musicology and new individualism. Elsinore’s psychoacoustic deafness to the melodious notes of Ophelia and ignoring the due value of sound is a reason for the tragedy that befalls the royal family. The city is a deaf conglomeration of an incapacitated community struggling between reason and problematic aspirations. The madness, melancholy and frenzy are mere symptoms of an underlying disease - psychoacoustic deafness. Neither the protagonist nor the antagonist could hear, play the right note, or use music as a diplomatic tool to avert the looming tragedy. The recent surge of new individualism suffers the same inability to utilize music for finding order amidst the neo-colonial global anarchic structure. Elsinore, like an idiomatic Van Gogh’s ear for music, deliberately deprives itself of the ability to discern and acknowledge the constructive powers of music. The play manifests how music could avert tragedies, and how ignoring it could result in several socio-political catastrophes in a new individualist world.