Hamlet & Hamlet
Hamlet & Hamlet by Liliana Heer
Prologue by Laura Cerrato and illustrations by Rep FUNDACIÓN SHAKESPEARE ARGENTINA
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Hamlet & Hamlet
Liliana Heer is an Argentinian writer and psychoanalyst. She is a member of the Escuela de Orientación Lacaniana and of the World Association of Psychoanalysis. She published the novel Hamlet & Hamlet in 2011. Dr. Laura Cerrato has been the Head of the Department of English Literature at the Arts Faculty of the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires. Miguel Antonio Repiso (Rep) is one of the most talented Argentinian illustrators of his generation. His version of Don Quijote de la Mancha was published by Castalia in Spain. The Fundación Shakespeare Argentina would like to thank Dr. Laura Cerrato for allowing us to publish her article on Hamlet & Hamlet by Liliana Heer on our website. We would also like to express our gratitude to the author, Liliana Heer, and the illustrator, Miguel Rep, for their permission to share the wonderful illustrations from the book on our website.
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Hamlet & Hamlet
Hamlet & Hamlet By Liliana Heer Prologue by Laura Cerrato Postmodern poetics doesn’t intend to modify the ontological state of aporia, in language, but rather to adjust to it, and give it a manieristic aesthetic category. Joyce’s modernism, instead, compels him to fill in any void of meaning and bury the abyss of words under the buttresses of discourse. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (v. 430), writes T.S.Eliot at the end of The Waste Land. But Eliot does so, despondently and allows the hypotext to come back to surface, with a gesture of gratitude from him. On the other hand, Joyce invents language all over again in a triumphalist attitude, just as Stephen in Ulysses reinvents Shakespeare’s life, in a brilliant exercise of modernist intertextuality, though with certain postmodern intimations. In a reference to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (Ulysses, chapter 9), an author Joyce had translated, he defines through Lyster, one of the characters, what intertextuality means to him: “A great poet [speaking] about another great poet. A hesitant soul, taking arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them”.
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Hamlet & Hamlet
T.S.Eliot wrote in Tradition and the Individual Talent that every book issued modifies all the previous ones. Adopting this idea, the protagonist of Small World, by David Lodge, proposed as subject of his PhD research “The Influence of T.S.Eliot on Shakespeare”, to the astonishment of the Faculty at Rummidge University. In this trend, Hamlet & Hamlet by Liliana Heer adds to that long chain of supporters of Hamlet’s long life, after having gone through successive transpositions, hetero and homodiegetic, in Gerard Genette’s sense, i.e. of epoch, place and social class. From The Hamlet of Stepney Green by Bernard Kops (1959), to less literal readings of Shakespeare’s play, as Hamlet Machine by Heiner Müller (1977), or to Tom Stoppard, who made several successful attempts: the hilarious Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are dead (1966), and 15minute Hamlet, and finally, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth (1979), with interesting echoes of Wittgenstein, as well. The less frequent, In this pleiad of transpositions, are narrative transpositions, and even more scarce, the poetic ones. In this field, Hamlet & Hamlet shows a creativiness of a different quality, extremely adjusted to our postmodern world, since in its text Hamlet’s dilemma is cross-dressed dramatically, poetically and epically. From Shakespeare, the father, it preserves a dramatic structure, in the monological mode, dense with reflexive introspection. Rich in metaphors, images and allusions, the text preserves a deeply lyrical mood, and a poetical tone in a general sense, that dives us into the seduction of words, almost obliterating the undercurrent story, and growing with it. But the fable, the epics, in an Aristotelian sense, remains there, latent and emerging, in a succession that rescues a plurality of genres, which is one of Shakespeare’s marks: texts
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Hamlet & Hamlet
that are unquestionably dramatic, of extreme poetry, and equally capable of telling a story as no one else. Thus, a postmodern sensitiveness took in charge not only the free treatment of previous texts, but it also engendered its own hypotexts, while trying at the same time to reinforce a turn and change its point of view. New literature doesn’t feel as being looked upon with authority by past glories anymore, as the cause of the exhaustion of literature. On the contrary, it adopts John Barth’s terms “a literature of (about) exhaustion”.
ACHILLES: Who's there? PATROCLUS: Thersites, my lord. ACHILLES: Where, where? Art thou come? why, my cheese, my digestion, why hast thou not served thyself in to my table so many meals? Come, what's Agamemnon? THERSITES: Thy commander, Achilles. Then tell me, Patroclus, what's Achilles? PATROCLUS: Thy lord, Thersites: then tell me, I pray thee, what's thyself? THERSITES: Thy knower, Patroclus: then tell me, Patroclus, what art thou? PATROCLUS: Thou mayst tell that knowest. ACHILLES: O, tell, tell. THERSITES: I'll decline the whole question. Agamemnon commands Achilles; Achilles is my lord; I am Patroclus' knower, and Patroclus is a fool. (Troilus and Cressida, II, 3)
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Hamlet & Hamlet
This defining look on the “other”, consistent with Berkeley’s esse est percipi aut percipere, emphasizes percipi, which will now
have to be born by all
predecessors to preserve existence. And it is not only a question of an umpteenth subjective Interpretation by an author of another author. No, what this implies, as Eliot said, is that every new reading ineluctably transforms the object read, which, thus modified, will be again subject of another “reading”, and modified once more, and so on. Just as, in quantics terms, the eye of the observer modifies the experiment. When everything seemed to have been sifted by the exhaustion of deconstruction, and about to remain an orphan to the three Aristotelian principles, the texts turns suddenly to the need for restitution of Sense (with a big S, as distinguished by Julia Kristeva in Histoires d'amour1. This turn skips those decades that psychoanalysis had monopolized for itself in a sort of borgesque pirouette. Significance and not significance. Just to offer an obstacle every time we are tempted to put a label to the obverse of things that reject stillness. Thus, Hamlet & Hamlet transforms by sleight of hand the many meanings read in Hamlet by different schools and disciplines, following Kristeva’s idea that beyond univocal sense there is non-sense and Sense. But this does not imply renouncing plurality of senses, because, as atoms in the body, they all form that unity that can only arise from diversity. Paradoxically, it is giving Hamlet its mystery back, that the hermeneutical attempts of so many generations will still preserve their own validity. Just as those viruses apparently disappearing but remaining latent, in persevering forms of survival. Liliana Heer wrote: 1
"il faudrait [ le] lire en l'entendant, et l'interpréter comme un vaste mouvement de transport du sens univoque hors de ses limites, vers les deux bordes du non-sense et de la totalité métaphysique mystique du Sens." (Histoires..., 268)
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Hamlet & Hamlet
Language reserves tempests, offers abode to pain, menaces, and contempts. It is a marsh. We are never clever enough; sooner or later de sound of words spits its invisible venom and immunizes as well, as the best of antidotes. (p.28) Hamlet & Hamlet, order and chaos, in the nostalgia of that shapeless protohistory, but generating all the shapes: “Enveloped in the nets of misfortune everything was stripped of its natural wholeness, signs ceased to have the value they used to have.” (p.25) But also, Hamlet and Hamlet and Hamlet, and so on. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that of his contemporaries, that of the romantics, those of later generations, less imaginative, but more boldly re-creative. All imbricate, articulate, to rescue that Sense going beyond particular senses. Just as a trandisciplinary inauguration of “a tardy generation, doomed to inherit crimes and wrongs alien to its source” (p. 25), without denying any previous reading, but transcending them as a whole. According to Liliana Heer: Nobility, its name, and their inscription –on stone, metal or breath- have their consonants altered: I wasn´t even unique, besides your replica, o divine King Hamlet, there was another, and another. Heroic dreams, engraftings, repetitions, legend and biography are undistinguishable. (p. 31) You can’t be unique and survive oblivion. Every reality needs a virtuality that saves it from oblivion, and the more virtual the image, more efficient it becomes. That is, the more virtual a reality is, it is more real. Virtual is what has only an appearance of reality. But, how can we preserve reality? With a copy? No, because that is denying what makes desirable preserving reality: its uniqueness, its unparalleled perfection. Only writing, which does not reproduce, nor copy, FUNDACIÓN SHAKESPEARE ARGENTINA
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Hamlet & Hamlet
can garantee a certain degree of uniqueness, bound to a certain degree of memory. As an echo of those Shakespearean sonnets to the beloved, speaks our modern Hamlet: “Why wouldn’t I stroll about reading the book I have written myself?” (p.43) The Hamlet oscillating “from despair to ennui, the solitary drama, basculating ideas, the personal journal, and derivations (p.90)” generates a poetics of the multivocal, as if the prince were struggling between what he thinks his role is and the infinite roles appointed by others. Inside and outside the play: My role is divided among all, Divided and propagated I am a prince, scholar, courtier, fool. (p.120) And also, “I conjugate alternatives, look for a simpler formula, foresaken by precious sharp edges, reduced to unbalance, to a perpetual attempt, to pure sensation, to the verb.“ (90) According to this context, “The Mousetrap” in Heer’s text, acquires the quality of a rehearsal before the rehearsal, the essay infinitely reiterated that remits to the never concluded work, never finished, in that fixity that kills. Rehearsal that anticipates revenge, in a play that is the opposite of revenge. Hamlet refuses the part of his father’s avenger: [ . . . ] he wasn´t just the father of his own son, but no, not being a son any longer, he was and felt as the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his grandson not yet born, who, for that same reason, was never born, because Nature hates perfection. (p.124) FUNDACIÓN SHAKESPEARE ARGENTINA
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Hamlet & Hamlet
Joyce would agree to this, through Stephen, in chapter 9 of Ulysses, and Jung,2 on the other hand, tells about one of his cases, in which he failed to cure, and concludes the reason was that the patient was not born. Shakespeare too avoids the perfection of peremptory revenge, and tangently carries concrete crime, that must also be avenged, to the metaphoric fiction of representation. “Totus mundus agit histrionem”3 read the motto at the Globe. What, that is, is not representation? A world looks at another, which doesn’t know it is also observed; this one, in turn, looks at another, and so on, till we reach the most ambiguous maze of identity. In macro or microcosm, what’s the difference? “Going upwards is just a bit shorter or a bit longer than going downwards”, wrote Roberto Juarroz,4 in consonance with the Kybalion (“Just as it is above, it is below.”) Metaphor of her own poetics, Liliana Heer’s “mousetrap” represents for us another possible mousetrap, with an unexpected conclusion, in which things could be other things. And viceversa. A mousetrap where wedding and funeral mimetize, weeping and laughing mimetize. And the audience understands that it must not look for a meaning, because “the actress could weep but she laughs” (p.79). And, mysteriously, this is perceived as the most intense possible meaning. 2 Jung, C. G, “The Tavistock Lectures,” in Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968
3 All 4
the world plays the actor.
Poesía vertical. Buenos Aires: equis, 1958. Epigraph.
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Hamlet & Hamlet
Hamlet & Hamlet illustrated by Rep
FUNDACIÓN SHAKESPEARE ARGENTINA
www.shakespeareargentina.org
Hamlet & Hamlet
FUNDACIÓN SHAKESPEARE ARGENTINA
www.shakespeareargentina.org
Hamlet & Hamlet
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