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William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Act II. A Deconstructive Outlook Saeideh Akbari Pouria Torkamaneh Fall of 2013.
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A Deconstructive Outlook SaeidehAkbari Pouria Torkamaneh Fall of 2013
Scene I: Ophelia consults her father about Hamlet’s strange behavior. She is commanded not to answer Hamlet’s letters according to her father’s orders.Scene II: King and Queen urge Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to gain more information about Hamlet’s recent strange behaviors. Yet, nothing much comes out of the debates. Then, Polonius and Claudius decide to hold a secret meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia in search of gaining more information about the true cause of Hamlet’s behaviors. The Play
Logocentrism: Any attempt for desiring a centre is called Logocentrism. It’s a belief that an ultimate reality or centre of truth exists and can serve as the basis for all our thoughts and actions. We can almost never free ourselves from our Logocentric habit of thinking. • Attachment: Any obsessive, excessive, and illogically groundless connection to any firmly centralized ideology, thought, belief, emotion, or tradition, leading to a flawed judgment or failure. • Iterability: Repetitious repetitions are not necessarily repetitious. We should let new voices in. • Phallogocentrism: Any sort of domination put into action or thought by men over women. This can build a centre, create privilege, and lead to failure, since no centre can apparently or possibly pave the path to any ground we can stand strongly on.
Differance: Etymologically, derived from the French word ‘differer’, meaning to “defer, postpone, or delay” and “to differ, to be different from”. Basically, Differance is Derrida’s “What if?” What if there is no presence in whom or what we can find ultimate truth? How much trust we can put into setting all our thoughts and actions upon a firmly believed ideology (logo)? Does it lead to truth and reality? Are our truths really ‘true truths’? Is there any right or wrong, truth or falsity to build a logo out of?
Introduction Merriam Webster dictionary defines drama and a dramatic piece as “a composition in verse or prose intended to portray life or character or to tell a story usually involving intense conflict of forces and emotions through action and dialogue”. Hamlet lives up to our expectations of a well-made play driven by emotions and conflict in pretty much a spectacular way. The murdered father pressures and forces the son into a world reigned by extreme impulses of mourning and melancholy where reason and patience seem not to be able to find any opportunity to right the apparent wrongs and shift emotions to reasons. It is no wonder why Hamlet keeps searching for a way to let go of these emotions aroused by his father’s death and comes up with revenge as the only way to re-order his disordered world of emotions.
Attachment as a Logocentric Power Father’s murder and his sudden death seems to have devastated Hamlet. He drowns in his melancholic world deeper and deeper while no one really comes to understand him in any manner. The appearance of the ghost from the beginning unveils many apparent facts and starts him the journey of plotting for revenge. He seems unable to put an end to any of his trauma-related memories of his dead father and is attached to a severe sense of melancholy during the play. He states that “Denmark’s a prison, a goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’th’ worst”. This proves how much the misfortune is pushing him to alienation. In fact, he does not let new Presensts draw new pictures of life or adapt him to new voices, and reasons himself with the same ideology that without his father the world (England) is a dungeon.
Although he even suspects that the nightmarish life he created out for himself “A dream itself is but a shadow” and that in this circumstance of his life he “cannot reason well”, he relies on his shadowy feelings of sadness which has become a mighty Logo that are running his life keeping him attached to mourning and revenge. In another dialogue he unveils his beliefs to Rosencrantz, “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god –the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so” (107). Apart from the philosophical interpretations that can be drawn on this dialogue, it easily shows how much his pessimism toward the world and all beings is darkening the world to
to his eyes. This much deep feeling of melancholy for his father’s death does not let him see the world as it should be so far as that even the notion of ‘Iterability’ seems not to be able to change his repetitious Pasts (after the death) which are attached to his Presents, empowering and strengthening this Logo of sadness ruling his life. He can reason with himself that after all, all this mourning and melancholy belongs to the past and by letting new voices speak in his Presents he can leave the sad feelings of the past to where they belong and open another window of hope to his world with the simple belief that life can change no matter what. Simply put, Hamlet seems to be afraid of change.
Even if he crosses out these gloomy thoughts out of his life, still is left one more destructive Logo in Hamlet’s life and thought: Revenge. When his friends from afar come to run a drama in the palace again his deep feelings of maddening sadness resurface in his thoughts that: Now I am alone. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann’d, Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing! For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? What would he do, Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty and appal the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak, Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing; no, not for a king, Upon whose property and most dear life A damn’d defeat was made. Am I a coward? Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across? Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! O, vengeance!
In fact, the way he has opted to live his life does not seem to change at any cost and has become a Logo. Every time something makes him remember his father as a great person who was unfairly killed, he feeds himself the same frenzy thoughts and feelings that only vengeance can help him give them up.
Phallogocentrism Another important stimulus that makes Hamlet think of revenge to put an end to all this misery is his broken relationship with Ophelia who keeps rejecting to be with Hamlet. Yet, what makes it more interesting centers on a phallocentirc background which keeps them apart. He tries to talk to her as someone Hamlet still trusts, yet as her father commands her, she does not respond: “No, my good lord, but, as you did command, I did repel his letters and denied His access to me.” (92) This, indeed, arises from his phallocentric thoughts “that I have a daughter—have while she is mine—Who, in her duty and obedience” does whatever I (father) ask her (Ophelia) to do. This very simple act makes Hamlet be more of a loner and pushes him to a mental blockage, offering revenge as seemingly the only option left.
Aporia Vs. Differance No need to rack our brain. Hamlet has reached a bloody Aporia, which is hardly inescapable. The presence of his father’s ghost accusing Claudius of murder, his mother’s immediate marriage to the king, his broken relationship with Ophelia because of her Phallocentric father, has turned him into a broken shell of a man left with extreme sadness and suspicion to everyone, contemplating revenge as what can make him feel relieved. Yet, he should even doubt the veracity of the ghost’s words and its presence, since “The spirit that I have seen May be the devil: and the devil hath power/ To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps/ Out of my weakness and my melancholy,/ As he is very potent with such spirits,/ Abuses me to damn me: I’ll have grounds/ More relative than this: the play ‘s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” (119)
The argument is that Hamlet should not have acted so hastily and based on sheer emotion. From the beginning he has trusted the ghost as the one to deliver the truth. However, he himself states that it might have been a spirit to have shaped itself well that desires to abuse and damn him, and he particularly uses the word ‘relative’ as some quality of the play, which might have gained ground from something unrelative which was the presence of the ghost. First he believed in the ghost as a being who has enough power to guide him to the path of truth. Yet, after a period of contemplation, he finds out the ghost cannot provide him a fair and relative ground based on which he can take revenge. This way we realize he was initially mistaken to have believed in the ghost. This clearly shows the very notion of ‘differance’ has helped him to more secure actions and decisions by differing what he was bound to do. This seems contradictory to his feelings of sadness and revenge that would cause
another murder based not on a relative and firm ground. So, again we can conclude that his decision based on murdering his uncle just by catching his conscience during a play might prove that he is guilty, but not something to refer to as evidence to take revenge. Plus, all in all, it seems like taking revenge might not end everything, though it can temporarily make him feel better, it will lead to more destruction, misery, deaths (of friends and families), more carnages, and disbelief in noble people as cultured and honored. Therefore, we understand that this text like any other develops the inherent tendency to refute its apparent flow of incidents to provide a stable meaning.
