Make mad the guilty and appal the free

Hamlet’s Theater of Resentment

Richard van Oort

anthropologically “revelatory” is its reproduction within the individual of the aesthetic effect, an effect that can be traced to the originary event. “Esthetic ex-perience,” Gans writes in Originary Thinking, “is our only socially unmediated link with the originary event.”4 Whence the intuitive sureness of our experience that a particular art work possesses fundamental anthropological content.

Let us briefly recall Gans’s analysis of the aesthetic in the originary event. The originary sign defers the conflict of exacerbated mimetic attention. But this deferral does not enable humanity to transcend mimetic conflict once and for all, as must be assumed by Girard in his apocalyptic interpretation of the art work “against itself.” Generative anthropology’s more minimal notion of the “defer-ral of violence through representation” is an “etic” description of the aborted gesture of the originary scene. What makes the aborted gesture a specifically aesthetic sign is not the self-conscious desire to defer conflict, but the desire to imagine oneself the sole occupant of the center. But this desiring representation of the center can only be experienced by the individual if the original appeti-tive goal remains unfulfilled. The experience of this unfulfillment, or in other terms, of the self’s necessary exclusion from the center is the “second moment” of desire, powerfully described by Gans as the moment of “originary resent-ment.” Aesthetic experience is the individual’s attempt to cope with resentment. “The source of [aesthetic] pleasure in the sign,” Gans writes, “is the temporary relief (or deferral) it provides from originary resentment. Through the sign, we replace, or supplement, our originary alienation from the center” (OT 118).

than Girard, Gans argues that humans are aware of their own violence from the beginning. The originary desire to imagine oneself in the center is the first step in recognizing the dependence of the center on the desires of the periphery. For most of human history, aesthetic experience remains a necessary but subordinate element of ritual, which is by definition suspicious of individual desire. But be-ginning with the ancient Greeks, desire is released from its containment in ritual to become the explicit object of an independent cultural institution. The classical aesthetic does not restrict individual desire by sacralizing the center in order to guarantee its inviolability outside the collective context of ritual distribution. On the contrary, it encourages you to imagine yourself in the center by presenting fictional models of the center’s usurpation by the periphery. In classical tragedy, this imaginary usurpation is “punished” when the protagonist’s occupation of the center is demonstrated to be the result of a monstrous crime, as when Oedipus discovers that his heroic rise to the throne of Thebes is in reality the fulfillment of the prohibited narratives of parricide and incest. Having released desire from its stasis in collective ritual, the classical aesthetic opens the center to increasingly profound explorations of it.

Aesthetic history tells the story of this expansion from center to periphery. When drama reemerges as the central cultural institution in the Renaissance, Shakespeare thematizes the classical protagonist’s relationship to the center by representing it as a contested space among equals rather than as inherent to the being of the protagonist. Whereas Oedipus unselfconsciously believes his existence to be synonymous with the center’s immortality, Hamlet imagines the center as permanently divorced from him. Hamlet understands, where Oedipus does not, that the achievement of central being is a dream rather than a reality. Hence the preponderance of soliloquizing in the play, the most famous example of which is Hamlet’s reflection on the gulf between peripheral selfhood and central immortality in the “To be or not to be” speech. The classical aesthetic is historicized and ultimately anthropologized. Aesthetic history becomes a history of increasingly developed thematizations of the center-periphery configuration of the originary event. The rise and fall of literature as the central cultural insti-tution in the West reflects “the rise and fall of the aesthetic as an anthropological discovery procedure” (OT 25).

Girard’s sense of the devious voyeurism at the core of Hamlet accurately describes both the prince and the play. As the romantics were the first to realize, it is in fact impossible to separate the two. The dramatic action is an externaliza-tion of the prince’s mind. The celebrated “play within a play” at the center of the work is a self-conscious staging of a violent scene that Hamlet first imagines.

II

The rapid oscillation between positive and negative images of the ghost mir-rors the oscillation of the originary aesthetic sign. The sign points to the object we desire. But the sign without the object is insignificant, so we return to the

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without also accepting its nihilism. In his more polemical moments, Girard would have us believe that language is a mere word game, that beneath the words there is a reality that transcends the human scene of representation. But this re-ality — if it really is an anthropological reality and not a biological mechanism — is as dependent upon the scene of representation as humanity itself.

Girard ultimately demands too much of the texts of the aesthetic tradition. On the one hand he requires them to demonstrate his theory. On the other he rejects them as a partial truth on the road to full mimetic disclosure. In Girard’s analyses one sometimes gets the impression that his anthropology exists despite the misleading games played by poets.

Gans accepts the historical significance of Girard’s theory of sacrifice, but he disputes its originary or foundational status. For Gans, the ambivalence of the victim is not in the first place a founding misrecognition on the part of the community concerning the source of its own violence. Ambivalence or “mimetic paradox” describes rather the very condition in which humanity comes into be-ing. Humans are aware of their own violence from the beginning. This does not mean that we must attribute to the first sign-users a hyper-rational “etic” awareness that they are inaugurating an anthropology in which human origin is explained as the “deferral of violence through representation.” Human history is not predetermined by the originary hypothesis. The openness of human history is the openness of symbolic representation, which is without precedent among animal communication systems. Whence the paradox of the “end of history.” If history really were at an end it would mean that the mimetic conflict of the originary hypothesis had finally been transcended. But then humans would no longer require representation to defer it. Historical consciousness of the origi-nary would be forgotten, and any attempt to formulate either its beginning or end would be superfluous. The need to formulate the end of history assumes that we have yet to reach it.

Thus no theory of the aesthetic can begin by expelling the aesthetic. Ham-let indeed defers his relationship to the center, but this deferral is not an end in itself. The specifically aesthetic moment of originary signification is the oscil-lation between the sign and the central object. This oscillation, which implies minimally the cognitive construction of a purely symbolic image of the object, delays rather than triggers the kind of motor response characteristic of nonsym-bolic “genetically assimilable” patterns of behavior, including so-called “Skin-nerian” or behaviorist modes of perceptual conditioning.13 Hamlet does not merely seek models to imitate. He seeks to represent those models aesthetically in his “mind’s eye” (1.2.185), as he says to Horatio, echoing Horatio’s own char-acterization of the ghost as a “mote... to trouble the mind’s eye” (1.1.115). This internalization of the public space of collective ritual is the source of the histo-ricity of the aesthetic, which influences individual behavior not by communal

In a kind of perverse reverse snobbery, Hamlet tolerates only those who can demonstrate their credentials as fellow resenters of Claudius’s court. Hence the disproportionate degree of vituperation he directs at Gertrude, which is

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King. But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son —
Ham. A little more than kin, and less than kind. (1.2.64–65)

If I am both your cousin and your son, Hamlet ironically implies, then this is a little more kinship and a little less kindness than I am prepared to accept. By expressing this sentiment in an aside to the audience, Hamlet im-plicitly identifies us as “equal” resenters of Claudius. Only we, fellow masters of aesthetic irony, are able to appreciate the ironist’s superiority over the object he ridicules. When Hamlet finally does address Claudius directly, the tone has been set. The literal meaning is for Claudius (and the court), the ironic mean-ing for us:

But if today’s postmodern ironists have taken Hamlet’s strategy to its mini-mal originary source in the play of the differing and deferring signifier, Hamlet himself is far less minimal in his conclusions about the ultimate source of his significance. What enables him to ironize Claudius repeatedly is quite simply his sense that he is more authentic than those he ironizes. It is no surprise that Hamlet’s first sustained speech comes as a vehement defense of his authenticity when he detects (mistakenly, as it happens) a criticism of it by the queen. In response to her query, “Why seems it so particular with thee?” (1.2.75), Hamlet pounces on the word “seems” rather than the word Gertrude stresses, which is “particular.” (Imagine if Gertrude had instead said, “Why is it so particular with thee?”) Hamlet the pun-master needs no further encouragement:

Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior 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 but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.76–86)

In seeking to strike his audience dumb, Hamlet hopes to reproduce the asymmetry of the reader’s/spectator’s aesthetic relation to the text, in which re-ciprocal dialogue between the text’s authorial or narrative “voice” and its audi-ence is impossible. In attending to the play, we have no choice but to be engaged, to be momentarily struck dumb by its spectacle. This is not to deny the possi-bility that an aesthetic work may fail to sustain our interest. Inattention occurs precisely when the work fails to live up to the asymmetry granted to it by the subordinate position required by the spectator or reader. In opening a novel that we have never read before, or sitting down to a movie we have never seen, we expect this self-enforced asymmetry with respect to the text to be rewarded by a satisfying aesthetic experience, where this experience is itself ultimately a descendent of the originary mimetic paradox upon which all representation depends. In the most revelatory cases, in which category we can certainly count Hamlet, this aesthetic experience becomes the object of reflection by the work itself.20
If we are to understand the ultimate source of Hamlet’s moral indignation, we must go beyond the sterile opposition of victim and victimizer that motivates the traditional interpretation of Hamlet. In his reading of “Hamlet against re-venge,” Girard goes a long way to unsettling this orthodoxy, and this places him in an important counter-tradition that includes earlier twentieth-century critics like W. W. Greg, Wilson Knight, and Harold Goddard. Greg’s attempt to coun-ter the traditional reading, however, was largely unsuccessful, partly because of limitations within his own theory, which tended to interpret the problem of the dumb show in terms of the question of the ghost’s ontological objectivity, but also partly because of the weight of the tradition itself, which was unpre-pared for the heresy implied by a Hamlet more resentful (and thus also capable of more virulent forms of violence) than Claudius himself. The significance of Wilson Knight’s and Harold Goddard’s subsequent interpretations was to point out the degree to which this early modern tragedy is structured around a form of violence that begins not with Claudius, nor indeed with the heroic man-slayer King Hamlet, but with the displaced prince, whose festering resentment haunts

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1. See René Girard, “Hamlet’s Dull Revenge,” Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, eds. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 280-302; hereafter cited in the text as “HDR.” For the full argument as ap-plied to Shakespeare’s career as a writer for the stage, see Girard, A Theater of Envy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

2. See Eric Gans, “Form Against Content: René Girard’s Theory of Tragedy,” Re-vista Portuguesa de Filosofia 56 (2000): 53–65.

7. See Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago Univer-sity Press, 1951), 331-86, esp. 362-68. Goddard identifies this scene as the critical turning point of the play as a whole: “There are many crises in Hamlet, but this is the crisis of crises — this, and not the sparing of the praying King or the killing

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12. Knight’s essay “The Embassy of Death” was first published in 1930 in the first edition of The Wheel of Fire. In the fourth edition, published in 1949, Knight in-cluded a second essay on Hamlet, “Hamlet Reconsidered.” See G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy with Three New Essays, 4th ed. (London: Methuen, 1949), 17–46, 298–343.

13. For the impossibility of genetically assimilating the symbolic function, see Ter-rence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997), esp. 331-32. The aesthetic oscillation between sign and object is the anthropological correlate of the kind of interactional paradoxes that Gregory Bateson proposed as the source for schizophrenia and which Anna K.

16. For a brilliant interpretation of the events leading up to the opening court scene, I recommend John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (New York: Ballatine Books,

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And let us hear Barnardo speak of this. (1.1.33–37)

No sooner does Barnardo begin his narrative than the ghost, as if waiting for its cue, usurps the stage, its sudden appearance designed to “freeze” our blood, make our “eyes like stars start from their spheres,” and “each particular hair to stand an end / Like quills upon the fretful porpentine” (1.5.16–20). The story has begun.

20. For a provocative interpretation of literary history as founded on the paradoxical supplementarity of representation, see Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Representa-tion: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton Univer-sity Press, 1977). Felperin’s deconstructive intuitions serve him well in his readings of Shakespeare and Homer, but without a hypothesis for the origin of what Felperin at least implicitly accepts as a necessary (aesthetic) category of language, he is forced to place this origin, rather implausibly, in the Homeric text rather than in the origin of language, where it belongs.

21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1967).