Sworn to Secrecy
WALTER BENJAMIN’S discussion of the way the German baroque mourning play seeks to “reanimate” theatrically a world whose faith in the narrative of Christian redemption has been badly shaken reminds us of how central the question of life and death have always been to the theatrical medium—and to its repression. That medium has always assumed an equivocal position with respect to life and the living. On the one hand, it has claimed a certain superiority over other mimetic forms of representation precisely insofar as it involves living persons—living “means,” as Benjamin called it. On the other, the very mimetic function of the stage undercuts the claim to reproduce and perhaps redeem the living, a claim that in recent years has been adopted by television (“live programming”). But in the new media, no less than in the old, this emphasis on life only serves to underscore the ghostly nature of the screen as well as the stage: what it brings to life is not simply resurrected, but also embalmed.
It is not the least merit of the writings of Jacques Derrida to have explored, in the most varied configurations, the complicity of spectrality with theatricality. Nowhere is this motif more pronounced than in Specters of Marx. Readers of this text will doubtless remember the insistent and recurrent references to Hamlet as an exemplary instance of the singular relation of “spectrality” to theatricality. Derrida emphasizes repeatedly that spectrality distinguishes itself from spirituality by being inextricably linked to visibility, physicality, and localizability. Such traits distinguish the materiality of ghosts from the ideality of spirits in the sense of the Hegelian, philosophical Geist.
In a word, according to Derrida, what distinguishes the ghost from the Geist, the specter from the spirit, not just in Hamlet but generally, is its relation to the phenomenal world. A ghost is obliged to appear, which means to appear somewhere, in a particular place. A ghost, in short, must take place. But it takes place in a way that differentiates it both from ideal spirits and from material beings. It is tied to a particular locale, and yet not to any single one. In short, a ghost, as distinct from a Geist, haunts. What it haunts is, first and foremost, places : houses, of course, but other kinds of places as well. Although the etymology of haunt is uncertain, it seems related to the idea of habit and thus to the notions of recurrence and repetition. To haunt and to have a haunt is to be compelled to return to the same place again and again, whether one wants to or not. Such involuntary recurrence also links spectral haunting to the uncanny: the haunted place is both familiar and yet, in its familiarity, irreducibly strange. Both ghost and haunt are possessed, without there being an identifiable possessor.
But if a ghost is compelled to appear and to return to the same place, that is also because it requires a particular audience. The audience is never entirely arbitrary, but rather stands in a significant relationship to the ghost, even if it is unaware of that relationship. For all of these reasons the haunts of ghosts inevitably have a theatrical quality. Nowhere is this quality more in evidence than in Act I of Hamlet.
• • •
Already in their initial encounter with the ghost, before Hamlet has yet appeared on the scene, Marcellus and Horatio react in a significant and symptomatic fashion: they seek to call it to account, engage it in dialogue, and, above all, to bring it to a standstill:
Horatio.
… Stay, and speak. Stop it, Marcellus.
Marcellus.
Shall I strike at it with my partisan?
Horatio.
Do, if it will not stand.
Bernardo. ‘Tis here.
Horatio. ‘Tis here.
Marcellus.
‘Tis gone. (1.1.139–44)
The ghost appears, but it is difficult to pin down, since, as Horatio anticipates, “it will not stand.”
This “instability” of the ghost returns later in the first act and takes on an added significance. That occurs after Hamlet has spoken to, and above all listened to, the ghost and the story it has to tell. Hamlet’s initial response to this story is to take an oath of revenge. But that oath in turn requires another one, this time on the part of all those who have seen the ghost: Horatio and Marcellus in particular. They must be sworn to secrecy about what they have seen and heard, lest Hamlet’s oath of revenge prove impossible to keep. Hamlet thus enjoins his companions to swear not to speak about what they have witnessed. As Hamlet sets about organizing the oath, the ghost is no longer anywhere to be seen:
Hamlet.
Give me one poor request.
Horatio.
What is’t, my lord? We will.
Hamlet.
Never make known what you have seen to-night.
Both.
My lord, we will not.
Hamlet Nay, but swear’t.
Horatio. In faith,
My lord, not I.
Marcellus. Nor I, my lord, in faith.
Hamlet.
Upon my sword.
Marcellus. We have sworn, my lord, already.
Hamlet.
Indeed, upon my sword, indeed.
Note Hamlet’s insistence upon all the external trappings of a formal oath: it is not enough for Marcellus to protest, “We have sworn, my lord, already,” not enough that he has already agreed, verbally, to Hamlet’s injunction “never make known what you have seen tonight.” Although Hamlet, like Horatio, has studied at Wittenberg, the Protestant mistrust of sacramental ritual seems to extend to the “faith” that for Luther is supposed to supplant it. “Faith alone,” sola fides, is for Hamlet no more reliable a criterion than “good works.” He therefore insists, much to Horatio’s surprise and discomfort, that his companions repeat the oath they have sworn in faith, this timein deed: “Indeed, upon my sword, indeed.” The repetition of “indeed” serves more to unsettle its emphasis than to accentuate it. Neither “deeds” (good works) nor “faith” seem to be sufficient to allay Hamlet’s concern, and, as we shall soon see, with good reason. Immediately after Hamlet’s nearly obsessive insistence on swearing in deed, by his sword, something unexpected happens, which will call into question both deed and faith as the basis of a given pledge:
Ghost cries under the stage.
Ghost. Swear.
Hamlet.
Ha, ha, boy, say’st thou so? Art thou there, truepenny?
Come on. You hear this fellow in the cellarage.
Consent to swear.
Horatio. Propose the oath, my lord. (1.5.149–52)
What the ghost says is doubly uncanny: not just because it is invisible, but because it echoes Hamlet’s own voice, his injunction to swear, while making that all but impossible to accomplish. The ghost’s echo thus illustrates the antiperformative effect of a certain iterability: by repeating the command to “swear,” it renders the execution of that command impossible.1 The utterance is both eminently theatrical, bringing into play—in the play—all of its theatrical elements, and eminently antiperformative: it renders impossible the performance of an act and the continuation of the plot.
The ghost is placed, not just out of sight, “under the stage,” below the deepest of plots, but in a place upon which, literally, the scene is founded, and with it the action that takes place. That this place suddenly reveals itself to be the haunt of a ghost allows his voice, echoing the words of the others, to interrupt and impede the action they intend. The visible plot is suspended by a divisible voice, emanating from an invisible plot below and before all possible plots or plotting.
This interruption provokes a sudden and unexpected shift in Hamlet’s tone: Hamlet recognizes the voice as that of the ghost, but responds to it with a desperate frivolity and familiarity bordering on disrespect: “Ha, ha, boy… . Art thou there, truepenny?” It is as if the ghost of King Hamlet, demanding that his son avenge his murder, then prevents him from beginning to act, not by doing anything, but merely by dividing and turning his voice and intention back upon themselves. It is a reflection that dissolves the subject by foregrounding its theatrical iterability: that is, its divisibility.
This situation does not merely hold for the “act” (1.5.84) that the ghost enjoins Hamlet to accomplish: it applies even more directly to the ghost’s parting words: “Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me.” But how can Hamlet “remember” a ghost who leaves him no room to forget? “Room” here must be understood literally. In order to swear his companions to secrecy, Hamlet must first find a place where the speech act can be accomplished. But the attempt to find this place, to find a “plot” where the plot can take place, is frustrated by the very instance that gets the plot going in the first place: the ghost, invisible but audible “under the stage.”
A tension thus emerges between plot as story and plot as stage: between the demands of theater as the presentation of “plot” and the spatio-temporal medium of that presentation. In order for the plot to be presented theatrically, it must take place onstage. But everything that takes place onstage relates, constitutively, to what has taken and will take place offstage, which is to say, on other stages.2 Every speech onstage is already an echo and repetition of a “part” inscribed elsewhere, which must be remembered in order to be spoken, yet which exists only in being spoken. The iterable divisibility of “representing” thus contaminates the visibility of the represented. The intended act—here, the oath—is derailed by the fact that it is always already the product of acting.3
Thus just as the plot is about to get under way, the voice of the ghost, echoing that of the hero, interrupts the expected progression of the dramatic action by revealing its dependence upon a localization that can only be called aporetic. Hamlet is quick to characterize the new situation, although not so quick to recognize its novel implications:
Hamlet.
Hic et ubique? Then we’ll shift our ground.
Come hither, gentlemen,
And lay your hands again upon my sword.
Swear by my sword
Never to speak of this that you have heard. (1.5.155–59)
“Hic et ubique” is as succinct a characterization of the divisible space of a spectral theatricality as is possible, but “shifting our ground” is hardly going to be an effective response. Not just “time” is “out of joint,” but “space” as well: the space of the stage is split between “hic et ubique,” here and everywhere.4 The ghost has to be somewhere, but it does not have to be in one place at a time. The very fact that the ghost has returned from the dead to haunt the living indicates that it has no stable place. This is what it has in common with the figures on the stage, living or dead, animate or inanimate. Those figures are never just on the stage, but always somewhere else as well.5 This double or split way of being is not so much represented as enacted by the recurrence of the ghost or, rather, of its voice, which here emerges, against all expectation, as the quintessentially theatrical organ. Despite the emphasis on visibility as a defining trait of theater, the divisibility of the stage can often be displayed better by the voice, for it is easier for a voice to be simultaneously here and elsewhere. No movement can therefore be quick enough to escape the ghostly echo of that voice:
Ghost. [beneath] Swear by his sword.
Hamlet.
Well said, old mole! Cannst work i’ th’earth so fast?
A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends.
(1.5.161–62)
Once again, Hamlet—Prince Hamlet—responds to the echoing voice of his father’s ghost with a mixture of familiarity, exasperation, and determination. The specter repeats the words of his son, who responds by repeating his injunction to his companions. But by this point his “good friends” are much too shaken to “remove” themselves as Hamlet demands. Instead, Horatio can only express his dismay: “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.” It is ironic that precisely astonishment over the strangeness of the scene should provoke Hamlet to respond with what in the meanwhile has become one of those all too familiar formulas that tend to be obstacles rather than incitements to the reading of this play. Perhaps a reminder of the context in which this celebrated response is inscribed can help overcome the anesthetizing effect of its over-familiarity:
Horatio.
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.
Hamlet.
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Then are dreamt of in your philosophy.
But come. (1.5.164–66)
What escapes the imagination of Horatio’s “philosophy”—and not just Horatio’s—are things that are “wondrous strange,” that do not fit in with existing schemes or familiar knowledge. Does Hamlet envisage another kind of philosophy or something other than philosophy when he urges Horatio to extend a welcome to what is “wondrous strange”? In any case, he does not simply welcome the ghostly voice, echoing his own, and he still clings to his project of keeping the secret to himself. And so, again and again, he insists that his friends “but come,” shift their ground and follow him to another place where they can finally take the oath of secrecy.
Follow him where? To a place that is not “out of joint”? There is no place where an oath can be sworn because there is no place that is not divided in advance by its dependence upon other places, which in turn can never be located once and for all. For this reason, every place is always part and parcel of a medium, although never simply in the sense of an interval or transition between two fixed points or poles. The medium is what happens when places are haunted by an uncanny divisibility. Medium is the ghost of place: its haunt.6
This line of thought brings out a new aspect of Hamlet’s all too famous complaint, with which he acknowledges the impossibility of ever accomplishing the oath of secrecy:
Hamlet.
The time is out of joint. O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nay, come, let’s go together. (1.5.187–89)
If not just “the time” but also its localization as “place” is equally “out of joint,” it will not be easy ever to “set it right,” for there will be no right place where the time can be set straight. Hamlet’s response is to invoke the traditional manner of dealing with this dilemma: that of plotting action:
Hamlet. Let us go in together,
And still your fingers on your lips, I pray. (1.5.185–86)
Hamlet can only “pray” that his plot will allow him to find a place where he can escape the divisible disjointedness of time and place, of which the murder of his father, the king, is more a symptom than a cause. Some sort of action, or reaction, is required. But in a time and space that is divided and out of joint, there is no room for decisive action —only for acting. Yet the results of that acting will never add up to a coherent and meaningful story, a muthos capable of framing and containing the mediality that makes it possible and impossible at once.
“Come, let us go (in) together.” This injunction—half resignation, half defiance—with which Hamlet reacts to the double bind of his spectral situation, marks the impossible transition from the theatricality of the first five scenes of Act 1 to the plot as such. To “come” is to “go,” to exit the scene and enter the expected action. But in the end coming and going will turn out to be not successive alternatives but rather inseparable aspects of the same theatrical movement, one exemplified in the strange ability of the Berlin comic actor Beckmann to “come going,” as Kierkegaard’s narrator Constantin Constantius puts it in Repetition, a text to be discussed in the following chapter. This can perhaps help to explain why Hamlet’s movements are so marked by hesitation: it is difficult to get anything done if coming and going can no longer be clearly kept apart.
In any case, if theatrical movement, determined by the divided space of the stage, ibi et ubique, always tends toward such coming while going (not simply coming and going, much less coming or going), then it will never be reducible to a “performance” in the sense of the accomplishing of an action or an intention. The English language differentiates, before and beyond any specialized knowledge, acting from action: the former mimics the latter, but is constitutively incapable of consummating or completing itself. It has more to do with responding to the unpredictable than with accomplishing an intention. This is also why theater takes place in “plays” rather than in “works,” a concept that, in the aesthetic tradition of great art at least, always implies the instantiation of a genre: tragedy or comedy, for example. As the instantiation of genre, the “work of art” is generally understood to be structurally independent of the conditions of its taking place. In this respect, it can be deemed to exemplify the aspiration to transcend finitude. To maintain this aspiration with respect to theater, the stage, as materialization of the medium, must be considered to be nothing more than the neutral condition under which plot can be presented through action. As generic work, theatrical presentation is thus elevated above the restrictive limitations of its localizability,which for living beings is inseparable from mortality. Every self-contained “story” tends as such to be a story of salvation, every Geschichte, a Heilsgeschichte; every ending is a happy one for the viewer, listener, or reader who “survives” it.
The resurgence of the divisible space of theater complicates this kind of story, this kind of “plot,” since life and death can no longer simply be opposed to one another as mutually exclusive. In the spectral space of theatricality, the two are revealed to be inseparable, as in the coming-as-going of the ghost. The “plot” does not disappear, but its role changes. It is no longer the plotting of action, but the plotting of acting, which is also the staging of the plot.
The Seat of Memory
As we have seen, Hamlet’s futile attempt to have his friends swear an oath of secrecy follows upon the pledge he has made in response to the ghost’s injunction to “remember me.” Hamlet repeats these parting words of the ghost and in so doing makes them his own and the substance of his oath:
Hamlet. Now to my word:
It is “Adieu, adieu. Remember me.”
I have sworn it. (1.5.110–12)
Hamlet’s oath echoes verbatim the ghost’s entreaty not to be forgotten. These words come not simply from within but from without, echoing words spoken by another. But who or what is this other that asks to be remembered, and avenged? The question returns later as Hamlet questions the reliability of the story the ghost has related, the story of a murder with multiple faces: regicide, fratricide, murder of a father and of a husband. In the words of the ghost himself:
Thus was I sleeping by a brother’s hand
Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched. (1.5.74–75)
One need not accept the particular historical interpretations of Carl Schmitt, and of Dover Wilson before him, to see a more general relationship here to what Schmitt describes as the “religious civil war [konfessionellen Bürgerkrieg]” that pitted European Christendom against itself in the seventeenth century, with an outcome that has marked Western modernity ever since:
The hundred-year civil war between Catholics and Protestants could only be overcome by dethroning the theologians, given that their doctrine of tyrannicide and just war fanned the flames of civil war ever anew. In place of the medieval feudal order of estates, there emerged a public tranquility, security, and order, whose establishment and maintenance became the legitimating task of the new institution, the state…. Sovereign states and politics stand in opposition to the medieval forms and methods of clerical and feudal rule.7
According to Schmitt, this genesis of the modern state and of modern politics as a response to the Christian “civil war” determines their development and structure. The result of an “internal” struggle or “war,” both state and politics are inseparably bound to conflict: politics through its constitutive relationship to the enemy (elaborated by Schmitt in his Concept of the Political, published in 1932); and the state through the no less constitutive relationship of its sovereignty to that which escapes the rule of law: to the “state of exception” (articulated in Schmitt’s Political Theology, (1922). Such conflicts thus cannot be resolved definitively, but only responded to case by case, insofar as both state and politics are assigned a task that, from a Christian perspective, at least, cannot be accomplished with worldly means alone, since it ultimately involves the question of grace: which is to say, the relation of finite beings to their “end,” that is, to mortality. As a result, compromises have to be struck, of which the most familiar and perhaps most important for modern politics has been the translation of “grace” into “security” and its derivatives, “law and order”—a move that addresses the question of mortality mainly by displacing it.
From Schmitt’s account of the emergence of modern politics, one of his most astute readers, Walter Benjamin, drew conclusions that sharply diverge from those envisaged by Schmitt himself. In his 1925 study, The Origin of the German Mourning Play, Benjamin traces how the German baroque period responded to the profound crisis associated with the Reformation; not directly in political means, but through a very distinct kind of theater. The Trauer staged by this theater is not just melancholic, nor does it simply mourn, as the following brief but incisive passage makes clear: “Sadness and Mourning is the sensibility [Gesinnung] in which feeling reanimates the emptied world by masking it [maskenhaft neubelebt], in order to draw an enigmatic satisfaction from its appearance…. The theory of Trauer … can, accordingly, be unrolled only through the description of the world that arises [sich auftut] in response to the melancholic glance.”8
The world that emerges in response to the melancholic glance is “reanimated” through the “masks” it now wears: since nothing in this world can be deemed to be transparent any longer, the very opacity of the “emptied world” becomes the condition of its masked resurrection. But that resurrection remains a mask, tied to the theater. What otherwise will be known as “secularization” becomes, in Benjamin’s account, something more like allegorical theatricalization. Such allegorical theatricalization cannot simply overcome time and mortality, but it can temporarily arrest, interrupt, or suspend their progress. Hence the tendency of baroque theater toward ostentation, since the only saving grace it can envisage is the demonstration of its own theatricality.
Such theatricality, however, implies the inversion of the traditional Aristotelian demand that tragedy represent a unified action in a no less unified plot. Instead of placing the emphasis on the plot, allegorical theater foregrounds the play. Hamlet, of course, is no exception, as recurrent plays on the meanings of “plot,” “play,” and “action” indicate. Language and theater cease to be mere instruments for the representation of action through plot and instead take on a more immediate, more opaque and ambiguous significance. The tendency of the plot to unravel, often noted in Hamlet, reflects a characteristic that distinguishes the German baroque drama from its Spanish counterpart: “the deficient development of the plot” that, Benjamin observes, constitutes the essential “insufficiency of the German mourning play.” Benjamin observes of the Trauerspiel: “Only the plot [die Intrige] would have been capable of leading the scenic organization to that allegorical totality which, in the image of the apotheosis, begins something radically different from the sequence of images and which as such ushers mourning both in and out at once” (GS, 1.1:409).
Only the plot, in short, would have the power to point beyond the temporal-diachronic sequence of scenes and images toward a transcendent solution of the problems with which the mourning play grapples. Such a solution, however, remains inaccessible to the German mourning play, which, again unlike its Spanish counterpart, remains bound to the immanence of the theatrical: “However, the transfigured apotheosis that we encounter in Calderon is not to be attained with the banal resources of the theater. It emerges necessarily from a meaningful constellation of the whole” (GS, 1.1:408; my italics). Benjamin’s reading of the German baroque mourning play is thus “framed” on the one side by Calderon, and on the other by Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Hamlet, the play and the figure, thus plays a small but important role on the fringe of Benjamin’s study. Like Calderon’s plays, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is presented as the unattainable antipode of the German mourning play, but with a significant difference. The Spanish mourning plays, as Benjamin describes them, go beyond “the banal resource of the theater” by developing a plot leading to a transcendent apotheosis. Like religion itself, Calderon’s theater goes beyond mere theater. The same is not quite true of Hamlet. Here too, according to Benjamin, a religious solution appears to be within reach: Hamlet, writes Benjamin, is unique in “striking Christian sparks” from the profoundly un-Christian world of melancholy. But it does this, not by simply transcending that world, but by allowing it to confront itself: “Only in a life of this princely kind does melancholy resolve itself precisely by encountering itself [Nur in einem Leben von der Art dieses fürstlichen löst Melancholie, indem sie sich begegnet, sich ein]” (GS, 1.1.335). I quote the German here to emphasize Benjamin’s insistence on the reflexive moment of the play: melancholy “resolves itself… by encountering itself [lost indem sie sich begegnet, sich ein].” How is this reflexive return of melancholy to and upon itself achieved? Precisely through a positioning that is inseparable from a certain kind of melancholically reflective spectator:
The secret of his person is shut up [beschlossen] in the theatrical but therefore also measured way he traverses all the stations of this intentional space [of melancholy] just as the secret of his destiny is shut up in a happening that is entirely homogeneous to this [melancholic] sight [Blick] . Hamlet alone is for the mourning play a spectator by and of the grace[s] of God; what can satisfy him, however, is not what they play for him, but only his own destiny. (GS, 1.1.335)9
If the mourning play for Benjamin is distinguished from tragedy precisely by the role it assigns to the audience, which assumes the role of plaintiff in an interminable trial of the Creation, then Hamlet appears as the quintessence and culmination of the Trauerspiel, insofar as he is able to stage his “destiny” as a spectacle that is homogeneous with his vision as spectator. Divine Grace, which after Luther is no longer accessible to “good works” and human action, thus appears to become accessible to a spectator who is also a director and a player—an actor—not just contemplating his own destiny as the object of his melancholy but staging it as spectacle. In this staging, the spectacle as such appears to be the saving grace, since it allows the spectator to recover his “destiny,” but only qua spectacle.
Benjamin’s insight here is suggestive, even if all of its complexities can hardly be discussed here. Hamlet, he implies, alone among mourning plays, resolves the problem of mourning, not just by making it into a theatrical spectacle, but by replacing the role of the hero with that of spectator, actor, and director, all in one. As has often been observed, Hamlet does not act in the purposive, effective way commanded by the ghost of his father: rather, he acts as an actor, while observing as spectator and staging as director. He does not so much accomplish his mission as stage it. He plays with and for Polonius, Ophelia, Claudius, and his mother; he uses the traveling players to stage his “mousetrap” and, together with Horatio, to observe its effects. He thus plays with everyone, with the exceptions of the ghost and Horatio. Horatio will ultimately serve as witness of the play that Hamlet stages and that significantly (for Benjamin’s argument, at least) bears his name. Horatio will thus need at the end, and after the end, to bear witness to what has just been staged, so that it too may be remembered.
For it is not just the ghost of King Hamlet who wishes to be remembered:
Hamlet.
O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story. (5.2.33–38)
Following the Reformation’s attack on “good works,” memory takes on a new function, that of consoling a world in which action is no longer the unquestionable pathway to grace.
But there are different ways in which stories can be told and “wounded names” remembered. The most familiar, no doubt, and most consoling is that already described by Aristotle in his Poetics, the muthos of a praxis that was supposed to constitute the ultimate object of tragic mimesis. This muthos was to consist in a beginning, middle, and end, the latter being understood as that which was to make of everything previous a meaningful and intelligible whole. In such a story, the end is understood not just as cessation but as conclusion, one that completes the sequence rather than simply interrupting it. The “middle,” in consequence, is “that which naturally follows on something else and something else on it.”10 The remembrance of such a story thus subordinates the medium to a bridge linking a beginning to a conclusion in a “natural” and “necessary” manner, which is to say, in the unity of a meaningful whole.
But the very tragedies that Aristotle cites as examples of the tragic muthos often call into question the subordination of medium to plot and the ideal of memory that informs it. Already the final chorus of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos warns the audience to
learn that mortal man must always look to his ending,
And none can be called happy until that day when he carries
His happiness down to the grave in peace.11
Such knowledge, to be sure, can never be self-knowledge, as Ophelia, in her “madness,” fully recognizes: “Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. God be at your table” (4.5.43–44) This renders the traditional demand of a story to be integral and whole applicable only to others, never to oneself. It places the listener or spectator in a fundamentally asymmetrical position with respect to the spectacle—precisely not the “homogeneity” that Benjamin attributes to Hamlet, as “spectator of and by the grace(s) of God.”
Such asymmetry both calls for and is put into play by a theatricality that stages a different way of remembering and being remembered, one that in turn implies another way of staging stories. Staged stories do not define their “middle” as a natural, necessary, and totalizing transition from a beginning to an end, but rather recognize that beginnings and ends are always the media of other stories. Staged stories therefore never simply begin in medias res, since their res is already itself a medium. Staged stories are thus always stories “of” the medium in and about which they take place. The kind of listening and memory to which they appeal do not seek to recover a self-contained meaning or resurrect the dead. Rather, such memory knows itself to be inseparable from forgetting rather than its simple opposite; it does not strive to neutralize or surmount time in a transcendence of the self. As the Player-King reminds his Queen, who protests that she will remain true to him beyond death:
I do believe you think what now you speak,
But what we do determine oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth, but poor validity.
…
Most necessary ’tis that we forget
To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt. (3.2.168–76)
No one, of course, experiences the difficulties of paying back the debts of memory, whether to himself or to others, more acutely than Hamlet, and not only when he tries to carry out his pledge to the ghost. Those debts result not just from practical problems, but from the inseparable linkage of memory to forgetting. In his response to the ghost, Hamlet demonstrates that he is aware of this link and of its ramifications, which involve not just his character and the plot or plots in which he is engaged, but also his immediate situation, that of an actor on the stage. On the stage itself, such awareness can only take the form of an interruption that breaks the fictional continuity of a self-contained plot by referring it to its theatrical and medial conditions of possibility. Despite appearances, this reference is not just a practical or empirical one, since the medial conditions of representation to which it refers bear directly upon the issues represented. This, then, is how Hamlet begins his response to the ghost’s story, admonition, and departure:
Hamlet.
O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, hold, my heart,
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. (1.5.92–95)
To promise, as Nietzsche elaborates at the beginning of the Genealogy of Morals, implies the ability to overcome time and space as media of separation, alteration, and forgetting. Fully aware of this, Hamlet implores his “heart” to “hold, hold” and his “sinews [to] grow not instant old.” Indeed, nothing less is required if he is to fulfill the Ghost’s wish to be remembered and avenged. But immediately after thus sounding the reaches of earth, heaven, and hell, Hamlet’s tone suddenly changes, as though it were overtaken by the language of another, which was beginning to get out of hand:
Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. (1.5.95–97)
From heaven and earth and hell, Hamlet’s thoughts jump suddenly to a “globe” that is not just a synonym for the earth, or even for the head, anatomical seat of memory, but also the name of the theater in which Hamlet (the play) was written to be performed. This theatrical allusion could be considered as merely a facetious or narcissistic jibe, at the expense of the drama, were it not for the adjective that precedes and modifies the noun: the globe referred to, whatever else it may mean or be, is also distracted, literally and etymologically “torn asunder,” as split in its meaning and being as is the stage and theatrical space in general. In this “distracted globe” “memory” may “hold a seat,” but it is only one and only for a limited time. How long memory can hold that seat will depend on the general distraction in and of the theater. This, perhaps, is why Hamlet immediately declares his intention of emptying that theater, and its globe, of everything that might distract his memory:
Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. (1.5.95–104)
Memory, as Hamlet would have it, at least, should rule the roost in a “globe” purged of “all saws of books” and other “baser matter”—a globe that can thus become its undisturbed site: “thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain.”
That such single-mindedness could turn out to be entirely compatible with global distractedness is, of course, one of the lessons that Hamlet will soon begin to learn. For nothing is more futile, whether in theater or in politics, than trying to purify the “globe”—in all of its senses—by turning it into the site of a coherent plot. “Remember me” are the ghost’s parting words to Hamlet. But what does it mean to remember a ghost? To remember this ghost, at least, is to remember the story he tells and to draw consequences and conclusions from it. But what happens to such a story when it is emphatically “staged”? What happens to a staged plot?
The word plot returns in various contexts in this play. One of the most suggestive occurs toward the end, when Hamlet sees Fortinbras leading his army off to conquer Poland. Hamlet is overcome by shame:
to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
…
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? (4.4.59–65; my italics)
The plot of Hamlet does not try to “hide the slain.” It does not seek to become the “continent” that would contain and comprehend theatrical spectrality. Perhaps that is also why it continues to fascinate until today: it does not try to give meaning to death, but rather to exhibit its effects. Such a plot can be described as incontinent since, by refusing to contain or comprehend the conflicts in which it consists, it inevitably, as in Hamlet, displays a certain disorderly excess.
Toward the end of the play, Hamlet, in a conversation with his friend Horatio, refers to this other kind of plot as involving a memory that does not seek to transcend time but only to respond to it:
Hamlet.
So much for this, sir; now shall you see the other.
You do remember all the circumstance?
Horatio.
Remember it, my lord!
Hamlet.
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly,
And praised be rashness for it—let us know,
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will—(5.2.2–10)
The memory that Hamlet here recalls is one of rashness and of indiscretion, which “sometime serve us well / When our deep plots do pall.” The plot, or plots, of Hamlet —for there are obviously more than one—are of this kind. When plotting and scheming “pall” (fail, falter, fade, and die), then “rashness” is all. As Kierkegaard will write and Derrida will echo, spectrally and uncannily, “the moment of decision is a moment of madness.” Even and especially when it involves the murder of a king. This holds for the act of murder as it does for the act of revenge: neither act, qua action, will ever be “tomb enough and continent / To hide the slain” or give death meaning. This issue, or lack of issue, this aporia, is what the play displays at its end, in the multiple corpses that lie strewn across the stage.
Horatio. Give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view,
And let me speak to th’ yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads. All this can I
Truly deliver. (5.2.366–74)
Responding to Hamlet’s wish, Horatio still dreams of a coherent and meaningful plot, one that will enable him to tell the story of “how these things came about.” But the play has already shown its audience not just “how” these things “came about” but, no less importantly, where: namely, on a stage. In the end, this staged plot consists of “purposes mistook / Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads,” taking place in a “distracted globe” where memory and forgetting jostle for position. What remains are corpses strewn about the stage, which are now to be elevated, “placed to the view” “high on a stage.” But however high they are to be placed, the stage on which they will be exhibited remains just another stage of the stage before the curtain closes upon it. However visible they may be, the staged exhibition of corpses will never add up to the single, all-embracing plot of which Aristotle and the tradition indebted to him continue even today to dream. On the contrary, the elevation of those corpses upon the stage reveals what has been known all along but perhaps not fully been recognized: that the theatrical stage remains a temporal stage, which comes only in going, and which, in departing, leaves room for what is to come.