University of Oregon
The Conscience of the King: Oedipus, Hamlet, and the Problem of Reading
Author(s): Leroy F. Searle
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 316-343
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
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LEROY F. SEARLE
The
the
Conscience
of
Oedipus,
King:
Hamlet,
and
Problem
of
the
Reading
T
HE CENTRAL ISSUE I take up in this essay is the
problem of reading-starting from the striking evidence, to
which any teacher can attest, that people appear to be boundlessly
agile in finding ways to misread.' I do not accept the view that all
reading is, in some way, misreading, or that textual meaning is indeterminate, irretrievably ambiguous, or covertly determined by
ideological and other commitments to which critics have been
alleged to be blind (e.g., de Man, Bloom, Derrida, Fish). I am not
talking about different choices of interpretive protocols, or the
effects of communities of interpreters on the constitution of
meaning, but about plain, outright mistakes: failures to construe a
sentence, lapses of memory about what a text says or a character
utters, unambiguous oversights wherein a direct statement or an
obvious relation is simply, plainly missed. Most such errors are
mundane enough, but some are profoundly revealing-often
affecting the most widely read and vigorously interpreted textsbecause they seem to be functional mistakes, arising either from
theoretical or practical beliefs and commitments on the part of a
reader, or from elements within texts that are particularly important in our habitual modes of thought and perception.
This is not to say that reading is simple, direct, or obvious; or
that the sophistication of recent critical practice is something to
which we can 'just say no." On the contrary, the revealing quality
of the mistakes in reading considered here presupposes just the
kind of theoretical and ideological sophistication that has been
prominent in recent criticism and that has done much to wake us
1An earlier version of this essay was presented as a Liberal Arts Professor lecture
at the University of Washington in May, 1995. I am grateful for many suggestions
from reviewers and colleagues, particularly Daniel Burgoyne and Ranjana Khanna,
both of whom tried, without enough success, to persuade me to give more scope to
Teiresias and to moderate my polemical handling of Freud.
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PROBLEM OF READING / 317
from dogmatic slumbers concerning reading and interpretation.
As we now recognize, there are genuine interpretive dilemmas,
paradoxes, and aporias in criticism; however, I take most of them
to be either metaphysical or logical or both, and therefore not so
much an impassable fact of the profession or a systematic feature
of literary language as an occasion for a kind of philosophical
speculation or logical analysis that, frankly, we do not do very well.
So too, there are genuine ambiguities in texts, some so puzzling
that no amount of evidence or argument appears to be sufficient
to disambiguate the case; but, once again, these are quite rare;
most cases do not justify the claim that the text (or literature genor
erally) is, by virtue of such examples, inherently indeterminate
If one asks the wrong
that it poses a question that is undecidable.
question or puts it in the wrong context, one gets tangled and confusing answers, but that does not mean that there is something in
the nature of literature that guarantees such results, no matter
how much we have become accustomed to expecting them.
For anyone involved in literary and cultural studies, reading is
not a simple problem, but the site of an intricate and profound set
that constitutes a ring of linked
of interactions and negotiations
The commonplace
theoretical contingencies.
assumption that, if
one knows the language, one should be able to understand a text
quickly (and systematically) breaks down for five fundamental reasons. First, knowing a language does not ensure that one will recognize the principles by which that language is structured or how
they facilitate the creation of meaning. Although even elementary
grammatical principles can present such a problem, the chief issue
is the common sense prejudice (also a philosophical
dogma as old
as Parmenides) that words have "meanings" in something like the
way that bodies have spatial extension or apples have flavor. Words
merely have differentiable structures, to which people assign interpretations. This need not involve the contrary mistake of thinking
that language is therefore "arbitrary" or is essentially an unconstrained free play of signifiers.2 The point is just that meaning is
of relations that always
not a property of words: it is a consequence
include human beings. But that does not make it ineluctably "subjective" or even subject to whimsy, desire, or the will to power on
the part of individuals or identifiable social groups. Everything depends on what relations are established, and in what way.
Thus the second point in this ring of theoretical contingency is
2 This point merits extended discussion, but not here: the chief difficulty is that
the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (or, more exactly, his students) in Course in
General Linguistics has become a touchstone for what Homi Bhabha calls the "language metaphor," in which Saussure's pivotal observation concerning the arbitrariness of the signifier escalates into the notion that language itself is arbitrary,
with Wittgenstein's metaphor of the "language game"-almost
which-together
completely displaces any reasoned account of how language, as a set of meticulously functional subsystems, actually works. See Homi Bhabha.
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 318
that one cannot read a text, in any language, without some knowledge of (and possibly theories about) human beings. If one makes
certain assumptions about people, or fails to notice or make use of
one's own experience as at least a reasonable facsimile of a person,
one may understand every word in a text and miss the point commystery here, but what the
pletely. There is no psychological
reader is prepared to acknowledge as true, possible, or probable
about human beings is a fundamental factor in reading. Granting
that, however, human beings are obviously social; this is the third
about
something
Every text presupposes
point of contingency.
how the reader will understand or be conscious of human sociin turn conveys us to the fourth point: the fact that huety-which
man societies are historical and change over time. Finally, every
text raises some question concerning value: when people express
preferences and make decisions, on what basis do they do so? Even
if one denies the existence or intelligibility of the concept of "values," people do make choices, and they do so on grounds that can
be inferentially constructed-though
usually there is no need to
be so clever, since most systems of value are themselves historical,
exinvested, and linguistically
socially manifest, psychologically
plicit. The primary constraint is that the reader has to know about
them, which means having to read more (and different) texts that
may employ familiar literary strategies but have a more or less
transparent practical intent, be it religious, ethical, moral, political, or philosophical.
All of this may seem obvious enough. But if we make these contingencies explicit in the form of a diagram (see below), it beof modern criticism is
comes clear why the radical sophistication
of
to
articulate
a
unavoidable:
reading presupposes
cogent theory
at least five other theories, or theoretically discernible domains, of
language, psychology, society, history, and axiology (or values);
and as we all know, these are areas where not only particular theories but sometimes the very idea of theory is itself deeply contested. If we waited for verifiable, generally accepted theories in
any of these five areas, any theory of reading would be stalled from
the beginning.
Value
Language
eersons
EX
Histor
ociety
(Note: this figure, which vaguely resembles Blake's Mundane Shell
in Milton, is an artifact of software and authorial ineptitude. It's
just a Venn Diagram.)
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PROBLEM OF READING / 319
Clearly, we don't require an explicit theory of reading in order
to read, so the theoretical enterprise starts with ordinary reading
practices: what actually happens to readers of literary texts, and
what can we learn from it? If we bear in mind that when a problem
comes up, it is most likely to reside in some inadequate conception
of language, people, society, history, or value, we can at least prevent ourselves from making the sophomoric mistake of supposing
that if we do not understand a text the first time through (or even
the second or third), either the author has not been clear enough,
or we are not meant to understand because it is not possible to
"understand" literary language. In an entirely ordinary way, we
know there is a problem when we experience some inconsistency
or violation of our readerly expectations. Thus, even though I am
profoundly skeptical about the quality, consistency, or reliability of
collateral theories upon which literary critics necessarily rely, I am
not in the least skeptical about theory itself, when it is considered
not as a collection of texts and certified attitudes, but as an ongoing speculative enterprise from which we can learn enormously. I
have put these theoretical issues in the form of a diagram for the
simple reason that it focuses attention on an obvious but otherwise
forgettable fact: most of the problems we encounter with literature
have very little to do with literature alone.
In fact the interlocking figure indicates, however crudely, that
no problem in "literature" has to do with literature alone-much
as it suggests exactly the same thing about all the pursuits in the
humanities and social sciences. The notorious embarrassment of
theory in all the fields of the so-called "human sciences"-namely,
that our theories are obviously not scientific (if we mean by a "science" something like chemistry or physics or biology) -has a lot to
do with the fact that the disciplines are so often treated as if they
or could be traversed with abandon, assumpwere independent
tions that forget that they are still, even in this age of Panoptical
self-consciousness,
disciplines, not all of which can be replicated entirely within the literature department. When this point is taken
seriously, the theory of reading appears to be notjust a matter of a
rudimentary skill or of elaborating an "approach" to literature, but
as perhaps the most vexing and central theoretical issue in the humanities and social sciences.
of daily
The fact that reading is also the constant preoccupation
difference.
in
another
crucial
teaching foregrounds
practice
Abstract theoretical questions are the stuff of very direct experiments, in which our students are our usually unacknowledged
collaborators and subjects: we proceed through texts, experimenting with (and sometimes upon) our students, testing or illustrating
this "approach" or that, without nearly enough attention to the
fact that this is what we are doing. We tell it like we see it, under
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 320
the rhetoric of telling it like it is. The surest sign of this ordinary
is that the "approach" appears (if not to
theoretical entanglement
the practitioner, then surely to some of his or her colleagues) reductive, so we label it overly "ideological," or "political," if not
or worse. We trust to the tacdownright coercive, wrong-headed,
tics and tricks of persuasion primarily because we would not know
or a proof of anything we care
how to carry out a demonstration
about, since we do not have, tucked away somewhere in the curriculum, a set of axiomatic principles like Euclid's Elements, the
or the Periodic Table of Elements
Principles of Thermodynamics,
and the calculus.
There is, then, something both inductive (and abductive) about
reading, in the sense that we start where we actually are and try to
come up with hypotheses that lead to intelligible results: if passage
X is construed in this way, does it then make sense to me?3 If one
tries, diligently, to reflect on what is happening when one reads,
and to follow, with some accuracy, the questions that emerge from
the activity, it is not a choice to try to be "interdisciplinary" or to
work collaboratively: it is the necessary condition for continuing.
The consequences
are, I think, radical, both for the enterprise of
and
for
the
theory
ordinary classroom activity of teaching students
to read hard texts. The results, in the texts discussed here, will include some surprises, even for adept and seasoned readers.
The theoretical investigation
First, some broad generalizations.
of reading, based on reading practices, requires giving up the notion that "theory" is in some way value neutral, if for no other reason than the fact that wherever there are theories there are people
those who take umbrage at the
using or making them-especially
mere suggestion that theory waits upon value judgment, usually
because of deep and passionate commitments to the pure value of
"objectivity" and "truth" (see, for example, Kuhn). Even in cases
to "theory" may be radically skeptical on
where a commitment
such questions as "truth," the espousal of "theory" may very well
turn out to be a commitment to a moral position that is not itself
ever doubted or open to question.
By the same token, however, one has to give up the idea that
"theory" is merely "subjective," since it is a form of speculative reasoning that must be shared in order to serve any discursive function. Theory, in this view, is something one does, not something
one merely reads in order to apply it to particular cases.
There is, of course, another process that impinges directly on the formation of
critical hypotheses, namely, the response of one reader to the reading of a prior
reader. What enters by way of this contingency is the deeply problematic question
of the social role of the critic, typically projected as a claim (or counter-claim, or
counter-counter claim) about the social role of literature. I have treated this phenomenon at length in Democratic Literacy and the Politics of Reading (in process).
See alsoJohn Guillory's astute treatment of related matters in Cultural Capital.
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PROBLEM OF READING / 321
Secondly, one has to give up the notion that it is necessary to
segregate questions pertaining to the imaginative, the fictive, and
the literary from questions pertaining to the real, the factual, and
the pragmatic, since the primary use of imagination
is the construction of our sense of "reality." I am not just thinking of
Coleridge's famous distinction between the primary and secondary imagination on the one hand, and fancy on the other. Imagination always stakes out and prefigures the field that reason will explore, since it is, among other things, our means for creating hypotheses, ratifying our interests and needs, and projecting possible futures. Nor am I adopting
one of the current bits of
deracinated dogma that everything is "socially constructed," including putative laws of nature, such that they can be subsumed
under a nominalism so extreme that it would have rendered William of Occam speechless.4 It is, rather, that we construct all meanrelations among concepts,
ing as networks of interconnected
such
things, ourselves, other people, and institutions-including
artifacts as texts. To put it plainly, imagination is the power without which we could not think at all, so there is no need to traffic in
the counterfactual just because one is dealing with the fictive. The
fact that Shakespeare invents the actions at Elsinore does not authorize us to simply improvise a linguistics or confect a psychology.
In ordinary experience,
we construct and construe meaning
as we interact with objects, form concepts,
make
relationally,
promises, fall in love, go to school, argue, suffer, and so on. So too
in a literary text, meaning is the result of the same elaboration of
interconnected
relations: characters form concepts, make promises, fall in love, go to school, and so on." But the only possible
point of comparison is between relations: how does the set of relations Dickens establishes in The Tale of Two Cities compare to the
relations we establish with an historical world, or how does the set
4 See, for example, the recent notorious send-up of social construction by Alan
Sokal published in a special double issue of Social Text and the New York Times
coverage of this episode, May 19-23, 1996.
SI steer clear of the morass of speech act theory here for the simple reason that it
is entirely unnecessary. The unproductive debate over whether or not literary language is, asJohn Searle has long maintained, "parasitic" on a "normal" speech act
stems from the prejudice that there is a fundamental difference between normal
and literary speech, when the only relevant consideration is whether or not speech
is involved at all. If it is, and we find it useful (as I do not) to focus on acts performed by way of words, then there is no functional difference between a speech
act in a play and a speech act in one's dining room, so far as we are focusing on the
speech act and not our longitudinal response to it. The only point of interest in
either case is the relations (what Austin called the conditions of felicity) that must
be established for there to be, for instance, a promise; and what we do, in the case
of fictive speech, is to compare the relations established in the context of the literary text with the relations we would establish in exactly the same way in our dining
rooms (or wherever), in order to gauge our response to the outcome. For similar
reasons, I avoid here reader-response theories which, when true, are only trivially
true: obviously, readers constitute meaning according
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 322
of relations established in Sophocles's play, Oedipus Rex, compare
to the relations we establish in families, cities, and states? In such
of relacases, facticity is not in question, only the comparison
if
be
clearer
we
tions-a
that
that
recognize
every litermay
point
the
are
text
is
materials
not
an
where
objects but
ary
experiment,
not
in
but
in
our
minds.
the
is
a
and
words,
laboratory
building
Since Aristotle, we have routinely assumed that a literary text is,
in some obvious way, an imitation or representation of the world of
as if the question were for us to decide if
ordinary experience,
in
France
Dickens's novel is really like the historical
revolutionary
scene; if Sophocles's Oedipus or Shakespeare's Hamlet is like the
of Saxo
legendary
figures of Greek myth or the writings
Grammaticus, or if both resemble some transtemporal Everyman.
If the point seems subtle, that is only because when the relations
between the world and the text are easy to establish we see "resemblance," and the text as a literal, precise document seems transparIn other
ent, in need of no specific construal or interpretation.
when it does, bad things
words, the text tends to disappear-and
happen.6
I have argued elsewhere that this problem in reading can be reduced by trying to follow two injunctions: first, don't worry about
what the text means, since that can only be realized in understanding what the text says; and second, do not mistake the integrity of a
text for a presumed authority of the text.' Either way, these injunctions amount to a single directive: rather than asking what a text
means, ask yourself how you could understand what a text says, on
the assumption that the author who made it had reasons for putting it together precisely as he or she did.8 The cases where such
questions resist any convincing answer, while they may seem easy
to find, are not, for my purposes in this essay, anywhere nearly as
interesting as those cases where we all seem to know, almost in adto what they understand, which does not in any respect prevent them from being
wrong, individually or communally, about almost anything-and we do have ample
ways to check, if it really matters to us, whether we are right or wrong.
6 Or
alternatively, the text concretizes into utter rhetorical opacity, such that the
"resemblance" we see is demonstrated to be evidently impossible, leaving us only
the options of embracing an idealist or transcendental version of symbolism we
already know to be mystified, or attaching ourselves to the free-fall of allegorical
irony that only death can terminate. (See, for example, Paul de Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporarily" and The Resistance to Theory.) In such a case, really bad things
happen.
7Democratic Literacy and the Politics of Reading (forthcoming)
s I note here only that the marked degree of confusion that has grown up around
the problem of intention, with efforts to localize its fallacies and demonstrate the
impossibility of ascertaining it, relating it to problems of grammar, consciousness,
logic and semiosis, may be traceable to the elementary circumstance that our ability to recognize irony, carry out comparisons, or use language for any particular
purpose whatsoever depends on the fact that "intention" becomes a problem
when, and only when, we fail to grasp it. Otherwise, we experience intention as
comprehension, precisely at the point where expression meets a context for action.
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PROBLEM OF READING / 323
vance, why a text is put together the way it is, or even what it
means. The trouble is that these are cases where it is easy to show
is incorrect, inconsistent, or
that our knowledge or foreknowledge
the
text
contradicted
what
flatly
by
says.
The cases in question here are both plays, claiming such massive
and persistent privilege that one could hardly imagine European
literature, or, for that matter, European thought and culture, without them: Sophocles's
Oedipus and Shakespeare's Hamlet.9 In the
first case, the text is the primary implicit example of tragedy in
Poetics, where formal literary criticism begins, as Aristotle starts the
long process of traditional poetics, to provide an apology for poetry to overcome Plato's censorious and puritanical exclusion of it
from the ideal Republic (see Krieger). For the modern world,
Hamlet has had an almost equal impact, as the play by Shakespeare,
the poet who seems to make an answer
who is, not coincidentally,
to Plato unnecessary, as Hamlet shows transparently what it means
to be "modern."
Significantly, both plays converge for one of the signal thinkers
of our era, Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytic
theory of the
role of sexuality in the human psyche centers on the "Oedipus
in a letter to Wilhelm
complex," which, when first mentioned
Fliess on October 15, 1897, was illustrated not by a sustained readon Hamlet
ing of Sophocles's
play, but by a brief commentary
(Freud, Complete Letters 270-273). Indeed, it would be uncomfortof a theory of the
ably accurate to say that Freud's development
psyche that could even float after the embarrassment of his early
on a foray into literary
seduction theory, depends fundamentally
of
the
criticism
two plays together-not
very good literary criticism
at that, as I will try to show.
For other readers as well, from Coleridge in his Shakespearean
criticism and Goethe, especially in The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm
Meister, to T. S. Eliot's "Hamlet and His Problems," these two plays
seem to present a "universal" dimension of human experience in
which the resemblance between the literary characters and oneself, or at least a ready ability to empathize with such characters,
induces one to read the text in the very terms by which one conclaim that
structs those self-referring feelings. The conventional
'
Straight away, there is a problem, since these two texts have been so relentlessly
interpreted, commented upon, and written about that a survey of published critia practical contributor to the current disinclinacism is virtually impossible-itself
tion to even approach the briar patch of reading as a subject for theory. The current MLA On-Line Bibliography lists 362 items on Oedipus, and 2169 on Hamlet,
and this does not include any of the multiple uses of or references to these texts in
books on other subjects. However, here I am not pursuing the manifold lines of
prior interpretation and scholarship, but am concentrating on a specific problem
in the theory of reading, in the effort to explain how issues as palpably obvious as
those in the two episodes I treat in these plays have not become commonplaces of
critical discussion.
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 324
certain works of literature are "universal," in other words, arises
from the belief that as works of art, they "hold the mirror up to
nature," to borrow Hamlet's figure; but we do not notice that the
"nature" reflected back to us is our own endlessly malleable need
to constitute ourselves in the very terms that seem to be offered or
suggested to us. Hence these moments seem to demand some kind
of psychological or psychoanalytical explanation, when the issue at
stake is primarily logical."'
Partly for this reason, in our time Freud's reading has held a
place of privilege almost as pronounced as the plays themselves; in
his words the "gripping power of Oedipus Rex" resides in the fact
that
the Greek legend seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he
senses its existence within himself. Everyone in the audience was once a budding
Oedipus in fantasy and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfillment here
transplanted into reality, with the full quality of repression which separates his infantile state from his present one. (272)
While in Sophocles's play, Jocasta herself remarks that this fanand should be taken to mean nothing (lines
tasy is commonplace
981-82), Freud seizes upon it as a way to reinstitute as fact the myth
upon which Sophocles drew, to posit a psychological universal that
has become for us the defining tenet of psychoanalysis:
Fleetingly the thought passed through my head that the same thing might be at the
bottom of Hamlet as well. I am not thinking of Shakespeare's conscious intention,
but believe, rather, that a real event stimulated the poet in his representation, in
that his unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero. How does Hamlet
the hysteric justify his words, "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all?" How
does he explain his irresolution in avenging his father by the murder of his unclethe same man who sends his courtiers to their death without a scruple and who is
positively precipitate in murdering Laertes? How better than through the torment
he suffers from the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same
deed against his father out of passion for his mother, and-"use every man after his
desert, and who should 'scape whipping?" His conscience is his unconscious sense
of guilt. And is not his sexual alienation in his conversation with Ophelia typically
hysterical? And his rejection of the instinct that seeks to beget children? And, finally, his transferal of the deed from his own father to Ophelia's? And does he not,
in the end, in the same marvelous way as my hysterical patients, bring down punishment on himself by suffering the same fate as his father of being poisoned by the
same rival? (272-273)
It is not just that Freud, in this commentary, provides the impetus for Ernst Jones's classic study, Hamlet and Oedipus, and gives a
distinctive modern shape to the so-called "Hamlet problem"-in
brief, why he does not just go out, in the style of Gorboduc, and
10For a suggestive discussion of this possibility, see Charles Sanders Peirce's Reasoning and the Logic of Things, 143-145, and his 1865 lectures on "The Logic of
Science," Writings,vol. 1, 162-335, esp. 305 ff.). Briefly, Peirce's life-long resistance
to psychologism of all sorts stems from his view of the "self" as being of the order of
a sign, developed from a continuum of possibility that neither can nor need be
conceived as exhausted or even defined by any particular configuration of it. See
Colapietro.
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PROBLEM OF READING / 325
dispatch his uncle straight away, without all this shilly-shallying
over "conscience?" Indeed, if Hamlet comes to seem the Hysteric, it
is partly because Shakespeare's play makes a richer, shapelier, and
more coherent case study than any of the messy clinical escapades
of Freud's early practice; and so the analysis of "the hysteric,"
which Freud had "not yet even attempted to try out" at this point,
arguably owes more to Hamlet than to Freud's patients. If we then
find the play giving shape to our own private anguishes, the irony
is that reading Hamlet (or Oedipus Rex) in the light of Freud's conjectures, "doth make Freudians of us all." So pressing, evidently,
did T. S. Eliot find this matter that he decided the play was a failure, since it evoked (for Eliot) a problem too big for even
Shakespeare to resolve and seemed to require that "we understand
things which Shakespeare did not understand himself" (126).
I do not intend to pursue this Freudian byway, because I regard
it as a detour (though a much traveled road) provoked not by the
fundamental truth or falsity of Freud's conjectures about the Oedipus complex, or the unfolding of it in the tragedy of Hamlet (in
or revealing about the human
both cases, far less interesting
psyche than what Sophocles and Shakespeare do in the texts themselves), but by the logic of analysis that Freud shares with almost all
conventional
literary criticism and scholarship, from Aristotle to
the present day. It is that literary texts are objects, about which to
reason, from simpler principles established on other authority (be
it transcendental,
divine, empirical, or clinical); and what we find
in texts are therefore examples of other concepts, other truths,
prior to the imaginative work and presumably explanatory of it. It
is the mode by which critics, in selecting some theory or "approach," read the text by way of the presumed authority of the independently articulated theory, which then seems to sanction an
indifference to the integrity of the text in question."
The theory of reading outlined here starts from a very different
premise: that literary texts are themselves already forms of reasoning,
and that the reason to respect what a text says in precisely the way
" By this, I mean that we read only so far as our "theory" takes us, and if we find
confirmation of, say, a Freudian, Girardian, Marxist, feminist, post-colonialist, pattern, as the theory renders it, we don't look to see if there is counter evidence in
the text that reduces our favored theory to incoherence. Thus we can set aside the
thematic issues through which Freud's conjecture appeals to us, to remark, as
Freud himself did, that Sophocles got there first in seeing homologies between
sexuality and power, between the family and the state; and that Shakespeare,
particilarly in Hamlet, provides a vastly richer case study than does, say, Dora, within
which the operations of neurosis and hysteria are small change when set against
the complexities of conscience, of which Freud makes relatively short work. In his
better known return to the "Oedipus complex" in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud reduces the matter one more degree by asserting that the further
knowledge gained through psychoanalysis "is soon told. The complex is revealed
just as the myth relates it; it will be seen that every one of these neurotics [Freud's
patients] was himself an Oedipus or, what amounts to the same thing,
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 326
that it says it, is that the text is not only saying something, but also
doing something, though not in the mode of speech acts. It is an
inquiry into problems and relatibns, the very problems and relations that constitute us as individual and social subjects. I will be
examining, albeit briefly, two notorious moments, one from Oedipus and one from Hamlet, where I believe we can see with startling
clarity how it is that reading for resemblances, or, more generally,
reading as if the text were an object mirroring or representing
something else, is a profound mistake, no matter how much the
metaphysical commitments of everyday life recommend it.12 What
follows from it, perhaps as startling, is that interpretive cruxes,
that have been virtually coexcrises, aporias, and befuddlements
tensive with the domain of literary criticism,
change shape
dramatically, to appear as avoidance reactions concerning cognitive, affective, and political claims that imaginative texts place, for
the most part gently, upon us. To modulate the celebrated line
from Rilke's "Torso of an Archaic Apollo," it is as if "There is no
poem that does not see you: You must change your life."'"
I. Oracles, Curses, and Vision
There is perhaps no feature of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex as prominent as the ironic, tragic reversal that affects Oedipus, when his
relentless search for the killer of his predecessor, King Laius, only
confirms that he, Oedipus, has murdered not just a king but his
own father. Within that brilliantly modulated dramatic developcelebrated
after hearing
"curse," delivered
ment, Oedipus's
Creon's report of the oracle, is a pivotal moment. Oedipus, it
seems, issues a resounding curse, full of detail about awful things
that are to happen to the unknown miscreant. By the end of the
play, it appears that he has cursed himself to a life of misery and
exile (see for example, lines 744-45)-which
is, in fact, what Oedihas become a Hamlet in his reaction to the complex" (344). When Shakespeare
has Hamlet give his farewell, he says to Horatio, "Absent thee from felicity a while
and tell my tale." When Freud takes up that task, from the letter to Fliess all the way
through to Civilization and Its Discontents, it runs on straighter tracks: "Absent
thee from felicity forever, for such is the origin of all stories, detailing the price of
civil order." Even the "felicity" of death offers no release.
12I reject expressive models and mimetic models on the same grounds. The only
difference is that the presumed origin of a text is taken to be in the consciousness
or psyche of an author, instead of in mimesis of an independent world. The very
thing missing is that literature as reasoning is something constructed; and for us to
find the construction expressive does not at all entail that it is "an expression" of
some state, thought, apprehension, or quality that could as well exist without the
text. Consider, for instance, how odd it would be if the syllogism, All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal, were explained as an "expression" of the consciousness of a particular author.
'• Rilke's famous line is, "There is no place that does not see you. You must
change your life."
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PROBLEM OF READING / 327
pus gets.
for one who, like me, could more properly be said to
But-even
wrestle Greek than to read it-it is easy to find out that this is not
what the text says; and as we will see later on, there is intriguing
evidence in Oedipus at Colonus with a direct bearing on how to understand what it does say.'4 Sophocles clearly wants us to see that
Oedipus, who raised his hand against Laius, will, at the catastrophe, raise the same hand against himself (as Gould points out in
his sensitive commentary on Sophocles's use of the figure of the
hand, pp. 30-33). So too, everyone from Creon and the Chorus to
readers like ourselves expects that the murderer of a king will be
punished at least by exile. But looking at what Oedipus actually
says should radically undermine our confidence about how to read
this crucial scene.
Creon has just returned from the oracle at Delphi, which he reports in a typically ambiguous two liner, quoted here from Gould's
translation: "drive out pollution sheltered in our land, / and do
not shield what is incurable" (lines 96-97). This is supplemented
a
few lines later when the oracle is reported as saying, "What we pursue / that can be caught; but not what we neglect" (lines 110111).1'5
The trouble starts as Oedipus (and Creon) try to read this message, which, like all oracles, is genuinely ambiguous. It is inconceivable to Creon (as to most of us) that the "pollution" could be
anything other than the murder of the former king; but to Oedithat any people would allow their
pus it is equally inconceivable
to
not
be
murdered
and
king
try to find the guilty party. If the
oracle were as simple and straightforward as Creon takes it to be, it
would be a Delphic first; but Oedipus, as the reader of riddling
texts (having read the Sphinx), knows that this marvel of oracular
compression is not going to be so easy. The passage in which he
issues his celebrated curse thus starts as a request for help in seek14 From the perspective of Oedipus at Colonus, it is first Creon and, later,
Oedipus's sons that force Oedipus into exile; and the central problem in that later
play hinges on the fact that Oedipus is so resolutely certain that the punishment
was unjust and illicit. Obviously, Oedipus views himself as more sinned against
than sinning, as he says explicitly in the later play, lines 960-1013. See discussion
below.
'" There is an altogether remarkable convergence here between the riddling
speech of the Delphic oracle and the Sphinx, whose "perplexed,juggling song" (as
Liddell and Scott render poikilodos) is later used by Creon as an explanation (or an
excuse) for not conducting an inquiry; he says the Sphinx told them "to turn /
from the obscure to what lay at [your] feet" (II. 130-131). Gould, in his cominmentary, examines at length the peculiarity of the Sphinx being mentioned at thisjuncture, since it shows how closely connected in time were Laius's death and
Oedipus's solving of the riddle of the Sphinx. But he does not notice that this
particular "perplexed, juggling song" accords precisely with what the oracle is telling them now. Like all inexperienced readers, they are looking for hidden meaning without considering what is already on the surface. See Gould's notes to lines
36, 130, and 567.
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 328
ing the trail of this old outrage:
Since it was only later that Ijoined you,
to all the sons of Cadmus I say this:
whoever has clear knowledge of the man
who murdered Laius, son of Labdacus,
I command him to reveal it all to menor fear if, to remove the charge, he must
accuse himself: his fate will not be cruelhe will depart unstumbling into exile.
But if you know another, or a stranger,
to be the one whose hand is guilty, speak:
I shall reward you and remember you.
But if you keep your peace because of fear,
and shield yourself or kin from my command,
hear you what I shall do in that event:
I charge all in this land where I have throne
and power, shut out that man--no matter whoboth from your shelter and all spoken words,
nor in your prayer or sacrifices make
him partner, nor allot him lustral water.
All men shall drive him from their homes: for he
is the pollution that the god-sent Pythian
response has only now revealed to me.
In this way I ally myself in war
with the divinity and the deceased.
And this curse, too, against the one who did it,
whether alone in secrecy, or with others:
may he wear out his life unblest and evil!
I pray this, too: if he is at my hearth
and in my home, and I have knowledge of him,
may the curse pronounced on others come to me.
All this I lay to you to execute,
for my sake, for the god's, and for this land
now ruined, barren, abandoned by the gods.
Even if no god had driven you to it,
You ought not to have left this stain uncleansed,
the murdered man a nobleman, a king!
You should have looked! ...(lines 222-258)
As Oedipus begins, he appeals to the Thebans for their cooperation, though as he goes on, his speech rises (by about line 238) to a
general mode of malediction. But the horrible penalty of exile and
ostracism appears to apply first and primarily to the one who has
knowledge and does not reveal it-not
necessarily
to the one who did
the deed, whose particular curse is, in Gould's translation, that he
"may wear out his life unblest and evil." Oedipus is careful to include the possibility (which he takes as probable) that the main
reason not to reveal what one knew is self-incrimination, so he includes a kind of precursor to the fifth amendment (already implied in Athenian law-see Ahl 21) in lines 227-29: "nor fear if, to
remove the charge, he must / accuse himself: his fate will not be
cruel-/ he will depart unstumbling into exile." It is worth emphasizing here that this particular aspect of the curse could also be
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PROBLEM OF READING / 329
taken as a promise of leniency: that is, ifyou know something and
tell it, even though you thereby indict yourself with regicide, you
or humiliated,
but will be sent off
will not be ostracized
"unstumbling."
Now, the supposition that the intended object of this rousing
curse could only be the murderer, not the one who refuses to
speak, is only that, a supposition, no matter how heavy the weight
of scholarly tradition affirming it; that Oedipus does not share this
supposition is structurally and contextually confirmed by the fact
that he frames every particular of the penalty by referring to what
shall be done in the event that someone has knowledge but refuses
to give it. As if that were not enough, Oedipus explicitly singles out
the murderer for a second, separate curse at lines 246 ff.16 Before
and after this pivotal speech, moreover, Oedipus is insistent that
the Thebans should never have let this murder lie unsolved and
unpunished: the great fault is the failure of inquiry.
What are we to make of Sophocles (and Oedipus) singling out
the one who refuses to speak what he knows to bear the brunt of
it seems, for the
the curse and reserving a lighter punishment,
murderer? Among the recent translators and commentators I have
consulted, only Thomas Gould even mentions this detail, and he
then brushes it aside: "At first glance it would seem that the object
of this imprecation was that man who refused to expose the killer of
Laius. In 242, however, that man is said to be the pollution indicated by the oracle..." (44)."17 But there is no help in this logic,
of the
which is but a projection of the presumed foreknowledge
reader: "that man" who is the pollution could just as well be the one
'6 It is of course striking that this peculiarity of the speech evades general notice,
though part of the reason is that when it has been noticed by editors and scholars,
it has been consistently smoothed over if not suppressed. In Sophoclea: Studies on
the Text of Sophocles, published in conjunction with the 1990 Oxford edition of the
Greek text, Hugh Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson are categorical about how this
should be read: "The curse is surely pronounced against the murderer, not the
concealer ... If this is agreed, it is hard to resist the suggestion of Wecklein, made
first in his revision of the fifth edition of Wunder (1880)... that 246-51 were interpolated by someone who took 236f. to be a curse upon the concealer." But that
does nothing at all for the deeper problem that Oedipus is so adamant and insistent from the start in his attention to the concealer, which reduces the confidence
of Lloyd-Jones and Wilson to an unsupported assertion that remains incoherent
despite its congeniality to what we would rather think. Worse yet, if one were to
agree with Wecklein and the string of distinguished scholars who have followed
him, there is nothingin the speech as we have it to indicate clearly that the object
of these edicts and curses is the murderer. When Gould notices this problem, he
persists in the error anyway, evidently because he takes the next couplet to indicate
that Oedipus really has the killer in mind. But that puts us in the embarrassing
position of ratifying Creon's interpretation of what the eloquently ambiguous
oracle really means and neglecting the fact that Oedipus disagrees. To repeat, what
we know of the oracle stems from two lines: "drive out pollution sheltered in our
land, / and do not shelter what is incurable." The entire question is what one takes
"the pollution" to be, and if, indeed, it is "one or many," as in the case of the ambiguity exploited by Goodhart on the question of the evidence, never heard, that all
reports insist that Laius was killed by many men, not one.
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 330
who refuses to reveal what he knows as the one who killed the king.
Oedipus, on the contrary, does not have that knowledge, nor does
he have Creon's balmy confidence that all one has to do to get this
matter settled is find the killer and kill him-or
at least send him
into exile-since
the whole point lies in finding him in the first
place. Oedipus, in other words, appears here to believe that he has
found (contrary to Creonic common sense) the miasma, the pollution, to be any act that blocks the path of inquiry,18 for that is, after
all, what allows the traditional blood crime to become a miasma, a
deeply settled and obscure "pollution" that persists because it is
never found out (in the words of the oracle, is "sheltered in this
land") and therefore is never submitted to any kind of purification
or "catharsis."
Even more startling is the fact that the first curse (i.e., that the
man should be shunned and ostracized) does not apply to Oedipus, even if one resorts to the Freudian device of the unconscious,
since Oedipus does tell all he knows and does not hesitate from
seeking out the truth. At the very least, he appears to deserve the
leniency promised to the cooperative informant. But the malediction does apply, with uncanny precision, to that other reader,
Teiresias, who evidently has known the whole truth from the beginning but even now will tell what he knows only when forced to
do so.
Lest anyone think that I am leaping from a straw into an abyss
here, the point is that this seemingly confounding
interpretive option is not only possible, but fits the text vastly better than the common reading that there is only one curse, one man, one polluter:
Oedipus himself. The question is not, therefore, which option to
take, but rather, why did Sophocles put this stumbling block here,
when it appears that almost nobody sees it, recognizes it, or even
stumbles over it? And make no mistake: Oedipus may be confused,
misguided, and horribly wrong, but Sophocles is not.19 There is a
very profound point in leaving this issue open precisely because it
is the problem for which Oedipus, blinded by his own hand at the
17Jebb, on the other hand, patches this to render "that man" as "that murderer,"
such that the reader has only the structure of the speech to disclose the oddity. In
Sophocles's text, however, the point is overdetermined by the belt and suspenders
of grammar and structure. See note 19. The whole point is that neither Oedipus
nor the Thebans know who the murderer is, and are therefore reliant on "that
man" who knows to speak up. See Jebb, p. 43. When Oedipus, moreover, says at
line 243 that the god has just revealed to him what the pollution is, it is at least
grammatically and notionally possible to take it to mean that Oedipus hasjust now
(as he speaks) figured out that the real pollution on the land is the harboring of
the secret of the murder, and that is what the oracle means.
18I'm borrowing the phrase which Charles Sanders Peirce says should be emblazoned on all the walls of any school of philosophy: "Do not block the path of inquiry" (Reasoning and the Logic of Things 178).
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PROBLEM OF READING / 331
end of the play, is the very figure and symbol. It encapsulates perfectly the problem of reading, wherein you must also read yourself,
reading, and resolutely does not close off that problem by flattering the reader's or viewer's hunger for resemblance.20
The central ambiguity here, moreover, is not the curse or its application: it is the prior problem of how to interpret an oracular
is it that man
utterance. The ambiguity over "that man"-namely,
who refuses to tell what he knows, or that man who killed the
with the question, what is the "pollution" menking-overlaps
tioned by the oracle: "drive out pollution sheltered in our land /
and do not shelter what is incurable." Creon sees the pollution
simply as the murder; Oedipus sees the pollution as the refusal to
reveal what one knows, thereby preventing any healing catharsis
from taking place. It should also be plain that the paradoxical
pleasures of tragic irony are present in both readings, when we inquire what it would mean to see the refusal to reveal what one
knows as a miasma or pollution needing to be purged and expiated.
Such a possibility changes one's root sense of what this play is
about: it is about inquiry and knowledge, particularly the kind that
comes from the frequently painful work of construing obscure or
puzzling sayings. It is, in other words, about analysis; and Oedipus,
like Freud, presumes himself a master at it. Thus, when Oedipus
issues his injunction, sealed with a curse, that everyone tell him
what they know, his encounter with Teiresias, the figure and sym"1 The point at issue, moreover, is neither grammatical nor lexical, but structural, a point which all philological emendations and conjectures entirely ignore.
The problem of grammatically fixing the referent of "that man" makes no essential
difference, given Oedipus's assumption that if you find the one with knowledge
who refuses to tell it, you will find the murderer. About this, he is wrong; but,
ironically, finding the one who refuses to tell does lead to discovering the murderer.
20 Goodhart raises a similar point in demonstrating that Sophocles does not provide the kind of "smoking gun" evidence that Oedipus's own inquiry seems to seek.
I demur a bit from joining Goodhart's more general conclusion, however, that
such cases may turn our "guiding assumptions about literature and literary study
inside out," on the grounds that "great literature" is already a "critical staging or
dramatization of the structures of difference-the
myths or stories-of which it is
composed," while the literary criticism which has "grown up around and has attached itself to this 'literature"' does not so much represent that literature as it
displaces it, "emptying it of its critical content and rewriting it in favor of the more
familiar structures of difference criticism has expected" (xii, xi). My hesitation lies
less in a disagreement than in a growing conviction that the problem is embedded
in just such rhetoric of uncanny reversals, paradoxes, aporias, and turnings-insideout that merely invites us, under the attractive banner of some contemporary practice, to out-sophisticate the sophists, when the fundamental problem is a metaphysical category mistake: literature is not a class of objects that can be either represented or turned inside out, nor is it a form of language or a species of discursive
practice. It is a primary form of reasoning that we urgently need to reason with,
instead of reading against it or transforming it into a rhetorical agon where we
seem always to be our very own antagonists.
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 332
bol of an older mode of knowledge to which inquiry and thinking
are alien, immediately provokes denials and refusals on the part of
the blind prophet, who, in knowing, is unable to believe that it
does any good.
I am not forgetting
is hardly someone to be
that Sophocles
counted among the optimists, being a man who evidently thought
that the next best thing to being dead was never to have been born.
But by comparison with Teiresias in this play, Sophocles seems a
veritable Pollyanna, and Freud a Dr. Pangloss. Note, however, that
the "stumbling block," over which I at least have stumbled, has the
effect of foregrounding
Oedipus and Teiresias as advocates of two
modes of analysis. Teiresias's mode,
incommensurable
absolutely
divination, reads signs, not texts; and it is devoted to a direct
daimonic access to truths that, for all the luck he has had with
them, cannot be told to people in a way that they can ever get it.
Moreover, it doesn't take eyes, it takes a pipeline to the daimon;
and that pipeline also leads straight to the wellspring of fate, the
view that everything in human life is beyond help or cure. Recall
here the explicit language that sets up the problem of interpreting
the oracle: "drive out pollution sheltered in our land, / and do not
shield what is incurable" (1.96-97). Freud argues that as bad as repression and neurosis may be, they are the cost of civilization; but
for Teiresias repression and neurosis do not lead to civilization but
until the arrival
to endless barbarity, mayhem, and murder-which
of Oedipus had been the whole story of the house of Cadmus.
Analysis as Oedipus practices it, however, is a mode of empirical
common sense, with an enormously confident trust in rationality.
When he encounters Teiresias, then, he is full of scorn for this old
"blind man," and Sophocles provides another of the play's many
exquisite ironies in having Oedipus raise his hand, not against his
life, but against his own eyes. In this respect, we could see the action of the tragedy as a complex transposition of sight and blindness, both physical and spiritual. At the start of the play Teiresias is
physically but not spiritually blind, while Oedipus is exactly the opposite. By the end of it, Teiresias has been displaced by Oedipus,
who is now physically blind, but spiritually visionary.
has become
that Oedipus
This does not mean, however,
he
has
the
since
miasma, has lifted the
Teiresias,
actually
dissipated
curse on Thebes (leaving aside the terrible mess that his brotherin-law and his sons create), and has come to a kind of self-knowledge that only he could possibly attain in this play: he knows his
that error,
origins, and he knows his error. More revealingly,
in the line of
which Oedipus shares with all his predecessors
Labdacus back to Cadmus (who, according to Herodotus, introduced the alphabet into Greece), is an error in reading. Every one
of these fated males, not so much hysterical as testerical, is con-
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PROBLEMOF READING/ 333
fronted by an oracle, a puzzling piece of language, which each one
tries to read as if he had no reason to question his own relation to
what the puzzle is about: thus, Laius pierces the feet of Oedipus
and abandons him on the hillside to escape the apparent meaning
of the oracle that decreed his own son would kill him, just as Oedipus, hearing rumors of the same oracle, reacts in the same literal
way and flees his putative parents, only to complete the prophecy
in the most tragic way.
When Oedipus displaces Teiresias, the change, wholly positive,
is in the mode of inquiry-to a mode of thinking and reading that
does not look far and wide in search of the truth, but right at one's
own feet, which for Oedipus, with his deformed ankles, carries an
added poignancy and point. There is however a subtler, more general point that needs mentioning here, pertaining to the role of
analysis (and the analyst), the problem of repression, and the implications for knowledge of Freud's model of the unconscious.
The deeper reason that the curse does not apply to Oedipus is that
it is he who insists on finding out the truth, even at great personal
cost, rather than the analyst, who is all too ready to badger the
patient in his desire to find a confirming case for a theory. Thus,
Teiresias, as the displaced psychoanalyst urging Oedipus to "think
this out" (line 461) to arrive at knowledge the analyst already has,
is so deeply entangled in confusion that he cannot see his "knowledge" as anything other than the idea of Fate, which, like the idea
of the unconscious, posits knowledge as prior to itself, beyond any
form of melioration or change. While Freud appears to have
wanted his mode of analysis to resemble Oedipus's, insofar as it
does intend a cure of the malady, Sandor Goodhart brilliantly
points out that, "The patient for Freud must discover himself Oedipus and must confess his crimes at the level of desire to the doctor who knew that truth in advance and who, with his wise silence
and prophetic eyes, has assumed throughout the position of
Teiresias" (38). And if we see Freud as occupying the functional
place of Teiresias, Sophocles's text, as I am construing it here,
spells the end of Freud's theoretical credibility in exactly the same
sense that it supplies its origin. When Sophocles, however, puts
Teiresias right in the sights of Oedipus's worst curse (which
Teiresias, like everyone else, presumes to apply only to the killer of
King Laius-cf. lines 350-353), we are put in the position of looking, as it were, upon the primal scene of knowing, wherein knowledge loses forever its absolute sanction as belonging only to the
gods, and is established, through Oedipus, as a specific human relation that is only realized through thought and inquiry, and only
revealed in and through the specificity of a text.
The novelty that comes to light when we see how Oedipus displaces Teiresias, however, is something that we are liable to miss:
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 334
the emergence of a very specific political conscience,
something
altogether absent from previous kings in the line of Cadmus. It is a
conscience that depends explicitly on the knowledge of one's own
deep involvement in understanding what one sets out to read. And
though I believe that a fuller account of Oedipus Rex would suffice
to make the point, it has a crucial link to the Oedipus at Colonus.21
Oedipus at Colonus is a man who knows precisely and specifically
that he has been wronged, and that not one but a host of terrible
injustices has been visited upon him. That knowledge leads him to
seek refuge in Athens at the shrine of Apollo, the god who has
been the instrument of his horrifically acquired self-knowledge.
Athens and Theseus make Oedipus an honorary citizen and hero
of the city-and
appropriately so, given the text inscribed over the
entrance to the shrine at Delphi: "From heaven it descended:
Know Thyself." Oedipus belongs to that oracle and the city that
claimed it in the most thorough-going way possible.
a conscience
Oedipus is thus the first king with a conscience,
that arises as a direct result of his way of conducting an inquiry:
looking at what is immediately at hand, and not hesitating when he
finds himself implicated in all that appears to be wrong. As a figure
for the reader, he makes the same kind of mistake we all make
when we look off into the far symbolic distance for meaning-but
he discovers, by persisting, that what one needs is right before
of Teiresias,
one's eyes, or right at one's feet. His displacement
moreover, is so complete that Teiresias simply vanishes from the
play after line 461: no one talks to him, seeks him out, listens to
him, or pays him any heed whatsoever; he becomes the very substance of the curse Oedipus issues but does not even have to carry
out. When we read this play as Freud did, we lapse into the reading
practice of Teiresias, which makes all matters of conscience foreign and fated. We let the theory do our thinking for us, not explaining the text but offering us a pipeline to something demonic
in which we are, ourselves, implicated. Though I will not pursue
this point here, it seems clear that if we want to understand how
this matter of conscience
applies to our own psychic energies,
than Freud-and
is
still
a
better
source
Shakespeare
Sophocles
21 There have always been problems in trying to reconcile, or even relate these
two plays to each other, in part because Oedipus, near his death at Colonus, seems
to remember with a startling bitterness the injustice he feels at his own expulsion
and exile from Thebes at the hand of his sons. For the reader, the problem is likely
to seem that Oedipus must have forgotten that he himself brought the curse of
exile upon himself-though
as I hope I have shown, there is ample reason to argue
otherwise-and that his fierce anger at Polynices is uncomfortably reminiscent of
the rage that elsewhere brings him down. Cf., however, Gould's article, "The Innocence of Oedipus and the Nature of Tragedy." Arguing against Aristotle's shift of
the burden of tragedy from fate to character, Gould points out that what happens
to Oedipus is not something for which we can blame him. Thus, he sees no reason
even to question the "infallible vision" of Teirisias (290).
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PROBLEM OF READING / 335
might be better yet.
II. The Play's the Thing
We should recall that Freud's interest in Oedipus Rex was shaped
by his musings upon Hamlet, and not the other way around, because for Freud the problematic Prince of Denmark's "conscience
is his unconscious sense of guilt." Thus, Freud's identification with
Hamlet opens the route by which the "Oedipus complex" is theoretically instituted, universalizing a sense of guilt that is "unconscious" only because the logic by which it is formulated is never
made explicit. If Hamlet were not a neurotic and not reacting to
his Oedipal fixation on his mother, Freud suggests, he would dispatch Claudius in a trice and be done with it. It is "passing strange"
that we do not pause to consider what kind of notion of "conscience" Freud puts in play here. It is positively worthy of Creon, if
not Laius or Labdacus or Cadmus: a generation of dragons, all
sharing the same teeth. But Hamlet is an exemplary reader, like
Oedipus, precisely because his conscience is not his unconscious
sense of guilt but his eminently conscious sense of justice--so long
as he remains conscious of reading.
When the old ghost taps the floor and then appears with his
chilling tale, the focus is not enmity between father and son, but a
contest between the brothers-surely,
one would think, an appealing psychoanalytic topic. This "Hamlet problem" does not belong
to the prince, but to old Hamlet and Claudius; and it is less concerned with a hesitation to kill than with a willingness to murder in
order to gain power, even (or especially) if it is your own brother
who will die. This is a very old ghost indeed, as old as Cadmus or
Polynices and Eteocles (or Cain and Abel); and where-as Oedipus,
as the father in the middle, escaped the fate of his father and his
sons, Prince Hamlet is the son in the middle, trying to escape the
fate of his father and uncle. And like Oedipus, Hamlet is given an
oracle that requires interpretation.
Shakespeare, however, gives us not so much a bifurcated curse as
a bifurcated play within the play, with which Prince Hamlet, possihopes to
bly a better critic than Freud and Creon combined,
"catch the conscience of the king." Being a careful reader, however, offers Hamlet no more protection in itself than it provides
and reflective activity
Oedipus, partly because the contemplative
of reading explicitly defers action in the interest of understanding.
But when one forgets what reading requires, action overwhelms it.
In fact, it is hard, even for Hamlet, to remember that, "The play 's
the thing..." "The Murder of Gonzago," suitably modified by Hamlet by adding a dumb show to present the anterior action informHamlet, obviously bifurcates attention: which
ing Shakespeare's
or Hamlet's-is
"the thing?" In addition,
play-Shakespeare's
when "The Murder of Gonzago" is being presented,
Hamlet is
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 336
prattling on to Ophelia and anyone else in the range of his disturbance, and is not so much watching the play he has engineered as
he is performing for Ophelia and testing Claudius. Perhaps that is
why neither he nor many readers have paid much attention to the
fact that in the play within the play the king is murdered not by his
brother, but by his nephew:
Hamlet: Madam, how like you this play?
Queen:The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Hamlet: 0, but she'll keep her word.
King: Have you heard the argument? Is there no offense in't?
Hamlet: No, no, they do butjest, poison in jest; no offense i'th' world.
King: What do you call the play?
Hamlet: TheMousetrap.Merry, how? Tropically. This play is the image of a
murder done in Vienna; Gonzago is the Duke's name; his wife, Baptista. You
shall see anon. 'Tis a knavish piece of work, but what of that? Your Majesty,
and we that have free souls, it touches us not. Let the galledjade winch;
our withers are unwrung.
Enter Lucianus.
This is one Lucianus, nephew to the King.
Ophelia:You are as good as a chorus, my lord. (III. ii. 235 ff.)
Lying in the garden, Gonzago, the player king, is killed by his
nephew, who pours poison in the king's ear. We already know
Claudius did the deed, so we don't even pause over the possibility
that in this case, he sees himself as that sleeping king, about to be
killed by his nephew, which is Prince Hamlet.22 The point is not
that Claudius is innocent, but that this is where Hamlet ceases to
be so.
This is another case, like Oedipus, where our foreknowledge
so
blinds us that we neither register what has been presented, nor
reflect on the fact that this little detail is not a mistake that could
be laid at Shakespeare's desk any more than Oedipus's confusions
could be attributed to Sophocles. It is intentional by any warrant,
and, once again, can change dramatically what we think this altogether too familiar play is about.
22 I have found only one critical article that explicitly notices this blatantly obvious circumstance, a brief note by AmyJ. Riess and George W. Walton in Shakespeare
Newsletter. This note, however, is devoted to trying to locate the lines that Hamlet
added to "The Murder of Gonzaga," eliciting only the comment that this "unexpected alteration of family relationship, though puzzling, reflects a dramatic situation which can superimpose" (in the words of Harold Jenkins, in The Arden
Shakespeare) "'upon the image of the murder [by a brother] . .. an image of its
revenge [by a nephew]"' (p. 3; Jenkins quotation from p. 481). So too, G.R.
Hibbard, in his 1987 Oxford edition of the play, asserts without providing any references that this shift from the brother to the nephew "has been the subject of
much speculation" (262). No doubt this relation is sometimes noticed, but evidently it is almost instantly "renormalized," as it were, to raise no further questions
and reinforce attention on the motif of revenge and its deferral. Thus, for example, Philip Edwards, in his edition of Hamlet for The New Cambridge
Shakespeare, applies a kind of critical heat-sink: "In identifying Lucianus thus,
Hamlet brings together past and future: Claudius's killing of his brother, and his
own projected killing of his uncle" (163).
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PROBLEM OF READING / 337
In this case, notice that if Prince Hamlet is not attending to the
play, but only to its effect on Claudius, Gertrude, and Ophelia,
then he has made the same mistake in reading that most readers
make: reading through his foreconceit (in this case prompted by a
ghost) and looking for a sign from Claudius, he misses what the
very text he has contrived to have presented is saying. Significantly, the only ones reading this play are the viewers / readers of
Shakespeare's Hamlet, since Horatio too is bid to keep his eyes on
Claudius. This is so precisely structured that it can function as a
very explicit test case to see if we know how to read, since no one in
the action is doing it. Shakespeare's critics might get a grade of
2.0, and Horatio may outscore them, depending on how we take
his line to Hamlet, who thinks his device should get him "a fellowship in a cry of players." Horatio counters sensibly that it may deserve "half a share," since, if Horatio has been reading this scene,
he can scarcely have missed that Hamlet, toying with Claudius, as
if both of them have "free souls," does not recognize how the trope
of his play will cost him his free soul as well. Ironically, Hamlet has
already bought into the play he has neglected to watch.
The play within the play should thus have caught the conscience
of the Prince, had he noticed that by presenting what he was about
to do, namely kill his uncle, it put him in the position of his uncle,
the murderer, rather than in that of the virtuous avenger of his
father. Like a kind of dumb-show Teiresias, the play within the
play shows him that if he kills his uncle, he kills Hamlet-as both
his figured father, and ultimately himself. A Freudian reading, under this construal, actually works out-but with devastating theoretical consequences for a conventional Freudian reading of the
case. That is, if Hamlet is put into the position of his uncle, then
he is precisely the one who wishes old Hamlet dead so as to be able
to possess Queen Gertrude. But there is nothing unconscious
about this. There is, rather, something inadvertent, as Hamlet
doesn't see it because he's not reading theplay, and thereby his conscience is not immediately caught, as only a reader's may be. Note
too that for Claudius the device does less to catch his conscience
than to mobilize his guilt, with the result that he sets out to poison
everybody left alive. Hamlet's hesitation, in this light, may result
from a nagging suspicion that he has still missed something, and
indeed he has. As Hamlet says at the end of the play within the
play: "For some must watch, while some must sleep; / Thus runs
the world away."
The question is, "Who is watching, who sleeping?" Like Horatio
we must watch vigilently, for disaster stems from a fundamental
failure to recognize the imagination as the problematic ground of
reasoning rather than from fate or a universal complex in the
psyche. As the imagination is inclined, so runs the reason; and the
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 338
critical task of examining this relationship is rendered more difficult precisely because reading, which demands space and time reflectively to construe what is read, is constantly being forced to
give way to action. In this case, the play within the play shows that
Hamlet, if he pursues the revenge urged upon him by his dead
father, will become another Claudius.
As if this were not complicating
enough, even the reader who
have
noticed
the
familial
might
logic of "The Murder of Gonzago"
overlook
another
feature
of
this scene, the manner of death:
may
is
into
the
ear
of
the
poison
poured
sleeper. There could hardly be
a metaphor more apt for reflecting on the risks of reading. If one
is asleep, as it were, what enters the ear does so with only the protection of a permeable membrane. Poison poured into the ear is
like a lie, something that kills the soul before it can make sense of
what is heard. The poison poured in Hamlet's ear is the injunction
laid on him by his own father; and if we permit ourselves to think
with this form of literary reasoning, consider briefly where it leads.
Polonius pours poison in the ears of his son, his daughter, his
son's associates, the king, in short, everyone, because, like Creon
he thinks himself sufficiently endowed with good sense to need
only the principle of manipulative calculation. Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern
attempt to play upon Hamlet as one would play
upon a pipe, and in doing so hasten their own deaths. Claudius
and Laertes conspire to kill Hamlet under the cover of sport, and
finally Hamlet, having transformed another text into a death warrant for his old chums, returns to Denmark, ready to "play" without realizing how much poison has already been poured into
everybody's ears, some of it from his own pen. The game, in brief,
is deadly earnest and will leave the stage littered with bodies. All of
these devices, conspiracies, and plots resemble the play within the
play, with the difference of not being textual: all involve action of
the deadliest sort.
What is distinctly modern or, for that matter, postmodern about
Hamlet is the degree to which the role for the reader is already
structured, not like the Chorus in Greek plays, but as a privileged
participant who can both watch and read the action as a matter of
the very faculty Hamlet is constantly complaining
conscience,
about. Shakespeare's device of the play within the play, moreover,
makes this role a part of the structure of the work, such that we can
make out by explicitly textual means what everyone else, including
Hamlet, is prone to miss: the devices we use to trap another may,
on virtually any occasion,
serve to trap us as well. Not only
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or Claudius and Laertes, but Hamlet himself may be "hoist with [his] own petard"(III. iv. 207).
If the primary injunction in such plays is to attend precisely to
their language, it leads to a conception
of reading that is more
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PROBLEM OF READING / 339
difficult than the analysis of an object precisely because it requires
us to include ourselves explicitly in the orbit of the action in order
to reflect upon it, asking the same intimate and perplexing questions about ourselves as these tragic characters do (or don't). This
readerly privilege does not translate into power, but instead entails the most rigorous and unstinting critique of power one is
likely to find anywhere, a critique from which we cannot claim immunity, even though the actions that transpire take place only in
our minds.
I hope it is evident from this brief chronicle what would be involved in order to develop a full reading of either of these plays. It
should be clear, at any rate, that a full reading is less a subject for
prose than for intense discussion, as sometimes happens in a classroom, where one can work out the details with other readers who
are awake and watching, and for whom the enterprise of reading is
the process of carrying out a difficult critique of one's own habits
and practices. That is to say, reading is not just a solitary activity,
but a scene of social action; and most of our modes of professional
discourse
formal lectures and published
essays)
(particularly
thrive on the gesture of treating the text as object, not as reasoning, because that gesture allows us to imagine the text as a patient
ox awaiting the rapiers of our wit.
The centrality of the two texts I have treated here lies in their
marvelous precision, which is, to pursue my dangerous metaphor,
surgical. Taken together, these plays inaugurate and carry out an
analysis of kingly power that takes the king off his throne, in all its
gendered and patriarchal presumption, and puts him in a play to
confront himself and his own conscience.
In the case of Hamlet,
Shakespeare's delicate and careful framing of the issues not only
gives us the play within the play, which places Hamlet the Prince at
the center of the miasma rotting away in Denmark, but also includes two other homologous
figures: Horatio, who is our partial
and
who
enters the stage at the very end to
Fortinbras,
stand-in;
clean up the slaughterhouse.
Horatio's attempt to read this awful situation is perfectly exemplified in a climactic but not very dramatic moment in the play,
when Hamlet comes back with the blood of his friends on his
hands. Horatio says to him, "So Guildenstern and Rosencranz go
to 't," and Hamlet replies,
Why,man, they did make love to this employment;
They are not near my conscience. Their defeat
Does by their own insinuation grow.
Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell-incensed points
Of mighty opposites." (V. ii. 56-62)
In other words, Hamlet has forgotten
where he was, where he is,
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 340
and what he has become. Thus, Horatio's exclamatory
reply,
"Why, what a king is this!" (1.62), resonates as anything but a rhetorical question, since this king (that is, Hamlet) has barely any
conscience to be caught, and, as such, is hardly different from the
interminable line of kings from Cadmus to Claudius who take for
granted their privilege. Here, moreover, is a point of genuine amwe must consider whether
biguity-not
undecidability-because
Horatio means here to praise Hamlet or to ironize his suddenly
brazen conscience. Moreover, the problem with which we are presented is not interpretive, but axiological: is it good-in
moral,
have a King who slaughters hapless
ethical, and political terms-to
friends, even if those friends did "make love to this employment,"
of a
so that the king can carry out the ambiguous injunctions
ghost? This question and others like it are central to the intent of
literature, which raises them not to give us pat answers in the
or dismal myths of fate in the mode of
mode of Polonius,
Teiresias, or theoretical algorithms of the psyche, the subject, or
the post-industrial
state, in the mode of recent criticism, but to
compel us to consider them in all their complexity.
Fortinbras, whose life and pursuits are homologous to Hamlet's,
but not so intimately
deadly, enters after Hamlet, in his last
breath, implores Horatio to "absent thee from felicity awhile, /
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my
story." Like Theseus in Oedipus at Colonus, Fortinbras memorializes
Hamlet as a victim of great wrong, and provides a larger frame for
Hamlet's tragedy that is explicitly linked to Hamlet's request to
Horatio. But the story that remains to be told includes the fact that
Fortinbras, whose dubious Polish campaign drew Hamlet's admiration on the eve of his own dubious journey to England, is now
the pursuit of power that
about to hear an account concerning
it
chasten
even
should
him,
engage his conscience as it can
may
the reader's. As Horatio puts it, Fortinbras will hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidentaljudgments, casualslaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on th'inventors' heads. All this can I
Truly deliver. (V.ii. 360-365).
We never hear Horatio tell this story, however, because it is a
story that only the reader can tell, at the end of every self-conscious text, which becomes intelligible to us only when the critical
reflection that the text itself enables is honored and inscribed in
the parof what we read. Furthermore,
our own understanding
ticular privilege of these two texts holds in store yet one more possible surprise, and they have been magnets for interpretive debate
because of it. In each case, the task of figuring out a puzzling or
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PROBLEM OF READING / 341
oracular
text shows us the tragedy, embodied
and enacted, of
if
if we are too
as
one's
were
sufficient:
reading
foreknowledge
our
too
confident
about
our theories,
of
own
or
trusting
opinions,
in the sense that
we only see what we are expecting to see-notjust
if we do not search we will find nothing, but in the more dangerinclined to read only to conous sense that we are constitutionally
firm what we already know or believe we know. Thus to have a
theory of reading is in fact the very opposite of having a theory
about texts or an ideological conception of discursive practices.
The hermeneutic perils of recent criticism, in this light, have all
the makings of a tragedy, or a comedy, depending on the perspective from which they are viewed. There can be something procircle when it tries to esfoundly vicious about the hermeneutic
to
of culture or politics,
from
the
text
a
generalized
critique
cape
or to some schematic reading of history. Theory, when it takes that
the
shape, too often erects a barrier to reading by representing
text primarily as a case for theory or an illustration of its claims,
instead of an injunction to carry out an inquiry in which the intimate link between reading, reasoning, and practical action is always at stake. The tragedy of kings lies precisely in their belief that
the text has nothing to teach them that is not already contained in
their regal or imperial theories of what the text has to mean; and
this principle obviously applies to the ordinary modern reader as
well. The catharsis of the tragic, and the gift of the texts in which
we witness and experience it, lies in those remarkable cases that
allow the reader to see and imagine, in all its awful potentiality,
what happens when anyone in power does not know or forgets how
to read a text.
University of Washington
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