Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine

It seems that the struggle in this book is to not accept fully that Nietzsche had a youth, realized his faulted judgment, corrected it, but that society works its way on our writing so as to fight his ghost and then take him without full honor

most stimulating!

A lot of platitudes presented with pompous flourishes. Nothing really new or insightful. Very disappointing.

The authors write in a manner that suggests, "Why use one word when you can use five?" Much of writing is arrogant and smug in its inaccessibility. Lacan, for instance, is difficult enough to grasp without the authors' compounding him gratuitously. This is a fulminating case of "English-majoritis."

An often quirky and strange book of essays that keeps me intrigued.

Exciting, insightful, full of the angst you expect with Hamlet, but with some eye opening revelations (if that's possible)!

Simon Critchley, a British philosophy professor who now teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York City, has teamed up with his American spouse Jamieson Webster, a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City, to write the short book STAY, ILLUSION! THE HAMLET DOCTRINE (New York: Pantheon Books, 2013). In this book the authors have packed 43 short, highly focused chapters in which they admirably combine erudite substance with a lively style, but not always with decorum.OVERVIEW OF THEIR MAIN ARGUMENTCritchley and Webster say, "He [young Prince Hamlet] should never have been commanded by the ghost to avenge his murder" (page 91). They are right. But this is how Shakespeare the playwright structured the play. As a result of being commanded by the ghost of King Hamlet to avenge his murder, the already grieving young Prince Hamlet is thrown into an emotional overload situation. Subsequently, he swings wildly from morose melancholia to verbose mania. Technically, he is not psychotic. That is, he has not lost touch with reality, because his ego-consciousness system is still working but in impaired ways because he is weighed down by the working of the bereavement system operating in his psyche and further weighed down by the ghost's command to avenge his death, which seems to activate some other kind of undertow system in his psyche. In contrast with the resilient young Hamlet, young Ophelia does become psychotic - and commits suicide.When psychoanalysis works optimally, it helps us free ourselves from illusions about ourselves and our lives. So the words of Prince Hamlet to his father's ghost ("Stay, illusion!") can serve as a springboard for the authors to discuss psychoanalytic theory - with huge prostrating bows to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. To put it mildly, Critchley and Webster pay homage to Freud and Lacan. In short, Critchley and Webster have learned a lot from Freud and Lacan that helps them understand Prince Hamlet.Because Shakespeare's HAMLET is a tragedy, Critchley and Webster also pay homage to Friedrich Nietzsche. As a young man, he wrote THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, in which he comments briefly but perceptively in the judgment of Critchley and Webster on Hamlet. They quote the lengthy passage on pages 194-195. In the quoted passage Nietzsche mentions the Hamlet Doctrine, which Critchley and Webster refer to in the subtitle of their book. Later in life, Nietzsche suffered a debilitating mental breakdown. But before his fateful mental breakdown, he wrote an incisive critique of THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, which Critchley and Webster quote briefly (page 185). However, despite the shortcomings of this early work, Nietzsche describes himself in ECCE HOMO as "the first tragic philosopher," as Critchley and Webster note (page 193). Sadly, he himself was a tragic figure as the result of his debilitating mental breakdown.BACKGROUND CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE PLAYBut let's review Shakespeare's play briefly. King Hamlet of Denmark, a warrior-king, has died recently. His son, young Prince Hamlet, is a teenager who has presumably been groomed his entire life to succeed his father as the future warrior-king of Denmark.Young Alexander of Macedonia (later known as Alexander the Great) and at another time young Octavian in Rome (later known as Caesar Augustus) had been groomed their entire lives to become warriors in their teenage years - and each of them did become a warrior as a teenager and a leader of warriors. So as a teenager, young Prince Hamlet has in effect been groomed to follow their example when the time comes for him to become the warrior-king of Denmark.But Prince Hamlet has been a student at Wittenberg, the place where Martin Luther became famous. So the Lutheran reformation is in the background in Shakespeare's play, which means that the Roman Catholic Church against which Luther rebelled is also hovering in the background. More than once, Critchley and Webster refer to this larger historical context that is in the background in Shakespeare's play.As Shakespeare's play opens, we learn about the appearance of the ghost of the deceased King Hamlet. The ghost of King Hamlet calls on Prince Hamlet to avenge his foul murder. In this way, Shakespeare calls to mind revenge tragedies.But Prince Hamlet freezes at the ghost's injunction. Today we speak of our fight/flight/freeze reaction. Hamlet freezes. Because he freezes at the idea of avenging his father's supposedly foul murder, Prince Hamlet is not a teenager action-hero as Alexander and Octavian were.As a result of freezing, Prince Hamlet puts on his thinking cap, instead of undertaking immediate action to avenge his father's supposed foul murder. He thinks that he can find out the truth about his father's supposed murder by having a play staged for King Claudius to watch. King Claudius is the brother of the dead King Hamlet and the uncle of Prince Hamlet and the current husband of Prince Hamlet's mother, Queen Gertrude. (Remember that Freud, the father of psychoanalytic theory, wrote about the family romance.) In any event, the play's the thing through which Prince Hamlet hopes to catch the conscience of King Claudius.Let's step back for a moment. Here we have the playwright Shakespeare writing a play in which we are going to have a play within the play which will catch the conscience of King Claudius. But isn't this an idealization of the play within the play? After all, how many plays in Shakespeare's time caught the consciences of Queen Elizabeth or, later, King James? Or is this apparent idealization supposed to hint at the consciences of the larger audience of the plays in Shakespeare's time? If plays in Shakespeare's time were able to catch the consciences of at least some people in the audience, wouldn't those people be in danger of experiencing the kind of catharsis that Aristotle writes about in his POETICS?It is far from clear that anybody in Shakespeare's time or later experienced a catharsis of emotion as the result of seeing HAMLET performed live on stage - or as the result of seeing the play performed on television or on videotape, or as a result of listening to the stage being performed on an audiotape, or as a result of reading the play.Nevertheless, HAMLET has evidently caught something in all the people who have written. So what exactly about this play catches if not the consciences at least the attention of certain people?However, Critchley and Webster say, "To be clear, we do not see any aspects of ourselves or each other in Hamlet" (page 90). Perhaps this is true, but their disclaimer here leaves me wondering how they came to devote enough time and attention to studying Hamlet that they were able to write a book about him.Moreover, Critchley and Webster, say that Freud's "self-analysis turns on Freud's identification with the figure of Hamlet" (page 110; also see pages 104-105, 112).CRITCHLEY AND WEBSTER'S MAIN ARGUMENTBut their various comments quoted here bring me to the short fragment attributed to Gorgias that the authors quote:"Tragedy, by means of legends and emotions, creates a deception in which the deceiver is more honest than the non-deceiver and the deceived is wiser than the non-deceived" (Quoted on page 16).This quote may obliquely describe certain aspects of Aeschylus's ORESTEIA and Sophocles's OEDIPUS THE KING. But the authors use it as a touchstone for discussing aspects of Shakespeare's HAMLET. They work with this quote throughout their book. Moreover, they claim that "Socrates [a character in Plato's dialogues] targets Gorgias implicitly in the REPUBLIC and explicitly in the dialogue [by Plato] that bears his name" (page 16).DIGRESSION: During his long lifetime, Gorgias of Leontini served as an ambassador from Syracuse to Athens. During the famous experiment with participatory democracy in Athens, Socrates established himself as an intellectual gadfly - or what we today would call a public intellectual. In the Peloponnesian War, Syracuse defeated Athens, thereby temporarily bringing the famous Athenian experiment in participatory democracy to an end temporarily. However, subsequently, the Athenian democracy was restored. Under the restored democracy, Socrates was brought to trial on trumped up charges. In the end, his fellow Athenians voted the death penalty against him.Plato commemorates the trial of Socrates in his dialogue known as the APOLOGY. Because Socrates was sentenced to death in the restored democracy, Plato understandably never thought highly of democracy. Subsequently, Plato wrote numerous artful dialogues, many of which featured a character named Socrates. By all accounts, Plato was a master on ancient Greek. Plato's dialogues do not include anything comparable to the chorus in ancient Greek tragedies. However, in other respects, his dialogues have a certain family resemblance to the dialogue-parts in ancient Greek tragedies. As is well known, the Homeric epics, the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY, consist mostly of dialogue. Moreover, Plato's dialogues also happen to include a number of myths. But the artful Plato is known as a philosopher, not as a playwright or a poet. Indeed, the artful Plato even provides us with the contrast of philosophy versus poetry - which involves an unfortunate denigration of the spirit of poetry that Critchley and Webster set out to challenge by rectifying how we view tragedy. They say, "Tragedy is not some prephilosophical expression of a traditional way of life" (page 191). Using the above quote from Gorgias as a touchstone, Critchley and Webster claim that "tragedy is always something spectated; it always involves a theoretical or cognitive distance" (page 191). Here is how they explain their own reasoning: "As is well known, the ancient Greek word for `theory' (theoria) is linked to theoros, the spectator in a theater, and can be connected to the verb that denotes the act of seeing or contemplation (theorein)" (page 16). Critchley and Webster also say that "we don't believe that there is psychical existence without fantasy" (page 189). Fantasy may be involved in sublimation, which they define as "the transformation of passion" (page 200). Passion is related to desire. END OF DIGRESSION.In Plato's REPUBLIC, we learn about the famous Parable of the Cave. In the Parable of the Cave, a fellow who has been chained experiences shadows, or illusions. However, he manages to work his way out of the Cave and sees the light. Now, it strikes me that when psychoanalysis works optimally, it helps people work their way free from certain illusions in their lives and see themselves and their lives clearly - without illusions.Moreover, it strikes me that Critchley and Webster are trying to see the play HAMLET clearly - if it is possible to see it clearly. Indeed, the play seems to be designed to remind us of all the times when we are not able to see things clearly.We should pause here and ask ourselves what we understand the experience of leaving the Cave and experiencing the light of the sun to mean. I understand this imagery to stand for mystic experience and mystic awareness. I understand mystic experience to be an intra-psychic experience. Both people who hold a materialist philosophic view and people who hold a non-materialist philosophic view (e.g., Plato) can have mystic experiences, because they are intra-psychic experiences. Moreover, mystic experiences can enable us to see clearly the illusions in our lives, including the illusions that we ourselves create through our verbal constructs and predications of our verbal constructs. As a result of my understanding of the light imagery in the Parable of the Cave, I consider Plato to be a mystic philosopher.Basically, I accept Anthony de Mello's description of the mystic in his posthumously published book THE WAY TO LOVE (reissued Image, 2012). In the 31 short meditations in this book, Anthony de Mello, S.J., from India champions what he refers to as awareness. What he refers to as awareness is the equivalent of what Aristotle refers to as contemplation in his NICOMACHEAN ETHICS.In any event, Critchley and Webster explain Freud's understanding of two kinds of love:(1) narcissistic love that gives a heightened self-regard; and(2) the love that exceeds narcissism and leads to a form of humility and an expenditure of desire (page 117).This second kind of love is the kind of love that Anthony de Mello describes in his book THE WAY TO LOVE, mentioned above. Elsewhere, Critchley and Webster refer to "the force of desire" (page 192). In effect, they see desire as the life-force.For understandable reasons, Critchley and Webster discuss Freud's 1917 paper "Mourning and Melancholia" in detail (pages 119-125). Freud refers to "normal mourning" as involving a process of psychical working through. But melancholia cannot begin this work. In addition, melancholia involves a disturbance in self-regard. According to Critchley and Webster, "Freud speculates that if the attachment to the lost object [Hamlet's father] is fundamentally narcissistic, this leaves one vulnerable to melancholia" (page 124). Hamlet is the melancholic Dane. "One might say that the beloved cannot be seen in his or her difference in order to begin the work on what was loved and what was lost" (page 124).The authors also say, "Mourning is the pivot between the selfish sequestering of narcissism and the integrity of desire. As Freud indicates, however briefly, HAMLET can be read as containing this unfolding story, the tragedy and sublimity of desire" (page 129).As Critchley and Webster dig deeper into the psychodynamics of Hamlet's melancholia, they note how he is identified with his mother's desires. They point out that "Hamlet will be compelled to either repeat or work through his relation to his mother's desire" (page 168).According to them, Hamlet's "[d]esire must cut through this mirroring melancholic identification. Some act of mourning must cut through this pride of injury in relation to his mother" (page 168).In early childhood, the child needs the mirroring that the mother-figure and father-figure and other adults usually provide. We might say that the Child Within (also known as the Inner Child) carries the remembrance of this early mirroring experience. Thus the young Hamlet's Child Within carries the remembrance of the mirroring that his mother had provided him with earlier in life. But in the optimal development during his teenage years, he should have learned experientially how to relinquish his remembrance of her early mirroring. Evidently, he did not learn this.Even the ghost of Hamlet's father beseeches young Hamlet to step back, to purify his desire of his preoccupation with his mother (page 169). But the ghost's beseeching is of no avail.CRITCHLEY AND WEBSTER'S KEY CONCLUSIONWhen Critchley and Webster turn to Jacques Lacan's discussion of HAMLET, they say, "The violence of Hamlet is the violence of failed mourning" (page 131). They repeat that mourning "is the pivot between narcissism and desire. The narcissistic capture that Hamlet embodies - this locked, internal tension of inhibition, the pride in the sense of injury - shows the necessity of desire, its point of relief" (page 133).Wow! If "[t]he violence of Hamlet is the violence of failed mourning," then I have to wonder how much violence in the United States today is the violence of failed mourning. For example, consider what is at times referred to as suicide by cop. In other words, a man (it's usually a man) starts a shootout with the police, in which the most likely outcome will be the death of the man who started the shootout. The death of such a man is tragic, a tragic loss of human life. Because the genre of dramas known as tragedies involve the tragic, we may wonder if Critchley and Webster's study of young Hamlet's tragic life and death could help us better understand the tragic loss of life of other young men in the United States today.DIGRESSION: for an excellent discussion of the psychodynamics of Faulknerian tragedy, see Warwick Wadlington's READING FAULKNERIAN TRAGEDY (Cornell University Press, 1987). END OF DIGRESSION.

Did Plato identify forms for disgust, shame, and love? Is life the illusion which we beg to STAY? Could it be that Hamlet's problem was that he knew too much? Questions with only silence for an answer.

This book is superb, beautifully written and critically complex.