David Gontar
David Paul Gontar | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 10, 1945 Yonkers, New York |
| Education | Lake Forest College (B.A. 1968) Tulane University (PhD 1976) Loyola College of Law (JD 1982) |
| Notable works | Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays (2013); Unreading Shakespeare (2015) |
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David Gontar (born December 10, 1945) is an American philosopher, poet, literary critic, and retired attorney. Many consider him to be one of the most skilled English prose stylists in history, drawing comparisons to such writers as George Santayana, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edward Gibbon. Gontar is Professor of English and Philosophy at Inner Mongolia University in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. He has a Green Card status in the People's Republic of China, granted for his work in editing China's application to the U.N. for Shangdu as a World Heritage Site. The first of his two volumes on Shakespeare, Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays, is known for its theory of Hamlet's delay in avenging his father's murder.[1]
Early Life and Education
Gontar was born in Yonkers, New York to Herb (Herbert) and Genevieve (née Sattarelle) Gontar, and raised mainly in Westchester County, New York, and in Westport, Connecticut with his three brothers. Herb Gontar (1914-1995) was a real estate agent, contractor, inventor, and former teacher. In 1965 Herb patented the first tab-retaining beverage can (which coiled the tab around a key, unlike the tab-pushing device now standard, invented in 1972 by Daniel F. Cudzik). Herb, a fan of music of Mozart and Beethoven, was born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents from Odessa, Ukraine and raised in a Yiddish-speaking household. Genevieve Sattarelle's parents were from Westchester County and of entirely Sicilian heritage.
In the summer of 1954, Herb and David moved to Rolling Hills, California, a Los Angeles suburb where they lived for a year.
During 4th grade in Rolling Hills, Gontar played his first game of baseball. He was given a catcher's mitt, and an infielder told him to stand between first and second base. In the top of the first inning a batter hit a fly ball which landed in Gontar's upturned glove, while he had not moved at all after the ball was hit. No one seemed to notice that the catch was an accident (they were children after all), and Gontar's team retired the side as if it had been deliberate. It was the third out, hence the Infield Fly Rule would not have applied. Notwithstanding the lucky catch, Gontar took to baseball quickly and played well. 50+ years later he visited the same field in remembrance. Before moving away from Los Angeles, he was among the first visitors to Disneyland prior to its actual public opening on July 17, 1955.
Gontar returned east in the summer of 1955, living with the reunited family in Pelham, New York where he attended 5th grade at Pelham Memorial High School. Frank Sattarelle had recently passed away. David and his friends played conkers, taking advantage of Pelham's many chestnut trees.
In 1956, the family moved together to Westport and lived at 14 Fillow Street. Though he'd passed 5th grade in Pelham, Gontar repeated the grade in Westport at what is today Bedford Middle School. He had at some point learned chess, and would follow the game through the remainder of the 1950s and early 60s by reading Chess Life and working on problems in the magazine. Gontar's younger son Daniel P. Gontar (b. April 1977) is a chess master (maintaining a rating around 2200 Elo).
Bedford went as far as 9th grade, and Gontar attended Staples High School for 10 to 12. He began reading philosophy on his own at Staples, beginning with Aquinas and Anselm, and graduated high school in 1964. Yet he expressed an inclination for philosophy in grammar school. He later claimed that his mature work reflected his earliest metaphysical thought, in particular change as is often associated with ancient philosophy. Though reading philosophy independently, Gontar was not the typical bookworm and played ice hockey in high school.
Gontar completed his BA degree in philosophy in 1968 at Lake Forest College. While in college, he read Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness in the Hazel Barnes translation, and the MacQuarrie translation of Being and Time by Martin Heidegger. Both texts had a life-long influence on his thought along with, in particular, Western theology and the Vedanta philosophy of India. In 1968 he joined the PhD program in philosophy at Tulane University, where he completed his M.A. with the thesis Positivism versus Rationalism: a Study of the Philosophy of Brand Blanshard. He taught a course on Plato's Republic in 1971, and earned a PhD in 1976 with a dissertation directed by Andrew J. Reck, Criticism and Speculation in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley.
Career
Influenced by the British idealist Bradley, Gontar is an internalist about relations, a view reminiscent of Vedantism. For Bradley, various types of relations resist analysis by a kind of recursion, an endless proliferation that is implicit. For example, terms relate to relations. That conclusion typically applies to the so-called "secondary qualities" of color and other sensed qualities in relation to objects, and it applies also to causation. While the dissertation focused on this topic, later on Gontar suggested that a similar kind of distancing characterizes the interpersonal, or intersubjective as described in Being and Nothingness.
Gontar's metaphysical position of "dialectical nihilism" reflects the influence of Hegel.
In 1975, while at work on his dissertation, Gontar composed around two hundred aphorisms which remained unpublished until 2013 when one hundred were published online by New English Review. Shortly after its creation, the original aphorism collection was also shown to James K. Feibleman, a prolific author, emeritus professor of philosophy at Tulane and former department chair who praised the writings as "brilliant." The aphorism-scholar James Geary discovered Gontar's work at the New English Review website in 2013 where many of Gontar's writings appeared from 2012 until 2016. As a result, the small handful Geary quoted appear in google images with the author's name, in such websites as Wise Famous Quotes or Top Famous Quotes, for example, "Democracy is a brawl settled in advance by counting heads."
Gontar taught philosophy at Southern University of New Orleans from 1975 to 1979 and was granted tenure as Assistant Professor. His syllabi often included Lucretius and Stoic philosophy. In 1979 he enrolled at Loyola College of Law in New Orleans in evening classes while teaching at Southern. At Loyola he served as Articles Editor of the Law Review and received his JD degree in 1982. He practiced insurance defense law in Louisiana from 1983 till 1991 and worker's compensation law in Los Angeles, California from 1991 till 2010, with a brief return to New Orleans. During his legal career, Gontar published many articles in law review journals. His 1978 article on the Platonic portrait of Socrates, "The Problem of the Formal Charges in Plato's Apology" has been cited in several published volumes on Plato and ancient Greek philosophy.
Drawing on his experience in literary criticism and poetic composition, from the late 1980s Gontar immersed himself in Shakespeare. By the early 2000s, he had an in-depth knowledge of all of Shakespeare's plays and the Sonnets generally, and the topic became, as he once put it, a "bias." With Harold Bloom as in many ways a critical model, Gontar seeks Shakespeare's personal identity through Bloom's analysis of the figure of the bastard in King John. Bloom again proves influential as he suggests that Hamlet has "doubts about his paternity."
Besides Shakespeare, Gontar has since not devoted time to any other literary figures except Plato and the Bible. Early in his Shakespeare studies, from 1989 to 1991 he wrote a series of eighteen sonnets primarily on themes of courtly love. In 1996, his rare skill in Elizabethan verse was further displayed when he won a drama competition at Tulane University involving alternative endings to Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It. The prize was an opportunity to present to the University his fifty-eight-page essay "A Most Humorous Sadness," on existentialist interpretations of Shakespeare and the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship. Gontar published Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays in 2013 and Unreading Shakespeare in 2015.
In 2010, Gontar moved to Inner Mongolia, place of origin of his second wife Li Min. During the same year the People's Republic of China began to apply to the U.N. for designation of Shangdu as one of its World Heritage Sites. Alluded to in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan" as "Xanadu," the summer palace at Shangdu was a real structure designed along with the rest of the city by architect Liu Bingzhong from 1252 to 1256. Gontar became involved after the U.N. requested that a native speaker edit the application. Li Min led the PRC to Gontar through personal connections in the national government, so that with Gontar's revisions Shangdu was accepted as a World Heritage Site. For his work as editor in this instance the government of China granted Gontar permanent residency.
Works
Literary criticism
Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays Hamlet is suicidal well before learning of the murder of the former king. According to Gontar, the situation of the play and dispositions of the characters suggest that Claudius and Gertrude are far from hastily united, but have been in a relationship for decades. Hamlet's anguish consists in the court rumor that, to his extreme disgust, Claudius is his actual father. This illegitimacy of Hamlet unravels basic paradoxes of the play, including his being denied succession. It explains his inability to kill Claudius as the king's ghost directs him, being torn between admiration for this father and sympathy for Claudius.
Unreading Shakespeare
References
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