Which Dead?: Hamlet and the Ends of History

Barker, F. Which Dead? Hamlet and the Ends of History. Uses of History. Ed. Francis Barker et al. , New York: St. Martin’s P, 1991. 47-75.

(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)

Either, it has become near orthodox to hold, we must abandon, epistemo-theoretically, historical discourse as now understood to be overweeningly objectivist or, worse, totalising; or history in an objective sense has come to an end, supplanted by the famous new condition which is not, in its own self-estimation or in any received sense, historical.

Ghost. Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me.

Shakespearean tragedy dramatises an end of history. This is inherent in its formation and explicitly figured.

68n6

…surely the history of human societies is littered with—and even, arguably, constituted by—the claim of their discursive regimes to locate and to valorise in various patterns of dominance, subordination and dependency: value ranking, logical derivation, material or ideal causality, formation of phenomena and epi-phenomena, and so on? These structures cannot be wished out of existence by remarking that it’s all representation

At the end the son, now also dying, begs his friend Horatio to survive in order to tell the story. It is the most important thing. A culture is losing its memory.

…memory, pre eminently in the special forms of mourning and commemoration , as a cultural practice which is coded—in somewhat abstract and ideal ways—as essential, but which in the event is either absent or crucially damaged. The crisis in memory and narration will turn out to be a crisis in the governing sovereignty of the play and its discursive regime.

68n8

In Macbeth Duncan is short-lived, but a sovereign presence is dramatised, if only to maximise the violence of the ‘absentiation’ which ensues. In Lear the map of the realm, and the pastoral language in which the sovereign land is represented, form, inter alia, less palpably, this constructed—rather than given—horizon. …the cultural forms of mourning and commemoration are themselves uneasily offset against what should properly be called historical memory, but which is given in the signifiers of continuity with the sovereign past, represented by the ghost of the king and the desire for continued narration of his son…

On one hand the voice of the king is coded as the absolute medium of the master discourse of a sovereign power…

…on the other, it is the ghostly trace of a power that has already disappeared into the past. The voice that reminds speaks in pain from beyond the grave, it struggles to be heard across the line between life and death, and in that struggle it at once inaugurates a need and a difficulty which together afflict the play’s representations throughout.

…the need of memory and narration is signalled powerfully, but denied in , and as, practice. Displacement is a major figure of this doubling. Elsewhere Hamlet has been read as incipiently modern. If separations are opening up in the alleged, tendentiously represented, plenitude of the old sovereign order, and if that between the public and the private is a major dimension of them, so too here is the separation between historical and personal memory. Among the transactions of remembering, there is a critical disjunction between history and mourning in a play which, if it initiates a kind of modernity, also hesitates on that threshold.

…the king is not an individual, and memory is not personal grief but the record of historical sequence (or in this case, rather, a break in sequence, for arguably discontinuity is the more historical form).

…the mourning of fathers… becomes its dominant articulation.

…history and mourning are engaged together in a pattern of displacement and substitution where historical memory is displaced on to and tendentially replace by the personal version, and considerable analytic and dramatic effort is and would be then needed to unpick and demystify this dehistoricising substitution.

If…Hamlet’s grief cannot be the prompt of action, still less of what might be called ‘historical action’, commemorations—at least in the form of funerals—are also flawed and truncated as in the case of Ophelia’s, or are otherwise perceived as inadequate, secret rather than public as is that of Polonius, and in any case quickly forgotten or ‘superseded’ as is that of Hamlet’s father.

69n13

…Clifford Geertz… formal consonance between his anthropological method—which has, of course, much to recommend it—and many of the strategies of New Historicism: interpretative and semiotic rather than positively scientific, performative rather than ideational, particular and essayistic rather than generalisably systematic, descriptive rather than causally explanatory, inflected by ‘theory’ rather than methodologically regularised… even as it… tracks the subversive element(s) in the text or the culture, New Historicism none the less seems… to confirm the effectivity of power figured as the containment of that very subversion. … The result as often, in the name of studying the poetics of power, a practical denial of the fact and poignancy of domination, substituting notions of circulation for those of oppression, anxiety for terror. …sense of cultural ‘reciprocity’ –subversion and containment… power—or ‘social energy’—is figured not just as exchange—which is of course an originary concept of (cultural) anthropology—but also as circulation and negotiation which are then the organising metaphors of recent New Historicism, and arguably are not formally that far, in fact, form Lyotard’s fully postmodernist language games, and are drained, in any case, of all political force.

…a faulty solution to the problem, tempting—even a radical—critique through the necessary criticism of desocialised ‘private’ grief on to the lure of collective memorialisation as the answer to the problem of the access to, and practice of, history…

If the text can neither reinstate—re-member, in practice—the master-signifiers of the discourse it accepts as sovereign, nor opt for their revolutionary transformation, then Fortinbras is the result: a refiguration of central rule which in narrative terms is more or less arbitrarily produced…

It is a degradation of the symbolic-ideological efficacy of he representation of sovereign rule form which the play both sets out and departs.

The diminution in affect and charge, as the place of the sovereign gives way to the rule of the military, in the battle for monarchical nostalgia, for defining history as the question of the lost body of the king or the heir, but loses the war for the continuity of that discourse and that power.

…Fortinbras…is Hamlet’s son… But Hamlet has no son. If generation is a characteristic but mystified Shakespearean metaphor for historical sequence, here it is unavailable, and an ‘end’ of history is figured…

But history cannot be allowed to end, and… Fortinbras… re-establishes something of what was erased in the displacement of history on to grief.

71n18

‘Demystified’… classically Marxist usage which refers a cultural form structurally to its decoded grounding elsewhere in the social formation… idiom which probably began with Machiavelli… abandons the transcendentally charged—whole continuing to manipulate it as a mode of coercion—in favour of force and rationality…

That the play can only code historicity as royal history… but that it cannot sustain that code, we might read as—again—critique.

…nothing should prevent a priori the thinking of ‘ends of history’ as being fully historical.

III

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. (Marx)

The demystified, proletarian revolution, ‘like the revolution of the nineteenth century’, abandons the play of disguise. It is defined in opposition to either the tragedy or the farce of he bourgeois revolution; it does without the costumes of previous epochs, and leaves the dead behind. Its slogan, it could be said, is ‘forget’.

…the bourgeois revolution dresses itself in the costume of previous epochs…

Marx urges the revolution of the nineteenth century to abandon the dead in favour of the poetry of the future.

The end of history is historical, whether we are discussing postmodernism as theory or condition (and its own theoretical bad faith needs to be put to it in this way). That end of history is not a new thing but a farcical rediscovery of (an) ‘earlier’ tragedy.

…the end of history has always been the theme and condition of any radical, historical (and radically historical), practical, thought.

A history of ‘postmodernism’ … as the recurrence of certain themes, or as the articulation of a dimension of successive, essentially identical, historical conjunctures, successive presents. In the first sense it would stretch, paradoxically, not form about 1960 but from, say, Shakespeare, or—especially if the model of the subject and the object persists in it—form Descartes. …who, at the beginnings of capitalism as a potential world system, left he West the, in one sense, radically demystified, artificial man which amounts of liberal humanism have subsequently strained to animate and recuperate, to , say, Blade runner…

…since it has been possible to think a notion of the present as ‘modern’ at all (i. e. since the Renaissance), successive conjunctures have had their modern, of not modernist, an postmodern, of not postmodernist, moments.

The difference, or differance, assiduously promoted by some forms of theory today, is pallid when compared either descriptively or agonistically with the difference that a Marx, or a Benjamin—or a Gramsci—were trying to make. It pales into distracting insignificance when taken as an historical diagnosis rather than a critical tool…

72n30

For the ‘crisis of representation’, connected to a discussion of postmodernity as also a crisis of legitimation, see again, in an appropriate context, Jameson in his forward to Lyotard 1984, p. viii and passim.

Postmodern cancellations of the historical frequently take the form of reinstating the subject—in the substitution of ethics for politics. The Hamlet syndrome.

…the dark night of difficult language is there for Benjamin, no less was it so for Gramsci: localised only too palpably in his case by Fascism’s prisons. However, the real ‘pessimism’, it seems to me, is not the metaphysical reflex of looking into the face of defeat, which each resisted, but that of theorising the post-historical, or even… the post-political.

…if the end of history is to be figured, I prefer the complex transactions of Hamlet to the knowing verities of postmodern ends of history. …It is a text that signals continuity—the tradition of the memory of the past; the dead as the King—and practises its impossibility. It displaces that conservative historical substance into different forms of mourning, and they then fail as signs of the absence of the historical for which they were substituted. Not content with that negativity the displaced signs of memory are shifted back on tot the promise of historical succession (rather than either personal memory or collective memorialisation), but in a form whose secular declination—caught in a network of failing voices, useless audiences, impossible hearing and necessary but inefficient narration—undercuts both the form and the substance o f the nostalgic continuity it cannot either dramatise or be. History is at once signalled and ‘ends’. …the end in question is not that of history as such but of a certain sovereign discourse still powerful enough dominantly to code what might count as the historical, but already residual enough to need to offer to drag into tits end the end of everything, or dominant and residual enough to figure ‘survival’ only in the diminished compromise.

Hamlet signals history when it dramatises the breakdown of the controllingly historicist discourses of its epoch…

…the end of history is a banally familiar theme. …has still yet to be brought into historically actual contact with the ways in which a Marx or a Benjamin could thing the end of a certain history as the beginning of another.

75n51

It is the critical value of alterity on the—revolutionary but then amnesiac—threshold of ‘our own’ determining history which alone can legitimate the critical value of the study, and its implications for practice. And not just alterity of empirical substance, but also of an interpretative strategy which might have its beginnings—not origins—in a counter-reading of the founding moment of modernity…

75n52

… Shakespearean tragedy, itself on the threshold of the modern, and on the threshold of originally modern, of not ‘postmodern’, ends of history… Where the delirium or disorientation of the new is represented in Shakespeare as loss and disruption, isn’t it possible now to see in such a way of representing the present, not signs of ‘the world we have lost’, but alost opportunity for historical strategy?