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Article Excerpt
ONE OF THE MOST CHALLENGING and variously interpreted masterworks of twentieth-century critical theory is Walter Benjamin's 1928 Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiele, translated into English by John Osborne as The Origin of German Tragic Drama. (1) However, neither the examples Benjamin studied of the seventeenth-century baroque plays called Trauerspiele in German nor the term Trauerspiel itself has ever had much currency in the English-speaking world. If the book is familiar to readers interested in Benjamin's singular critical theory, it has been largely either because of its "Epistemo-Critical Prologue," where Benjamin first developed his antitotalizing concept of the "constellation" (which organizes ideas into selected, inter-connected groupings); or through the later prescient deconstructing demonstration of how the concept of allegory was a devalued binary opposite of the privileged term "symbol," in a relationship, Benjamin wrote, similar to that of writing to speech. (2)
For readers of Shakespeare, however, the book presents ideas and analysis little discussed in English about Shakespeare's relation to his historical moment and to the dramatic form in which he wrote his noncomic plays. (3) The first half of Benjamin's study after the prologue is devoted to a multifaceted argument that the dramatic form of the Trauerspiel is fundamentally different from that of ancient Greek tragedy and needs to be distinguished from tragedy proper (Tragodie in Benjamin's German). (4) But since for many German critics, before and after Benjamin, Trauerspiele were thought of as forms of tragedy, the confusion is built into the language. (5) I will nonetheless use the German form Trauerspiel(e) in this essay with the understanding that Benjamin's sense of the word is meant, and not that of a broader German critical tradition.
The Trauerspiel as Walter Benjamin conceptualizes it is an aesthetic form that, like all others, seeks to express truths about the time in which it was constructed. But Benjamin is no New Historicist--he is much more Hegelian than that, and his periodization is large-scale. Essentially, the Trauerspiel is an expression of modernity, of an era of a profound subject-object split, resulting in a world of objects empty of inherent significance and of a subject who confronts the world as an alien collection of objects, seeking meaning and significance but through a structure of deferral, a movement from object to object. Since, however, one of the most common characteristics of the Trauerspiele Benjamin studied is their lack of a focalizing hero, there is thus an important way in which Shakespeare's Hamlet is not a typical example of the form. But the affinity of Shakespeare's play to the Trauerspiel form manifests in several other ways, as we will see, (6) even though, as I hope it is clear, Benjamin's remarks on Shakespeare's Hamlet as a kind of Trauerspiel are scattered and tangential, never developed into a full reading of the play. It is that lack in the original work that justifies the present essay.
In what follows, I will first review some salient features of Benjamin's singular and complex theory of the allegory, both as a trope and as something like a genre. But the larger part of my effort thereafter will be taken up by applying some of Benjamin's ideas to a close and detailed reading of Hamlet as a Benjaminesque allegory, in one sense of his multifaceted theoretical excursus--as a series of the small, "local" sets of images that Benjamin calls "fragmented allegories." These smaller units connect through a strategy of deferment and accumulate into a nonorganic unity manifesting an empty world.
Benjamin's Theory of Allegory
"Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things," Benjamin famously wrote, (7) thus emphasizing the open-ended meaning process created through the formal logic of this singular trope. Allegories disclose a world in decay, but they show how the elements of decay can be reborn as new art in a new and different era.
The most important critical concept for a Benjaminesque reading of Hamlet is undoubtedly this complex theory of the allegory, which Benjamin constructs (like a mosaic) over some seventy-six dense pages--and his text takes on new meaning in our own time, in the wake of more recent critical theory. In the small space available here, I will attempt to explicate Benjamin's theory of allegory primarily through examples of its application to Hamlet, and through an updating based on Benjamin's affinity to aspects of contemporary critical theory. I have noted Benjamin's "presentist" proclivities before. (8) Here I want to bring out other qualities of his methods relevant to the present conjuncture in Shakespeare studies as the field searches for methods that go beyond an almost exhausted New Historicism. Benjamin's insistence on reading dramas as aesthetic constructs intensely connected to their own moment of construction, but capable of constant renegotiation with changing moments of history, of the changing now or Jetztzeit, is one such promising approach. Benjamin's project has a historicizing dimension, but history for him is always a construct of our present moment, and he is also deeply interested in aesthetic issues of form and genre as expressions of historical moments. His analytic strategy is in some ways rooted in the 1920s, as perhaps the earliest instance of the modernist project of spatializing the temporal dimensions of the artwork, especially through a strategy of denarrativization. (9) But in his championing of fragmentation and his definition of an antitotalizing form of aesthetic unity structured through a series of deferrals, Benjamin has postmodernist dimensions as well, and these prescient postmodernist features authorize for me an incorporation into Benjamin's theory of later critical concepts. At stake is the critical usefulness of an idea defined in the late 1920s, and inevitably some of its features will require updating. What is remarkable to me, however, is how current much of the discussion remains all these decades after it was written.
The chief updating has to do with a kind of temporal structure that I see as crucial to the combination of allegories in Hamlet, but that Benjamin did not explicitly define. Benjamin largely avoids reference to the temporal dimension in his discussion of the plays, in common with many of the modernist-influenced critics who came after him, for whom, in their revolt against nineteenth-century realist narrativization, temporal structure was irrelevant. Instead, Benjamin developed a method of reading dramas not for narrative or other temporal elements, but for the depiction of an internal "world" expressive of the play's larger philosophical-historical moment; and for their mobilization of objects and motifs in poetic language and stagecraft, which create via "allegory" a form whose unity he characterizes as an amalgamation of signifying elements rather than an organic unity--albeit one ultimately forming an aesthetic, dissonant, nonorganic "unity" of fragments with multiple significations. I want to explore one possible configuration (or constellation) of poetic images and signifying objects creative of a "world" of this sort, an aesthetic space of fragmented allegories characteristic of modernity. However, these fragments, I will argue, participate in the play's forward movement, not at the level of narrative strictly speaking, but as part of the logic of deferral that gives structure to the play's development at formal and thematic levels--a process Benjamin referred to briefly as "substitution." (10)
The allegory as defined by Benjamin thus involves "fragmentation" in more than one sense of the word. The term refers both to the overall nonorganic unity created by this poetic trope as well as the individual units--the "fragmented allegories"--that are "amalgamated" into a dissonant unity. The most important point for Benjamin is that the Trauerspiel's allegorical form never coheres into the organic unity that classical German aesthetic theory celebrated for the case of what it called "symbols"--the much-repeated example being that of a Greek sculpture of a god or goddess that unifies multiple signfications in one aesthetic object. The allegory instead defers meaning through a a set of "substitutions." It creates, in a phrase borrowed by Benjamin from Friedrich Creuzer, "an idea which is different from itself," (11) as one signifier is supplemented by the next. But Benjamin also gives attention to a particular poetic strategy he found exemplied in many of the seventeenth-century Trauerspiele that he studied, the technique of the "fragmented allegory," by which he means either an individual visual element in the play's iconography (like Yorick's skull) or a local, relatively short set of unified poetic comparisions that does not, however, extend over the course of the entire work, but rather forms a compact unit of local meaning. We can see this kind of "allegorical fragment," to take one of many possible examples, in Fortinbras's exclamation when he discovers the carnage in Hamlet's last scenes:
O proud death, What feast is toward in thine eternal cell, That thou so many princes at a shot So bloodily hast struck? (12)
In terms of the work as a whole, these poetic units, he insists, "amalgamate" rather than organically cohere. In the case of Hamlet, as I see it, such fragmented allegories serve as elements of a larger, nonorganic structure of deferred meaning. They are fragmented allegories in two interrelated senses--in that they are themselves brief units rather than extended over the whole work, and in the sense that the larger unity of which they are parts is fragmented, not organic.
A later, deconstructive tradition encompassing Paul de Man, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida worked in detail parts of the terrain covered briefly here by Benjamin--in distinct but related terms. For Benjamin the allegorical, with its disjunctive and fragmentizing structural principle, is a formal, aesthetic category, characteristic of a certain kind of art. For the later deconstructors, those qualities were those of textuality, of the structure of language itself, so that the context for their analysis is no longer strictly aesthetic (although these critics, of course, work primarily if not exclusively with literary and literary-philosophical texts). This important difference being granted, however, I think that it is possible to create a certain intertextuality between Benjamin's theory of the allegory and later deconstructive theory. At issue here, as I mentioned, is the concept of "deferral" as a term for describing the formal logic of a certain chain of signification. The term is not prominent in Benjamin (as we saw above, he speaks rather of "substitution"), but it appears prominently in Lacan (as one of the terms describing the structure constituting desire in the Symbolic Order of the speaking "I" (13)) and Derrida (for whom it is one of the components behind his neologism differance, along with differ, referring among other things to the always incomplete sense of meaning of specific words in statements). In Hamlet particularly, as we will see below, the dissonant but unifying formal principle is not so much the strategy of accumulation that Benjamin emphasizes for the German Trauerspiele as it is a strategy of deferral or substitution.
Much of Hamlet's allegorical quality thus shows up in its stage props, (14) stage effects, and imagery. Even though Benjamin does not analyze Hamlet in detail, it...
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