| LOUIS ARMAND DEUS EX MACHINA(THE DRAMATIC EFFECTS OF THE PLAY-WITHIN-A-PLAY IN SHAKESPEARE'S HAMLET AND MARLOWE'S DR. FAUSTUS) What could this mean, the dramatic effects of the play-within-a-play? What is the force of the genitive of in the title of this paper? Does it indicate dramatic effects that are generated by the play-within-a-play, deriving from it, or does it indicate dramatic effects that are somehow intrinsic to the play-within-a-play, and so remaining within it? Or does the of in this case signify both at once; both within and without and therefore on the seam? And again, is the play-within-a-play merely subordinate to the play as such, being a device which is a simple addition to the whole, as a supplement, or is it somehow implicit in the play, in fact inscribing the play's action, inscribing the play itself as a dramatic effect, even going so far as to become a substitute for the play? I propose to argue, in light of these concerns, that 'the dramatic effects of the play-within-a-play,' in Hamlet and Faustus, arise at points of tension between what is termed a play and that which inscribes it and is inscribed by it; the dramatic or textual sense of a mise en abyme; that is to say, the tension which accompanies such notions as containment and closure, and which inhabits the problematic of the episteme and finite knowledge. [...] HAM. O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space - were it not that I have bad dreams. GUILD. Which dreams indeed are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. HAM. A dream itself is but a shadow. [II.ii.254-260] Guildenstern, acting on the promptings of Claudius, here attempts an analysis of Hamlet's disposition in terms of the Renaissance concept of princely ambition. According to such an analysis we might be satisfied in reading the metaphor of the nutshell simply in terms of the will to power and the transgression of certain limits. However, Hamlet's retort renders the certainty of such an interpretation problematic. For Hamlet, commonplace speculations regarding princely ambition amount to little more than gossip or idle talk; a play of shadows that lacks substance because arising from suspicion and prejudice. Rather, Hamlet's comment ("I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space-were it not that I have bad dreams") signifies a larger crisis in the subject's relation to knowledge, in particular 'self-knowledge,' of which the question of ambition is simply a part. Hamlet's speculative metaphysics seems, from the outset, to be preoccupied with various tensions between objectivist reality and subjectivist 'affect' or 'affectation.' Whatever certainty he has, regarding the predicament of human existence, is continually placed in jeopardy by the question of a possible transcendental 'outside,' beyond the otherwise 'infinite' space of men's minds (and by declensions of the existence of providence and the supernatural). Moreover, he is concerned by the possibility of this outside's never being apprehended, except in a derivative form or representation (subject to interpretation and distortion, and of indeterminate authenticity in the first place-such as the appearance of his father's ghost). Unlike Polonius, however, Hamlet is not willing to simply retreat from these problems into the wisdom of the church and the superstitions of the state, yet at the same time his belief in his own ability to discern things 'as they are' is profoundly shaken-for instance, by the recurrent dilemma of whether the very notion of transcendence is not in fact merely a dream or fiction. Such a dilemma signifies a profound crisis in Hamlet's faith in abstract reason (the "bad dreams," which recall Plato's notion of 'bad' mimesis, and anticipate the 'ambition' of a Nietzschean will to knowledge and Freudian theories of the unconscious and of neurosis and anxiety): as to whether he can tell the difference between 'real' knowledge and 'imaginary' knowledge, and whether he can ever know that difference itself. The psychological orientation of Hamlet's dilemma requires that any attempt to interpret the "bad dreams" in terms of, say, ambition, must firstly address the question of will. It becomes clear, considering Hamlet's reservations about free will, that we would need to consider ambition in terms of unconscious motivations, or rather as the sublimation of desire. Moreover, we would have to assume a certain ambiguity in the orientation of that desire. For instance, Guildenstern assumes that Hamlet's "ambition" is directed toward Claudius, the current "king." But we hardly need to make recourse to Freudian theories to realise that "king" would firstly signify Hamlet's father. Thus "bad dreams" can be read, counter to ambition, as symptomatic of a kind of guilt. From here might arise an entire double-play: HAM. The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right [I.v.196-7]<1> In certain ways, Hamlet is separated from what he seeks to know by the time of a dream-the disjointed time of the subject at the limits of conscious self-knowledge; at the approach of the spectre; between desire and will, where the certitude of the cogito is beset with anxieties arising through the return of the repressed<2>: The fearful accusation of his uncle rings in his ears; the summons to revenge, and the piercing oft-repeated prayer, Remember me!<3> This passage from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister highlights the tension at the heart of the Shakespearian dramatic text; the division that arises in the subject at the moment it is called (summoned/summonsed) through an insistence upon an act of the will. It is necessary, however, to ask whether or not the action of the play is structured by this call or "summons" as either a demand (always carrying within it a threat) or an act of seduction, or by a "summons" as a deontological imperative, and whether or not Hamlet is able to accept or refuse the 'contract' he subsequently enters into. Here one is confronted by the old determinist dilemma, is anything possible that does not actually take place? To act implies a prior act of choosing ("To be or not to be" [III.i.56]) at the same time as it implies an imperative or compulsion ("I must"): Hamlet can only speculate as to whether he is ever able to make a choice or if the business of 'choosing' itself is a priori concluded by forces beyond his control. The nature of the "summons," then, should perhaps be conceived in terms of this contradiction, as both summons and accusation, both an act of seduction and of repression, in the form of a kind of double-contract. Indeed, Hamlet's relationship to the summons, specifically to the overwhelming ontological question, to be or not to be, is displaced in advance by the way he is already implicated in the question.<4> Goethe's critique opens the way for a reading of the duplicitous nature of Hamlet's "summons" as deriving from a confusion of spatial and temporal difference. On the one hand Goethe posits a spatialisation of desire between Hamlet fils and Hamlet pere, situated in the repetition of the name and the filiation of truth, logos, and its various Platonic and dialectical implications. And on the other hand he situates the temporisation of desire in the ear of the subject: implying that Hamlet's desire is divided from himself (and his name-sake) by the time of a voice; the echo of a dream, of his father's ghost (his name, himself as son), and of his own conscience. This repetition of the name marks the way in which the gift becomes a summons, and in so doing marks precisely what Hamlet will continually lose sight of. The ghost is not what returns-as if we could say, the return of the ghost-instead the ghost is this return. In other words, the voice of this "summons" would resonate with the voice, or voices, of desire itself; like Faustus's pre-Hegelian fantasy of the gift of absolute knowledge, it lures and compels Hamlet into the abyss of the always other, his other 'self,' driven on by an "accusation" and the "of't repeated prayer": "Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me" [I.v.91]. Goethe's "fearful accusation" also alerts us the possible presence of Hamlet's own guilt. This guilt is two-fold. It appears at first to arise from the deferral of revenge, but this deferral itself, and Hamlet's subsequent obsession with motivations and the "summons," points toward a guilt arising from the son's desire for the death of the father in the first place. Before the ghost utters a single word, Hamlet names his guilt: "I'll call thee Hamlet, father..." And elsewhere, it is the spectre of the father that haunts Hamlet, that mars his every moment of peace like a mental stigmata: HAM. My father - me thinks I see my father - HOR. Where, my lord? HAM. In my mind's eye Horatio. [I.ii.183-185] It is interesting to note that in the process of deferring revenge, Hamlet in fact substitutes the question of the summons. The summons becomes indissociable from the question of truth, and this question continually takes the place of an act. Moreover, the result of this substitution is that truth and revenge are brought into immediate proximity, and this proximity must then also be extended to include the objects of truth and revenge, a tendency that can only result in the symbolic conflation of the ghost of Hamlet's father and King Claudius: The fearful accusation of his uncle rings in his ears; the summons to revenge, and the piercing oft-repeated prayer, Remember me! The spectral return-the mnemic function of the repetition/echo-serves also to preserve and erase the time of enunciation; the ghost says "Adieu" and so departs, and yet "Remember me" and so remains as the ghost of a ghost in Hamlet's mind. Hamlet is "driven" by this contradiction emanating from the father as origin; the gift of memory and of forgetfulness. Or rather he is driven by the mnemic function upon which the mimetic text is structured and the disturbing fact that at the origin there is only a ghost and not a presence. It is this contradiction at the origin (at the time of enunciation itself), and not simple procrastination, that marks the evolution of the play: the impossibility of Hamlet either returning to his father in the past, or of recuperating him in the future; he is caught in this double-bind, in the disjoining of time, in the echo that "rings in his ears."<5> But before there is ever the question of a return, or of a recuperation, there is the question of the name and naming. The return of the spectre is never separated from the intricate weaving of the names: Hamlet is his father's ghost, ghost of a ghost. And here, once again, we are reminded of an earlier exchange, concerning dreams, ambition and shadows, shadows of shadows [II..ii.254-260]. The outward effect of this originary paradox is a general paralysis and a neutralisation of the ethical imperative ("I must"): HAM. Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murder'd, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must like a whore unpack my heart with words... [II.ii.578-81] The play itself (as it unpacks its heart with words, mocking its own devices) takes the form of a strategic deferral of action<6> corresponding to a temporisation of desire (as Faustus says, "O lente, lente currite noctis equi!" [V.ii.140]<7>). Both Hamlet and Faustus are characterised by this continual deferral and by the substitution of plays, strategies, traps, and "seeming": they find themselves embedded in textual seam, in the structural shift, or play, between a signifier that is always already internally divided and a signified concept that is never more than an idealisation. As such the "dramatic effects" arising as a tension between the play and the play-within-a-play can be considered as a function of metaphor, in the full Aristotelian sense.<8> They mark an interplay between "that which passes show" and the denotation of the "inky cloak," between what "there is" and what "seems" [I.ii.76-85]. When Faustus asks: Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, Resolve me of all ambiguities, Perform what desperate enterprise I will? [I.i.78-80] he is under the spell of a certain deus ex machina of language: "Lines, circles, scenes, letters and characters..." [I.i.50], in short, language, is simply an utility which can be manipulated to the end of communicating absolute or unambiguous knowledge. However, like Faustus's conjurations, the dramatic effects of the play-within-a-play mark out a space precisely of semantic indeterminacy, they mark out a significatory chain that relates, in the mode of the mise en abyme, always to a re-presentation, to a metaphoricity without end, where the signified is neither transcendental nor internalised, but the illusory veil of a certain 'technology.' In this way we will find in contradiction the 'method' in both Hamlet's and Faustus's 'madness'; a sense of contradiction that marks the a-logos of logos, or the falsified reasoning of the sophist that pollutes so-called full-speech and tends toward the 'deceptive' position of writing. Significantly, Faustus's conjurations cannot tell us anything. Like the written text the mimicry of the devils takes the form of a dumb show, mute technological phantoms; the 'truth' of what they represent cannot be affirmed through direct speech.<9> In Hamlet, too, it is significant that the "Murder of Gonzago" is performed firstly in silence, by way of an argumentum [III.ii.136]. The play that follows, with speech, acts as an elaboration on the mime, referring to this mime as a kind of 'origin.' Speech becomes in this instance not an affirmation of presence-to-truth (as it does in the Platonic schema), but a rhetorical or dramatic device constructing an illusion of presence. It operates both as a poison and a cure, disseminated through the text via the sustained punning on the word "ear." When Claudius asks: "Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in't?" [III.ii.227-8] his question can, in effect, be taken in at least three ways. Firstly, it signifies the perceived absence of the spoken argument, or what we might call the partitioning of the argument and the deferral of speech. Claudius asks Hamlet whether he heard the argument because he himself was distracted by Hamlet's own 'mad' and bawdy talk (and actions). In this way the displaced 'spoken' argument is provided by Hamlet himself, toward the end of the scene ("This is one Lucianus, nephew to the king" [III.ii.229] and "You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife" [III.ii.247-8]). The importance of Hamlet's commentary cannot be underestimated. He imposes upon "The Murder of Gonzago" an interpretation that is not immediately evident in the play itself. Moreover, it is Hamlet's commentary, and the obvious familial analogies that it draws between the events at Elsinor and those of the fictionalised Venice, that ultimately provokes Claudius's reaction. Secondly, it touches on the question of knowledge that persists throughout the text: for example, had Hamlet in fact heard the argument (argumentum), had he been present in some way to the event being reproduced in the play, or had he perhaps been told about the King's death, and does he know whether an offence actually took place? Thirdly, it suggests: had Hamlet heard the argument, had Hamlet mistaken this silence somehow for truth, is this mistake an offence, is the offence a construct of Hamlet's (deceived) imagination? Hamlet's response, then: "No, no, they jest-poison in jest" [III.ii.229-30] has the suggestion of: no, the players are jesting, they are pretending, they are acting under assumed names, they have not actually named you out loud, the offence is merely implied and therefore silent. And yet again, the answer contains the possibility that the jest itself is poison, that the ghost, which is also a player imitating the deceased king, has poisoned Hamlet with his words, that the echo: "Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me" [I.v.91] resounding in Hamlet's ears and driving him both to revenge and to self-doubt is the pharmakon of mythos and mimesis-it gestures in the direction of 'truth' as a remedy at the same time as it invests that gesture with the signification of speech as a 'poison.'<10> In both Hamlet and Faustus the play-within-a-play is considered by the protagonists as a purely mimetic device, a representation of a (plausible) past such as King Hamlet's "murder" or the bodily form of Alexander's concubine. Hamlet conceives the device as a possible means of remedying his personal suspicion that the ghost's words may have been poison in his ear: HAM. ... The spirit that I have seen May be a devil, and the devil hath power T'assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds More relative than this. The play's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King. [II.ii.594-601 (emphasis added)] Like the mole on the neck of Alexander's concubine in Faustus [IV.ii.63], the image and the response it provokes are considered by Hamlet to be something of a 'proof' against uncertainty.<11> When Hamlet states: "I'll have these players/Play something like the murder of my father" [II.ii.590-1: emphasis added] he has already assumed the truth of the ghost's testimony, or rather he has drawn an equation between a real event and what the ghost has said, so that truth and 'metaphorical truth' have, in Hamlet's mind, been confounded-at least to the extent that Hamlet has blinded himself to the crucial role of simile (as the ellipsis of metaphor) in his plan.<12> Here we should return to the earlier question of ambition and the return of the repressed. It is important to remember that "The Murder of Gonzago" is named "tropically." The familial analogies cast Hamlet (Lucianus), the nephew, as the murderer of his uncle, Claudius (Gonzago). For Hamlet, the play-within-the-play is a metaphor of Claudius's murder (double genitive). It repeats the crime that Hamlet assumes Claudius perpetrated against Hamlet pere, at the same time as it portrays (and substitutes for) Hamlet's desired 'revenge.' What is of primary importance here, though, is how, by representing "The Murder of Gonzago" as something "like the murder of my father," Hamlet reveals, once again through analogy, the possibility his own original patricidal desire. That, as the murderous nephew, he gains Gonzago's wife (again, by analogy, Gertrude his mother), simply serves to complete the Oedipal drama. In this way the tropic gesture of the interior-play defers onto Claudius the manifest desire that, in a latent form (signified through the earlier "bad dreams"), Hamlet will have directed toward his father. Either way, the "Murder of Gonzago" serves to demonstrate how knowledge in Hamlet is determined through the projection of the subject's desire, and what passes as ambition or will to knowledge is simply the sublimation of this desire, as we have already seen. The play-within-the-play also reveals the way in which meaning always has the potential to go astray, to signify beyond an authorial intention. The trompe l'oeil effect of dramatic space both contains and exceeds Hamlet's desire, and subsequently confounds his (and our) surest attempts at separating his speculative project from the skepsis of scepticism. It may be said that the figures of Faustus and Hamlet perform, in effect, a rhetorical function comparable Plato's Sophist. They are both "wizard and imitator" capable of "producing" "likenesses and homonyms" of alleged truth.<13> The Sophist mimes the poetic, which nevertheless comprises the mimetic; he produces production's double.<14> The dramatic effects of the "play-within-a-play", then, can be regarded as a production of sameness and difference, the production of a "contradiction at the origin", a general spatialising and temporising of the dramatic scene, the scene of the opening of the copula of the verb to be.<15> This formulation leads Faustus into a profound paradox; the reasoning he adopts in his rejection of divinity is centred on his opposition to the Calvinist-Jansenist doctrine of absolute determinism which denies the "real freedom" of the individual mind [I.i.37-47]. Yet it is this same "che sara, sara" which, in Faustus's argument, damns him; the play ends with Faustus believing that no action initiated by himself can succeed in attaining to God's grace [V.ii.40-51]. It is worth noting that Faustus's various arguments are primarily critiques of various theo-philosophical writings. Similarly the "absolute knowledge" conferred upon Faustus through Mephistophilis is contained in several volumes of text, his contract with Lucifer is written in blood, and his spells take the form of a kind of semiologist's language game: Within this circle is Jehovah's name, Forward and backward anagrammatised: Th'abbreviated names of holy saints, Figures of every adjunct to the heavens, And characters of signs and erring stars, By which the spirits are enforced to rise... [I.iii.8-13] Faustus is itself fundamentally intertextual, referring away from itself, citing and so representing the disembodied meanings of other 'plays.'<16> It acts as a play-within-a-play within the relative (inter/intra)texts of philosophy, theology and literature; a mise en scene of semantic systems, of (self-)representation and production. In short, knowledge in Faustus is very much seen to be situated as 'determinately' linguistic. However, the relationship between names and what they are purported to signify is further problematised by the fact that the 'is' of signification, of metaphor and proposition, is reported to function per accidens [I.iii.46], that is to say, the spirits are not "enforced to rise" by Faustus's invocation but by what it represents: Lines, circles, letters and characters! Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires. O what a world of profit and delight, of power, of honour, of omnipotence, Is promised by the studious artisan. [I.i.50-54: emphasis added] The ritual of conjuring, of inscribing symbols and substituting or distorting names ("Forward and backward anagrammatised" [I.iii.9]), draws attention to the arbitrary and textual nature of knowledge as Faustus conceives it. Language is seen to possess the power to effect (and affect) a so-called reality, or rather, reality is presented as a particular effect of language: A sound magician is a mighty god: Here Faustus, try thy brains to gain a deity. [I.i.62-3] The distinction between reality and the symbolic, then, seems little more than a rhetorical trope, a textual play with its own 'scenes' and 'characters,' the manipulation of words and concepts within the interior mental world of the individual subject. The artisan-magician acts as a seeming author-god, creating and conjuring through the reduplication of the logos, and it is this reduplication or dissimulation which is the mark of mythos and mimesis as the spatio-temporisation of signification-what I would call the para-dialectical fold of desire in language. The play-within-a-play, then, is never simply mimetic since it always carries within it the question of knowledge, and of whether or not the 'reality' of the thing that is being imitated has, or can be, established (beyond or 'outside' language). In Faustus the medium of re-presentation (the devils) deny the simple transparency of mimetic ideology by simultaneously relating a past reality and the world of Lucifer (the sham world, the world of deception and fictionality). When Faustus con-jures (or rather summons(es)), his devils dutifully appear, not as an effect of his words, but because of Lucifer's desire to obtain Faustus's soul, so that the relationship between Faustus and the interior play of representations performed by the devils can be seen to be structured by a double-law of desire<17>: FAUSTUS. But what is this inscription on mine arm? Homo fuge: whither should I fly? . . . My senses are deceiv'd; here's nothing writ:- I see it plain; here in this place is writ, Homo, fuge: yet shall not Faustus fly. [II.i.76-81] Faustus is "summoned" both to fly and not to fly by the double-contract of his desire, by the voice and mark of the Other, and of death:<18> FAUST. Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast, What shall I do to shun the snares of death? [V.i.69-70] As it transpires, the subject finds himself constantly on the verge of an abyss, confronted with the dread of not-being. This ontological threat-the death from which the subject desires to flee and yet towards which it is irresistibly drawn-is the very affirmation of Being itself, it marks out the ground of the subject's singular knowledge that he is not nothing. It is this death to which Faustus and Hamlet are always addressing their discourse. They addresses themselves to that which makes possible knowledge itself, to the silence at the origin (God/Father), from which the echo of their respective desires return to them, precisely, as the desire of the Other. Faustus begins with a desiring subject who seeks to attain the other as absolute knowledge itself, the very act of which makes the subject part of the other's game (part of the textual mechanics of that knowledge). Faustus's desire constructs both a deception and a revelation; he desires to possess absolute knowledge and yet all that is contained in the books he is given by Mephistophilis is what his own desire introduces there [II.ii.164-177]-the subject is always (under the illusion of) putting words in the other's mouth.<19> Similarly Mephistophilis's devils act as the projection of Faustus desire, seeming to perform tasks at his Will [II.i.86] by assuming the forms of desired objects (such as Helen [V.i.90]). The deception of this play of desire, however, is uncovered through a series of trivial episodes (the Vatican scene, the Emperor, Vanholt) by which Faustus's "knowledge" is shown-up as sham knowledge, as merely a lot of magician's tricks, so that it seems that Faustus, like the horse-coarser, has been duped, as if the stake of the dramatic text (the text of the other) was only to capture his desire (signified by the word "soul"). Faustus participates in a paradoxical inversion; from "A sound magician is a mighty God" to "absolute knowledge" as a bag of magician's optical tricks. What is properly revealed in Faustus, however, is that the subject is duped by his own desire; by the chimerical object of fantasy, the object causing Faustus's desire and at the same time-and this is the indispensable paradox-posed retrospectively by his desire. Faustus desires absolute knowledge, and yet it is his idea of what absolute knowledge is that makes him desire it. Mephistophilis, then, will have fulfilled his part of the contract, since the dramatic action of the text itself "reveals" the functions of representation, metaphor, illusion et cetera, and so presents to the subject an enactment of what constitutes the various tropes of human knowledge. In other words, the play reveals its own mechanics in the way of a play-within-a-play, a revelation which is always already a concealing, since those mechanics which are supposedly revealed "in truth" are instead "presented" as dramatic effects.<20> Individual Will, then, is caught always between what "seems" and what "is," in the textual opening of metaphor: HAM. Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not 'seems.' 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother . . . . . No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passes show, These are but the trappings and the suits of woe. [I.ii.76-86: emphasis added] The so-called individual himself is constituted by these dramatic effects that arise, in a quasi-phenomenological way, between an exterior play and an internal, supplemental gesture (a play-within-a-play) and, by analogy, between a text and its meaning. The dramatic effects of this reflexivity constitute that para-dialectical fold which crosses between an origin-as-absence and its necessarily inadequate re-presentation. The act of revelation, of the apokalyptikos, of a coming to knowledge, is always, for the individual, an incomplete tropic gesture which exhausts itself in the endless play of contradiction and intertextual resonance, ."..the rest is silence" [V.ii.363]. NOTES 1 Hamlet combines both the idea of free will (that he can act to change an 'unnatural' situation occurring in the world 'caused' by higher or supernatural forces) with the idea of providence (that he was in fact destined by birth to act in such and such a manner), thus inscribing will and determinism within the same locus. 2 Hamlet's desire to "set right" what seems to be "out of joint" can be seen to be one of the structuring principles of the play, in that rather than traversing the "time of a dream" to find knowledge, that knowledge itself dwells in the action of traversing. Hamlet's desire can be found in the difference that constitutes or defines reality from the symbolic (or fictional). The action of the play, which appears to be the effect of procrastination, is in fact the very enactment of the desire of knowledge (double genitive). 3 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, cited in Shakespeare and his Critics, 412. 4 In Hamlet we can detect a certain play between the ontological and the deontological which coalesces around the question: "to be or not to be." The movement of deontology, according to its own logic, precedes any question of action or of will. The deontological movement is precisely in accord with an ethics of intuition, it posits itself as the primary determination of action, prior to any code of moral, social or political coercion. Deontology's tendency toward the present revealing of itself to itself through a act or event brings it into the vicinity of a phenomenology of Being. The point at issue in Hamlet is that for the deontological movement to announce itself as the thing it is it must cease to be that thing it is. Once deontology can be approached and determined it can no longer be deontological, but something other. For Hamlet, then, Being can thus no longer be separated from an intuition of right, a state of affairs that, for the sceptic, inevitably reduces homo cogitens to brooding existential paralysis. 5 See also Lacan, "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet." The unconscious "drives" the subject towards objects whose cause is not only opaque, but lost qua content - it is a structur(ing) of desire around a fundamental fantasy. 6 See also McKenna, Violence and Difference, 240ff.: "The strategic thinking [of the subject] demands ever increasing subtlety; it involves less and less action, more and more calculation. In the end, it becomes difficult to distinguish strategy from procrastination. The very notion of strategy may be strategic in regard to the self-defeating nature of revenge which no one wants to face, not yet at least, so that the possibility of revenge is not entirely removed from the scene... men can postpone revenge indefinitely without ever giving it up." 7 Ovid, Amares, I.xiii, 40: "Often have I wished Aurora would not yield before you,/The stars not take to flight when you arrive." The passage refers to the poet's desire to spend an endless night with his lover. Here there is the irony of Faustus's desire to defer indefinitely the rendezvous with death and hell, while also desiring an eternal night in the arms of his lover, Helen, who sucks his soul from his lips [V.i.98-102] and is actually the disguised figure of a devil. As with the many instances in Faustus and Hamlet, this reveals the erotic/fetishistic infatuation the protagonists have with death and the other. The much vaunted "Oedipal" relationship between Hamlet to his mother is another example of this infatuation. Of some interest here is the fact that Hamlet's mother cannot see the ghost [III.iv.104-138], suggesting that the presence of the ghost in Hamlet's mind acts as a prohibition, as an extension of the father's tyranny even after his death, whereas this prohibition is no longer at work in the mind of Gertrude (she has married Claudius). There is also the possibility that Hamlet's deferral of revenge is the manifestation of the obsessive's preoccupation with waiting for the death of his "master", see Lacan, Ecrits, 99-100 and Freud, "Fetishism", Standard Works, XXI, 156: "The patient oscillated in every situation in life between two assumptions: the one, that his father was still alive and was hindering his activity; the other, opposite one, that he was entitled to regard himself as his father's successor" (although such speculations are perhaps beyond the scope of this paper). 8 Aristotle, Poetics, 1457b 6-9: "Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else, either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from one species to another species, or according to analogy." 9 For example: Faust. My lord, I must forewarn your Majesty, That when my spirits present the royal shapes Of Alexander and his paramour, Your grace demand no question of the king, But in dumb silence let them come and go. . . . . . My gracious lord, you do forget yourself; These are but shadows, not substantial... [IV.ii.44-55] Silence, here, also has the sinister aspect of a taboo; the individual (Vanholt) is refused discourse with the object of his desire. This represents one of the main dilemmas for Hamlet and Faustus in their respective quests for self knowledge. The subject is the one who has to question somebody else, an other, in order to know the "truth" about itself. The interposition of silence, then, in the dialectical exchange between subject and his other (or between the individual and his "real" conditions of existence) will also contribute to the necessary deferral of action, the constant vacillation, the "negative" ethical movement of the two texts. 10 The tension between the representational and the symbolic in the creation of meaning (and the implications it has for what the ghost says) is also found in the function of puns in the Shakespearian text and the possibility of meaning "going astray" between the speaker/writer and his audience (eg. II.ii.171-219: Hamlet and Polonius). 11 The dramatic effects of the play-within-a-play as the metaphor/metonym of the play, as a mode of reference and substitution, constitute a "presentation" as such, where the "is" acts as a stage: the space in which the drama is presented; the liminal space between the audience/observers and the desires they project onto the players. 12 Within the mind of the subject, then, reality and the symbolic become indistinguishable, as if some conspiracy of 'higher forces' (Mephistophilis or King Hamlet's ghost) had rendered any such distinction impossible by disseminating within the semantic field certain unverifiable 'truths.' The texts of Faustus and Hamlet, having proceeded from these 'truths,' can then be regarded as the effects of the paranoid subject, the hysterical subject caught on the edge of an abyss of discourse, between a fictional "antic disposition" and a real madness ("illusions, fruits of lunacy" [Faustus II.i.18]). 13 Plato, Sophist, 234b-235a. 14 On the role of mimesis as a mode of production (poiesis), or producing production, see Derrida, Dissemination, 186. The Sophist effects discourse, as the semantic horizon, as the representational field. Discourse is both a product and a mode of production; it constitutes a kind of fourth wall: "The opening of the classical representative scene" [297] - "This fourth surface is in a sense carved out of the air; it enables speeches to be heard, bodies to let themselves be seen; consequently, it is easily forgotten, and that is doubtless where illusion and error lie..." [312]. In Faustus and Hamlet, this fourth wall repeats itself, between the audience and the play, the play and the play-within-a-play, between the play-within-a-play and its referent, ad infinitum. It is the idea of this fourth wall (of the presencing of presence), the intersubjective space of "dramatic effect", that informs the text under so many different names ("stage," "dialectical space," "liminal space," "eidos," "temporisation/spatialisation," "mise en abyme" etc.). 15 Temporisation and spatialisation mark a de-constitution of the representational scene. The "is" at once signifies sameness and difference; the temporal and spatial gap that occurs between so-called "reality" and the symbolic order that sustains it. 16 For example, the Analytics and Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle, the work of Ramus, Galen and Justinian, the Vulgate, the Gospel, Ovid and so on. 17 The illusion of a human centred universe (or a psychological universe premised on the sovereignty of the cogito) gives rise in a similar fashion to fictional doctrine of two separate movements of the heavens [II.ii.46-48]. What is at stake here is the primacy of the cogito over the unconscious and over the discourse of the Other. 18 See the first article of Faustus's contract with Lucifer: ... that Faustus may be a spirit in form and substance. [II.i.96]. Faustus has literally entered into the "text" of Lucifer, that realm which illusion claims as its "true" origin. Faustus, himself, becomes a product of this realm, a simulacrum of "self" and desire as "will." This is paralleled in Hamlet somewhat by the repetition of names. Hamlet is symbolically the ghost of his father in that he is the son (which carries the classical signification of the logos). The subject, then, seems to enter into a covenant or contract with its double and its other. 19 This is echoed later, II.ii.4: "'Twas thine own seeking Faustus, thank thyself." 20 And it follows that the act of revealing the mechanics of drama must itself be subject to the conditions of drama, and of metaphor. The performance of revealing invokes its own dissimulation/concealment. (c) LOUIS ARMAND, 1993. Louis Armand is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies, Charles University, Prague, and a lecturer in art history at the University of New York, Prague. |