3
Psychoanalytic: Hamlet with Lacan
Hamlet continues to inspire new mysteries in postmodernity: the modernist “conflict of interpretations”—each one trumpeting its own “method” (which is to say, its ideology)—giving way to a legitimation of multiplicity, which is less relativistic than it is consumerist: we revel in their styles and pause only to wonder what it is about this peculiar object that arouses so many different readings in the first place. The variety of approaches has thereby been turned into a new problem in its own right—sheer quantity itself inspiring a new and qualitative question. The older readings themselves are by now effortlessly assimilated into so many master-codes, from the humanist to the historicist, from the psychoanalytic to the theatrical-performative: what now demands interpretation is the structure or “dispositif,” which encourages so many distinct and seemingly disparate libidinal investments (to use Lyotard’s excellent expression).
This development already gives Lacan’s meditations on the subject a certain priority, whose experience with psychic investments left him with a most convenient key or master-signifier, namely Desire itself1: even more conveniently, it is a usefully empty signifier. What do all these interpretations want? Or rather, reversing the question, what do they think Hamlet wants, and why does its “desire” so effectively capture their attention? As our fourfold scheme of allegory certainly presupposes various kinds of libidinal investment, perhaps it can say something useful to this question.
I.
The first two levels posit a text and its “mystical” or allegorical meaning. But as we have here an only figuratively “sacred” text, along with a surplus of spiritual meanings, modern allegory often tends to reverse this order, turning the text itself into a “meaning” for this or that “context,” which has become a literal level in its own right. Thus, an allegedly historical reading of Hamlet proves on closer scrutiny to be an operation in which Shakespeare’s play is itself taken to be a symptom (or interpretation) of a historical narrative now posited as the true or literal level of events: we claim to be using history to understand Hamlet, but in fact it is Hamlet we are using to understand history, that is to say, to construct a historical level or narrative in the first place. This slippage, this insensible shifting of levels in which the object of interpretation has changed places, is characteristic of much of modern allegory, owing to the disappearance of any universally acknowledged master text such as Homer or the Scriptures; but as for the history involved, I think it simply most often means “modernity,” that is to say, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, or the emergence and nature of this last; and Hamlet is no exception.
Brecht thought it was about militarism, as his magnificent sonnet suggests:
Here is the body, puffy and inert
Where we can trace the virus of the mind.
How lost he seems among his steel-clad kind
This introspective sponger in a shirt.
Till they bring drums to wake him up again
As Fortinbras and all the fools he’s found
March off to battle for that patch of ground
“Which is not tomb enough … to hide the slain.”
At that his too, too solid flesh sees red.
He feels he’s hesitated long enough.
It’s time to turn to (bloody) deeds instead.
So we nod grimly when the play is done
And they pronounce that he was of the stuff
To prove “most royally,” “had he been put on.”2
But we can just as easily construe his meaning—shorthand for the Thirties but also for the long Cold War—as feudalism, and even more narrowly as late feudalism, namely that strange and unclassifiable moment of the absolute monarchy, a moment that could just as easily be seen as the climax of the feudal system (liege lords, feudality, loyalty to the great clans) as on the other hand the laborious attempt to overcome its anarchy in national unification. From that perspective, the fundamental task of the new absolute monarch (amply represented in Shakespeare’s own history plays) was to subdue the warring feudal barons and, in a grisly reversal of Freud’s own myth of the primal horde, to castrate them all: Rossellini’s grand vision of La Prise de pouvoir de Louis XIV, indeed, demonstrates the enactment of that program, which turned the great nobles into drones by forcing them to leave their estates and to live all together in a Versailles in which they are little more than the slavish ornaments of a richly overdressed personnel. Marc Bloch’s classic book on feudalism, indeed, detected two contradictory systems at work in the catch-all term: on the one hand, the system of loyalties that link liege lords and vassals within the clans of feudal nobility, on the other, the relations of exploitation between landlord and serf.3
Given these ambiguities, we may be entitled to introduce a third one involving a doubtful etymological relationship of the “feudal” with the feud as such, thereby staging the entrance of the first of our interpreters, René Girard, whose version turns less around his influential theory of mimetic desire than on that of the essentially religious recourse to an external mediator.4
Girard’s historical imagination is stirred, above all, by the interminability of the great blood feuds of the ur-historical tribal world, as documented by Jules Henry in his Jungle People:5 blood feuds between tribes (which are not yet even clans in our modern sense) that last for generations, the original slaying to be repaid now lost in the mists of time immemorial. This dizzying nightmare of history, which suddenly sparks the prophetic impulse in a thinker already equipped with his master theory of mimetic desire (that is, of the dependency of the human being on the model of the Other’s desire), now unexpectedly casts a garish new light on Shakespeare’s play, the final form of the so-called revenger tragedy, and a tale of the blood feud scarcely sublimated by the attribution of it to royalty itself.
We may omit for the moment the ethical controversies to which this view of Hamlet inevitably gives rise (and which Girard himself revives): namely, the immorality of the assumption on which it seems based, that it is right and proper for the offended party to kill the offender. Girard thinks that Shakespeare’s play was written to disprove this uncivilized assumption by way of a bloody object lesson. Bernard Shaw thought something similar before him; but ‘tis no matter. For us here and now the essentials lie in the breakdown elements of feudalism: on the one hand, the residual memory or legacy of the great clans, memorialized in feuds and familial or dynastic competition (for Girard, indeed, this particular original sin is even to be detected in the aggressivity that individualism and social equality brings with it, the aggressivity of a wellnigh Lacanian mirror stage)6 ; and on the other hand, the generational dilemma of the feudal primus inter pares, the questions of royal succession and of the authority of usurpers: a dilemma that cannot be solved by pure reason, whence Hegel’s transformation of sovereignty—the monarch—into a mere empty unifying point.7
This is not a matter of the older biohistorical criticism, in which current events or people in the author’s life are laboriously identified in a kind of one-to-one allegory in the works as such. What is at stake rather is the ideological confusion of contradictory categories within the “political unconscious” of the contemporaries (author and spectators alike). This does not mean that some of the situations in the work may not reproduce historical memories in a suspiciously analogical way: thus, in his little study Hamlet oder Hekuba,8 Carl Schmitt reminds us that the situation of a king murdered by a queen’s lover who then assumes his throne already took place in reality some twenty years before Shakespeare’s play in the neighboring kingdom of Scotland (Mary Queen of Scots and Bothwell). But for Schmitt this is worth mentioning, not because it is supposed to have suggested his plot to the dramatist (who was in fact using an ancient story already recently revived in more or less contemporary form by Kyd): but rather because it supplied the answer to one of the lasting problems about Shakespeare’s version: why the Queen’s innocence (or guilt) is not satisfactorily resolved in the play itself. For Schmitt the answer is clear enough: to declare Gertrude innocent is to offend Elizabeth, who put her real-life counterpart to death; to declare her guilty is to offend the sovereign’s most likely successor, the son of the lady in question (and future patron of Shakespeare’s company). To leave the matter unsolved is then the best part of valor and an uncertainty that can only heighten the suspense Shakespeare necessarily needs to infuse into his remake of this now familiar old play.
Carl Schmitt borrows Benjamin’s distinction between Trauerspiel and Tragödie (they were mutual admirers) and reverses it, locating the binding nature of tragedy, as opposed to everything spielerisch in the Trauerspiel, in the way in which through it history “intervenes” in the aesthetic. For the Greeks that “history” was what we call myth, and it carried the conviction that the events in which those legendary gods or heroes were inextricably involved were historically archetypal. In modern times, it is the relationship of Hamlet to the “tragedy” of the Stuart family—the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the accession of James I/VI, in other words, the historical core of Shakespeare’s play—which for Schmitt demonstrates a different relationship between the Elizabethan public and “current events” than in our own time, or with the Greeks either.
Although Schmitt and Girard both indulge in tirades against the contemporary taboo on biographical criticism, Schmitt wants this exercise to be something rather different than the hunting of sources and models in the archives (what he calls “das Bildungswissen um die Geschichte, das bei den Zuschauern vorausgesetzt werden kann,” the historical knowledge that can be attributed to the spectators), but rather an intervention of History itself that gives the public sphere a “common present of time” and that might better be described as a kind of decisive breakthrough of “real” history. It is not therefore a matter of some one-to-one matching of fiction and reality—a superficial kind of topical allegory which can perhaps best be dispelled by thinking of history, not in terms of individual characters and models, but rather in terms of the tragic situations themselves.
Schmitt’s conception of the aesthetic function of history—“der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel” (his subtitle: the eruption of time itself into the “play”)—has indeed something in common with Benjamin’s more convulsive and revolutionary notion of the breakthrough of the past in moments of need, that “Jetztzeit” or time of the Now, in which ancient Rome “erupts” into the present of Robespierre’s revolution.9 If so, then Schmitt’s interpretation would have to be reread in terms of the deeper categories at work in his correlation of “current events,” namely that of sovereignty and usurpation—those at play in his fundamental notion of the “state of exception.” In Benjamin, too, the usurper is the secret truth of the Sovereign: for him the inner movement of the “Trauerspiel” (the “funereal pageant”) revolves around the triangular relationship between the roles of Usurper, Martyr, and Intriguer.10 We will see later on that these roles are scarcely absent from Hamlet: if Claudius is the obvious candidate for the part of usurper and tyrant, there are also more secret and subterranean readings whereby Hamlet himself occupies all three positions as well. At any rate, categories of our political unconscious such as succession and usurpation are what are profoundly unsettled by certain kinds of representations as well as certain kinds of events; and these are in any case, like all purely political categories, internally contradictory ones, subject to slippage and contamination; they are related to what are supposed to be more private or subjective categories, such as incest, marriage, the paternal function, and so forth; and when the two shift, there is a shudder in the world, like the premonition of an earthquake, or like the body’s spasm when an elevator falls. It would then preserve Schmitt’s commitment to history if we added the specification that this categorical reflex must first be glimpsed in this or that contingent historical event—an assassination, a scandal, a run on the market, the emergence of a new national enemy—before the literary work can then appropriate its deeper experiential content.
This kind of historical criticism is then very different from the kind that searches out topical and historical models: it is a deductive process that moves, step by step and by logical exclusion, and demonstrates what the play is not. What such procedures can do by way of suggesting what the work is and means is simply to deploy current events as symptoms—Elizabeth’s hesitations about the choice of her successor (like Hamlet’s own procrastination), the question of succession and usurpation raised both by the Essex rebellion and the eventual accession of a foreign monarch: these are so many signs of a profound categorial uncertainty aroused by the contradictions of the late-feudal system itself and of the structural incapacity of the dynastic institution to resolve the generational problem, the dilemma of time and change itself.
As for the revenge format, here indeed we can return to René Girard’s anthropological diagnosis and indict the early feudal clan system for this particular structural contradiction, which provides no solution save for a power rivalry and an internecine violence which will inevitably end up producing a centralization in royalty that undermines the system itself (much like monopolies under capitalism).11
Hamlet thus can be seen to emerge from a twofold situation that combines the contradictions of both feudalisms, the early rivalry of the clans, the later primacy of the monarch. It activates the conscious or unconscious uncertainties that haunt both, addressing its categorial anxieties not as its central thesis but rather as the raw material of its affective mood and as the narrative possibilities of its Darstellung. The political level of the text—clearly essential to the theatrical conventions of this genre—is thus not thematic in reference, but rather the secondary expression of deeper collective anxieties about the structural contradictions of the political arrangements of this historical society: here ideology is not the taking of a position on those problems (for example, whether Shakespeare was a Catholic sympathizer or a patriot) so much as it is the dawning confrontation with infrastructural contradiction as such.
But none of this does much to explain why Hamlet is so joyous a play, in the sense in which Deleuze uses the word (for which “life-enhancing” would be an adequate substitute only if we understood life as the heightening excitement of the present moment). Empson once explained the density of Shakespearean language by the need to keep the actors interested and to fuel debates and discussions in the green room.12 It is a welcome and materialist perspective—let us say theatrical-materialist—with which to restore all the “material causes” also at work in Hamlet’s place in history, now grasped as the history of the theater: the excitement of the audience is then stirred and aroused by this heightened intensity on stage, which results from the possibility of playing the roles in a variety of different forms and styles, so different from the naturalist assumption that there is just one way of doing it, namely the correct one. Here, in some first approach, we may revive the disagreement between Schmitt and Benjamin and contrast the former’s commitment to history with the latter’s insistence on the thematics of Spiel or play, as it surfaces in the name of the genre (Benjamin wants to distinguish his Trauerspiel sharply from an older Tragödie) and reaches a climax in Schiller’s aesthetics (for Lukács a prefiguration of Marx and disalienation). While Benjamin’s conception of Tragödie is nowhere fully expounded—it has to do with fate and silence and emerges from myth as history—it is much clearer that for him the Baroque (whose distinction from the medieval is to be found in the absence from it of the transcendent in a still nonsecular age) grasps history itself as Nature, eternally recurring in its rises and falls, the successions of its dynasties, in which death and resurrection are seasonal and only the span of a baroque ceiling or sky conveys the heavenly (even the idyll or the shepherds’ play “sows history like so many seeds in the earth’s motherly soil”).13 For such an aesthetic of immanence, even the formerly tragic is little more than the seasonal passage of the generations, and we catch a glimpse of this nonclosure of the eternal at the end of Hamlet. So the “mourning play” will in fact be a playing with natural symbols and recurrent ornamentation: nature is here ornament and profusion, and even the ever-changing stream of named emotions (which we are tempted to assimilate to some postmodern play of affect) confirms Schiller’s famous cry about the plants and animals of the natural world: “They are what we were!” In that case, we scarcely need to play at being them. Trauerspiel thereby completes its vocation to treat human history like the “history” of nature, to modify the stunned silences of humans in the face of destiny (tragedy) into the hapless baroque contemplation of the transience of all things.
II
This is the aesthetic recovered in Lionel Abel’s unjustly neglected classic, Metatheater,14 in which Hamlet becomes a play about acting, and thereby, in its reflexivity, the first truly modern drama and one radically distinct from Greek tragedy (spectacles of cruelty, Nietzsche said, fit only for viewing by the gods). Metatheater thus ranges itself alongside all those other theories that combine a thesis about the impossibility of tragedy in our time with an account of the radical difference of modern or often simply realist or bourgeois drama; in doing so, it becomes, in spite of itself, a theory of modernity as such and yet another periodizing and narrative version of the twice-told tale of modern individuality, with this difference, that: it is practical, and that its thesis is neither “performative” in the abstract-linguistic sense nor Spiel-oriented in the anthropological, but finds its evidence on the stage in the acting itself: and not merely in that openness of the role to multiple interpretations of which we have already spoken, but in the delight of the physical bodies under the lights, making their faces and belting out their lines. We are thereby already in Brecht (one of Abel’s prime exhibits), save that here the medium does not here lay out the message (“now from this side, now from that”), but as in its classical formulation, finds it in its own medium: Hamlet is a man of the theater, a producer and director of productions, besides being a madman who acts out his various fantasies. Meanwhile, king and queen famously have their official roles to play; the court is necessarily a place in which etiquette and intrigue require gestures rather than realities. “Sincerity” is in any case a romantic offshoot of this dramatic “insincerity,” along with the close-up and method acting; and only Sartre’s philosophy (omnipresent in Abel) risks the view that everything we feel and do is acting in the first place. So the stage shows us not rage or jealousy, hesitation, anxiety, love, admiration, confusion, loyalty, fear, or euphoria, but rather the acting out of all these things. In that sense, Hamlet’s famous madness, which might have been “real” in Kyd’s lost first version, is here patently a simulation that can stand as the very symbol of this meta-acting that characterizes the play as a whole—with this reminder, that just as Hamlet himself occasionally shades over into real delirium, so, too, the reality of all those emotions enumerated above also tends to show through more immediately from time to time. For the acting of them must be given its content by the things themselves: we are not yet in any thoroughgoing phantasmagoria or play-within-a-play (the Romantic emblem—The Prince of Homburg!—of that meta-distance from the role under discussion here).
I imagine that for whatever reason—maybe the political situation ruled out anything too close to power for comfort—Shakespeare was confronted with the demand for a remake of an already well-known play, which he had to liven up and modify for commercial purposes. Already the revenger’s tragedy itself was old stuff, and Kyd’s madman was easily transformed into someone pretending to be mad, but at the same time eluding the easy judgment that he was simply an intriguer in Benjamin’s sense, out for power in his own right. From the modern distance of existentialism we can see why “power,” the succession, being crowned Hamlet II, means lapsing into being: becoming only that, once and for all, and for good, losing the satisfactions of multiple possibilities—what Goethe and Coleridge thought of “hesitation”—by choosing one of them definitively. Acting, then, becomes the nonpsychological, nonsubjective vehicle for such an allegedly psychological state, which is in fact an ontological one. Hamlet can for the moment be everything and anything, but at the price of being nothing at all (which is no doubt the definition of the actor in the first place).
What is clearly central in this performance of metatheater is the critique of expression as such, a category which is still, at its outer limit rhetorical and at its ideological heart a belief in the existence of a true inner emotion that can be externalized. The player king’s famous account of Hecuba’s grief is then the definitive enactment of the latter kind of acting and Hamlet’s response an implicit designation of the constitutive difference between such rhetorical expression (at its best in Greek tragedy in the form of silence) and this role-playing of it.15 Meanwhile the distance from the content will not be demonstrated within the character as such (although it is itself acted out in Hamlet’s soliloquies); rather, it comes out best in the dialogue, the interplay between the characters, each of whom necessarily has a role to play with respect to the other. The transitional nature of the play is then underscored by this survival of the feudal or courtly role as such, at the moment in which it is becoming a role to be enacted; and the slippages within Hamlet’s own expressivity (and to a lesser degree those of Polonius) are to be explained by the constitutive uncertainties of their respective roles (for example, whether Hamlet is an heir to the throne, a son, or an avenger). Here, if we might be permitted a crude and peremptory interpretation, the play serves as a diagnostic symptom of that genuine historical transition which will ultimately “resolve” the feudal contradictions described above: it does not represent them, nor does it express them formally or thematically, but rather designates their effects, in this fluidity of the social roles which evolve and then dissolve in this transition between the two moments of the feudal system.
As for the language itself, Frank Kermode has given us at least one unassailable standpoint in his identification of hendiadys as the fundamental trope of this play at least, if not of Shakespeare’s style in general.16 Richness then is guaranteed by the overflowing of every named phenomenon into two distinct substantives, which are both the same and different all at once: “the windy suspiration of forced breath” can then be taken as a purely rhetorical figure and exaggeration, or as language’s own demonstration of its distance from the object and its capacity to revel in that distance and the differentiations it permits. In a Bakhtinian way we may glimpse here, in the carnavalesque opening and momentary window of Elizabethan style, a moment of freedom between the scrawny emergence of syntax in the Middle Ages (see Auerbach)17 and the codifications of the baroque era, the counterreformation’s dual reforms in terms of Spanish exuberance or French classical discipline. But here this possibility is dependent on the dual ancestry of the English language: its simultaneous Latinate and Germanic roots, which give us two of everything, rather than Heidegger’s Germanic Ur-purity or the mongrelized Latin proliferation.
I hesitate to attribute to this constitutive duality the two moments of feudalism designated above, although it should be noted that Kermode himself makes the connection between the trope of dualism and the proliferation of doubling that runs through the play’s action and characters. We will, however, certainly encounter such duality on the psychic level as well. For the moment, however, this trope can be considered as an operator of multiplicity.
We must not be too dogmatic on the matter of a philosophy of number. Certainly dualisms have often been signs of closure. But in this case it seems to me that the doublings encourage proliferation; while, if anything, Flaubertian or indeed Ciceronian triplication shuts a sentence down more irrevocably than any multiplication of dual alternatives ever would.
The opening of the language, then, its distance from itself and its object, encourage an immense variety of affect that is a source of this theatrical jouissance to which we alluded above. Not emotions but moods are developed and encouraged here: not Hamlet’s anger or his foreboding, not the King’s guilty suspicions, not Ophelia’s pity or the Queen’s rueful hurt, but rather the moods, melancholia, euphoria, eagerness, fury, insolence, disdain; these affects course through the scenes, as it were, spurring its heterogeneity of sheer difference into a succession of tones and keys. “The observations are suggested by the passing scene,” as Hazlitt put it,18 “the gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind.” Nor are the characters in any way fixed or monologic in their psychology (Hazlitt again: “Shakespeare was thoroughly a master of the mixed motives of human character”), and each one, as the occasion demands it, can momentarily constitute a vehicle for affective variety—Claudius with his kindness to the deranged Ophelia, the senile Polonius with his spymaster’s lucid cunning in the instructions on his son’s surveillance, the Queen herself, only occasionally given over to concern for her son in a moment of distraction from courtly festivities. All of which is an excellent and far more comprehensive equivalent for that more restricted gamut of repartee of the fool (le fol, the Renaissance madman), which was not only a staple of the time but also, one can surmise, the part an earlier Hamlet played in the lost first version. To the degree, however, to which this conception of reflexivity as a kind of ontological playacting becomes the narrative of modernity as such, this interpretation can be seen to constitute yet another allegorical level—perhaps, insofar as modernity (and its reflexive individuality) is the dirty little secret of so much historiographic periodization, a new and more satisfactory historical one—but one which has the advantage of illustrating itself in the variety of acts and gestures on stage before us in their form rather than their content.
And this very range is what opens the spectacle up for investment in the psychoanalytic sense, a flow of time and temporalities as varied as a Mahler symphony, and which stimulates Lacan again and again to express his admiration for its useful variety:19 this “tragedy of desire” (271) is a veritable “phenomenology” (355), “une sorte de cartographie de tous les rapports humains possibles” (449), “comme une plaque tournante où se situe un désir, où nous pourrons retrouver tous les traits du désir, c’est à dire l’orienter, l’interpreter dans le sens de ce qui se passe à l’insu d’un rêve pour le désir de l’hystérique …!” (315). But here, with the indication of a form that fulfills the fundamental structuralist demand for exhaustive permutation schemes, we pass over into the third level of our allegorical system, namely the moral level, or what corresponds to the situation and experiences of the individual subject.
III
I will not here recapitulate the development of the specifically Freudian interpretation of Hamlet, which begins, as is well known, with the famous footnote in the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams (where the Oedipus complex is first, with a suitable discussion of Sophocles’s play, described and named)20: it finds its fullest development in Ernest Jones’s article on the subject (later expanded into a booklength study).21 I should add that Lacan had the greatest respect for Jones, as for many of the first generation of Freud’s disciples: the notion of the phallus as primal signifier along with that of aphanisis as the fading of desire (and in Lacan, the fading of the subject as such) are both attributed to Jones. But it would be dishonest not to admit that it is the Oedipus complex which has become the most boring theme of traditional Freudian literary criticism (however much we might still, unlike Deleuze and Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus, believe in it). Lacan maintains it along with castration as such: and at that point, as with the classes and class struggle in the most ingenious “Western” or Hegelian neo-Marxist interpretations, the postcontemporary reader may well feel that despite appearances all this is simply more of the same tired old stuff. On the other hand, if we turn the Lacanian castration complex into a mere figure of speech, where the “phallus” simply means the feeling of personal autonomy, strength, renewed identity, and so forth, then one passes just as surely into revisionism as do those post-Marxists who dispense with class and class struggle altogether. The alternative to this postmodern “exhaustion of the raw material” would seem to be the equally unenviable (more Foucauldian) conclusion that even tired old stuff can be true, but then in that case perhaps it is unnecessary to have it repeated. At any rate, in what follows I try to avoid this dilemma by concentrating on what Lacan does say specifically about this or that feature of Hamlet; an allegorical level does not need to be systematic or even coherent, it is one code in a larger scheme of things.
This rather pragmatic if irresponsible view is then confirmed by Lacan’s own methodological remarks:
In many works, searching from this viewpoint for this or that trace, for something that can give you information about an author, you practice an essentially biographical investigation of the author himself, you don’t analyze the meaning and significance of the work as such. And the meaning that for us takes center stage in Hamlet is what gives it its structural equivalence with that of Oedipus. What allows us to examine the deepest level of this intrigue, what allows us to structure a certain number of problems, is not this or that passing confession. It is the whole, the articulation of the tragedy itself, that interests us and that I am trying to underscore. This works by way of its organization, by what it constructs in the way of superimposed levels within which the specific dimension of human subjectivity finds its place. And it is by way of this machinery, or if you like by these supports and bearers—to metaphorize what I’m saying—by way of the necessity of a certain number of superimposed levels, the depth of a room, of a hall, of a scene, that a depth is provided within which we can most fully pose our problem, which is that of the articulation of desire.22
The seemingly offhand remark about “plans superposés” is the key here, not only for Lacanianism as such, but also for our allegorical framework: levels no doubt, but above all spatial discontinuities as in the cinematic depth shot. These are related but discontinuous dimensions, which will ultimately in Lacan take the form of the orders (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) or later on the rings and knots of the final period. Yet even before that, the Unconscious itself—however it may be imagined (or not, since strictly speaking and literally it cannot by definition be imagined at all)—is in absolute discontinuity with the conscious subject, whether in its Freudian or Lacanian forms. Modern allegory then emerges from this strange situation in which somehow discontinuous realities must be placed in contact with one another, and the incommensurables somehow function concurrently.
This makes, then, for an appropriately discontinuous discussion of Hamlet, in which the fundamental “diagnosis” (we have seen hysteria briefly rear its head a moment ago, but obsessional neurosis will not be denied its rights either) must not be allowed to supersede other traits or comments, which in principle bear in a more general way on the matter of desire as such. (Indeed the Hamlet seminar is formally entitled “Le désir et son interprétation.”)
“Qu’on me donne mon désir!” cries Lacan at the opening of one of the lessons. Desire, indeed, has often been grasped as a Lacanian “master code” or interpretive theme (although it is clear that even if it is, it is certainly not the only one); we need first to look at this term more closely. To characterize Hamlet as a tragedy of desire, or even the tragedy of desire, as Lacan himself does, is no doubt to confirm this impression. I will for the moment argue against it by suggesting that “desire” in the Lacanian formulation has no content, and that a master interpretive code (normally the second line on our fourfold scheme, and in Christianity, the life of Christ) is constituted by the way in which it translates its objects or texts into this or that specific narrative content or demonstration about last things, metaphysical truths, the nature of reality, and so on—whether that be existential angst, the human condition, class struggle, the Oedipus complex, the self-designating structures of language, aesthetics itself as such—in short, any transcendental or extratextual thematization (of which religion is of course a fundamental paradigm).
Linguistic reification is to be sure a subset of the general reification process inherent in market society, one evidently greatly amplified by information technology, where it reinforces the structural property in language itself that seeks to slow down its own temporality and to organize it into islands of names and nouns. (French has but a single word for both: “le nom.”) Philosophers have identified reification under a variety of terms and descriptions, and the word itself has become an example of its own meaning, a class of which it is itself a part, being itself a reified slogan connoting a specifically capitalist form of commodification. Deleuze’s idea of the speech as a “mot d’ordre,” which must be seen against the background of his general linguistic pessimism—see the tirade against conversation and communication, in Cinema II—may also be taken in this spirit: it means “slogan,” but the political content is perhaps better grasped by translating it as “party line.”23 Here a theory of linguistic reification becomes a party line, and its presence can be detected in Foucault and Derrida as well, in their very different guises.
Indeed, we may attribute a theory of linguistic reification to Lacan himself insofar as the latter’s predilection for -isms and named thought systems stands as a fundamental example of what he termed university discourse.24 De Man has usefully rebaptized it as thematization, underscoring the way in which, as in the reappearance of tones in atonal music, such reified terms tend to organize discourse around themselves and to transform a formal linguistic process back into a kind of content, or ideology, or metaphysic. For these three things are in reality the same phenomenon, and all of them the result of reification.
Linguistic reification may indeed be seen as a fundamental feature of the Lacanian system, insofar as its “structuralism” (often taken by the uninformed as the usual glorification of language as some ultimate “determining instance”) in reality expresses a deep sense of the form-creating damage done by language to the prelinguistic and on the way in which the “signifying chain” is somehow the scar of a wound it has itself caused. The word in Lacan—which is always the word of the Other—is (following Sartre) a traumatically alienating shock from which one does not recover.
But here, in the context of a conception in which desire is not only unrealizable but ultimately unformulable, the reproach of a master code loses much of its force. What is dialectical about Lacanian desire is that it can be specified as this or that longing for a specific object, but also as its own absence, as the mere will to desire as such, to feel desire in general. Meanwhile, it can also accommodate the experience of a fading or eclipse of desire, and to be sure, it can also lose its individual reference, its identification with my “self” and be projected out into the ill-defined labyrinth of the Desire or the desires of an equally ill-defined Other or others; while in the late period, beginning with Seminar XI, desire slips into a different kind or concept altogether, namely “drive” (in French, pulsion) refashioned out of Freud’s infamous and enigmatic “death wish.” (At that point, one might be tempted to shift positions—like the Ghost’s voice under our feet—and to affirm instead that it is in reality not desire, but the Other that constitutes Lacan’s master code.) From his interpretive perspective, then, Lacanian desire is not merely desire or nondesire, it is also not-yet-desire, as Bloch might put it, it is even someone else’s desire; the desire to desire; maybe even the desire not to desire. So this thematization is less a code than it is a philosophic injunction to raise the question of desire and its nature on the occasion of a text, rather than a readymade thematics into which to translate a given text.
The argument obviously omits a fundamental connotation of this term, which is its sexual undertow; and we do not need Freud to observe that sexuality is the inevitable tenor of this vehicle, however muffled or mute; and that if we really wanted to avoid those questions (they at once turn metaphysical in the conceptions of human nature they cannot avoid raising), it might have been better to substitute something else, such as the concept of lack or the concept of loss (I will not enter the polemic around these two rivals), both of which are of course absorbed into the larger and more capacious Lacanian abstraction. Still, I have already observed that we cannot remove the sexual, orthodox-Freudian underpinnings of Lacanian psychoanalysis without turning it into one more relatively revisionist philosophical or metaphorical system among others. But is not this the Gödel’s Law of all philosophy, that at some point we inevitably reach an hors-texte, a forbidden transcendental signifier, which is to say, the temptation of the metaphysical, of some “theory” of nature or of human nature? (We also remember, however, that in Lacan’s formulation there is no metalanguage.)
But what is Hamlet’s desire? We are meant to assume a fairly normal (which is to say, functioning) pretraumatic state of things: a student life (Lacan thinks he is about thirty, and so does the gravedigger), having an affair, if not simply a courtship, with Ophelia. (The question of her virginity seems to be one of the more minor cruces of Hamlet exegesis.25 ) The clinical developments begin with the death of the father and the queen’s remarriage, which, as the first monologue so classically expresses it, issue in the twin effects of mourning and melancholia, very much in the spirit of Freud’s famous essay, which, as Alexander Welsh points out, is probably more relevant to Hamlet at this stage than Jones’s amplification of the famous footnote on the Oedipus complex.26
Two primary questions must guide us in this very provisional attempt to organize Lacan’s Hamlet observations into a study of the play itself. They have to do with the inevitable matter of Hamlet’s procrastination (Lacan likes this “pregnant” English word), and that of tragedy as such and the play’s relationship to it (or not). This second theme may seem to be a more specialized literary topic, raising as it seems to do the definition of literary genres: but Aristotle’s formulation had all kinds of collective and political implications, while the issue of the possibility of modern tragedy has been widely debated and also bears on political life. Meanwhile, as we have seen for Benjamin and for Carl Schmitt, the nature of tragedy and of its opposite, the Trauerspiel, is central, and not only to their discussions of Hamlet.
The Benjaminian alternative, however, with its component Trauer (melancholy), points us in a direction in which the question could have a more than literary significance for psychoanalysis as well. Freud’s famous essay “Mourning and Melancholia” figures prominently in any number of contemporary theories (most notably for Derrida) as well as in Lacan’s reading of Hamlet. In addition to being a question of rituals (which figure prominently in Freud as social mechanisms for completing mourning, as well as in the scene of Ophelia’s burial and the doctrinal discussions around it), the analysis of both mourning and melancholia designate a blockage of desire by the loss of the loved object. In the case of Hamlet, however, the situation is even more complex: his initial melancholia emerges with his mother’s remarriage, that is to say, with the Queen’s absence of mourning, which somehow interrupts Hamlet’s own. The revelation that his father was murdered then frees Hamlet from mourning by giving him a task and a new goal (that of revenge); while as we shall see, the mourning for Ophelia (also already a lost object) dispels the block on Hamlet’s energies and releases his capacity to act. We will return later to the question (appropriate in any discussion of classical tragedy) of the meaning and effects of the play’s dénouement.
As for procrastination, any number of significant “revisionist” discussions of this traditional Hamlet interpretation—pioneered by Goethe and Coleridge—have long since marginalized this theme, not least by pointing out that none of the contemporary audiences had any great problem about Hamlet’s alleged delays. The crucial scene here is the decision not to murder Claudius at prayer, which what we may call Empsonian theatrical materialism chalks up to the need to provide a five-act play. Meanwhile other, more moralizing revisionists, from Shaw to René Girard, have wondered whether “procrastination” did not in fact reflect serious “modern” doubts about the very ethics of premodern revenge as such. Does the perspective of desire have anything new to add to these multiple perspectives on an age-old theme, which sociologically, with Goethe and Coleridge, reflected the emergence of the modern intellectual and his differentiation from the political “man of action”? (Goethe, to be sure, as virtual prime minister of the little principality of which Weimar was the capital, incorporated both functions, as did the Faust of Part II.)
At the least, the focus on desire breaks up this theme of delay and forces us to inquire into the circumstances of each of its alleged instances. Violence is in any case a confused ideologeme, and the stabbing of Polonius or the dispatching of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern provides as little evidence of Hamlet’s capacity to act as the hesitation before the kneeling Claudius demonstrates his innate characterological irresolutions. But to put all this in perspective, we must return to the essentials of the Lacanian diagnosis. For Freud and Jones, to be sure, the case is clear enough: Claudius has succeeded in doing what Hamlet unconsciously desires, namely to kill his father and marry his mother. Claudius is therefore a kind of alter ego (although of a different kind than the imaginary figure of the Lacanian mirror stage, embodied in Laertes and perhaps even more distantly in Fortinbras): he has, to put it in Lacanian terms, had the jouissance that is forbidden Hamlet, the confusion of desires then falling back on Hamlet’s relationship to his mother, whom he must dissuade from that very jouissance in which he (or his unconscious) wishes to substitute himself for Claudius. This is then a double bind, in which at one and the same time he finds himself defending the sexual taboo—in the person of Claudius—which he himself longs to break: a psychology of puritanical repression with which we are only too familiar in the modern day politics of repression.
Our approach to Lacan, however, must start from the premise that Hamlet’s interest derives from the protagonist’s simultaneous embodiment of the two great variants of neurosis in the Lacanian diagnostic: hysteria and obsessional neurosis. They can succinctly be described and differentiated as follows: the hysteric “desires to desire,” he or she does not desire or does not desire enough (the dream of the butcher’s wife),27 desire is itself a problem for this subject. The subject of obsessional neurosis, on the other hand, by neutralizing or occluding desire, wonders whether he or she is alive or dead: not desire is central here, but rather time as such, and a perpetual scrutiny of it. I tend to associate this neurosis with that Sorge that Heidegger, following Faust II, placed at the heart of the human condition but which we do not properly understand, I think, unless we translate it as worry rather than the more noble-sounding Care. The obsessional neurotic’s problem is then this constant worry about a time seemingly empty of a desire that he does not in fact want to experience in the first place. Why? Because it is the desire of the Other, in both senses of the genitive, objective and subjective: it is a desire for the Other, but it is also (in a Girardian mimetic sense) the Other’s desire, rather than his own; and indeed, the Other’s desire for him, the infant, a desire that is terrifying by virtue of its all-engulfing power.
In this description, however, it is to be noted that the gender of the Other has imperceptibly changed: the masculine or paternal character of the Other has subtly given way to the demands of the maternal Other, primordial, and earliest in time and in the infant’s experience. This gender ambiguity in the Lacanian category of Otherness is indeed an interesting originality that we cannot pursue any further here. But it offers the opportunity to restate briefly the fundamental outline of Lacan’s theory of desire as such. Desire arises in the gap between need and demand, that is, when the nameless bodily urges of the infant are doubled by its helpless realization that only the Other can supply the lack. Desire is thus always desire of the Other, in the double sense of the genitive: the Other, following the hideous apparition in Cazotte’s Diable amoureux (a monstrous camel’s head that addresses the stentorian question to the protagonist: “Che vuoi?”“What do you wish?”) is both subject and object of the infant’s own interrogation, which is also to say that the Other is the same as language, the Other is the Symbolic Order or at least its source and guardian. (The Sartrean trauma of the other and the structuralist primacy of linguistics are thus here united.) Yet this intersection of the question to the Other and the prelinguistic (and preunified) body designated by the enigmatic “graph of desire”28 in which two vectors cross in opposite directions—confluence, Lacan says, of the synchronic and the diachronic, and a kind of psychoanalytic version of the mysteries of the hermeneutic circle—will have yet another, even more mysterious consequence that seems to me less than adequately mapped out by this complex graph (which also includes, as a subepisode the mirror stage and the emergence of the ego), and that is its sedimentation in the primal fantasy:
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Here a barred subject, the subject of the unconscious, stands in relationship (the lozenge , Fink tells us, can mean “envelopment, development, conjunction, disjunction … but is most simply read ‘in relation to’ or ‘desire for’”29—a most dialectical relationship indeed) to the little a (or o), the object of desire. Is this primal fantasme a narrative or even the cell of a narrative? Does the subject stage itself as an imaginary spectator from the outside to this scene (not exclusively the primal one, I think)?
Insofar as the fantasy of desire is inspired by what was one of the basic texts, not only of the whole structuralist period but of Lacan’s own work as well, namely Freud’s little essay “A Child Is Being Beaten,” we may hazard a few additional conjectures on the relationship between this characteristically Lacanian matheme of the primal fantasy and narrative as such. What comes into play in Freud’s essay, indeed, is the way in which the unconscious fantasy of the beating constitutes a structural permutation scheme where not only the positions but their very functions change. (To be sure, Freud’s text bears officially on the problem of perversion, that is, on the missing third possibility in the catalog of neuroses I have given above; but the essay has most often been read in recent years in purely logical or formal, “struturalist,” way.) In the original system, with its three logical permutations, the initial fantasy specifies simply that someone (the father) is beating a child to whom I am hostile. In the second configuration, I am being beaten. In the third, there is simply an unidentified beating taking place. For narrative purposes, I will add a fourth possibility (it is in a sense already implicit in the third one), namely that I myself am doing the beating, which would place me in the father’s position. All of which means that these “I”s and “me”s are not identities but subject positions, including the neutralized possibility of the purely contemplative spectator viewing all this from the outside. The scheme not only literalizes the concept of a “subject position”; it also recalls those “learning plays” of Brecht in which the actors take all the successive roles in turn in the rehearsals, now heroes, now villains, now secondary witnesses, and so forth. Indeed, it is just such a permutation of roles that the character named Hamlet is called upon to play in his drama, and Lacan will be helpful in allowing us to specify that these roles seem principally to be divided into those of his two fundamental neuroses, hysteria and obsessional neurosis. That the hysteric’s search for desire opens the whole gamut of possibilities for Hamlet’s languages, affects, gestures, and intentions has already become clear; and the dialectic of hysteria also ensures the alternating moments in which desire is missing and the subject somehow blocked or split, in its “fading” or its castration.
But it is the situation of obsessional neurosis that will for the moment be more productive, for this neurosis is a temporal one, and it means, among other things, that the subject is always “on the time of the Other,” his temporality running by the other’s clock, his appointments set by the other’s schedule, and so on. But this then casts a whole strange new light on the premise of the revenger tragedy as such. We have said that Hamlet is in mourning, and indeed in deep melancholy, by virtue of the superimposed death of his father and remarriage of his mother. The ghost, however, now places him unexpectedly under an injunction that ought to offer the relief of action in the paralysis of that complex mourning, but which in fact complicates it by placing Hamlet under the injunction of the Other. For it is the Father, not Claudius, who is the Other here (and in general), Claudius being, by virtue of the Oedipus complex itself, Hamlet’s alter ego. Whatever the truth of the ghost’s narrative, it is into Hamlet’s ear that its poison is filtered. Hamlet’s situation before that was a relatively simple dynastic one: as the legal heir, he needed to decide whether to escape the king’s present jurisdiction and to claim the throne in his own right. The shadow of the Fortinbras narrative is there to emphasize this narrative option, in however minor a key; the redeparture of Laertes to his Parisian university drives home another version of the same option.
Now, however, a different Law and a different injunction completely transform what amounts to the very same choice by depriving Hamlet of any freedom of decision in the matter (we must here recall how threatening the desire of the Other is for the subject in the Lacanian scheme of things). More than this, the ghost’s peculiar insistence on the mother’s exemption from this revenge (whatever political motives Shakespeare may have had to insert it, following Schmitt’s ingenious conjectures) is clearly itself a reinforcement of the Oedipal taboo: do not touch the mother. She belongs to someone else (to the father).
Indeed, Lacan’s reading of this climactic scene is one of the most remarkable in the whole Seminar. He notes the febrile excitement and intensifying energy with which Hamlet urges his mother to cease all sexual intercourse with Claudius—itself a rather remarkable moment in world literature, as he notes. (Surely this is a quintessential expression of that sexual disgust and revulsion which T. S. Eliot found so inexplicable in this play and in Shakespeare generally.)30 But even more significant is the collapse of this excitement after the second appearance and intervention of the ghost: a veritable withering and shriveling, as Lacan puts it. After the ghost’s warning—the reappearance of the Oedipal father and the threat of castration—Hamlet gives in: he withdraws his absolute demand for Gertrude’s renunciation and weakly asks her to reduce her indulgences of Claudius and to moderate her own desire and participation (“and that shall lend a kind of easiness / to the next abstinence”). Here more than anywhere else in the play, Hamlet’s own “desire” finds itself rebuked, and the strength of this interpretation is that it can be acted out and realized on the stage. It then casts a retroactive light on Hamlet’s behavior with Ophelia, which has left many respectable critics indignant, but which amounts to a systematic attempt to extinguish “normal” desire for an acceptable object in the light of this “unnatural” revival and reawakening of all the unconscious thoughts that center on the mother.
But then if this is what the emphasis on desire amounts to in Lacan’s reading, we need to be more attentive to the ebb and flow of energy itself: when is it aroused, so often in manic form? When does it suffer the kind of “dégonflement” Lacan so perceptively diagnoses in the scene we have just imagined? The arrival of the players is a particularly interesting moment, for Lacan sees in it the momentary chance for Hamlet to occupy the role of the artist and creator, the space of a kind of sublimation that if only for the moment lifts the psychic asphyxiation to which his desire is subject. (“You could, for a need, study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert in it, could you not?” [Act 2, Scene 2].) It has always seemed strange to me that few critics have wondered what those lines actually were and whether—given the interruption of the performance—the actors ever get to speak them. Most conjectures assume that they consist in an attempt to underscore the relevance of the older repertory staple to the current situation, particularly in the account of the murder itself and the peculiarity of its method, the pouring of venomous liquid into the ear (no doubt an Italian inspiration). Instead, the exegetic focus has mainly turned on Claudius’s peculiar inattentiveness: why not break things off during the dumbshow, when the very nature of the murder is out in the open for all to see? Was Claudius distracted, or did the murder itself (whose commission is acknowledged by his own outburst) perhaps not take that particular form at all? I believe that the speech of some dozen or so lines had nothing to do with the murder (or indeed with the ostensible aim of this “mousetrap”), but rather with the queen’s second marriage, about which notoriously the player queen “protests too much”: these lines testify to Hamlet’s obsession and document his unconscious hesitations about the rival and alter ego he finds in Claudius himself. Killing Claudius would in that case amount to a kind of suicide and thereby justify the famous soliloquy on this subject, otherwise interpretable as a merely existential interpolation.
As for Claudius’s reaction, Lacan seems to me extraordinarily perspicacious in identifying the moment in which he does recoil in surprise and horror from the theatrical spectacle: it is the moment when Hamlet explains the change of title and the transposition of responsibility for the crime from the king’s brother in the original to his nephew in this new acting version. The old version suits Hamlet well enough, the change (which he deliberately points out) makes its relevance even more obvious. But look at this change from Claudius’s perspective. Who is his nephew? And what is this king’s current anxiety?
In fact, Claudius is living in a different plot than that of Hamlet himself: beset in his newly acquired sovereignty by potential enemies on all sides: Norway as well as Hamlet, and later on the Polonius clan and the mob as such; the formerly adulterous relationship—indeed the murder itself—being the least of his worries. The designation of a nephew as a regicide then has for Claudius a very different meaning than it does for the nephew himself (leaving aside the fascinating matter of uncles and nephews inherited from the power relations of the earliest matriarchies).31 No wonder it is at this point that he cries out in alarm and halts the production.
There follows upon this interesting mismatch—treason along with artistic satisfaction—what is certainly the most probative scene in the play when it comes to the theme of procrastination, namely Hamlet’s postponement of his vengeance at the very moment, not only of the snapping shut of his mousetrap but of the greatest vulnerability of Claudius himself, unguarded by any of his retinue. I think we must simply conclude that what this scene proves has little enough to do with theological motives (whether Claudius will in this case still go to Hell or not), nor with any secret moral scruples about the ethics of revenge itself, à la Shaw or Girard, so much as it is a demonstration that Hamlet is not really interested in killing his father’s murderer and that he sees no real gratification in it. It does not, in Lacanian terms, really correspond to his deepest desires; it is not what he really wants—even though we do not wish to suggest by those words that he actually knows what he really wants. It is indeed the strength of the Lacanian perspective here that the “tragedy of desire” it emphasizes is not the failure of desire, let alone its disappointed fulfillment, so much as it is the very search for desire as such. The scene dramatizes the problematization of desire, the mystery not of its fulfillment but of its very content.
Now we come to another of Lacan’s great insights, which has to do with the astonishing recovery of Hamlet’s energies in the grave scene, another of what Lacan calls the “phallophanies” in which phallic power, personal identity, and the capacity to act are unexpectedly reborn.
The grave scene is distinguished by two new characteristics that seem to have little enough to do with the revenge plot. First of all, it stages a first substantive confrontation with Laertes, Hamlet’s boyhood friend, whose “activation” as an actant now for the first time reintroduces the theme of the mirror stage with a vengeance. Hamlet’s unconscious identification with Claudius remained within the Symbolic Order and in particular the Oedipal triangle and resulted from the usurper’s assumption of Hamlet’s position within that triangle, as the adversary of the father and the suitor to the mother’s attention and affections.
Laertes, however, is Hamlet’s double, his mirror image, and thereby the operator of a self-construction, in which narcissism is difficult to disentangle from aggressivity. This particular rivalry is thus Imaginary and involves what can be termed ambivalence, to distinguish it from all the other dialectical varieties of identity and difference that flourish throughout this play. The possibility of an antagonistic relationship to Laertes is then what enables the reassumption by Hamlet of an ego, a self, a personal identity (to use the pop-psychological language current today): “What is he whose grief / Bears such an emphasis? … This is I, / Hamlet the Dane.” But this is the very assumption of that alienated thing, the name, which reinserts the “subject of desire” back into the alienating social network—as royal, dynastic, son, and heir—as precisely those false identities and mythologies of the self from which the Ghost’s message had so traumatically separated him. This assumption of the alienated name is the moment in which Hamlet passes from hysteria—desiring to desire—to obsessional neurosis, being on the time of the other, the false time of the social and court of ritual. The speech in the grave then begins by denouncing Laertes and ends up assuming the latter’s rhetorical emotions for the speaker himself. It would be worth exploring further the way in which (as in the player king’s Hecuba declamation) rhetoric, bombast, the mere expression of an emotion whose very existence is in doubt, is foregrounded and not so subtly identified and denounced as bombast by contrast with the symptomatic glimpses through a different kind of language of affect as such, of nameless foreboding. (“Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart. But it is no matter.”)
This preprepared Imaginary role of an active self or subject is then reinforced by what happens on the level of desire, and that is the death or neutralization of the “objet petit a” or in other words, Ophelia herself. Now that she is dead, this desire is no longer embedded in the Oedipal entanglements that unexpectedly came to smother it and can be given full-throated expression (without consequences).
But it would be wrong (in my opinion) to see this upsurge in Hamlet’s energies as a sign of that renewal of self-confidence and phallic power that will lead him to his final “règlement de comptes.” For the sloppy denouement is in reality nothing of the kind; and it tends to reconfirm the Benjaminian position on the Trauerspiel as opposed to Carl Schmitt’s affirmation of true historical Tragödie. What Lacan points out is significant indeed, namely that this final duel with Laertes, from which the settlement emerges and all secrets are revealed, is not Hamlet’s act at all, but rather his service in a role Claudius has planned for him: by which I mean not so much conspiracy as rather feudal duty. Hamlet, says Lacan, is “le champion de l’Autre”: already reset to the clock of the Other, Hamlet now shows himself willing to do battle for his mortal enemy the usurper—the King—thereby remaining even more deeply mired in his feudal and familial subalternity. It would then be tempting to say that it is rather Laertes who defends the cause of a dead father, were the situation not so artfully confused by Shakespeare as to make even the deeper motive of the encounter (death of Ophelia? death of Polonius?) indeterminable (the ostensible occasion being a mere Spiel in Schmitt’s dismissive sense). This ending has nothing of the tragic climax we find in Lear or Othello (Macbeth and Coriolanus are clearly separate cases): it is simply an accidental massacre, and the deeper aesthetic satisfaction can only lie in the succession of Fortinbras himself, which fully reconfirms the contingency at the heart of dynastic logic as such, as much to his own amazement as that of the spectators on and off stage. This is satisfying because it proves what the Lacanian reader will have already anticipated, namely that there can be no satisfactory conclusion to a drama, let alone a tragedy, of desire; and that the return to dynastic thinking then appropriately confirms this impossibility, while at the same time allowing the whole complicated matter to be shut down.
But at this point another dimension of the Lacanian system proposes an explanation: Laertes, as we have said, is a character who has emerged from Hamlet’s mirror stage, so to speak; his activities are therefore firmly fixed in the Imaginary order, whereas the family situation ultimately belongs to the Symbolic. As I understand it there can be regressions of a familial signifier into the Imaginary realm—indeed, there can be a whole range of permutations in the way in which these three orders offer perspectives on one another32—but the promotion of a mirror figure to Symbolic status seems a good deal less likely.
What this means is that the whole bloody denouement has in fact been played out on the level of the Imaginary, whereas the proper conclusion to Hamlet’s Oedipal dilemma would require a Symbolic resolution. This reading of Hamlet would then seem to be a reversal of the great allegorical triumph of the Symbolic over the Imaginary in Lacan’s Seminar on the Purloined Letter. Here in Hamlet it is the Imaginary that blocks access to any Symbolic solution (whether in the form of some true revenge or of a conversion of the mother figure, perhaps even of a renunciation of the Ghost’s command altogether). The sense that the denouement is cobbled together, in haste and without any genuine necessity, is thereby both explained and justified: we are meant to be unsatisfied as the very recognition of our fixation in the Imaginary sphere.33
But perhaps a short coda is necessary here in order to trace the loose thread of Horatio’s charge (“to draw thy breath in pain to tell my story”). Empson might well observe that this is a charge to the public to come and see the play again and to the actors to continue to want to perform it. But there is here a generic twist as well, which bears on the issue of what we may call transitional narrative structure. Under the practiced direction of Henry James, the novel in its most fully developed form was able to deploy a new kind of dual perspective that critics since have baptized “Irony.” This is to say that the novel, in its construction of bourgeois subjectivity, was able to bring us close enough to the inner life of its individual characters, both to lock us into their subjective blindness and to deliver us from it all at once. Irony in the novel means a commitment to Densher’s subjectivity, a lack of distance from it, a veritable immersion, such that if and when we are brutally torn away from that spell we can see that the whole plot of The Wings of the Dove, which he himself simply lived as his own life, was in reality, when seen from the outside, a sordid matter of extortion and prostitution. This is a complex effect that depends on two related social developments: the one, an increasing autonomy and isolation of the individual subject (so-called individualism), and the other a well-defined multiplicity of social interrelationships organized into so many externally named situations.
The ultimate import of such irony is of course political: in principle, it should make it possible for the reader to take a dual perspective, inside and outside, on subjective ideology and on a historical totality in which such ideology and experience are seen to have an altogether different meaning and value. It is rare enough that literary works reach this level of effectivity; more important for us here is their relative scarcity—but now for technical reasons—in drama as such, where identification with the individual protagonist is nowhere near so absolute as to enhance the shock of withdrawing from it. But when we reflect on Hamlet in this context, we see a latency of the novel form, as well as the absence of its realization. I have already touched on Claudius’s sudden alarm at the identification of the player villain as the King’s nephew. With a little further effort along these lines, a completely different narrative—that of Claudius himself—seems on the point of emerging here. In recent memory, indeed, the heir to the Nepalese throne, presumably in some fit of derangement (not unlike Hamlet’s own?), entered the royal dining room and assassinated the entire royal family before taking his own life. Is this not the objective tale of Hamlet as it will reach the public, if Horatio does not tell the “true story”? That Hamlet includes this possibility without developing it can then be for us the sign of its unique historical situation, on the cusp between two worlds. And with that possibility we have in fact arrived at the fourth level of interpretation, the analogical one, or that of the political destiny of the human race, of human history as such.
That level is in fact what Jean-François Lyotard once famously named a grand narrative, or in what has been called in another context that of philosophies of history.34 Lyotard only indicted two of these, which he identified as the Marxist narrative of the inevitability of socialism and the “liberal” narrative of emergent freedom (Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” or the universal triumph of “democracy,” understood as a representational political system). These particular visions may not really be narratives at all, although they do certainly touch on the destiny of the human race, and are allegories of what is on the other levels a narrative structure. That they are also ideologies is something Lyotard did not seem to want to stress, inasmuch as his “postmodernity”—an end of history in its own way—also included an equally banal ideological stereotype in its own right, namely the infamous “end of ideology.”
I believe, however, that underlying the concept of postmodernity is yet another “grand narrative,” a more fundamental one, which Lyotard failed to see and denounce. For both of his candidates are in reality narratives of modernity, and it is modernity that we must identify and denounce as the single great philosophy of history or ideological grand narrative if we wish to be consequent with Lyotard’s program. He was himself, as his aesthetic writings made clear, preeminently a modernist in taste and character; and there can be no doubt that for all of us who have been formed by modernism in the arts, the indictment of the concept and the ideology of modernity is a peculiarly reflexive and self-critical process.
In that spirit I would argue that the historical meaning of Hamlet is also modernity. “The unity of the personality has been recognized as illusory since Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” remark Adorno and Horkheimer in passing.35 The offhand reference marks the play as a fundamental break, standing as an index of modernity as surely as all the other famous “beginnings” (such as Descartes or Galileo, Luther, the French Revolution), something one would not think of saying about Lear or Othello.
This inference then becomes far more consistent with Lionel Abel’s conception of metatheater as acting and reflexivity, as the reflexive transformation of classical spectacle: and is probably implicit in most of the polemics around modern tragedy, when they do not include Shakespeare on the other side of that particular grand divide. For the grand divide that is constitutively a necessary component of any ideology of the modern is probably also very much a structural feature of everything Lyotard would have been inclined to subsume under the category of the grand narrative as such.
Yet the permanence of this latent obsession with modernity may be detected in other kinds of debates about Hamlet and tragedy. So it is that the distinction between Tragedy and Trauerspiel that is the occasion for the Benjamin–Schmitt debate may itself be complicated by a third possibility. For Schmitt himself explains that his dissatisfaction with Benjamin’s classification of Hamlet as the paradigmatic Trauerspiel (along with Calderon’s La Vida es sueño) lies in fact in the exceptionalism of the English situation, which does not evolve into those continental absolute monarchies which furnish the raw material for Benjamin’s “funereal pageants.” For Schmitt, the emergence of absolutism on the continent is to be explained by the unresolvable religious and confessional civil wars to which feudalism was unable to put an end: absolute monarchy—Hobbes’s Leviathan—comes into being with the vocation of repressing these bloody struggles. But England in the Elizabethan era moves in the very different direction of maritime empire. (It will be remembered that Schmitt’s Nomos der Erde is something of a revision of Mahon’s doctrine of land versus sea powers.) The maritime expeditions begin as commercial ventures, which develop into imperial enterprises and the emergence of industrial capitalism (raw materials from the colonies, foreign markets, and so on). For Schmitt, then, the tragedy of Hamlet, associated in his mind with the Stuart dynasty and in particular with James I, lies in his (and their) erroneous belief that they represent absolute monarchy in a situation in which it is utterly out of place.
We can retain Schmitt’s historical framework while replacing his own interpretive conclusion. In that case, Hamlet would be some third kind of text, unclassifiable generically at this period, but which points toward that eventual dominant generic expression of (Anglo-American) capitalism which is the novel; and indeed most of the innumerable interpretations of this play (probably not excluding this one) can be seen in effect as writing “the novel of Hamlet.” But the novel is the quintessential expression of modernity (itself an ideological substitute and idealized image of capitalism as such): Bakhtin indeed thought that the novel was always the sign and expression (the symptom?) of emergent modernity. Thus, from another more roundabout direction, the debate about Hamlet’s tragicality also resolves itself into a disguised or distorted meditation on modernity as such.
But we have not yet considered the most curious theory of modernity of them all: Lacan’s version. Like the others, it turns on the matter of tragedy, and indeed like that of Freud himself, and Jones, on the structural differences between Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. Freud famously pointed out that of all the males in the world, Oedipus alone did not have an Oedipus complex, in this quite unlike Hamlet. But this is not the fundamental distinction, for which we must scan the rest of the Seminar on desire, in particular asking ourselves how to account for Lacan’s peculiar fascination with a certain type of dream.
This particular one comes from Ella Sharpe,36 but there are other examples throughout Freud’s writings and indeed in the course of Lacan’s own Seminars. It is this: a son in mourning once again sees his dead father in a dream and talks to him: “but the father did not know he was dead.” The rest of the dream has to do with the guilt of the son, who had hoped for the father’s death during his lifetime (ostensibly owing to the painful illness to which he succumbed): but this guilt does not seem so startling in the Freudian-Lacanian context as the father’s nonknowledge. What can this last mean? It is this odd intervention of an alien note into the dream consciousness that is somehow for Lacan constitutive. His further exploration of paradoxical negatives makes this clearer: the pleonastic “ne” in French, for example, which must grammatically accompany an affirmation in which, however, it strikes a kind of minor self-contradictory note; in English the famous double negative, forbidden by schoolmasters. Fink ingeniously proposes another English version, far rarer, perhaps, than the French: it is the “but” of hesitation and reversal: “Not but that I should have gone if I had the chance.”37 Fink goes on to gloss this peculiar grammatical event as follows:
A conflict seems to be played out in such expressions between a conscious or ego discourse, and another “agency” which takes advantage of the possibility offered by English grammar (and French grammar in the case of ne) to manifest itself. The other agency, this non-ego or unconscious “discourse,” interrupts the former—almost saying “No!”—in much the same way as the slip of the tongue.38
(And we should here parenthetically recall Lacan’s remark about Shakespearean puns and wordplay—as with the gravedigger scene if not the preciosity of plays like Love’s Labour’s Lost—as a half-open door that gives the unconscious greater access to verbal expression.)
The unconscious cannot say no, Freud taught, but perhaps this is the exception that proves the rule: it can say no in conscious discourse, and it does so in the way we have been outlining, hereby opening a space for itself in our waking life, as the father who does not know (that he is dead). What is the relationship of all this to modernity? On a popsociological level, this unknowing father is of course the waning of the paternal function socially and historically, as the Germans have lamented since Mitscherlich’s famous book.39 Even Marcuse deplored the end of the old authoritarian father, insofar as it excluded the option of Oedipal revolt. On a level of social opinion, Lacan also seems to have sympathized with this line, and in general, in the later Seminars, also alluded to a kind of historical retreat or waning of the Oedipal situation.
Yet in any case there is a paradox here, inasmuch as the Ghost, in Hamlet, knows that he is dead (and can recite the details of his own murder), whereas Laius, long forgotten, presumably does not. But this is to misunderstand the very function of a ghost, who is par excellence a figure who remains, who fails to realize he is dead and to disappear appropriately, who taunts the living with his ongoing half-life and inspires them (as in Ella Sharpe’s dream) with the consequent guilt.
When a Greek dies, he’s dead, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein. The implication in this Lacanian designation of Hamlet as dawning modernity, and the emergence of the Unconscious as something palpable if not yet theorizable, is that it portrays a father who does not know he is dead. On the appropriate level of allegory—that of the anagogical, or world history, the analogy would be that of an old order incapable, as the Stuarts were, of acknowledging their obsolescence, of realizing that they were dead. Perhaps our own moment of late capitalism is in a similar situation, of denial and rebirth.40 At any rate, it becomes clear that on this level the fascination of Hamlet lies in just this allegorical staging of the misrecognized emergence of what has over and over again been identified as modernity.
And if this chapter had been entitled “Hamlet and Allegory,” we might have ended this way: