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Overview
Originally published in 1978.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691609256 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1843 |
| Pages: | 324 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.30(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Hamlet's Absent Father
By Avi Erlich
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1977 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06340-9
CHAPTER 1
PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A CRITICAL METHOD FOR HAMLET
I
"Shakespeare is at this moment strolling down the Strand and might tell one, if one plucked him by the sleeve ... what he meant by Hamlet." So many critics having tried to pluck out the secret of the world's most famous play, so many theories about it that sound only almost right, so many more that sound as if they could not be right except for the suspicion that the secret might be, so long in being discovered, precisely the unexpected; such unabated puzzlement — no wonder Virginia Woolf1 dreamed she might hear directly from the author the truth at its most spectacular, the simple, obvious truth of a Columbus who looked at the same old facts and knew what no one else knew but what everyone could be taught to accept, the kind of truth that can be immediately convincing even if it is casually delivered on the Strand.
It is not likely that this is the kind of truth at the heart of Hamlet. But we can recognize that no elucidation of the play's manifest themes is going to satisfy us, that we are indeed looking for a secret, that this secret has something to do with the man who created the play and once walked the Strand, that there must be some relationship between the secret of the play and the secret of the human mind. In fact, the play forces us to recognize this.
All critics of Hamlet eventually try to explain whatever difficulties they may find in it by relating the play to some psychological framework, some model of the secret mind, be it healthy or pathological. There are critics, like T. S. Eliot, who insist on a fundamental psychological problem with the play that existed in Shakespeare's mind: "So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. ... Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art." Thus the few critics who take Eliot's line use psychology to explain Hamlet as a failure in Shakespeare's ability to sublimate. On the other hand, the majority of critics wish to rescue the play, but they also wheel out a psychology that focuses not on the problems of the author but those of his characters.
For instance, Harold C. Goddard has an ingenious interpretation of Hamlet's twitting Polonius into seeing a cloud first as a camel, then a weasel, and finally a whale: "Since the cloud doubtless resembled none of the three in any marked degree, what Hamlet pretended to see in it was the result of free association on his part. But free association is a basic method of modern analytical psychology for bringing to the surface the contents of the unconscious mind. A camel, a weasel, and a whale! A camel — the beast that bears burdens. A weasel — an animal noted for its combined wiliness and ferocity and for the fact that it can capture and kill snakes (remember the royal serpent!). A whale — a mammal that returned to a lower element and so still has to come to the surface of it occasionally for air, not a land creature, to be sure, nor yet quite a sea creature. What an astonishing essay on Hamlet in three words!"
Thus Goddard makes use of "modern analytic psychology" to recognize and address this curious instance of "free association." It should not be supposed that Goddard is any great follower of this psychology, for in the same essay he condemns it roundly; but it serves his critique of Hamlet's descent from bearing burdens to savagery, so he uses it here. Our acceptance of this intelligent but ad hoc borrowing from psychology is natural, part of our everyday experience.
But it should be noticed that neither Eliot nor Goddard has bothered to explain the relationship of "art" and the unconscious material that they respectively think that Shakespeare could or could not manipulate into meaning. Though we are comfortable with Eliot's and Goddard's psychologizing, we should not be, at least not until we more accurately understand the dynamics of the creative process they imply.
According to Goddard, Shakespeare is consciously using the troubled Hamlet's associations on clouds to write an "essay" on regression from bearing trouble to drowning humanity in the lower element of revenge. But can we be sure that conscious control belongs to the playwright while the frenzy belongs solely to the playwright's character? Surely free association picks up more chaotic material than Goddard's interpretation implies, and are not some of these associations going to be just as unconscious on Shakespeare's part as they are on Hamlet's? Perhaps not, perhaps art is the one human activity that can be subjected to perfect conscious control. Perhaps, as Goddard implies, Shakespeare's controlled involvement with plays has no connection with Hamlet's maniacal use of his play. But this is not the considered opinion of modern psychology, and if we are going to transmute our psychology as we borrow it, we should at least acknowledge this.
This is not to say that Goddard's interpretation is wrong. On the contrary, it seems quite plausible as far as it goes. But it gives us a strange vision of a dramatic character using free association to write a conscious essay for his author, cuts us off from the conflicts that churned in Shakespeare's mind before they were poured into Hamlet along with conscious control, dehumanizes the creative process into a mechanical separation of serene artists and troubled characters. Is it not likely that "cloud-camel-weasel-whale" represents a phonic progression that Shakespeare was using to control his own free and troubling associations, free in more realistic and subtle ways than Goddard chooses to use, troubling in that they really do represent the repressed? I think it is likely. But how are we going to discover the complex processes that joined the l from "cloud-camel-weasel" with the w from "weasel" to form "whale"? How do we explain the presence of just these animals, for there are other beasts of burden (if that, as Goddard suggests, is the only meaningful category for "camel")? And since there is some textual difficulty here, as there is almost everywhere in Hamlet, dare we speculate about weasels if Shakespeare could have had ouzles on his mind? And what about the fact that when Shakespeare has Antony free-associate on clouds in Antony and Cleopatra, he gives an entirely different sequence of images.
Though beset with all these problems, let us pursue Shakespeare's free associations for a moment as a lesson in the difficulties of psychologizing. First, let us have the passage before us:
POL. My lord, the queen would speak with you, and presently.
HAM. Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
POL. By th' mass and 'tis, like a camel indeed.
HAM. Methinks it is like a weasel.
POL. It is backed like a weasel.
HAM. Or like a whale.
POL. Very like a whale.
HAM. Then I will come to my mother by and by. [Aside.] They fool me to the top of my bent. — I will come by and by.
POL. I will say so.
(III. ii. 382-394)
Notice that there are two preliminary steps in Hamlet's free associations that Goddard neglects, presumably because they do not contribute to his thesis. Replacing the series camel-weasel-whale in its context, we find the previous link "cloud"; this, in turn, is associated to Hamlet's mother, or, more precisely, to Polonius' playing messenger for Gertrude. That Gertrude is the important beginning to the sequence is underscored by Hamlet's returning to "mother" with a pseudo-logical "then" after he finishes with "whale." Now let us try making of this what we can by seeing what associations these words have in other contexts.
Shakespeare's protean clouds — not his incidental clouds but those which he loads with meaning — usually represent unreliable fortune, changeable and fickle love, betrayal, falseness, stained worth. Thus, for example, a betraying lover is bitterly and cynically forgiven in Sonnet 35 because even "Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, / And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud." When Shakespeare uses "camel" with any intensity he means it as a form of depreciation, alluding to the dumb beast of burden to be sure, but mainly to dumb brutish men. Thus Pandarus emphasizes the inferiority of Achilles to Troilus: "Achilles? A drayman, a porter, a very camel." And Thersites curses the bully Ajax: "Mars his idiot! Do rudeness; do, camel; do, do." Shakespeare's weasels tend to appear as likenesses of vicious men and women who suck the value out of life; thus the melancholic Jacques describes himself this way: "I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs." Whales, more than they are Goddard's regressors to a lower element, are great gluttons, and, in All's Well, rapacious consumers of virgins: "I knew the young count to be a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds."
Suppose we hold these associations up to Goddard's formalistic reading of the camel passage in Hamlet? Now we have before us material more compatible with Hamlet's agitated mood after the play scene and with the troubled aspect of Shakespeare that, according to Eliot, was projected into Hamlet. But whatever interpretation we can wrestle from this material is going to be very chancy, necessitating many detours through other plays and poems. But Hamlet is about King Hamlet, a hero like the Achilles of the Iliad but also a brute warrior commanding revenge like the camel Achilles of Troilus; about Gertrude, a cloud-stained "weasel" who sucks the life out of her son instead of nourishing him (remember that the free associations are provoked by Gertrude); about the all-consuming nature of the whale's gross sexual appetite. Shall we say that these are the things that Shakespeare is trying to whittle down to "whale" not as symbol but rather as euphonious condensation of sounds from cloud, camel, and weasel? Shall we say that a disgust with supposedly heroic males like King Hamlet and supposedly virtuous women like Gertrude make Shakespeare and his character Hamlet resort to the pleasing qualities of poetic sound in order to control this disgust; that in the camel passage Hamlet is still trying to control what he failed to control in the play scene, namely the brutality and lechery involved in his father's death; that word play helps Hamlet dissipate an unpleasant association between the weakly messenger-boy Polonius and his father who also proved ultimately weak? We can say all this — modern psychology means us to concern ourselves with similar psychodynamics if we are going to discuss free association — but we are going to have a hard time being convincing. No wonder Goddard used his own safe and restricted version of what free association is.
Nor are we yet finished with the embarrassing consequences of trying to use modern psychology in our interpretation of art. We need to know exactly how Shakespeare is involved in Hamlet's free association, for, according to the modern psychology, involved he must be. Free association is a technique used in clinical practice to get at the full nuances of the unconscious thoughts that help determine a patient's behavior. Over the course of his analysis the patient will offer thousands of associations to an idea or image, and these will be much more likely to form a recognizable mosaic than Hamlet's (and Shakespeare's) five isolated tiles, mother-cloud-camel-weasel-whale. Even with the associations in the other plays and poems we do not have much to work with. Like Walter C. Langer, a psychoanalyst who wrote a clinical study of Hitler for the United States government from a wartime distance, we must do a lot of filling in for the analysand who is not present. It does not altogether help that Langer's study of Hitler has stood the test of time and accumulating evidence, for the application of psychoanalysis, or any other modern psychology, under conditions for which it was not designed, is never going to be entirely satisfying.
Look what happens if we insist on reading a pattern into Shakespeare's mind from the tokens he has given us. We proceed on the grounds that there must be some unconscious logic to Shakespeare's free associations, that we want to know what it is, and that we will just have to do our best with limited evidence. Let us uncomfortably guess that Shakespeare has stopped with "whale" because it best expresses and defends against the unconscious idea that occupied him. Let us desperately guess that "whale" is working towards his own name "Will," a not quite completed pun to be distinguished from the conscious punning on "Will" in Sonnets 134-136. Why should we guess this, other than our need to guess something? "Whale" is not that close to "will" (but see the OED for the interrelationships between "will," "wale," and "whale"). "Will" does occur rather incidentally three times in the next four lines, but that does not provide a convincing link. If we could establish that "whale" is the culminating association because it simultaneously represents the sexual gluttony of the whale that needs to be controlled, the poet Will who is trying to do the controlling, and the poetic process of playing with sounds (w and l) that provides the technique of control, then we would be able to account for one small detail of Shakespeare's poetry. But we can establish no such thing. Though this desperate application of free association is, to my mind, closer than Goddard to what psychologists try to do in much better circumstances, it is also embarrassingly inadequate because of all the necessary guesswork.
Perhaps, since it is so difficult to apply psychology intact to literary studies, we should leave it alone. This is the recommendation of many. But the fact is we do not leave it alone, especially in our criticism of Hamlet. John Dover Wilson warns us that we are "greatly mistaken" to try to understand Hamlet either in terms of Timothy Bright's sixteenth-century psychology or Freud's twentieth-century version, that Hamlet was not composed out of a psychological recipe book of any kind. I do not think that Freud and Bright would equally view the creative process as subject to understanding through fixed recipes, but let that pass; what is more important is that Wilson, like Goddard and every other critic, makes forays into Freudian psychology even against his own advice, uses what he finds tasteful and ignores what is unseemly. It is inconsistent to warn against the dangers of psychologizing and then compound matters by psychologizing after our own idiosyncratic tastes.
But that is what Wilson does (we all do). Consider two passages, admittedly separated by many pages, but from the same book. The first is from Wilson's account of Hamlet's first soliloquy:
"Hamlet is thinking aloud. He speaks as in a dream. But the dream is a nightmare, the full meaning of which we do not realize until the last three lines. His mind turns and turns upon itself in its effort to escape giving birth to the 'monster in his thought too hideous to be shown'; and at the exclamation 'Let me not think on't' he seems for a moment to batten it down beneath the hatches of consciousness. But the writhings begin again, and the stream of images continues to flow as uninterruptedly as before, until there comes the second pause — this time in the middle of a sentence — and the dreadful thought is born at last with sibilants hissing like a brood of snakes:
to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets.
"This incest-business is so important that it is scarcely possible to make too much of it. Shakespeare places it in the very forefront of the play, he devotes a whole soliloquy to it, he shows us Hamlet's mind filled with the fumes of its poison, writhing in anguish, longing for death as an escape."
Note the reliance on such Freudian concepts as repression (Hamlet's need to batten incest down "beneath the hatches of consciousness"), obsession (being led to despair because one cannot get an idea out of one's head), and the tyranny of incest over the mind.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hamlet's Absent Father by Avi Erlich. Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Preface, pg. vii
- Contents, pg. xi
- ONE. Psychoanalysis as a Critical Method for Hamlet, pg. 1
- TWO. Freud's Misleading Hunch about Hamlet, pg. 19
- THREE. The Problem of Delay, pg. 43
- FOUR. The Absent Father and His Son, pg. 51
- FIVE. The Vain Search for a Strong Father, pg. 99
- SIX. Mother Mistress Man, pg. 152
- SEVEN. To Be or Not To Be Born, pg. 178
- EIGHT. Managing the Unconscious, pg. 207
- NINE. Conclusion, pg. 260
- APPENDIX A. King Hamlet and the Sonneteer's Friend Remembered, pg. 275
- APPENDIX B. Shakespeare's Smiling Villains as Transformed Men, pg. 280
- APPENDIX C. Polonius and John Donne's Busy Old Fool, pg. 287
- Notes, pg. 291
- General Index, pg. 301
- Index of Passages from Hamlet Quoted or Discussed, pg. 307