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Signs of Absence
The Ghost in Hamlet's Machine
by
Michael Dellert
"Hic et ubique? Then we'll shift our ground.
Come hither, gentlemen,
And lay your hands again upon my sword.
Swear by my sword
Never to speak of this that you have heard."
— The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, I.5.156-160
Deconstruction as a school of critical theory designates a practice of reading which claims to subvert or undermine the assumption that the system of language provides grounds that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meanings of a text. Typically, a deconstructive reading sets out to show that conflicting forces within a text itself invariably dissolve the seeming definity of its structure and meanings into an array of multiple, conflictual, and undecidable possibilities. Originated and named by the French thinker Jacques Derrida, deconstruction takes the vantage point which Derrida calls "the axial proposition that there is nothing outside the text," (Of Grammatology) which means primarily that, in attempting to interpret a text, one cannot get beyond the sequence of verbal signs to anything that stands outside of or independent of the language system that constitutes the text. For example, one cannot, when interpreting a text, go beyond the linguistic structure of the text to something such as the intention of its speaker or writer to express a determinate signification, because to do so, one requires language to be logocentric, that is, centered or grounded in logos, or presence. By logos, Derrida signifies what he calls an "ultimate referent", a self-certifying absolute, ground, or foundation, outside the play of language itself, that is directly presented to our awareness and which serves to "center" the structure of the linguistic system in such a way as to fix the bounds, coherence, and determinate meanings of any spoken or written utterance within that system. Historical instances of claims for such an absolute ground for language are God as the guarantor of validity, or a Platonic Form of the true reference of a general term, or a goal toward which all process strives, or an intention to signify something determinate that is directly known to the person who initiates an utterance. Derrida undertakes to show that these and all other attempts to establish an absolute ground in presence, and all implicit reliance on such a ground in using language, are illusory, like the Ghost of Hamlet the Elder in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
In her essay "Hamlet: Giving Up the Ghost," Marjorie Garber says of the Ghost of Hamlet's father that "It is a memory trace... the sign of something missing... It is itself at once a question, and the sign of putting things in question... the concretization of a missing presence, the sign of what is there by not being there" (p.299). This is indicative of Derrida's argument, where language itself has become a ghost, the sign of something missing. "The ghost -- itself traditionally often veiled, sheeted or shadowy in form -- is a cultural marker of absence, a reminder of loss" (Garber, 300). The ghost, like language itself, lacks an ultimate referent.
Think of it this way. It is an entirely less disconcerting experience to think you see someone whom you know to be alive, and to be mistaken, than to see someone whom you know to be dead, and to not be mistaken. If the person whom you have mistakenly seen is alive, then the impression of having seen them (walking across a campus parking lot, for instance) is merely that, a mistaken impression (oh, that's George, not Bob, gee, they look an awful lot alike, funny, I never noticed) and the event is dismissed, because the ultimate referent signified by the mistaken impression still exists to confirm or deny the determinate meaning of the impression (oh, of course that's George, there's Bob over there, how silly of me). But a ghost lacks that referent, and can therefore be anything, or worse yet, nothing at all. The Ghostly figure of Hamlet the Elder allows for the replacement of the ultimate and absent referent with the projected presence of Self, that is, it allows the Self, the reader, to project a presence from its own system of language into the absence represented by the Ghost. Thus, the uncertainty of the nature of the Ghost, because by being nothing, it is capable of being anything. "Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn'd,/ Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell,/ Be thy intents wicked, or charitable, / thou com'st in such a questionable shape” (Hamlet, I.4.40-43).
Unfortunately, Ms. Garber is currently undergoing therapy for phallus envy (I understand she had the room next to Lorena Bobbitt), as well as recovering from the enormous stress of her dissertation, so she and her imaginary playmate, Jacques Lacan, can not be here with us today, which is just as well, because, from my point of view (and Mr. Derrida's, I would think), Ms. Garber commits the fallacy of applying a determinate meaning to the text of Shakespeare by creating a Lacanian psychoanalytical overlay which is barely good psychology, much less good criticism, because, let’s face it, if little boys really wanted to sleep with their mothers, and fathers really threatened their little boys with castration, and mothers really wanted to sleep with their little boys, and little girls really envied their fathers’ reproductive organs, the world would be considerably more bizarre than it already is. Never mind the fact that Hamlet the Younger is not a real person, but a fictive person, and therefore reasonably immune to the deductive powers of the psychoanalyst for one very simple reason: he can't talk back if you ask him a question, unless you're willing to track him down at the local fiction bar, where he and Laertes stop off for a drink after each reading of Hamlet.
Which is not to say that Ms. Garber's essay is not a good example of deconstruction. If you can slog through her verbosity, she actually makes a good case for her thesis, and also goes to prove that you really can make any text mean anything, because there is no ultimate signifier and, as W.B. Yeats put it, "the center does not hold" (The Second Coming). It is to say, however, that literary critics ought to get off their literary pretensions and start producing clear, concise and meaningful criticism (but there’s a subject for a whole other essay).
To return to the topic at hand, however, the Ghost is, indeed, a cultural signifier for absence. It is absence made present, a confusing experience for anyone, particularly for a pair of Danish soldiers on guard duty at Elsinore.
"Stop it, Marcellus.
"Shall I strike it with my partisan?
"Do, if it will not stand.
"'Tis here!
"'Tis here!
"'Tis gone!" (I.1.139-140)
Following this unnerving and uncanny experience, the guards, Marcellus and Barnardo, compare notes, exchange information, and seek to confirm the nature of their experience with each other, despite the fact that they were both present during the appearance of the Ghost and presumably saw the same things. Why would they do this? Because although they were present, the Ghost was absent, and they are attempting to interpret the nature of their experience, to give it a value of some kind, a determinate meaning, and to place it in a context for understanding. They are creating, between the two of them, what Stanley Fish would call "an interpretive community," a shared system of language where meaning, while still not determinate in any objective sense, is relatively agreed upon between them, narrowing the possibility for miscommunication. "The fact of agreement, rather than being a proof of the stability of objects, is a testimony to the power of an interpretive community to constitute the objects upon which its members (also and simultaneously constituted) can then agree" (Fish, What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?, 371).
Fish's argument, essentially, is that for any kind of meaningful and determinate signification to take place, there must be this agreement between the principal parties of communication, that is, between the speaker and the auditor, the writer and the reader, as to the essential interpretation of particular significations, and that, because an utterance on its own, without an utterer, is effectively meaningless, any group of interpreters can give it any meaning they choose to agree upon. Mr. Fish's theory accounts for the variety of the so-called "acceptable" readings of texts by pointing out that one man's meat is another man's poison, and that just because it won't play in Peoria doesn't mean it won't play in New York.
In the view that I have been urging, however, disagreements cannot be resolved by reference to the facts [a text or a critical theory of texts], because the facts emerge only in the context of some point of view. It follows, then, that disagreements must occur between those who hold... different points of view, and what is at stake in a disagreement is the right to specify what the facts can hereafter be said to be." (Fish, 371)
Thus, it becomes impossible for any critical school or theory to claim the literary high ground by virtue of what a text objectively signifies, because texts do not objectively signify anything, and all disagreements of interpretation are not disagreements of the text with itself, but of varying schools of critical theory with each other. The text stands above such arguments, invulnerable and impervious to the whims of critical theory, or rather, the text disagrees with everyone by disagreeing with no one, because the text itself means nothing, and therefore can mean everything to anyone, something to no one, or anything to everyone. And that is what Derrida would call differance, the freeplay of linguistic meaning.
Bibliography
Derrida, Jacques, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Keesey, California: Mayfield, 1994, 347-358
De Man, Paul, "Semiology and Rhetoric." Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Keesey, California: Mayfield, 1994, 359-369
Fish, Stanley, "What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?" Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Keesey, California: Mayfield, 1994, 370-379
Garber, Marjorie, "Hamlet: Giving Up the Ghost." Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford, New York: Bedford, 1994, 297-331
MacDonald, David J., "Hamlet and the Mimesis of Absence: A Post-Structuralist Analysis." Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Keesey, California: Mayfield, 1994, 380-393