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Macbeth Appalled
STANLEY CAVELL
When a given text is claimed to work in the light, or in the shadow, of another – taking
obvious extremes, as one of a given work’s sources or as one of its commentaries –
a measure of the responsibility of such a linking is the degree to which each is found
responsive to the other, to tap the other, as for its closer attention. Macbeth is a likely
work to turn to in these terms on a number of counts. Being Shakespearean melodrama,
it takes up the question of responsiveness, the question, we might say, of the truth of
response, of whether an action or reaction is – or can be – sensually or emotionally
adequate to its cause, neither withholding nor excessive (Macbeth’s to news of his wife’s
death, or Macduff’s to his wife’s and his childrens’, or Macbeth’s to Banquo’s reappearance, or Lady Macbeth’s to Macbeth’s return from the wars). More than any other
Shakespearean tragedy, Macbeth thematically shows melodramatic responsiveness as
a contest over interpretations, hence over whether an understanding is – or can be –
intellectually adequate to its question, neither denying what is there, nor affirming what
is not there (a deed, a dagger). As if what is at stake is the intelligibility of the human
to itself.
The question of human intelligibility takes the form, in what I want to begin to work
through in Macbeth, of a question of the intelligibility of human history, a question whether
we can see what we make happen and tell its difference from what happens to us, as
in the difference between human action and human suffering. I conceive of Macbeth
as belonging as much with Shakespearean histories as with the tragedies, but not as
a history that takes for granted the importance of the political and of what constitutes
a pertinent representation of its present condition. It raises, rather, the question of
what history is a history of, hence the question of how its present is to be thought
of. This continues the direction I was taking the last time I was caught up in a text of
Shakespeare’s, in thinking about Antony and Cleopatra. There, accepting as uncontroversial the ideas that a Shakespeare history play forms some precedent or parable
for its own political present, and that the playing of Antony and Cleopatra and
their company is a setting for world catastrophe, I proposed thinking through the
play as a representation of the catastrophe of the modern advent of skepticism (hence
also of the advent of the new science, a new form of knowing), taken as an individual
A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature Edited by Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-14170-3
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and a historical process. (This is recorded in the introduction to my Disowning
Knowledge.) But while certain contemporary historical events are accepted as sources
for Macbeth – accounts of the Gowrie Conspiracy and of the Gunpowder Plot – there
is not, to my knowledge, an uncontroversial sense of the play as unfolding, in its
claustrophobic setting, its own sense of its present politics and of human history.
On the reading of the play proposed here this lack of clarity itself becomes a certain
confirmation of the play’s invocation of its sense of its own matrix, specifically a sense
of the political as itself changing, as itself a scene of obscurity, even, one might say, of
the occult.
I might describe the drift of this reading as following out my sense that the texts of
Macbeth and of Antony and Cleopatra – I am glad to accept them as dating within a year
or so of one another – are opposite faces of a study of the interpenetration of the erotic
and the political. Here is a way I described the changeover of worlds envisioned in Antony
and Cleopatra: “Hegel says that with the birth of Christianity a new subjectivity enters
the world. I want to say that with the birth of skepticism, hence of modern philosophy, a new intimacy, or wish for it, enters the world; call it privacy shared (not shared
with the public, but from it).” Macbeth, I conjecture, secretes its own environment of
a new intimacy, of privacy shared, a setting not exactly of world catastrophe but of
a catastrophe of privacy, hence of a certain politics. This privacy is expressed in philosophy as a catastrophe of knowledge. It may be thought of as the skeptical isolation of
the mind from the body, simultaneously a sense that everything is closed to, occluded
in, human knowledge (in philosophy?) and at the same time that everything is open
to human knowledge (in science? in magic?). The aspiration and eroticization of the
new science invoked at the opening of Antony and Cleopatra (“Then must you needs
find out new heaven, new earth”) marks its relation to and distance from the closing
of the world of Macbeth within magic, science’s origin and shadow.
It matters to me, in ways some of which will become explicit, to mention in passing
another sort of unfinished or continuing business of mine determining my interest in
history in Macbeth – my attention in recent years to the work of Emerson, in which
narrative history, let us say, is under incessant attack. It is clear enough that
Emerson’s mission as a writer of the philosophical constitution of a new nation is in
part to free its potential members from an enslaving worship of the past and its institutions, in religion, in politics, in literature, in philosophy. But the anticipation is quite
uncanny, in his “History,” the first essay of his First Series of Essays, of the spirit of the
Annales historians’ disdain for great events, their pursuit of the uneventful, a pursuit
requiring an altered sense of time and of change, an interpretation of what I call the
ordinary or the everyday. I had thought that Emerson’s formulations concerning
history would play a more extensive role in this text – or in some unwritten one of which
the present text is perhaps a fragment – than has so far proven the case. At present
I will be content with four citations from “History”:
I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was
done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense
than what he is doing to-day.
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But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another history goes daily
forward – that of the external world, – in which he is not less strictly implicated.
I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. . . . What does
Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring
systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux
seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?
When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me, – when a truth that fired the soul of
Pindar fires mine, time is no more.
The immediate background for what follows formed itself in an unpredicted
interaction of two seminars I was teaching two springs ago. The more elaborate of these
was a large seminar on recent trends in Shakespearean criticism that my colleague
Marjorie Garber and I were offering on an experimental basis to a group of students
divided between the study of literature and of philosophy. The division itself is one that
various trends in contemporary literary theory have promised to move beyond, but which,
in my part of the academic forest, is kept in place by all but immovable institutional
forces. The trends in criticism we proposed to consider fell, not surprisingly, into the
more or less recognizable categories of feminist, psychoanalytic, and new historicist work;
but while as an outsider to the institutions of Shakespeare study I was happy for the
instruction in recontextualizing this material, and while the feminist and the psychoanalytic continued to seem to me about what I expected criticism to be, the new
historicist, for all its evident attractions, kept presenting itself to me as combating
something that I kept failing to grasp steadily or clearly. Put otherwise, in reading the
feminist and/or the psychoanalytic critics I did not feel that I had in advance to answer
the questions, What does Shakespeare think women are, or think psychology is?, but
that I could read these pieces as part of thinking about these questions; whereas I found
myself, in reading the new historicist critics, somehow required to have an independent answer to the question, What does Shakespeare think history is?
The form the question took for me more particularly was, How does Shakespeare
think things happen? – is it in the way science thinks, in the way magic thinks, or
religion, or politics, or perhaps in the way works of art, for example, works of poetic
drama think? It is not clear that these questions make good sense. You may even feel
in them a certain unstable frame of mind, as if there is already palpable in them a response
to Macbeth.
This form of the question of history was shaped for me by the other seminar I was
offering that spring, on Romanticism and skepticism, in which the romantic fantasy
of a union between philosophy and poetry was a recurrent topic, particularized in the
question to what extent Emerson is to be thought of as a philosopher and the question
of the extent to which, or sense in which, Wittgenstein’s thinking is a function of
his writing. An important theoretical statement of the questions of philosophy and
writing for the seminar was Heidegger’s “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” taking up
its formulation according to which the work of the work of art is that of letting truth
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happen; and taking up Heidegger’s relating, as the German does, of the idea of
happening to the idea of history; so that the implied notion is that truth becomes
historical in art. This can be seen as a contesting of Hegel’s finding that the belief in
art as the highest expression of truth is a thing of the past. Behind both Heidegger and
Emerson we read Friedrich Schlegel, the great translator and follower of Shakespeare,
who had called for the union of philosophy and poetry, who had said that what
happens in poetry happens in a given work always or never, whose concept of poesis,
or poetic making or work, evidently inspires Heidegger’s idea of the particular, irreplaceable work art does, and who in his extraordinary essay “On Incomprehensibility”
cites Shakespeare’s “infinitely many depths, subterfuges, and intentions” as an example
of the conscious artist enabled to carry on “ironically, hundreds of years after their
deaths, with their most faithful followers and admirers,” and who also in that essay
on incomprehensibility had said, “I absolutely detest incomprehension, not only the
incomprehension of the uncomprehending but even more the incomprehension of the
comprehending” – the moral of which I take to concern the present human intellectual task as one of undoing our present understanding of understanding, a task I find
continued with startling faithfulness to Schlegel’s terms in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,”
understanding this essay to be, as it quite explicitly declares itself to be, an essay on
human understanding.
In the reading we assigned ourselves for our Shakespeare seminar, I found Macbeth
to be the text of Shakespeare’s about which the most interesting concentration of
current critical intelligence had been brought to bear. Both Marjorie Garber and
Janet Adelman have recently published major discussions of the play, as has Steven
Mullaney, whose work cites its affiliation with, and is cited in the work of, Stephen
Greenblatt. While Macbeth is not given special attention in Greenblatt’s Shakespearean
Negotiations, certain sentences from that book’s introduction – entitled “The
Circulation of Social Energy” – rather haunt the preoccupations that will guide my
remarks here. Greenblatt’s introduction concludes with the sentence, “The speech of
the dead, like my own speech, is not private property,” about which I feel both that
I agree with the intuition or impulse being expressed, and at the same time, that this
expression invites me to deny something – something about the privacy of language
– that I have never affirmed, that no one can simply have affirmed. I must try, even
briefly, to articulate this double feeling. I am not alone in finding the most significant
work of this century on the idea of the privacy of language to be Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein rather cultivates the impression – which the
prevailing view of him takes as his thesis – that he denies language is private; whereas
his teaching is that the assertion or the denial either of the publicness or of the
privateness of my language is empty. Philosophers, typically modern philosophers, do
chronically seem to be denying something, typically that we can know there is a world
and others and we in it, and then denying that they are denying it. Wittgenstein is
distinguished by asking (as it were non-rhetorically), “What gives the impression that
I want to deny anything?” His answer has to do with his efforts to destroy philosophical illusions (ones he takes apparently as endemic in Western philosophical thought):
denial is in the effect of a presiding, locked philosophical struggle between, let us say,
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skepticism and metaphysics. To understand this effect or impression is part of
Wittgenstein’s philosophical mission. For him simply to deny that he is denying privacy,
say by asserting publicness, would accordingly amount to no intellectual advance. It
would merely constitute a private assertion of publicness, as though publicness itself
had become private property. Something of the sort is a way of putting my intuition
of what Macbeth is about; one might call it the privatization of politics or think of it as
a discovery of the state of nature.
Because at the moment I see my contribution to the study of Macbeth to lie perhaps
in addressing certain features of its language that I find peculiar to it, I shall mostly
forgo discussion of recent important work, and its conflicts, on the question of gender
in Macbeth, as for instance Janet Adelman’s proposal (in “Born of Woman”1) that the
play embodies at once fantasies of absolute maternal domination and of absolute
escape from that domination (a discussion, besides, whose generosity in the notation
of the critical literature goes beyond my scholarship); and as Marjorie Garber’s rather
conflicting proposal (in “Macbeth: The Male Medusa”2) that the play studies gender
indeterminacy. I mark this elision here and at the same time give a little warm-up,
out-of-context exercise in the way I read Shakespeare’s lines, by taking a certain
exception to Garber’s interpretation in that piece of a familiar exchange in Macbeth,
one that can be taken as involving a discourse of gender.
When Macbeth says, “I dare do all that may become a man. / Who dares do more
is none,” Lady Macbeth replies, “What beast was’t then / That made you break this
enterprise to me? / When you durst do it, then you were a man” (1.7.46–9). Garber
reads this as an all-too-familiar sexual taunt, a questioning of her partner’s masculinity. Without denying the taunt in Lady Macbeth’s question, I find myself struck by her
taunting interpretation of Macbeth’s idea of excessive daring as meaning that to strike
beyond certain human limits is to be a beast. If we take it – something that will come
back – that Lady Macbeth shares with Macbeth, as they share every other idea, something like the idea of men as beasts, then this tells another way to hear her puzzling
continuation: “To be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more the
man” (1.7.50–51). That is: To be more beast is to be more man. On this way of
thinking, her sexual taunt is something more than, or is prejudicially confined in being
called, an “attack upon his masculinity, his male identity.” It is as much an attack
on human sexuality as such, as it has revealed itself; surely including an attack on its
presence in her.
My fastening on to the species reading of the sexual taunt – its expression of an
anxiety about human identity – has been prepared by the way I have over the years
addressed the issue of philosophical skepticism as an expression of the human wish to
escape the bounds or bonds of the human, if not from above then from below. I call it
the human craving for, and horror of, the inhuman, of limitlessness, of monstrousness.
(Besides being a beast, another species-like contrast with being human is being a
monster. It may be that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have reason to suppress this
possibility while they can, to cover it with a somewhat different horror.) There is in
me, accordingly, a standing possibility that I use the more general, or less historical
(is it? and is it more metaphysical?) species anxiety to cover a wish to avoid thinking
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through the anxiety of gender. If there is a good reason to run this risk it is that the
reverse covering is also a risk, since knowing what is to be thought about the human
is part of knowing what is to be thought about gender.
The risks of confining interpretation – to move now further into the play – are exemplified in the much-considered announcement of Macduff’s that he was untimely
ripped from the womb. Macbeth’s response is to denounce, or pray for, or command
disbelief in, the “fiends / That palter with us in a double sense; / That keep the word
of promise to our ear, / And break it to our hope” (3.8.19–22). The picture here is
that to wish to rule out equivocation, the work of witches, is the prayer of tyranny.
The picture is itself equivocal, however, since it must be asked why Macbeth believes
Macduff. That means both: Why does he believe this man? and Why does he believe
what this man says? Here I can merely assert something. In turning against Macduff
(to “try the last against him”), Macbeth is contesting not simply a man (whatever that
is) but an interpretation; or really a double interpretation. The first interpretation,
I believe uncontested, is that being of no woman born just means being untimely ripped
from the womb. Some critics have expressed puzzlement and dissatisfaction over this
interpretation, feeling that a fateful moment is made to depend on a quibble, as if
Shakespeare is being superficial or sloppy; yet they feel forced to accept it, presumably
because Macbeth accepts it. But I do not know that any have expressed a sense that
Macbeth may himself (though he has suggested other possibilities – that Macduff
derives from a girl, or from witches) have felt forced.
This is the burden of what I suggest as the second interpretation Macbeth contests
in his fatal encounter with Macduff, one that associates with the name of Caesar the
procedure of delivering a child by an incision through the abdominal wall and uterus.
Macbeth had identified Banquo as the one “under [whom] / My genius is rebuk’d; as,
it is said, / Mark Antony’s was by Caesar” (3.1.53–5). It is congenial to my sense of
things that this fact of Caesar’s rebuke cited by Macbeth about Mark Antony is notable
in Antony and Cleopatra; beyond this, my suggestion that Macbeth silently associates
Macduff’s origin as partaking of Caesar’s and so transfers to the antagonist before him
the power to rebuke or subdue his spirit (for example the power to force his acceptance
of that other’s interpretation of what is between them), is a reading which reveals Macbeth
to be afraid of domination by a masculine as much as by a feminine figure. I say he is
contesting an interpretation (or fantasy), and it is one to which, this being tragedy, he
succumbs, having (always) already accepted an interpretation (that of witchery) – as if
the other face of tyranny (or a redescription of its fear of equivocation) is fixation, say
superstition. (Of course my second interpretation depends on granting that Shakespeare knew the surgical procedure in question under the Caesarean interpretation.)
Since (what proves to be) the equivocation of “no woman born” is a construction of
the witches, and since fixating its meaning as being ripped untimely is Macbeth’s response
to Macduff’s fixing of himself as rebuker and subduer, I am taking the play to characterize interpretation as a kind of inner or private contest between witchcraft and
tyranny, which it almost identifies as a war between the feminine and the masculine.
This formulation contests, while to an unassessed extent it agrees with, the perception
of the play in Steven Mullaney’s “Lying Like Truth.”3 I agree particularly with
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Mullaney’s sense that the play virtually announces its topic as, whatever else,
equivocation, and that standing interpretations of equivocation, or ambiguity, do
not account for the extraordinary language of this play. But, putting aside here
Mullaney’s elegant presentation of the play as a presentation of treasonous language
(which nevertheless seems to me a confined interpretation), he cites too few of the actual
words of the play to clarify his claim of their specialness. For example, he claims that
the “language [Macbeth] would use [to lie] instead masters him.” How shall we assess
whether Mullaney’s idea of being mastered comes to more than an assertion of one
of the common facts of words, that they have associations beyond their use on a
particular occasion? Certainly we must not deny it: A word’s reach exceeds a speaker’s
grasp, or what’s a language for?
This is to say: words recur, in unforetellable contexts; there would be no words
otherwise; and no intentions otherwise, none beyond the, let me say, natural expression of instinct; nothing would be the expression of desire, or ambition, or the making
of a promise, or the acceptance of a prophecy. Unpredictable recurrence is not a sign
of language’s ambiguity but is a fact of language as such, that there are words.
I strew my reservation concerning Mullaney’s description of Macbeth’s language with
references to various of the play’s famous topics – ambition, prophecy, promise – to
register my awareness that in claiming, despite my reservation, to share a sense of the
play’s specialness of language, the weight of this reservation depends on proposing
an alternative account. I shall sketch two elements of such a proposal, isolating two
common features or conditions of the medium of the play – its language to begin with
– that the text of Macbeth particularly acknowledges, or interprets. One can think of
the idea of a text’s uniqueness, or difference, as the theory of language the text holds
of itself, as Friedrich Schlegel more or less puts it. I will call these features of language
language as prophecy and as magic or mind-reading.
These features interpret conditions of what can be called the possibility of language
as such. Prophecy, or foretelling, takes up the condition of words as recurrent; mindreading takes up words as shared. Philosophy has wished to explain the recurrence
of words (which may present itself as their evanescence) by a theory of what it calls
universals; and similarly (taking universals as concepts or as rules) to explain their
sharing or mutuality, so far as this is seen to be a separate question. Wittgenstein’s
Investigations questions precisely the necessity and possibility of these places of
philosophical explanation. In this light, Macbeth represents the world whose existence
philosophy is horrified by, and created by – the possibility that there is no end to our
irrationalities, to our will to intellectual emptiness.
My idea of the first of the conditions of language acknowledged by this play – language as prophecy – is that a kind of foretelling is effected by the way the play, at what
prove to be charged moments, will bond a small group of generally small words so that
they may then at any time fall upon one another and discharge or expel meaning. The
play dramatizes the fact that a word does not exist until it is understood as repeated.
Examples I specify a bit here are the foretelling of the words face, hand, do and done,
success and succession, time, sleep, and walk. That the acknowledgement of words as
foretelling is a specific strain within the Shakespearean virtuosity is indicated in
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contrasting it with words as telling or counting in The Winter’s Tale (as recounted in
Disowning Knowledge). Foretelling emphasizes the unpredictable time of telling,
unguarded as it were from the time of understanding. Take the case of do and done.
The word leaps from a witch’s “I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do,” to Lady Macbeth’s “What’s
done cannot be undone,” and Macbeth’s “[ I] wish the estate o’ th’ world were now
undone.” I take up the word from what is perhaps its most intricate instance: “If it were
done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” (1.7.1–2).
As a statement is grammatically what can prove to be true or false, and be verified
or modified, so a human action is what can prove to succeed or fail, and be justified or
excused – words and deeds carry within themselves the terms, or intentions, of their
satisfaction. With recurrence on my mind, and having said that without the recurrence
of words there are no words (hence no expression beyond that of organic need, no expression, we might say, that contains desire), I hear Macbeth’s speculation of deeds done
in the doing, without consequence, when surcease is success, to be a wish for there to
be no human action, no separation of consequence from intention, no gratification of
desire, no showing of one’s hand in what happens. It is a wish to escape a condition
of the human which, while developing terms of Emerson’s essay “Fate,” I have
described as the human fatedness to significance, ourselves as victims of intelligibility.
And I have claimed that it is this perception that Wittgenstein captures in identifying
the human form of life as that of language. Something of the sort is, I believe, meant
in recent years when it is said that language speaks us, or that the self is created by
language. The implication in these formulations seems often to be that we are not exactly
or fully responsible for what we say, or that we do not have selves. And yet the only
point of such assertions – cast in a skeptical tone – is to deny a prior stance or tone of
metaphysics, a metaphysical “picture” of what it is to “be” responsible or to “have” a
self (a picture no doubt at the service of politics, but what is not?). Such skeptical
assertions would deny that the self is everything by asserting that it is nothing, or deny
that we are in control of a present plenum of meaning by denying that we have so much
as a single human hand in what we say. These assertions and denials of metaphysics
are the victories of tyranny over witchcraft, Macbeth’s occupation. Whose story is it
that the self is self-presence, that meaning is the fullness of a word? It is not truer than
it is false.
A famous registration of what I am calling the fatedness to significance is Freud’s
idea of the overdetermination of meaning in human action and passion. If we follow
Jean Laplanche (in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis) in watching the origins of human
significance in the emergence of human sexuality, tracing the transfiguration of
psychic drives out of biological instincts, then may we not further recognize in this
origin of desire the origin of time, say of the delay or interval or containment in
human satisfaction; hence the origin of the end of time, say of the repetitiveness of desire’s
wants and satisfactions; hence the origin of reality, say of something “beyond” me in
which my satisfaction is provided, or not? Then we have a way of thinking about why
Macbeth, in wishing for the success of his act to be a surcease of the need of action,
for a deed that undoes doing, must (logically) wish for an end to time. For to destroy
time is what he would, with paralyzing paradox, risk the future for: “that but this
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blow / Might be the be-all and the end-all – here, / But here, upon this bank and shoal
of time” (1.7.4–6). This is what “We’d jump the life to come” in favor of (whether the
life to come is taken to mean the rest of his time, or the rest of time). Why? (And
suppose the life to come suggests the life to come from him. He says that the worth of
his kingship is bound up for him with the question of his succession. But we have just
heard him say in effect that success would consist for him in surcease, in remaining,
with respect to the act which is the type of the consequential – producing progeny –
“unlineal,” “unfruitful.” Well, does he want babies or not? Is this undecidable? If we
say so, then Macbeth is the picture of undecidability.)
Both he and Lady Macbeth associate doing, in addition to time, with thinking: “I am
afraid to think what I have done,” he says (2.2.50); and a few lines earlier she had
said, “These deeds must not be thought / After these ways; so, it will make us mad”
(2.2.32–3). If there were nothing done or to do there would be nothing to think about.
Before we come to ponder what it is they have to think about, I note that the opposite
of thinking in Macbeth’s mind is sleep (“sore labour’s bath, / Balm of hurt minds”
(2.2.37–8), and that in acting to kill action and end time Macbeth “does murther Sleep”
(2.2.35); so that in acting metaphysically to end thought he consigns himself absolutely to thinking, to unending watchfulness. Lady Macbeth at last finds a solution to
the problem of thinking how not to think, when there is no obvious way not to think,
in sleepwalking, which her witness describes as a version of watchfulness.
Before moving from language as foretelling to the second of the conditions of language which I hypothesize the play particularly to acknowledge – language as magic
or mind-reading – I simply note two foretellings or occurrences of the idea of walking
(or walking as sleeping) that bond with the ambiguity or reciprocity, real or imagined,
of action without consequence, say of the active and the passive becoming one
another. First, the witnessing Doctor’s description of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking –
“to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching” – seems most
literally a description of the conditions of a play’s audience, and play-watching
becomes, along with (or as an interpretation of ) sleepwalking, exemplary of human
action as such, as conceived in this play – yet another of Shakespeare’s apparently
unending figurations, or explorations, of theater; here, theater as the scene, and as the
perception or witnessing of the scene, that is, of human existence, as sleepwalking.
Macbeth’s all but literal equivalent of sleepwalking is his walking, striding, pacing
(all words of his), to his appointment to murder, led by “a dagger of the mind, a false
creation” (2.1.38), moving like a ghost (2.1.56).
Another bonding of the idea of walking with that of acting without acting is
Macbeth’s description of life as “but a walking shadow; a poor player” (5.5.24). While
in this inaudibly familiar speech about all our tomorrows I remark that Macbeth has
a use for something like the idea that life, construed as a tale, signifies nothing – he
has, as said, been trying to achieve the condition of insignificance ever since his speech
about ending time, and before that. That life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
like both mad Lady Macbeth and sad Macbeth and like the perhaps sane players
playing them, is a tremendous thought, but not something Macbeth learned just
now, upon hearing of his wife’s death. Perhaps it is something he can say now, say for
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himself, now that she is dead – that human life does not, any more than a human player,
signify its course for and beyond itself; it is instead the scene or medium in which
significance is found, or not. She is apt to have found this idea unmanly, anyway as
diverging from her point of view. To speak of a player who “struts and frets” is simply,
minus the melodramatic mode, to speak of someone who walks and cares, hence
signifies acting and suffering and talking about both in view of others, which pretty
well covers the human territory. And what is wrong with strutting and fretting for an
“hour on the stage” that is not wrong with time altogether? Is “signifying nothing”
the decay of their having been “promised greatness” (favorite words of both Macbeth
and Lady Macbeth in their opening speeches)? And is this announcement of greatness
taken as a hint of pregnancy and issue, or is it perhaps the promise of exemption from
time (if that is different); or is it, given the hints of religious contestation in the play,
a charge against the promise of eternity, against something Macbeth calls, thinking
of the witches, the “metaphysical”? It is imaginable that Macbeth is taking revenge
against any and all of these promises of consequence, perhaps against the idea of
history as fulfilling promises.
Of course this speech about insignificance, or say inexpressiveness, is an expression
of limitlessly painful melancholy; but again, that pain is not new to Macbeth, not caused
by the news of his wife’s death. His response to that news I find in full – before the
metaphysics of time and meaning, so to speak, take over – to be: “She should have died
hereafter; / There would have been a time for such a word.” That is all. Is it so little?
He says that like everything else that happens her death is untimely, as if not hers:
nothing is on or in time when nothing is desired, when desire is nothing, is not yours.
And he says that he is incapable of mourning now; and if not capable now, then when
not? The wrong time for death is an ultimately missed appointment; no time for
mourning death sets an ultimate stake in disappointment. Here is a view of human
history, history as unmournable disappointment. Macbeth’s speech goes on to explore
it. Perhaps it is a perception Lady Macbeth perished in trying to protect her husband
from. This is something he can say now, no longer protecting her from her failure to
protect him. If so, then the play’s study of history is a study of their relationship, this
marriage. What is this marriage?
In arriving at the question I have opened what is for myself the encompassing
question of why, in thinking about Shakespearean tragedy, I have previously avoided
turning to this play. Two questions have, it seems forever, dogged me about Macbeth.
What is the source of the attractiveness of this terrible pair? And why have I always
felt intimate yet unengaged with their famous moments? As if I have and have not
wanted to consider that this pair, representing the most extensive description the
Shakespearean corpus devotes to an undoubted marriage (that of Cleopatra’s with Antony
is not undoubted), represents, to some as yet unmeasured extent, an always standing
possibility of marriage itself.
Masculine disappointment together with feminine deflection of that disappointment
indicates a more or less familiarly cursed marriage; and I was suggesting that the mood
of “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” is informed by knowledge Macbeth
brings onto the stage from the beginning. If that is so, then the events of the play, the
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ambition for and against greatness and exemption, are in defense against this knowledge. In asking what this marriage is we have crossed to the second of the conditions
of language that I have been claiming this play particularly to acknowledge: the first
was language as prophesy, as foretelling; the second is language as mind-reading,
a particular sharing of words, as if by magic.
As foretelling in Macbeth may be contrasted with telling or counting in The Winters
Tale, so sharing words in Macbeth may be compared with sharing words in Coriolanus,
namely with words figured as food; in Macbeth words may rather, it seems, be
something like potions: “Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear”
(1.5.25–6). There recurrently seems to me a phantasm glancing in these words of Lady
Macbeth, beyond the idea of her wishing to inspire her husband, or give him courage,
through her words; some more literal or imagined posture in which she invades him
with her essence. Anyone might note that the play associates the production of words
with the production and reception of blood: “We but teach / Bloody instructions,
which, being taught, return / To plague th’ inventor. This even-handed justice /
Commends th’ ingredience of our poison’d chalice / To our own lips” (1.7.8–12); “My
gashes cry for help” / “So well thy words become thee, as thy wounds” (1.2.43–4),
as if in a tragedy of blood – and in this one, as the Arden editor reports, blood is
mentioned over one hundred times – words are wounds, and the causes of wounds.
I am drawn to test for the phantasm I allude to because of my sense of the pairs of
certain cursed marriages, as in a relation of a sort I have elsewhere called spiritual
vampirism.
The idea of words as mind-reading is a conception of reading as such – or playwatching – reading the text of another as being read by the other. Uttering words as
mind-reading is represented in the language of this marriage, in which each of the pair
says what the other already knows or has already said; or does not say something the
other does not say, either assuming the other knows, or keeping a pledge of silence.
They exemplify exchanges of words that are not exchanges, that represent a kind of
negation of conversation. For example: Macbeth prays to “let that be, / Which the eye
fears, when it is done, to see” (1.4.52–3), and Lady Macbeth is soon incanting “That
my keen knife see not the wound it makes” (1.5.52); again, she fears that he is “without / The illness that should attend” ambition (1.5.19–20), and later he says to
her, “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill” (3.3.55); and earlier,
Macbeth’s letter tells Lady Macbeth that greatness is promised her, and she repeats this
in her ensuing soliloquy as something promised him. And let us add that before she
reads, while sleepwalking, the letter she has in that condition written herself, as a kind
of script of the play (a suggestion of Marjorie Garber’s), Macbeth at the opposite end of
the play had already written a letter which forms a script for her words; the first words
we hear her say are his. But my hypothesis is that the play’s sense of mind-reading, of
being trapped in one another’s mind, in false, draining intimacies (the idea of vampirism),
is expressed preeminently in what the pair of the marriage do not, or not in good time,
say to, or say for, one another. I note three topics about which they are silent: the plan
to kill Duncan, their childlessness, and the relation of Lady Macbeth to the witches.
I imagine there are different causes for silence in the three cases.
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The pair’s initial implicitness to one another over the plan to kill Duncan means to
me not that each had the idea independently but that each thinks it is the other’s idea,
that each does the deed somehow for the other. It is an omen that neither knows why
it is done. This will come back.
The compulsively repeated critical sneer expressed in the question “how many
children had Lady Macbeth?” expresses anxiety over the question of the marriage’s
sexuality and childlessness, as if critics are spooked by the marriage. But I speak for
myself. Is there any good reason, otherwise, to deny or to slight the one break in Lady
Macbeth’s silence on the subject of her childlessness, her assertion that she has suckled
a (male) child? There may be good reason for her husband to deny or doubt it, in
his considering whose it might be. If we do not deny her assertion, then the question
how many children she had is of no interest that I can see; the interesting question is
what happened, in fact or in fantasy, to the child she remembers. (David Willbern, as
I recall, in a fine essay suggests in passing that her suckling is a fantasy. If so, then
what is the fantasy of remembering a (fantasied) child?) And if we do not deny or slight
her assertion then the fate of the child is their question, a fact or issue for them of a
magnitude to cause the magnitude and intimacy of guilt and melancholy Macbeth begins
with and Lady Macbeth ends with. Its massive unspokenness is registered by the
reverse of the procedure of the recurrence of words, namely by the dispersal or
dissemination of words for birth throughout the play – deliver, issue, breed, labour,
hatch’d, birthdom, bring forth. I would like to include the punning use of borne,
repeated by Lenox in his nervously ironic “Men must not walk too late” speech (a nice
instance of the prophetic or foretelling use of “walk,” especially of Lady Macbeth’s last
appearance). This listing of terms for child-bearing perhaps tells us nothing about early
references in the play to becoming great or to “the swelling act / Of the imperial theme”
(1.3.128–9). But when one is caught by the power – it will not happen predictably –
of the vanished child, one may wonder even over Lady Macbeth’s response upon the
initial entrance to her of Macbeth, “I feel now / The future in the present,” which
in turn is, and is not, Macbeth’s perception of history. (A sense of pregnancy, but
without assurance of reproduction, may suggest the monstrous as much as it does
the sterile.)
Anticipating for some reason an especially negative reaction to the last instance of
deflected birth and death I am about to adduce, I emphasize that I am not undertaking to persuade anyone of unspoken presence. I am testifying to something guiding
me that I cannot distinguish from a valid intuition. If I do not eventually discover a
satisfying tuition for it, I will have to give it up as a guide. Perhaps it is not an intuition
of free interpretation but a dagger of the mind, precisely not to be followed. But if one
could know this in advance, or settle it, there would be no spiritual danger of the kind
criticism runs, no such acts and thoughts to be responsible for or to; one would be either
a witch or a tyrant. I would like to say: The great responsibility of philosophy is
responsiveness – to be awake after all the others have fallen asleep.
The instance I am thinking of is the opening human question of the play, I mean
the first words spoken after the witches have delivered themselves of their opening
questions and answers about their meeting again. Duncan enters and encounters
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something that brings forth his response, “What bloody man is that?” If we take it to
heart that in this tragedy, or say medium, of blood, blood is associated both with death
and with birth, and that bloody figures and figures of children originate or appear from,
as it were, the witches’ cauldron, then this appearance of the questionable bloody man
– as from the cauldron – may be seen to begin the play. It figures beginnings – of plays,
of human actions – as consequences, as conclusions manifested, synthesized, conjured.
The witches’ cauldron accordingly appears as the origin of theater, as the scene of apparitions or appearances, and as the source or representation of the human as that which
identifies and denies itself – or, as Hamlet virtually says, as that which imitates itself
so “abominably,” in the form of abominations, objects of horror to themselves.
That a first-night, or a first-day, audience may not at first recognize a connection
between the bloody man and the cauldron is true enough, but not obviously more
surprising than anything else not recognized, on the first, or on the hundred-and-first,
encounter. I assume that any complexity the average mortal finds in a play of
Shakespeare’s is something Shakespeare is capable of having placed there. The critical
question is: How? By what means? The question whether an author intends any or all
of what happens is a convenient defense against this critical question. Recent attacks
on intentionality share the (metaphysical) picture of intention that they would
criticize, one that makes its importance absolute, as if, if intention counts for anything
in meaning, it counts for everything. (We have seen the pattern before.) Metaphysics,
so described, here concerning intention, might be called magic thinking. So let us say:
Intention is merely of the last importance. Everything (else) has first to be in place for
it to do what it does – as in putting a flame to a fuse. And of course accidents can
happen. Would one like to imagine that the man of blood follows the witches’
incantations by accident? Magicless, impotent witches are no easier to imagine than
the other kind.
But I cannot stop the intuition here, the intuition of the magic of theater and its voices
and its other apparitions, of the declaration of theater as the power of making things
appear, along of course with the powers of equivocation and of casting spells. (Are only
witches and warlocks so empowered? Or are they only convenient paranoid projections
of what we accept as humdrum human power? Glendower’s metaphysical claim to call
up monsters, together with Hotspur’s skeptical question as to whether they will come
when he calls them, forms another instance of fixated philosophical sides that
Shakespeare may be taken as bringing to confusion. Is this the accomplishment of
philosophy, or its cue?) What has happened to Macbeth? What is the element of
difference to his consciousness that brings forth his guilt and private violence and
melancholy, as if settling something? This question draws me to imagine the bloody
man – a poor player whom we never see again, who in Shakespeare’s source was killed
– against the question I impute to Macbeth (granted as it were that Lady Macbeth knows
the answer) about what happened at the death and birth of his child. (Macbeth is not
the only Shakespearean male to find birth mysterious and unnatural, who might
believe anything about it and about those to whom and from whom it happens.
This is cardinal in the essay of Janet Adelman’s that I cited above.) I do not look for a
stable answer to be found by Macbeth: he protests his acceptance and his doubt of the
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witches throughout. But that there are witches and that they bring forth children
may provide him with a glance of explanation, perhaps of hope, perhaps of despair;
an explanation at once of the presence of the absence of his child and of the absence
in the presence of his wife.
I ask here only that we allow Macbeth to have posed for himself the issue that so
many critics now so readily take as answered – that there is some inner connection
between Lady Macbeth and witchery. Some approve the idea that in her opening scene
she is casting a spell on herself (“unsex me here . . . fill me, from the crown to the toe,
top-full / Of direst cruelty” (1.5.41–3) – though here I seem to have heard every interpretation of these frightening words except the one that seems unforced to me; that it
expresses rage, human as can be, at the violence and obligation of sexual intercourse,
at what Laplanche calls, in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, the traumatic nature of
human sexuality: her husband is returning any moment from the wars. And none fail
to remark that she is presenting herself as a mother, in her fashion (“Take my milk for
gall, you murth’ring ministers” [1.5.48]). If she is a witch it follows both that witches
are mothers and presumably that she is capable of destroying their child with her
own hands. (Is there a difference supposed in the pronunciation of “murth’ring” and
“mothering”? Or is this identity a critical commonplace?)
We are, of course, in the middle of the third of the three topics I said the pair are
silent about; the first two were their plan of Duncan’s murder and their vanished child;
the third is the topic and the logic of monstrousness. What is there for them to discuss
about this? Others may speculate with detachment over the belief in witches, but it is
the likes of Macbeth who, finding themselves confronted with witches, have to ask how
you tell who is a witch (the commonest question there could be about witches); and
have to carry through the logic that if anyone is a witch then his wife may be one;
that hence he may be the master and the minister of a witch, figures named in the play
(and he has perhaps tasted his wife’s milk or gall and had her pour her spirits in his
ear and felt chastised by the valor of her tongue, but I will not speculate here); hence
that he has had a child with a witch, produced something monstrous that has to die,
as if he were a devil, not a man (he is called “Hell-hound” by Macduff [5.8.3]). There
is nothing to discuss: No individual human knows more than any other what the
difference is between the human and the monstrous, as no human is exempt from the
wish for exemption from the human. I mean no one is in a position to tell another that
there are or are not witches, any more than to tell another that there are or are not
humans.
Here is a way of considering this play’s contribution to the continuing European
discussion of witches contemporary with it – its sense of metaphysical denial (say
denial of our fundamental metaphysical ignorance of difference between the human
and the monstrous) projected through human society by legalizing the identification
of witches. It seems to me just like Shakespeare to have already infiltrated this discussion (as noted in Disowning Knowledge) by coloring Othello’s psychological torture of
Desdemona (who, on the pattern of Lady Macbeth, is anything but a witch) as a witch
trial – a sense of the erotic denial introduced into one’s human identity by the projection of one’s sense of bewitchment. (Another of Shakespeare’s indirections with his sources
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is his hedging of Mark Antony, who, on the pattern of Coriolanus, is anything but a
Christ, with signs of Christ.)
By the time of Macbeth’s last encounter with the witches, at the opening of act 4,
he seems to have accepted his participation in their realm, undertaking, successfully,
to “conjure” them (4.1.50). In the ensuing appearances or apparitions from the cauldron to Macbeth (and to us) of the armed head and of the bloody child and of the child
crowned, we have the pattest declaration by the play of its theory of the work of
theater as the conjuring of apparitions; and I am taking it, if you like in deferred action,
to figure for us (and for Macbeth, whoever, in identification with us, he is), what we
see (saw) when at the beginning we encounter(ed) the bloody man, the origin and
destiny of his child, hence of himself. Now one may feel that all this takes Macbeth’s
sense of bewitchment or exemption to be a function of an incredible capacity for
literalization on his part. But is it really more than is shown by his sense that he is to
be dominated by a man who exists from no woman? Moreover, literalization is
perhaps not so uncommon, but is an ordinary part of magic thinking, like imagining
that to claim that an author means what he or she says is to claim that his or her
intention has created all the conditions in conjunction with which intention does what
it does, as if the striking match creates the fuse it lights, together with the anger and
the enemy and the opportunity in and for and from which it is struck. (In a sense, no
doubt, it does. What sense?)
To work toward a close of these remarks, one that takes them back to my opening
intuitions of Macbeth as a history play that questions whether anything can be known
– or known to be made – to happen, I come back to the murder of Duncan. What
I have said or implied about this so far is that Macbeth walks to it in a sleep and that
each of the pair acts it out as for the other, assuming its origination in the other, so
that the desire for the deed and the time of the deed can never be appropriate, never
quite intelligible. To raise the question of what it is that is thus done on borrowed time,
with stolen words, let us take it that it is performed with that dagger of the mind Macbeth
speculates might be the instrument of murder and ask what wound in the mind it makes,
one that each of the pair asks not to see – which we now understand as impossibly
asking the other not to see.
I pause to remark that it is probably the sense of their silence to one another about
unsilenceable topics that has above all prompted critics to suggest that scenes are
missing from the play. I am in effect claiming that what is missing is not absent but is
present in the play’s specific ways of saying nothing, say of showing the unspeakable.
A methodological point of interest thus arises concerning the subject of what you might
call critical responsibility. My claim is that readers/watchers of the play are meant to
read its silences; that, in effect, the speculation about a missing scene is a cover for the
speculator’s missing response to scenes that are present. This implies that should, as
it were, a missing scene show up for this play, it could prove neither the truth nor the
falsity of what I claim the silence is about. To accept such a scene is to be willing to
rethink the play; perhaps it would contain further silences. There is, by my definition,
no scene missing from the play I mean to be considering here, the one constituted in
the Arden edition I cite from. (How many plays have the Macbeths?)
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My account of the pair’s silence about the plan to kill Duncan depends here mostly
on three elements that indicate that they each imagine Macbeth’s deathblow to direct
itself to Lady Macbeth.
The first element is Macbeth’s speech as he reenters from having gone, after the
discovery of Duncan’s body, to see his handiwork: “From this instant, / There’s
nothing serious in mortality; / All is but toys” (2.3.90–92). Good readers have
characteristically felt that something is horrifyingly disproportionate in these words of
Macbeth’s, disagreeing about Macbeth’s sincerity or degree of consciousness in saying
them. My sense is that these words cannot take their direction from the figure of Duncan,
however they may recognize his disfigurement; but that the only object whose loss
for Macbeth could amount to the radical devaluation of the human world is Lady Macbeth,
together with some phantasm in the idea of “toys,” as of some existence left behind.
(A measure of the disproportion in Macbeth’s speech on Duncan’s death – “nothing
serious in mortality” – is to set it with Cleopatra’s on Antony’s death – “nothing
left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon” (4.15) – where I assume no sense of
disproportion. How far this connection verifies my general sense of these plays as
history plays about a break in history, as turns in the history of privacy, or say
skepticism, hence in the history of marriage, hence in the history of legitimacy and
succession, I do not guess now.)
That Lady Macbeth shares this knowledge of herself as the object of the killing is how
I take the second element I cite in this connection, that of her fainting upon Macbeth’s
words that recount in vivid and livid detail his killing of Duncan’s grooms: “Who
could refrain / That had a heart to love, and in that heart / Courage, to make ’s love
known?” (2.3.114–16.) It is she alone who knows what Macbeth loves, to whom
whatever he does makes his love known. (But the sincerity or reality of her fainting
is a matter of controversy. Am I simply assuming it? I might say I have provided
an argument in favor of its reality. But I would rather say that it is still perfectly
possible to insist that the fainting is insincere, put on by her to divert the attention of
the company, only this will now have to include her knowledge of what Macbeth’s
deed was in killing his love; and then the idea of her insincerity will perhaps seem less
attractive.) After Lady Macbeth is helped to exit from this scene, she is never an active
presence in the play’s events. This is why the fact of her death comes to Macbeth as
no shock.
The third element in defining the object of Macbeth’s killing is Lady Macbeth’s
entrance to him upon his words, “I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but
only / Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on th’ other” (1.7.25–6).
By now I will take no one by surprise in expressing my sense that the line should
be left alone (I mean, to begin with, that it should not be taken to be incomplete) to
nominate Lady Macbeth as the other. ( This at the same time leaves the line to mark
this entrance as a cardinal declaration in this play that its study or acknowledgment
of theatrical entrances is of their quality as appearances or apparitions, called forth,
conjured.) Critics have wished to see in Macbeth’s image of “overleaping” here an image
of himself as the rider of a horse, mounting it or jumping it, overeagerly. I do not say
this is wrong; but since Macbeth’s words are that it is his intent whose sides are, or are
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not, to be pricked, there is a suggestion that he is identifying himself also as the horse
(as earlier he associates himself with a wolf and later identifies himself as a baited bear);
a horse by whom or by what ridden is unclear, ambiguous: perhaps it is by his ambition, perhaps by the ambition of another, so that “falling on the other” means falling
to the other, to be responsible for it, but perhaps it means falling upon the other, as its
casualty. Then the falling is not overeager, but an inevitable self-projection of human
promise. (If one insists that not he but strictly his intent is the horse, he remaining strictly
the rider, then again his intent outruns his control not because of overeagerness
but because of the separate lives of intention and of the world, we riding, as best we
can, between.)
If we take it as ambiguous whether Macbeth is imagining himself as the rider or as
the horse, the ambiguity is then an expression of the pair’s mutual mind-reading, their
being as it were over-literally of one mind: whatever occurs to one occurs to the other;
whatever one does the other does; in striking at her he strikes at himself; his action is
something he suffers. Sleepwalking seems a fair instance of a condition ambiguous
as between doing something and having something happen to you. Other actions
pertinent to this play, exemplary of the ambiguity or reciprocity of acting and suffering, or in Emerson’s words, between getting and having, are giving birth and the
play of sexual gratification. The reciprocity presents itself to Macbeth as requiring an
assassination that trammels up consequence, all consequence, an act of metaphysics
whose consequence is of being assassinated; as if acts of realizing your world, acts of
self-empowerment, are acts of self-assassination, the openest case in which doing a deed
and suffering the deed are inseparable. The logic is that of narcissism, and the sense is
that there is a narcissism under a negative sign, with love replaced by hatred. You need
not think that masculinity and femininity are determined by a prior determination
of activity and passivity in order to think that prior to the individuation that begins
individuating others – to the formation of the human self that is subject to others and
subjects others, that knows passion and that knows action, that is bewitchable and tyrannical – there is nothing either decidable or undecidable about the self’s gender. And if
“being” a gender (one rather than another) is a mode like, or is part of, “having” a self
(this one rather than another), is individuation ever over? There are always others to
tell you so and others to tell you otherwise. Are they others?
A psychological account of the state in which punishment of an object (or former
object) of love is a state of self-punishment is given by Freud in his statement of the
etiology of melancholia. I shall quote some sentences from Freud’s “Mourning and
Melancholia” and then close with a few sentences about why I find their association
with Macbeth, through Nietzsche, significant, I mean why I want to follow them on.
An object-choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed;
then, owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person, the objectrelationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one of a withdrawal of the libido
from this object and a displacement of it onto a new one, but something different. . . . It
was withdrawn into the ego . . . [where] it served to establish an identification of the ego
with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, so that the
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[ego] could henceforth be criticized by a special mental faculty, the forsaken object. . . .
The melancholic displays . . . an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. In mourning
it is the world which has become poor and empty; in the melancholic, it is the ego itself.
“Impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale” – it seems a move in an auction of
nothingness, self-punishment as for the murder, finally, of the world. Guilt as melancholia seems a reasonable formulation of Macbeth’s frame of mind. It is a suggestion
from which to reenter the texts from which I reported that I have begun asking tuition
for my intuitions about this play.
The passages from “Mourning and Melancholia” just quoted were adduced a few years
ago in Timothy Gould’s study of Nietzsche’s Pale Criminal (a figure in an early section
of Thus Spoke Zarathustra), which appeared in the Summer 1986 issue of Soundings.4
In readducing the passages here I am in effect claiming that Nietzsche’s Pale Criminal,
whatever else, is a study of Macbeth. That section of Zarathustra speaks of guilt that
expresses itself in madness after the deed and madness before the deed, and it proposes
a problematic of blood and of human action in which performing a deed is taken over
by an image of the performance of the deed, an image which functions to fixate or exhaust
the doer’s identity so that he becomes nothing but the doer of this deed, suffering
subjective extinction as it were in the doing of what he does. It speaks, accordingly, to
why Macbeth thinks of himself (thinking shared, as it must be, by Lady Macbeth) as
in a sea of blood of his own giving, so as pale. (Macbeth once asks “seeling Night,” with
its “bloody and invisible hand” to release him from that “which keeps me pale”
[3.2.46–50] and in her sleepwalking Lady Macbeth will say, or say again, “Look not
so pale . . . give me your hand” [5.1.59, 63].) In a world of blood, to be pale, exceptional, exempt, without kin, without kind, is to want there to be no world, none
outside of you, nothing to be or not to be yours, neither from nor not from your hand;
but to be pale is to be drained and to demand blood, to absorb what is absorbing you.
And the bearing of Macbeth as Nietzsche’s Pale Criminal is significant for me, to be
followed on, because of Nietzsche’s response (so I claim) to Emerson’s “Experience,” a
centerpiece of the seminar on romanticism and skepticism I mentioned at the outset
of this essay. (Emerson’s essay opens with the question, “Where do we find ourselves?”
The introduction to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals opens with the two sentences: “We
are unknown to ourselves, we knowers. How should we have found ourselves when
we have never looked for ourselves?”) Emerson’s “Experience” is about the inability,
and the ability, to mourn the death of his five-year-old son; the essay works toward
the discovery of the social, call it America, toward the discovery of succession, imaged
by Emerson as coming to walk, to take steps, beginning in what is quite explicitly described
as walking in your sleep. Emerson here responds to, takes responsibility for,
Shakespeare’s and Kant’s and America’s ideas of success and succession: in effect, he
is claiming to enter history by becoming their successor. It is an essay, as I have put
it in the first chapter of This New Yet Unapproachable America, where the image of the
human hand emblematizes the question of how deeds enter and work in the world,
the question of how, as Emerson phrases it, you “realize your world,” something
Emerson’s critics, as he reports in his essay, keep complaining that he has himself failed
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to do. But realizing his world is of course precisely what Emerson takes himself to be
doing, in his writing, in the way only humans can; non-magically, as it were; by letting
something happen, the reversal of denial. This is more or less, not for unrelated reasons,
how Heidegger and Wittgenstein also think, so that what is most active is what is most
passive, or receptive. This suggests that we do not know whether knowing – for example,
knowing whether one is human or inhuman – is a masculine or a feminine affair.
I am citing bits of what might, in another world, be called the history of the reception of Macbeth, or part of its historical circulation or exchange or energy, say of its
money or blood of the mind, as a way of saying that if Shakespeare’s play is a distinctive event in the history it remembers and enacts – if it is to continue to happen to its
culture, to the extent that it, or anything, has ever happened to its culture as art
happens, as truth happens in art, not alone as conclusion but as premise, not alone as
document but as event – that is because events happen as this work shows them to
happen, contains them, no more nor less clearly. In emphasizing, rather than
Shakespeare’s sources, Shakespeare’s writing as a source variously open to appropriation, I may find my own provocation in it, without claiming to speak for it – as for
example fixing its own mode of appropriating sources. Then I am in effect claiming that
the Shakespearean play here claims a power to challenge authority that is based on
birth and inheritance; that the political as realm of royal blood never recovers from
this portrait which locates its causes in unsayable privacy (as in this marriage), in royal
authority’s sleek imitability (as in Malcolm’s apparent libeling of himself, and in
Macbeth’s bloody hand as the imitation and inheritor of the king’s healing touch); nor
recovers from its support by treasonableness in expansive masculinity (as in Macduff );
nor from its vanity (as in Banquo’s narcissistic mirror).
So I am in effect verifying the familiar idea that a Shakespeare history play develops
from the morality tradition, but taking its moral direction to put a kink in the old
history – taking it not as directed to teach the proper conduct of king and subject, but
instead to constitute a moral about what history is, or has become – that what
happens is not what is news, not a tale of a world, real or fictional; that such things
are accounts merely of trivial horrors, consequences of old deeds, revenge returning,
as Macbeth learns, as kings typically learn, too late; that learning what has happened
is exemplified by the learning of what is happening now, or as Emerson more or
less puts the matter, that history is not of the past, but for example is in our sleepwatching of this play; so that you need not become a horror-dealing, horror-dealt tyrant
in order to recognize what is worth doing and worth having. And might you learn how
not to become the victim of a tyrant? But what if, after the passing of tyrants, you
yourself play the confiner?
Notes
1 Janet Adelman, “ ‘Born of Woman’: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth,” in Marjorie
Garber, ed., Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1987), 90– 121.
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2 Marjorie Garber, “Macbeth: The Male Medusa,” in Susanne L. Wofford, ed., Shakespeare’s Late
Tragedies: A Collection of Critical Essays (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996),
74–103.
3 Steven Mullaney, “Lying Like Truth: Riddle, Representation and Treason in Renaissance
England,” ELH 47:1 (Spring 1980): 32– 47.
4 Timothy Gould, “What Makes the Pale Criminal Pale: Nietzsche and the Image of the Deed,”
Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 58 (1985): 510–36.
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