Visualizing Hamlet's Ghost: The Spirit of Modern Subjectivity Author(s): Alan L. Ackerman, Jr.

Reviewed work(s): Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 53, No. 1, Theatre and Visual Culture (Mar., 2001), pp. 119-144 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25068886 . Accessed: 27/12/2011 11:00
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The Spirit of Modern

Alan L. Ackerman

Visualizing

Hamlet's

Ghost:

Subjectivity
Jr.
Hamlet: Do there? you see nothing at all, yet all that is I see. ?Hamlet [3.4.136-37]

Queen:

Nothing

Ineluctable thought

modality through

of my

at least that if no more, the visible: . . . Shut eyes and see. eyes your ?James Joyce, Ulysses

a reality that is invisible, whether psychological, always represented or theological. A key problem for the drama since Shakespeare biological, metaphysical, what has been to represent or express human interiority on the stage. Understanding is meant by interiority, however, is also, more generally, a historical problem. The of the subject in the early premise of this essay is that a widespread re-imagining Plays have decades
"modern"

of the nineteenth
drama. This

century
often

is fundamental
characterized

to what we
as Romantic,

think of today as the

sees a re-investment

period,

in notions of the spirit and quasi-theological ways of thinking, a new way of imagining to his the relation of subject to object and the location of truth. In the preface Mind [Ph?nomenologie des Geistes] (1806), Hegel claims that "our age is Phenomenology of a birth-time, and a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things ... In like manner the spirit of the time, growing quietly ripe for the new one fragment after another of the structure of its form it is to assume, disintegrates previous world."1 This transition is fundamentally related to changes in the concept of

Alan

L. Ackerman

in the University Literature and

Jr. is Assistant Professor College Drama Program. the Nineteenth-Century

in the English He

Department is the author ofThe

at the and University of Toronto Portable Theater: American

Stage.

on previous For carefully and commenting I warmly thank Andrea drafts of this essay, reading and Scott Stevens. Most, Alexander Leggatt, 1 G. W. F. Hegel, trans. J. B. Baillie & Row, The Phenomenology (New York: Harper 1967), 75. ofMind, Several influential critical situate in Romanticism; studies the origins of modernist literature they Edmund Axels Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature include Frank Wilson, of 1870-1930, Romantic inModern Literature. Kermode, Image, and Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery Each of these historicity. Dissonances: the modern Phenomenology For to makes claims about form and pays little attention works, however, totalizing a see John Paul of this literary critical tradition, Harmony critique of Riquelme, T. S. Eliot, Romanticism, and Imagination. it should be noted that other studies of Further, drama in aspects situate its origins of Romanticism. Bennett claims that in the Benjamin Hegel lays a groundwork for a theory of drama, in Modern Drama and German

Theatre Journal53 (2001) 119-144 ? 2001 by The JohnsHopkins University Press

120 vision.
on

Alan L. Ackerman

Jr. the figure of the ghost

text. This essay traces

In this context, Hamlet, with

imagination, becomes

emphasis
a central

placed

upon

and
a

Hamlet's

Romantic

that begins, therefore, not simply with Hamlet but with Romantic interpre genealogy in a debate in which dramatic structures and terms, tations of Hamlet and evolves in turn by artists such images and even characters, taken from Hamlet are represented as Goethe, Ibsen, and Wilde. As everyone knows, the Ghost of Hamlet first appears to sentinels on the ramparts of from without, Elsinore. They are anticipating an action of some kind to be precipitated that something is rotten in the state of but we learn after the Ghost's appearance for Denmark. This rampart wall and the borders of the castle then become metaphors of the self which, as we are told repeatedly by characters in the play, the boundaries has its own divisions between outer and inner, visible and invisible, the "exterior [and] as modern conscious the inward man" (2.2.6). A key feature of what we understand ness is that knowledge is authorized not by an external order, but, as Charles Taylor writes, and self is unconditional that "the certainty of clear and distinct perception a few decades after Shakespeare, For Descartes, writing the division of generated."2 the key to self-sufficient certainty. But body and spirit, outside and inside, becomes in terms of representation. The cogito is like Hamlet, thinks of knowledge Descartes,

that is, objectified, for the subject who recognizes himself (ergo sum). represented, too, thinks in terms of his "mind's eye," a phrase he commonly uses. And Descartes, seems in rationality, Descartes there are moments when, despite his confidence haunted by a confusing world of images: "when I slightly relax my attention, my obscured and so to speak blinded by images of mind, finding its vision somewhat sensible objects."3 The world of sensible objects enters and clouds the space of the
mind.

of self-consciousness seeks to transcend (aufheben) the opposition Hegel's model between self and other, individual by subject and nature, essence and appearance, positing a unity of all things in the Spirit. This unity is the end of Hegel's dialectic of as represented most famously in "The Truth of Self-Certainty," the self-consciousness, fourth chapter of The Phenomenology ofMind. Hegel shows that consciousness requires consciousness of an other for self-consciousness; only when the other is recognized as identical with self is self-certainty achieved. But how or inwhat form is this other to be array of forms represented to the self? The Phenomenology itself suggests a bewildering as Taylor writes, "the spirit which which the Spirit is manifest. Ultimately, through

Classicism: Brustein's

Robert to Brecht 255-56. Press), (Ithaca: Cornell University from Lessing a thematic 1962) describes continuity of Revolt (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, with drama and "the second wave the dark fury of Nietzsche between the modern of Romanticism... on of man's life" (8). And monographs his radical demands for a total transformation spiritual Renaissance Theatre individual

and Brian Johnston, in Ibsen the Romantic, such as two on Ibsen by Errol Durbach, authors, trace the toWhen We Dead Awaken, in The Ibsen Cycle: The Design of the Plays from Pillars of Society of Martin the importance Scofield influence of Romantic thinkers on modern investigates playwrights. The Play and Modern in The Ghosts of Hamlet: in "modern" literature the "image" of Hamlet generally Writers. 2 Harvard Sources of the Self: The Making Charles University Identity (Cambridge: of theModern Taylor, Press, 1989), 157. 3 and G.R.T. Ross trans. E. S. Haldane M?ditations III in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Descartes, (Cambridge: Dover, 1955), I: 167.

VISUALIZING HAMLET'S GHOST /

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in itself in the external reality of nature comes to conscious expresses expression not for Hegel, art comes to be regarded man."4 Significantly, for the Romantics, though as the highest human activity. And the importance of an expressive rather than a or reflective notion of art is one thread that will run through theories of the mimetic toWilde. For Hegel art and drama in particular are vital in the drama from Coleridge But if the work of art, instead of manifesting process of self-realization. something is it to be visible beyond itself, constitutes itself as the locus of manifestation, where In his located? Hegel's inside, outside, and in-between. Spirit exists simultaneously in the nineteenth of the history of the German spirit century, Karl study to Goethe about Hegel was nothing L?with remarks, "What appealed less than the between self-being (Selbstsein) and being of his spiritual activity: mediation principle brilliant other (Anderssein)."5 is faced with the problem of theatre, of literally making Shakespeare The Ghost's appearances visible subjects and objects of knowledge. (entrances and of the stage are emblematic of that problem. The exits) across the boundaries by Hamlet himself as dichotomy between inside and outside is, of course, understood a theatrical division between appearance and reality (he has "that within which passes to being) seems to allow for no show" (1.2.85)), but his notion of playing (as opposed is the mirror. Other characters represent variations on the interior space; his metaphor "How should I your true love know / From another problem of seeing / knowing. a basic epistemological one?" sings Ophelia, problem of the theatre (4.5.23 signifying 24). Pragmatic Fortinbras "makes mouths at the invisible event" (4.4.49). The question for the modern self, however, will cease to be what is inside and what is outside, but what inside and what constitutes outside. In 1875 Edward Dowden writes, in their actual, phenomenal aspect flit before [Hamlet] as transitory, accidental "Things to be attained in the and unreal. And the absolute truth of things is... only, if at all,... constitutes In Hamlet,

mind."6

Hamlet

cutting against the grain of most readings of are preoccupied with an that Shakespeare's plays the human body.7 For the Elizabethan skeptic the of other bodies. What is especially (the "matter") about Hamlet's search formaterial knowledge is a ghost, who, after all, instructs Hamlet's "soul," and epitomizes betweenness. Generally, modern the interpreters have privileged inner life as a source of the play's complexity and power. Freud murkiness of Hamlet's of repression in the the play as an example of "the secular advance describes But Freud's approach is hardly empirical; he analyzes emotional life of mankind."8

In a recent essay, David Hillman, since the Romantics, argues imagination of the visceral interior of is a problem problem of other minds curious in this provocative argument its elision of the spirit, the Ghost as

4 Charles Press, 1979), 10. Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University 5 to Nietzsche: From Hegel in nineteenth-century Karl L?with, the revolution E. thought, trans. David Green Press, (New York: Columbia 1964), 6. University 6 and Art (London: Routledge, Edward Dowden, 1875), 133. Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind 7 David "Visceral and the Interior of the Early Hillman, Knowledge: Shakespeare, Skepticism, Modern in Early Modern Europe, eds. David Hillman Body," The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality and Carla Mazzio 1997), 81-106. (New York: Routledge, 8 ed. and trans. James Strachey The Interpretation Freud, (London: of Dreams, Sigmund Penguin Books, 1991), 366-67. Also see Jean-Fran?ois 1971), 163-89. Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksieck,

122

Alan L. Ackerman

Jr.

the nothing that he performs, Hamlet's inaction, his "hesitations," eliding Hamlet's in theatricality and his impulse to judge others based investment often contradictory as on superficial later describe Freud's method Jacques Lacan would impressions. Cartesian: "The question is?of what can one be certain? With this aim, the first thing ... to to be done is to overcome anything to do with the content of the unconscious overcome that which marks, stains, spots the text of any that which floats everywhere, am not sure, I doubt/'9 Doubt is a sign that I think, and by virtue dream interpretation?I of thinking, I am. Hamlet himself doubts. Where does the ghost of his father come from? Freud's response: from the sources of his own desire. Lionel Trilling traces the root of the problem of finding "one's own self" to Hamlet, noting that Freud "took the a laborious discipline it of research to discover where first steps towards devising the limits of the actually found within might be found."10 That self is not, however, The emphasis placed by Trilling and Freud not just on the interiority of the self play. self and other is characteristic of but on the interiority of the relationship between is that critics since Coleridge.11 For audiences since the Romantics a crucial assumption in Hamlet.12 Yet the unconscious, like the ghost, appears the "within" is privileged as an absence. How do we account for the gap between perception and paradoxically the internal life of the character or Remarkably, whether privileging representation? of the drama have that impinges on him, most the dramatic world interpretations of the theatre. tended to skirt the representational apparatus to the preference inner life is for Hamlet's One of the better known exceptions For T. S. Eliot: "The play is the primary problem, instructive for its polemical irony. and Hamlet the character only secondarily"13 Eliot singles out two critics as exemplary of the creative but weak minds typically drawn to the character of Hamlet: Goethe and a "vicarious existence for their own artistic realiza They see in Hamlet Coleridge. tion."14 Eliot complains that weak, creative critics, like them, ignore relevant historical facts, but he appears not to believe that criticism requires the same kind of historicizing.

9 New

trans. Alan Sheridan (1973, Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental & Company, York: W. W. Norton 1981). 10 Harvard Lionel Trilling, Press, 1971), 5. (Cambridge: University Sincerity and Authenticity 11 on the trope of have focussed recent psychoanalytic Some more of Hamlet writing. readings Literature Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: "Hamlet: A Writing-Effect" and Daniel Sibony, as

rpt.

See

Marjorie 137-149, Reading: Herman

Felman ed. Shoshana Otherwise, (Baltimore: that of Shakespeare the landscape of Hawthorne's soul to reading Melville compares reading 17 and 24,1850). in "Hawthorne The Literary World and His Mosses," (New York: August 12 on a Theme inModern Drama In Realms of the Self: Variations Press, (New York: New York University on the dissociation that an "emphasis roots extend back through dramatic of the interior and exterior worlds the Romantics most to Shakespeare, the mind" for whom

1988), (London: Methuen, Uncanny Causality in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of The Johns Hopkins Press, 1982), 53-85. University

Ganz 1980), Arthur argues us that Pirandello's reminds particularly to Hamlet." "could

as a describes Hamlet (189). Erich Heller "prince of in The Artist's into the his inner being," be in perfect accord with Journey nothing possibly 145. Northrop the Interior and Other Essays (New York: Random House), Frye remarks, "During as Hamlet was central of the twentieth, and through much nineteenth century, Shakespeare's regarded a central it dramatized of the age of Romanticism: and most preoccupation significant play, because the conflict 99. 13 T. S. Eliot, "Hamlet," and Giroux, 1975), 45. 14 Ibid. in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Farrar, Straus of consciousness and action." See Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (Yale University Press, 1986),

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Instead, in the objective correlative, he advocates a hypostatic notion of the spirit. He also represents it in the morality-play-like Tempters that objectify Thomas Becket's emotional and spiritual conflict in Murder in the Cathedral. As Eliot's essay implies, the notion that the world of things in Hamlet becomes intelligible only through analysis of is an ideological mind Hamlet's of the late-eighteenth and early development to ignore the importance centuries. But Eliot seems purposely nineteenth of this The shift in critical emphasis, which has radical ramifications for writing, implication. staging, and performing what we consider the modern drama, is plainly derived from that present radical new views on subjectivity writings of the early nineteenth-century and spiritual experience. But how is such experience in visual terms? The soul or spirit of a represented resists representation. thus character, like ghosts of the dead, frequently Visibility obtains importance in terms of both form and content. In theatrical terms the problem of the visual defines the relation of spectator to spectacle. How is the action materially framed or marked off; that is,what does the audience agree to see and what not to see? What can be seen? A play, like a painting, declares its subject by marking its spatial limits. Shakespeare in the theatre not thematizes the problem of such visual markers only by having his ghost appear first on the borders of Elsinore but also by placing a number of spectators within the play itself, beginning with a few radically uncertain sentinels and a scholar in scene one. The modern drama, with infinitely more supple is literally shaped by incomplete technologies of lighting than Shakespeare possessed, distinctions between light and dark and may play more or less self-reflexively with the fraught space between the visible and invisible. Dramatists were especially affected by the invention of the electric light bulb in 1879, but early nineteenth-century theatres also had the resource of gas-lighting In Edwin Booth's famous produc and mirrors. tion of Hamlet, "the house lights (gas jets) were very much lowered, if not completely so that in the Ghost scenes the nocturnal effects made their point... extinguished, By on the stage seem as if but shadowed this subdued forth in light the individuals outline, and even the two friends of Hamlet, who 'hold the watch tonight,' partake of the supernatural element which invests the whole scene."15 Significantly, phantasma exhibitions achieved the height of their popularity in the first half of that century. goria second aspect of the problem of visibility (deeply related to the problem of the boundaries of the aesthetic object) is to establish the relation of subject or defining to object. This problem is partly one of the theatre, and in the nineteenth beholder both new technologies and new theories of vision contributed to eroding the century distinction.16 In fact, Goethe begins his Theory of Colours (1810) with a subject-object discussion of colors that "belong altogether, or in a great degree, to the subject?to the The
15 Charles

The Hamlet of Illinois Press, Shattuck, 1969), 115,117. of Edwin Booth (Chicago: University source on Booth's Hamlet. is my primary for information Shattuck has published record of the 1870 production Charles Clarke's the history of Booth's Hamlet, along with photographs, and citations from contemporary are taken from this critics. All further references to Booth's Hamlet Shattuck's book a set of innovations such as the invention of the stereoscope, technological became from transience?that 1820s, vision is, from new "inseparable a new of flux and obsolescence, and sedimentation of the temporalities, speeds, experiences density structure of visual memory." in the Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity Nineteenth Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 20-21. Century (Cambridge, Crary details by which, beginning in the work. 16 Jonathan

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Alan L. Ackerman

Jr.

colors that have previously been "banished into the eye itself."17 These physiological of phantoms," he claims, are the foundation of his whole doctrine. InHamlet the region initial appearance and Horatio after the Ghost's first exchange between Hamlet a momentary confusion of the bodily/spatial of seeing: represents metaphor
Hamlet: Horatio: Hamlet: . . . father?methinks My lord? Where, my In my mind's eye, Horatio. I see my father.

[1.2.184-86]

vision cannot be literal; no physical image is apparent to any spectator, the remark. A detailed the jumpy Horatio record of initially misinterprets though Edmund Booth's Hamlet (1870) indicates how an actor might emphasize metaphorical seeing in these lines: "In (deep sound) my mind's (upward accent) eye, Horatio (rising inflection)."18 But Horatio too had referred to the Ghost after its first appearance as "a mote to trouble the mind's is a Wittenberg like Hamlet, eye" (1.1.111). Horatio, detached enough to be a surrogate for the audience. But Hamlet educated philosopher, its is no skeptic (he accepts news of the ghost sighting at face value but doubts while Horatio, more like later audiences, will find his assumptions about meaning), Hamlet's relations between the material and spiritual worlds severely tested by the ghost.19 The in Hamlet and Horatio's to literal and back to from metaphorical dialogue, slippage touches upon the very nature or roots of the theatre, in the Greek seeing, metaphorical is theatron or place of seeing. Do we still have theatre when the reality represented unseen? And what is the relation of the ghost to this notion of the theatrical? physically and, then, the appearance of the specter in act 1, Beginning with the act of watching scene 1, Hamlet is full of spectators and plays-within-the-play; including observable to actions and inactions, unverifiable and unobservable things (e.g., the method or concealed the spying and soon corpsed Polonius). Before Hamlet's madness) (e.g., The Mousetrap Hamlet tells Horatio, "when thou seest that act afoot . . .Observe my intends to make a judgment based upon how Claudius uncle" (3.2.78-80). Hamlet knows not seems.20 In the seems, though he himself, paradoxically (hypocritically?), out the problem of his first exchange with Horatio, however, Hamlet straightens

von Goethe, Lock Eastlake (1840, rpt. (1810), trans. Charles Johann Wolfgang Theory of Colours Frank Cass. & Co. Ltd., 1967), 1. London: 18 The Hamlet Shattuck, of Edwin Booth, 131-32. 19 .. that he was realistic men "never from practical, of the Booth's Hamlet different forgot. vastly His of the Ghost, he is left "in a state of high excitement. After his first vision nineteenth century." on the other hand, is described and fear were fresh upon him" wonder (159). Horatio, by J. Dover Wilson as a disciple of What and view was the sixteenth-century thinker, Reginald Scot, whose "frankly material he contests is the possibility of spirits assuming form," inWilson's Lavater, (Oxford: Oxford University by Nyght Of Ghosts and Spirites Walking

17

entirely sceptical... to Lewes Introduction

Press, 1929), xvii. 20 to believe is fortified by a... that "our eagerness the Ghost [like Hamlet's] suggests Stanley Cavell over the potentially the concern Hamlet foul condition of our own (183). exemplifies imaginations" that he or she exists, and that this of proving that to exist "the human notion being has the burden burden Descartes's existence Hamlet's is discharged in thinking Cavell your existence." upon cogito: "To exist is to take your existence To refuse this burden is theater, even melodrama. sense of theater I take as his ceaseless extreme that suggests you, to enact the epitome of this idea is it, as if the basis of human .. . to skepticism is to condemn yourself as an of theater, say show, perception

VISUALIZING HAMLET'S GHOST /

father's appearance quickly as he clearly asserts a distinction between form outside thought and a concrete reality that exists in objectifiable a

125

for metaphor of the body.

Hamlet begins to interrogate the separation of vision from the body, of the mental is reconsidered with image from the concrete reality. This separation far-ranging at the beginning of the nineteenth view, "Hamlet consequences century. In Coleridge's beheld external objects in the same way that a man (of vivid imagination) who shuts
his eyes, sees what has previously made ... an impression upon his . . . organs."21 A

the historical construction of vision and recognition of the deep relationship between is key to defining the modern drama. "Remember," Oscar the history of subjectivity to a journalist in 1884, "in Shakespeare's Wilde day ghosts were not explained shadowy, subjective conceptions, but beings of flesh and blood, only beings living on to break bounds."22 the other side of the border of life, and now and then permitted as M. H. Abrams In the decades the French Revolution, remarks, the following of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking" noted "secularization commonly of "traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had involved a reformulation been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation." God's relation in terms of the "prevailing to the universe was reformulated two-term system of or consciousness the human mind and its subject and object, ego and non-ego, transactions with nature."23 The terra incognita of poetic exploration was no longer the heaven and hell of traditional Christian epic but the inner landscape of the human mind.24 In Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle represents a conservative reaction to the epistemological changes of the time in his deeply ironic depiction of the protagonist "It is in his stupendous Section, headed Natural Supernaturalism, that the Teufelsdr?kh:
Professor first becomes a Seer ... Worst of all, two quite mysterious, world-embracing

round him, perplexing and bewilder Phantasms, Time and Space, have ing: but with these also he now resolutely grapples, these also he rends asunder. In a word, he has looked fixedly on Existence, till, one after the other, its earthly hulls and away; and now, to his rapt vision, the interior celestial garnitures have all melted lies disclosed."25 Borrowing Carlyle's phrase (Natural Supernaturalism), Holy-of-Holies Abrams details, through examples in various literary genres and from various national of ancient problems and ways of thinking from a super literatures, a displacement
natural to a natural frame of reference.

ever hovered

To extend the terms of that thesis, the history of theatre and drama undergoes in the decades similar changes. Melodrama, for instance, a genre that flourishes as Peter Brooks has written, the French Revolution, "both the represents, following

or mark of the human condition." Burden "Hamlet's of Cavell, inescapable metaphysical Stanley in Six Plays of Shakespeare in Disowning Proof" Press, Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University 1987), 179-92. 21 on Literature, Vol. 5, Part I of The Collected Works Lectures 1808-1819 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. R. A. Foakes Princeton Press, (Princeton: 1987), 386. University 22 in Richard Oscar Wilde Cited Ellmann, Books, (New York: Vintage 1987), 251. 23 M. H. Abrams, Tradition and Revolution Natural in Romantic Literature (New York: Supernaturalism: W. W. Norton, 1971), 12-13. 24 in notes the "Terra Incognita of the Human mentions Mind" for his Coleridge on Literature, in Vol. 5, Part II of Collected Works, 287. lectures. See Lectures 1808-1819 25 Sartor Resartus in Carlyle's Complete Works Thomas Estes (1831, rpt. Boston: Carlyle, 1885), 1:192. Shakespeare and Lauriat,

126

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Jr.

of conceiving sacralization other and the impossibility urge toward resacralization shares aspects of the impulse to make the than in personal terms."26 And melodrama later in the century, stand for the transcendental with genres developed empirical and symbolism. "Clearly," Strindberg writes pro including realism, expressionism, in the 1890s, "the spirits have taken to realism just as we human artists vocatively have."27 In short, the modern spirit runs through a gamut of genres. Jonathan Crary, the noted art historian, describes the re-mapping of the visual field in the first decades of the nineteenth century in terms of historical "figurations of an in in vision In contrast to "the pervasive of subjectivity observer." suppression "in the and eighteenth-century such figurations seventeenththought," Crary argues, on the priority of models of subjective vision."28 century depended early nineteenth The change that takes place from around 1810 to 1840 involves "an uprooting of vision in the camera obscura," as both a from the stable and fixed relations incarnated "as an objective ground of visual and a concept that was understood technology it is truth." Crary shows that "what occurs is a new valuation of visual experience: given an unprecedented site or referent" (14). mobility and exchangeability, abstracted from any founding

seems to anticipate to the camera obscura Of course, if Shakespeare challenges is that performances of Hamlet (and most model described by Crary, one explanation inside and outside, in the open-air of Shakespeare's simultaneously plays) happened scenes were played upon the same theatre of the Globe; closet as well as battlement them. The plays were also boards with relatively little stage furniture to distinguish so spectators were to project the in daylight; required, imaginatively, performed a spatial continuity to in night scenes, implicitly alluded recognizing moonlight
between themselves and the characters on stage. The camera obscura, on the other

of human vision and for ways of for the workings and metaphor hand, a dark inner room in which are projected images from the sun-lit requires knowing, between world outside. It demands a sharp and legible delineation light and dark.29
Moreover, Shakespeare's plays manifest ample self-consciousness about the relation

as model

the epistemological vision and imagination. And yet, Hamlet reinscribes between is an unhappy structure implied by the camera obscura model, for Hamlet anomaly It is the very lack of a fixed reference point that when it comes to problems of knowing. in his own judgment. so radically undermines Hamlet's confidence In one of his famous lectures "On Hamlet" notion of the balance that the "healthy" mind
26 Peter

articulates his own (1812), Coleridge maintains "between the impressions

and theMode Balzac, Henry Brooks, The Melodramatic James, Melodrama, of Excess Imagination: Yale University Press, 1976), 16. (New Haven: 27 an Occult Diary, trans. Mary Sandbach (London: Penguin Inferno and From August Strindberg, Books, 1979), 147. 28 9. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 29 was a it for subjectivity. As Crary The camera obscura explains, apt metaphor particularly as isolated, an observer an that is, it necessarily defines of individuation; operation "performs in order from the world, It impels a... withdrawal its dark confines. within and autonomous enclosed, to regulate and camera obscura observer exterior who world." one's relation purify is inseparable from is nominally Techniques to the manifold a certain contents of of the now 'exterior' world. Thus the metaphysic individual and a privatized 40. interiority: the it is a figure for both cut off from a public subject...

a free sovereign of the Observer,

VISUALIZING HAMLET'S GHOST /

from outward

127

this of the intellect ... In Hamlet objects and the inward operations is disturbed: his thoughts and the images of his fancy, are farmore vivid than is an exceptional his actual perceptions."30 Hamlet, like Coleridge and himself, case. Yet, this conception, of the Romantic poets, of the characteristic unfortunate that interacts with the material world becomes shaping power of the imagination in the nineteenth century. As Abrams has taught us, "Repeat increasingly prevalent romantic predications about poetry, or about art in general, turn on a metaphor edly balance like 'overflow,' signifies the internal made external. The most frequent of these which, terms was in his 1802 had defined poetic creativity 'expression.'"31 Wordsworth to Lyrical Ballads as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings."32 That preface to what seems like an erasure of the line inWordsworth, overflow leads ultimately, between self and other, transforming him into a kind of ghost; he describes "the Mind of Man" as "My haunt, and the main region of my song."33 The individual "limitless," the "line invisible / That parts the image from reality." mind is

visual.

to be the mind and reality is considered The most immediate relation between In The World asWill and Representation (1819), for example, Schopenhauer ranks far reaching, and its of the senses: "its sphere is the most sight as the highest and susceptibility the keenest. This is due to the fact that what stimulates it receptivity in other words, is an imponderable, something hardly corporeal, something quasi too erases the subject-object correspondence, subverting spiritual."34 Schopenhauer interior and exterior: "Space itself is a form of our faculty of distinctions between the 'outside us,' to which resides inside our head, for perception simulta that is fundamentally

in other words, a function of our brain. Therefore perception, we refer objects on the occasion of the sensation of sight, itself scene of action" (2: 22). This metaphor for there is its whole invokes theatrical terms and describes an experience neously the body of the spectator.35 Schopenhauer internal, within general operation of vision to the experience "mountains, forest, sea," though "everything in space "only insofar as we represent them" (my emphasis).

the compares explicitly sees of the spectator in the theatre who remains within the house." Things exist

30 Lectures upon Shakespeare and Other Dramatists, Samuel Coleridge, Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York: Harper 31 M. H Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University 32 to Lyrical Ballads, in Wordsworth's William "Preface" Wordsworth, Owen (London: Routledge 33 William Wordsworth, Wordsworth (Oxford: 1974), 85. [from MS. B.] for The Recluse, "Prospectus" The Clarendon Press, 1949), 5: 338. The following Paul, & Kegan

in Volume & Brothers, Press, Literary

IV of The Complete 1884), 145. 48. ed. W. J. B.

1953),

Criticism,

in The Poetical quotation 313-39.

Works of William is from The Recluse York: Dover "eyes know

in the same volume, from the poem proper to be found (1.1.576-77), 34 trans. E. F. J. Payne The World as Will and Representation, Arthur (New Schopenhauer, Les Aveugles, Inc., 1958), 2: 27. As the oldest blind man Publications, says inMaeterlinck's more 35 than hands." In his His the 1818 Lecture idea on The Tempest, idiosyncratic; Coleridge yet and articulates a notion of inner is strikingly it is important for indicating about claims the competing

vision. about material.

and, hence, "spiritual" at least a confusion both

site of phenomenal and the of the spiritual experience and only genuine to come that "the principle from excitement remarks Coleridge ought so much and sympathetic to the where is addressed the moved within,?from whereas, imagination; more senses of seeing and hearing, is apt to languish, and the attraction external vision the spiritual from without to spring hearing are will withdraw the mind from Vol. from within" relatively (Collected Works, external. and only legitimate the proper 5, Part I, 268-69). Significantly, interest which the senses is intended of seeing and

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Alan L. Ackerman

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that vision is spiritual and further the notion Later treatments of optics would accentuate the optical lens the liminality of the act of seeing. John Ruskin describes itself as a threshold and the physical eye as a source of life: "The power of the eye itself, as such, is in animation. You do not see with the lens of the eye. You see through it, and by means of that, but you see with the soul of the eye. Sight is an absolutely accurately, and only, to be so defined."36 Ruskin denies a fixed spiritual phenomenon, indicates the importance locus for the act of seeing, and his emphasis on prepositions The notion that vision is spiritual also suggests an implicit of relations and movement. and, in this respect, is continuous with critique of various aspects of materialism critic William Winter, criticism on Hamlet. The American for nineteenth-century no in 1863 that the role of Hamlet writes "involves no sensual excitements, example,
sensuous delight, no gorgeousness of color, no celerity of movement. Its passion ... is

that of intense "unsubstantial"

intellectuality." representations

This understanding of the Ghost.37

of the character

contributed

to

and nineteenth-century vision studies obtains a The terminology of eighteenthremarkable degree of importance inwritings on aesthetics and representation. Coleridge describes Hamlet's "brooding over the world within him" in terms clearly taken from In that essay about "Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision." George Berkeley's a of sight and touch and the difference between the two, Berkeley maintains problems is "in the mind" and what is "without the mind." crucial distinction between what And he coins the term "outness" to mean "ideas of space, outness, and things placed the term to discuss the [from the mind]."38 Coleridge appropriates of poetic expression. Concerned more with the appearance of ideas in space problem of than with the experience of things distant from the mind, he writes: "the prodigality ... are as it were the half of thought, that make them beautiful words embodyings more than Thought, give them an outness, a reality sui generis and yet retain their within" (my emphasis).39 Coleridge's shadowy approach to the Images and movements the "and yet" marks a significant difference between himself and Berkeley for whom
distinction between inner and outer was not "shadowy." Famous for his writer's

at a distance

celebrates block, Coleridge poignantly outward. But, how can thought projected new anxiety cally, betrays a historically "outness" of thought may be greater both in the broader context deconstructs the subject-object relationship.

can be ideas, in the form of words, which be only half embodied? Coleridge, paradoxi or in the notion that even a half embodiment an argument that than the image within, of his oeuvre and in historical figurations of

is deeply identified with Hamlet, is Significantly, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, who in terms of vision and isolation, through the metaphor first introduced to Shakespeare of of a new optical toy that represents a break from the camera obscura model "than by "You could not employ your time better," Jarno tells Wilhelm, experience.
36 The Art Criticism ed. Robert L. Herbert York: Da Capo

John Ruskin,

of John Ruskin,

(New

Press,

1964), 23-24. 37 51. A correspondent for the Evening Post writes of Booth's in-Booth's Hamlet, Quoted production: as as unsubstantial to make the apparition (119). possible" "Every art has, of course, been used 38 A New Theory of Vision and Other Select Philosophical J.M. Dent (London: Writings Berkeley, George & Sons, 1910), 33. 39 Vol. 5, Part I of The These notes are taken from lecture 3 of the 1813 series in Lectures 1808-1819, Collected Works, 540.

VISUALIZING HAMLET'S GHOST /

129

from everything else and, in the solitude of your own room, dissociating yourself into the kaleidoscope of this unknown world."40 Goethe not only shared peering foremost theorists in love of Hamlet but also was one of his generation's Coleridge's the study of vision. In the opening pages of his Theory of Colours, as Crary has shown, to present a radically new Goethe adopts and transforms the camera obscura model as a corporeal phenomenon that subverts simple dichotomies of into a dark room The camera obscura operates as light is admitted interior/exterior. through a small circular hole that casts upon a wall of that interior an image of the "Let the spectator outside world. Yet Goethe proposes a significant new experiment. ... fix his on the bright circle... The hole being then closed, let him look towards eyes the darkest part of the room; a circular image will now be seen to float before him."41 that occurs entirely in the interior of the body Goethe describes a visual experience no reference to an outer world. "The closing off of the opening," Crary explains, with model of vision inner and outer space on which the very function the distinction between ... The coloured circles that of the camera (as apparatus and paradigm) depended ing seem to float, undulate, and undergo a sequence of chromatic transformations have no the dark room."42 The image, writes Goethe, "now correlative either within or without to the eye."43 Illusion no longer has a status inferior to any other kind of belongs is the experience of illusion, a highly all optical experience optical experience; "dissolves
personal, even private experience.

is deeply related to his imagining of Indeed, Goethe's theory of the after-image in conjunction with Hamlet's and The Theory of Colours may be read profitably ghost, the treatment of Hamlet inWilhelm Meister. Goethe writes that "images may remain on the retina in morbid affections of the eye" even longer than they do on healthy eyes, and "this indicates of persons connexion between Wilhelm, who has, visions extreme weakness or things which sense in a of the organ, its inability to recover itself; while are the objects of love or aversion indicate the of the eye is apparent in and thought."44 This morbidity short time, both lost his own father and played a terrific ghost scenes), when, awakened at night, "the image of the his heated imagination."45

Hamlet (especially in the in arms came before king

It is significant, therefore, that nineteenth-century theatergoers regarded the closet scene in Hamlet as the key to evaluating the quality of a production and the ability of alone as a set the actor playing the title role. Indeed, the scene was often performed in 1802 that "nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are Charles Lamb writes piece.46 transactions between himself and his moral sense, [and] they are the effusions of his

von Goethe, in Goethe's trans. Eric A Blackall, Wilhelm Master's Johann Wolfgang Apprenticeship, Princeton Collected Works, vol. 9 (Princeton: Press, 1989), 105. University 41 16. Goethe, Theory of Colours, 42 the Observer, 68. Crary, Techniques of 43 Goethe, Theory of Colours, 21. 44 Ibid., 10. 45 Wilhelm Meister, 198. Goethe, 46 notes in his journal that he was to "speak" William for example, asked the Charles Macready, scene at Rugby. actor of his day, the great English also closet alone Macready, Shakespearean that during of 1841, while Hamlet the spring every night, nearly playing The Journal ofWilliam Charles Macready, ed. J.C. Trewin 1832-1851, reading Wilhelm Meister. Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 36,152. comments he was also (Carbondale:

40

130

Alan L. Ackerman

Jr.

solitary musings, which he retires to holes and corners and the most sequestered parts then that "our curiosity is excited, of the palace to pour forth." It is not surprising or a new Richard makes his appearance, a new Hamlet in the first place to when how he acted in the Closet scene, in the Tent scene; how he looked, and how inquire,
he started, when the Ghost came on . . . ."47Of course, both of these scenes involve

dream in the tent as proto-expressionist) (one might ghosts that also which appear in private space and only to a single character (a description to the appearance of Caesar's ghost to Brutus). Yet Hamlet's closet scene is applies certainly the more curious of the two since there is another person in the room at the in the problem of time of his vision. Critics like Lamb were especially interested claim Richard's In Wilhelm Meister, Goethe proposes the solipsized mind. to represent vision by using a life-sized portrait of the King with the Ghost posing subjective the Ghost leaves the stage, Hamlet exactly like the figure in the portrait. Then, when stares after the apparition and his mother at the picture, giving the impression that Hamlet has actually seen the specter. But, as Edwin Booth recognized, the scene only representing with vision representing Hamlet's of interiority on stage. Booth's Hamlet becomes problem the Queen cannot see the specter. is less concerned than with increasingly representing desperate the when

even

One of the many questions raised by the play iswhy the ghost is visible to all of the on stage in the first act, on the ramparts in the open air, but only to Hamlet in the closet scene.48 The way to address this important inconsistency is to consider not in these scenes but also the different only the different characters that are involved characters kinds of space they occupy. If, following Hamlet's architectural logic, the walls of for the parameters of the self, then we have moved Elsinore serve as a metaphor deeper into the problem of subjectivity once we enter the play's most disquietingly a structural homology the scene presents space. In space and dialogue, private "will set [Gertrude] up a between ghost sighting and soul searching. Now Hamlet see the inmost part of [herself]" (3.4.20-21). Hamlet's [she] may glass / Where obsession with the hidden, the invisible (e.g., "the unseen good old man," 4.1.12), is of body and soul; the expressed here with particular emphasis upon the metaphor to step between instructs Hamlet Ghost his mother and "her fighting soul," for "Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works" (3.4.117-18). But Gertrude has already . inward. Hamlet's badgering delved dangerously ("Have you eyes? . . Ha, have you leads her to turn her "eyes into [her] very soul." No one in the theatre can eyes?") of father and step-father, and we verify what Hamlet has seen in the two miniatures can assume the Queen's that Gertrude soul, though we cannot verify this subjective vision either. Nor can we see take Gertrude's word for it that she can. So, when Hamlet

47

Charles

Lamb,

Charles

Lamb on Shakespeare,

ed.

Joan Coldwell

(Buckinghamshire:

Colin

Smythe,

over the to the ghost have been hazarded blindness singular A. C. Bradley in Shakespearean argues prominent, Tragedy unconvincingly was able for any sufficient reason to in Shakespeare's (London: MacMillan, 1905), that "a ghost, day, to a single person in company" its manifestation Barker says easily that confine (140). Harley Granville to Shakespeare & Jackson, See Prefaces Gertrude is just "spiritually blind." LTD., (London: Sidgwick her that "Gertrude to see the 'gracious figure' because is unable J.Dover Wilson 1937), 3:116. suggests for Gertrude's eyes are held What Happens she has by the adultery in Hamlet (Cambridge: committed," Cambridge and now University she is cut off from her dead 1937), 254-55. husband. See Press,

1978), 29,18. 48 Many explanations the most years. Among

HAMLET'S VISUALIZING GHOST /

turns his own

131

of a ghost, why should the eyes upon the theatrical representation and share his point of view? If spectators audience recognize a suspend disbelief it is, a representation, the viewpoint of the more of invisibility for what representation to be privileged: in this case, sympathetic Gertrude, deserves empirical and, How
That

is itwith you,
you do bend your eye on vacancy, [3.4.120-22]

And with

the incorporeal air do hold discourse?

sees nothing, represented by an actor in the costume of Hamlet's father: at all, yet all that is I see" (3.4.137). Of course, the King (Hamlet's father? "Nothing In the closet scene, the Ghost's is "a thing ... of nothing" (4.2.29-31). Claudius?) to Hamlet alone, therefore, is not a consequence of the logic of the plot but appearance If the King is a thing of nothing, he of space, insofar as space has thematic significance. The Queen can only be seen, or, as Horatio might say, "a piece of him" can, when appearing in such as the ramparts or the space of the stage itself. This architectural specific spaces, repeatedly in the modern drama through the trope of the haunted logic is investigated
house, where characters, who in an opening scene are outside, are drawn to thresholds

and, often, move into the house itself as the play advances. The action of Strindberg's Ghost Sonata, for example, draws the eyes of the central characters from the initial of a fashionable house and action in a public square to the doors and windows into the home's deepest recesses. And the first words of Yeats's Old Man in ultimately Purgatory are "Study that house." of a technology The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the development that, in effect, made Hamlets of everyone. In 1798, literally using smoke and mirrors or the Belgian inventor and student of optics, what was known as the "magic-lantern," in what he called the first "fantasmagorie" Robertson presented Etienne-Gaspard and the Paris. In her fascinating article, "Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technologies chica of Modern Reverie," Terry Castle recounts Robertson's wonderful Metaphorics a candle is extin is locked in the "Salle de la Fantasmagorie"; The audience nery. sounds of wind and thunder fill the claustrophobic space; unearthly guished; muffled delivers a music emanates from a glass harmonica; and Robertson himself morbidly on death, immortality, and "the unsettling of superstition and fear to power speech create terrifying illusions." Then, one by one, mysterious luminous shapes begin to and flicker over the heads of the spectators.49 surge a raft of imitators, Robertson soon made his fortune as a showman of Despite shows quickly became a staple in London, for example, often ghosts. Phantasmagoria not only and pseudo-historical events, including literary classics dramatizing various ghosts but also the raising of Samuel by the witch at Endor, the Shakespeare's "The Haunted Man." transformation of Louis XVI into a skeleton, and later Dickens's Like the recently invented stereoscope, phantasmagoria shows were literally obscene. They "shattered the scenic relationship between viewer and object that was intrinsic to theatrical setup of the camera obscura."50 At least, they contributed the fundamentally

49 Terry 50 Crary,

Castle,

"Phantasmagoria: of the Observer,

Spectral 127.

Technology

and

the Metaphysics

of Modern

Reverie,"

Critical Inquiry 15 (1988):36.

Techniques

132

Alan L. Ackerman

Jr.

to a re-imagining of the theatrical. Though itmay be hard to appreciate in the radically visual culture of the twenty-first century, contemporary audiences of phantasmagoria were often terrified at what they perceived to be real ghosts coming at them. as popular entertain Castle indicates not only the importance of phantasmagoria ment around the turn of the century but also the pervasiveness of the terminology. in love with Lotte, speaks of seeing her Goethe's Werther, for instance, desperately inside his head: "In this hovel, this solitary place ... your image [Gestalt], the memory I seem to be standing before a sort of raree show of you, suddenly overwhelmed me... the little men and little horses jerk before my eyes; and I [Rarit?tenkasten], watching if everything is not an optical illusion [optischer Betrug]."51 Castle often ask myself external and public (an argues that, "from an initial connection with something illusion), the word has now come to refer to something artificially produced 'spectral' internal or subjective: the phantasmic wholly imagery of the mind."52 But, while Castle she also re-inscribes the division identifies a crucial shift inmetaphors for perception, between and external, merely to the former. shifting emphasis or mediation indicates a deconstruction of the binary example of inside-outside, Werther 's "vision" registers the imaginary-sensory. image of Lotte and the "whole world" on the same plane of reality. Later, internal from Goethe In fact, the opposition phantasmal in Dickens's

Great Expectations (1860), Pip too is subject to phantasmic visions, and, after seeing a of Hamlet, imagines himself to "play Hamlet toMiss Havisham's Ghost."53 production it is evident that this shift in the usage of ghosts as metaphors Nonetheless, indicates, as Castle claims, a "significant transformation over the past in human consciousness
two centuries .. . Even as we have come to discount the spirit-world of our ancestors

and to equate seeing ghosts and apparitions with having 'too much' imagination, we have come increasingly to believe, as if through a kind of epistemological recoil, in the nature of our own thoughts?to spectral figure imaginative activity itself, paradoxi cally, as a kind of ghost-seeing."54 Seeing ghosts thus involves a notion that is para doxically antitheatrical, an experience that ismental and private, not publicly verifiable. in the 1820s and 1830s is a repositioning As Crary writes, "What begins of the observer, outside of the fixed relations of interior/exterior presupposed by the camera terrain on which the distinction between obscura and into an undemarcated internal sensation and external signs is irrevocably blurred."55 Coleridge, who sees himself in Hamlet,
one

worries about the hyperactive ("sicklied o'er with the pale cast of imagination is turned not to the concrete reality without but to the insubstantial thought") which
within, "giving substance to shadows." The "glittering eye" of the ancient

mariner,
inward:

for instance,

is not only

turned upon

the outer world

but

is also

turned

I closed For

my

lids, and

and

kept

them and

close, and the sky

And the balls like pulses beat;

the sky the sea, the sea

51 Bogan

von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Books, (New York: Vintage

The Sorrows 1990),

trans. Elizabeth of Young Werther, 84. Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers

Mayer

and Louise

(Berlin: Akademie

Berlin, 1954). Verlag 52 29. Terry Castle, "Phantasmagoria," 53 Charles Great Expectations Dickens, (London: 54 29. Terry Castle, "Phantasmagoria," 55 24. of the Observer, Crary, Techniques

Penguin

Books,

1965),

279.

VISUALIZING HAMLET'S GHOST /

Lay And like a load the dead on my weary eye, at my feet.56

133

were

"mind's eye," much less Oedipus's This inner eye, not simply Hamlet's sightless orbs, but the eyeball itself, still seeing yet veiled from the world by its lid, becomes a crucial for playwrights of the modern stage. The distinction between the abstract or metaphor of the body is eroded. of the mind and the physical workings spiritual workings in "A Glance "What is light?" asks August into Space." "Something Strindberg outside me or within, subjective perceptions?" He notes how he can create the physical sensation of looking upon the sun by pressing on his lidded eyes: "What is light when darkness is not its opposite, which may be easily confirmed by going into a dark room ... When it is dark and I press on my eyeballs, I see and pressing upon one's eyeballs first a chaos of lights, stars or sparks, which are gradually condensed and gathered up into a brilliant disk."57 Strindberg's approach to the problem of vision is physical, but he also explains that light is a force, not itself an element or a thing. As such itmust be or invisible until activated inside the body. Light does not respect spatial boundaries a subject in which the gap between and object. Yet this formulation implies subject is located. The recent discovery of x-rays (1895) and the new ability to put experience cameras inside the body, as a Viennese surgeon did in 1898 to expose a pulsating heart, in the natural sciences that supplies a context for Strindberg's indicate the revolution visualizing human interiors.58

In discussing slides smoothly into and out of the nature of light, Strindberg the locus of the self: "Where does the self begin and where does it end? considering Has the eye adapted itself to the sun? Or does the eye create the phenomenon called the sun?"59 Strindberg's play The Ghost Sonata concludes with the trope of the sun of appearance. He equates the sun about the problem raising radical questions with hiddenness and theatricality with an invisible, spiritual experi paradoxically inform an important new antitheatrical ence.60 All of these questions tendency in the modern drama. The conclusion of The Ghost Sonata seems a direct allusion to another crucial instance of that tendency, the conclusion of Ibsen's Ghosts. in dramatic realism, Ibsen's Ghosts (1881), represents A ground-breaking experiment a deep meditation on the duality of spirit and form, and specifically a notion of form to one characterized by what Oswald that is rigid and absolute as opposed calls the that a modern audience will accept the figurability of of life."61 Ibsen recognizes "joy

56 "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" The Complete Poetical Works (Part IV, lines 248-252), Coleridge, Press, (Oxford: Clarendon 1912), 197. of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge 57 in Selected Essays by August trans. Michael into Space," "A Glance August Strindberg, Strindberg, Robinson Press, 1996), 165. University (Cambridge: Cambridge 58 Harvard Kern, The Culture Press, of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge: University Stephen

1983), 143.

59 Strindberg, 60 The song

"A Glance begins: August Archer's

"I saw

into Space," Selected Essays, 166. to see the sun / I seemed Plays: One, translation and motion: connotations. Greenwood trans. Michael is the source "It means

the Hidden

One."

And

then

the

room

"disappears." 61 William

Strindberg, influential recurrence

(London: Methuen, Meyer of the English title. But

1964), 190-91. the Norwegian

Gengangere emphasizes note Archer's prefatory and have "gengangere" ed. Thomas Postlewait

to Ibsen's Prose Dramas similar (London:

spirits that 'walk,'" in literally 'Again-goers/ Scribner's Sons, 1980). Yet, "ghost" (New York: Charles See William Archer on Ibsen: The Major Essays, 1889-1919, Press, 1984), 107-12.

134

Alan L. Ackerman

Jr.

as ametaphor that ismental and biological and for memory ghosts in language alone, or natural (not supernatural). There is no need for ghostly props and makeup, entirely Ibsen's central problem is not the representation music, smoke and mirrors. However, viruses or genetic inclinations that characters transmit to each other but of microscopic in a form that is free or self of the spirit and its realization the representation
conscious.

is haunted less by the return of the dead than by dead ideas. She is also Mrs. Alving haunted by the possibility of "free thinking" that is opposed to an existence that seeks to conform to ideals. But her anxiety about the ghosts that she cannot escape leads her to extend the idea of ghosts radically. We are all ghosts, as she tells Pastor Manders: that keeps on returning in "It's not only what we inherit from our fathers and mothers us. It's all kinds of old dead doctrines and opinions and beliefs, that sort of thing . . . and it's as if I could see the ghosts slipping between I just have to pick up a newspaper, ... And there the lines. They must be haunting our whole country, ghosts everywhere is both a form we are, the lot of us, so miserably afraid of the light."62 This ghostliness and a lack of freedom, and a sense of radical of unconsciousness, conformity, this The drama will develop instability, a sense of liminality, and of boundlessness. paradox into two kinds of ghostliness. One kind requires external light but lacks that is rigid and implies a firm subject framework of the interior. This epistemological internal space and is The other kind of ghostliness privileges object opposition. in a figurative slipping between the lines, The drama of Ghosts eventuates organic. self. visions collide on the rampart walls of Oswald's literal and metaphorical when Ghosts brilliantly defines a split between the different kinds of ghosts. Consequently of the stage, as the audience phenomenology a ghost. The play's most stunning moment moment and climax, a scene that takes us Hamlet. At kinds of seeing and two represents a radical revision of the play is forced to question what itmeans to see is the ultimate of ghostly representation closet scene in back to the mother-son two different is completely solipsized the representation of his

shrinks into himself. He the end of Ghosts Oswald his final collapse, his inherited disease, and, paradoxically, by inwardness or interiority, is the coup de th??tre.
Mrs. Alving: (bending sunlight. (She goes distant Osvald: over him)... Now you And can look, Osvald, see your out what home. a

lovely

day we'll

have. and peaks

Bright in the

really

to the table and puts Osvald

the lamp. Sunrise. in the armchair.)

The glaciers

background shine in the brilliant light of themorning. With his back toward the
view, sits motionless give me (abruptly). (repeats (moves (Osvald expression Mother, the sun. The what sun. The in sun.

Mrs. Alving:
Osvald: Mrs. Alving:

(by the table, looks at him startled).What did you say?

over in a dull monotone.) to him). Osvald, seems is the matter? the chair; blankly. all his muscles loosen; the stare

to crumple inwardly leaves his face; and his eyes

Mrs. Alving:

(shakingwith fear). What is it? (In a shriek.)Osvald! What's wrong! (Drops to her knees beside him and shakes him.) Osvald! Osvald! Look atme! Don't you
know me? The sun?the sun. (in the same monotone).

Osvald:

62

In quoting

Complete Major

the best from Ibsen, I follow Rolf Fjelde's translation, Prose Plays, trans. Rolf Fjelde (New York: Farrar Straus

to date. Giroux,

See Henrik 1965), 238.

Ibsen,

The

VISUALIZING HAMLET'S GHOST /

Mrs. Alving:

135

Osvald:

tears at her hair with both hands, and screams). I to her feet in anguish, (springs . as I can't bear can't bear this! (Whispers it! . . No, no, if paralyzed by fright.) no! thrust no!?Yes!?No, (She stands a few steps away from him, her fingers into her hair, staring at him in speechless horror.) as sun.63 (sitting motionless, before). The sun?the

Like Hamlet, Ghosts raises basic problems of theatrical representation. Oswald becomes in this terrifying moment most untheatrical, most of collapse. He is inexpressive is like Hamlet, Mrs. Alving, unreadable the witness, (or uninterpretable). Notably, The problem of what to do is activated by the epistemological problem: paralyzed. What is Oswald's status? What is the matter with him? What is going on, in this case, inside of him? She sees the ambiguous ghost, in effect, as her son's eyes are turned to his very soul. By locating the sun in the territory of the soul, the interior of the body, the long tradition of the Western self the play tacitly invokes stage in which is associated with the sun god Apollo. And Ghosts evokes important knowledge vision is an inner vision, and yet aspects of Oedipus in structure and theme.64 Oswald's a ghost of himself, seeing himself seeing.65 he is, unlike Oedipus, is a fundamental the interiority of Ibsen's characters formal Szondi, for the decisions that their truth is that of interiority: "There lie the motives problem; in the light of day; there the traumatic effects of these decisions lie hidden and emerge live on despite all external changes." The dramas thus lack not only a temporal present For Peter in the but also a topical one. The modern drama, as Szondi defines it, originated as an entirely self-enclosed Renaissance form. It is absolute in the sense that it does not (and implicitly does not require) an audience. The absolute drama acknowledge the totality of life; it is interpersonal. But Ibsen's figures are solitary and represents estranged, turned inward. That means, for Szondi, that Ibsen cannot give his thematic This material has need of the analytical technique, and "direct dramatic presentation. not simply to achieve greater density... remains alien to the [T]he thematic ultimately
stage. However much the thematic is tied to the presence ... of an action, it remains

exiled

in the past and the depths

of the individual."66

on at least two levels: the notion of But Szondi's theory is insufficiently developed the absolute, modern (Renaissance) drama is not based upon concrete examples from
theatre history or dramatic texts. Presumably any careful exegesis of particular

Renaissance

dramas

would

reveal

challenges

to the straightforwardly

"mimetic"

Ibid., 275-76. See Francis The Idea of Theater: A Study Fergusson, Princeton Press, (Princeton: 1949). Perspective University in the course of the play, just as what Oedipus changes 64 removed from one finds

63

the past and the present. The underlying it in Oedipus Rex" (151). 65 In a review of the American Theatre for the Boston Phoenix, Carolyn Repertory production Clay are "In Robert Brustein's of Ghosts, in the the title characters remarks, production things that go bump In the end, as young Oswald suffers his sudden, attack, there is an eerie, light... debilitating syphilitic as if at some and the sun also rises" sound; all the doors piercing fly open, supernatural instigation; is quoted in the review as insisting Brustein that there are actual ghosts (Boston Phoenix, June 1,1982). in the play, the setting is a "haunted house." The production indicates the difficulty of realizing such an idea while maintaining the integrity of Ibsen's realist text. dramaturgically 66 Peter trans. Michael of Szondi, Drama, Theory of the Modern Hays (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1987), 16.

in Changing of Ten Plays, The Art of Drama sees "What Mrs. Alving writes, Fergusson as one veil after another sees is changes as form of Ghosts is that of the tragic rhythm

136 model.

/ We

Alan L. Ackerman have

Jr.

in which theatre, and Hamlet in Shakespeare's already seen ways subvert Szondi's theory of the drama's origins. Szondi's notion of the particular, may is that the drama is limited by his persistent, assumption underlying objective he writes, "was the mirror up to nature. "The Drama of modernity," mimetic?holding the result of a newly self-conscious being [Renaissance man] who, after the collapse of to create an artistic reality within which he could fix the medieval worldview, sought and mirror himself on the basis of interpersonal relationships alone."67 But, this notion is and the notion of the absolute Drama is too rigid, relying on inadequately historicized, a stable (and absolute) notion of objectivity. Szondi's fiction/reality does dichotomy and of ghosts. not allow for the crucial space in-between, the space of performance and of present-past, material-spiritual, Ghosts, by definition, transgress boundaries,
real-imaginary.

Instead of adhering to or rejecting amonolithic concept of form, nineteenth-century dramatists sought a notion of form that is organic (an especially appropriate metaphor in Coleridge's articulated condition). The idea of organicism, considering Oswald's form, implies a more fluid process of mediation lectures, in contrast to "mechanical" and self-consciousness. Later, Henri Bergson would define drama in a way that erases internal and external and seeks to reconcile the subjective and the the line between
objective: "A drama, even when portraying passions or vices that bear a name, so

general
person

incorporates completely characteristics effaced,

in whom they

them

in the person their that their names are forgotten, and we no longer think of them at all, but rather of the

are assimilated."69.

in Bergson's use of the word form of drama ismost clearly suggested but generated is not imposed from without [la gr?ce]. Gracefulness "gracefulness" ... into matter" is "the immateriality which from within. Gracefulness (78). In passes or what Bergson elsewhere calls the ?lan vital, the life force, the soul, this formulation, the matter which contains it. The soul is not immobilized by matter, as it is in shapes The organic
comedy, but remains infinitely supple and perpetually in motion. In drama, we forget

in every and think only of its vitality. Thus, Bergson concludes, the soul's materiality a soul which our imagination is shaping matter, a soul "sees the effort of human form, in motion" is infinitely supple and perpetually which (78). Drama, according to this that passes into matter, the inner life of the soul. vision, represents the immateriality The Proteus chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses represents this "modern" understand Stephen Dedalus, ing of the drama and of Hamlet in particular. There, the melancholy to in his "Hamlet hat," is deeply unsettled because he has not been able adequately form to the ghosts that haunt him and, since they are internal, he remains deeply give self-alienated:

emphasis. The Johns Hopkins (Baltimore: University Sypher Comedy, ed. Wylie Bergson, "Laughter," to rigid, external refers to "inner form," as opposed Press, 1956) 70, my commonly emph. Goethe see Gadamer's to a mimetic model recent challenges of representation, forms. For more Han-Georg G. Marshall trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald of "play" in Truth and Method, discussion (New York: Continuum, Charting 1995), Literary Anthropology Iser on the "floating 109, and Wolfgang The Johns Hopkins (Baltimore: signifier" University in The Fictive Press, and the Imaginary: 1993), 31.

67 Ibid., 68 Henri

7, my

VISUALIZING HAMLET'S GHOST /

soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon's My in sable silvered, Elsinore's the rocks, hearing tempting midwatches flood.69 I pace the path

137
above

In a vision of haunting beauty, Joyce conflates Hamlet, Hamlet's father (of the "sable silvered" beard), and Stephen, the ghost and the hero's own soul.70 But he also tellingly articulates the central problem of Shakespeare's play: the formal realization of the
formless soul.

Szondi had argued that by trying to reveal the hidden life of his characters, Ibsen killed them. But, of course, Ibsen does not kill Oswald, who is still alive at the end of the play. Szondi's analysis instead reveals the creativity of the spectator who is drawn so often by Ibsen to transgress the limits of his dramas, to project his imagination limits of Ibsen's plays altogether. between the lines or outside of the structural to Nora after about what happens have been unable to resist speculating her final exit, crossing the visible boundaries of the stage and the temporal boundaries of the play, just as her first action had been to enter the space of visibility. A Doll House may be especially susceptible to creative interpretations precisely because the spatial boundaries of the play are so insistently thematized.71 But Joyce comically Spectators she makes to Ghosts. In the impulse of the spectator may lead when reveals where applied to Ibsen's 'Ghosts,'" Joyce images the return of the ghost of Captain Alving "Epilogue as a speaking part:
Dear Permit I am quick, whose conscience buried deep

The grim old grouser [Ibsen himself] has been salving

one more spectre the ghost of Captain to peep. Alving.72

Like the ghost of Hamlet's father, the ghost of Captain Alving returns to expose some that Oswald may not be his son after all but Pastor Manders's. dirty doings, namely But Joyce, whose novels, like Ibsen's dramas, represent the notion that children are the levels of irony. And this poem, ghosts of their parents, works as usual with multiple an artistic paternity in the first person, indirectly acknowledges written that breaks down the boundaries of authorship. Joyce is the ghost of Ibsen, just as every spectator can, in some
ghosts.

sense, be the play's

author. After

all, as Mrs. Alving

says, we

are all

This expressivist connects playwrights

reaction against the boundaries imposed by modern society as diverse as Ibsen and Oscar Wilde. Wilde remarks through a
Books, 1986), 37. is a common Romantic to a new sense trope, leading ghost or Fact?" and whole. In his verse dialogue "Phantom multiple . . . 'Twas own there sate beside my bed from my spirit come

69 James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin 70 The relation of the self to the self's own that the self

Coleridge heaven."

can be simultaneously "A lovely form writes, a enactment of self-alienation, his phantom shrinks back from himself with Yet, in a striking look" (The Friend, Essay V, 10 Aug. self walks with 1809). In The Prelude Wordsworth's "disavowing that is both self and not-self, too walks with his own soul ("Oh soul, another namely Nature. Whitman Iwith thee and thou with me"). And with later, in conversation Ibsen, Archer repressless, speculates that after result in Ghosts, the final curtain ifMrs. Alving "did not 'come to the rescue' itwas no doubt the a a in her" (112). Here too the notion of a gengangere, still 'walking' that one walks with ghost, "Ibsen as I Knew Him," inMajor See William self-alienation. Archer, implies Essays, 112. 1985), Joyce, 115-41. ed. Ellsworth

ghost 71 The Modern See Austin (New York: Methuen, Quigley, Stage and Other Worlds 72 to Ibsen's Ghosts" in The Critical Writings James Joyce, "Epilogue of James Mason and Richard Ellmann Press, (Ithaca: Cornell University 1989), 271.

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Alan L. Ackerman

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character, Vivian, in "The Decay of Lying" that the "unfortunate aphorism about Art said by Hamlet in order to convince the holding the mirror up toNature is deliberately of his absolute insanity in all art matters."73 For Wilde, Life imitates Art, bystanders is not to say simply that external or material beauty is produced by a more real which inner or spiritual one, but that the imagination constitutes reality for the eye. Nature herself is our creation: "it is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because on the Arts that have we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see come into existence" anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it (986). The "wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets," we get from in the served a long intellectual apprenticeship the Impressionists. Although Wilde in London, he would and Whistler fine arts, under Ruskin and Pater at Oxford the vision of the literature as chief among the arts, subordinating ultimately privilege no to that of the mind's "The image stained upon the canvas possesses eye. eye in "The Critic as Artist." spiritual element of growth or change," Wilde writes that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone" "Movement, is this problem of the visual arts more clear than in The Picture of (1026). Nowhere but in the narrative a painting comes alive. Dorian Gray. A painter ismurdered, of the binary and life are pervaded by his continual deconstruction between body and soul or matter and spirit, as well as that of subject and opposition says inWilde's novella, "Every portrait that is object, seer and seen. As Basil Hallward with feeling is a portrait of the artist" (21). And that remark about perception painted comment to Dorian that "nothing can cure the soul is deeply related to Lord Henry's but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul" (31). In The Picture of so deeply that he creates what Dorian Gray Wilde integrates literature and painting be described as his most theatrical work. Disaster befalls the actress Sibyl Vane may Wilde's work soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body" [53]), but that is ("the wonderful because in the end she gave up art for reality. "Dorian, Dorian," she exclaims, "before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. Itwas only in the theatre that I lived ... The ... I believed in everything painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but love!?and shadows, and I thought them real. You came?oh, my beautiful you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is" (74). But the shadows were
real. In Wilde's world, to be is to embrace seems.

and his Soul," one of Wilde's "The Fisherman lyrical fairy tales, extraordinarily on freedom and form; in it a young man literally cuts a similar meditation represents . . the away his Soul ("not the shadow of the body, but. body of the Soul" [255]) for love of a little mermaid. He achieves a higher wholeness only when, with the death of his beloved, his Soul reenters his body through his broken heart. The life of the soul requires the form of the body imagined through art in order to express itself: "I shall show you my soul, Dorian tells Hallward. You shall see the thing you fancy only God can see" (119).

73 See "The Decay of Lying," The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 981. will be from this edition of Complete Works. all future quotations from Wilde otherwise Unless noted, scene of Earnest with their that of Hamlet, later identify the opening would Max Beerbohm comparing in deep is dressed like Hamlet, theatrical effectiveness Jack Worthing 430n.). And, (in Ellmann, mourning.

HAMLET'S GHOST / VISUALIZING

139

in "The Critic as Artist." "They "Aesthetics are higher than ethics," Wilde writes the artistic vision vividly Wilde's to a more represents spiritual sphere." belong of form, subject-object polarities, often the comedy) of rigid conceptions dangers (and and the reifying gaze. "The Fisherman and his Soul," for example, explicitly echoes the on vision in dramatic form, Salom?. language of Wilde's most sustained meditation of the palace. The soldiers are spectators Salom? begins, like Hamlet, on the margins commenting
First Second First Second First The First The

on the act of seeing:

The Tetrarch has a sombre look.

Soldier: Soldier: Soldier: Soldier: Soldier: Cappadocian: Soldier: Cappadocian:

look. Yes; he has a somber at something. is looking He at someone. is looking He The Jews worship I cannot understand a God that. believe altogether in things that you ridiculous. cannot see. that you cannot see.

In fact, they only to me That seems

[553]
of the quasi court enables direct consideration of Jews in Herod's since the prohibition of theatrical representation against repre theological problem God in any image is a central feature of Judaic theology (the second of the ten senting the potently gazing Tetrarch, is afraid of Jokanaan because Herod, commandments). transcendent and "he is aman who has seen God"; he has performed a simultaneously subversive act of vision. "That cannot be," replies a Jew, expressing what the play will an even more effectively subversive notion. "There is no man show to be ultimately who hath seen God since the prophet Elias. He is the last man who saw God. In these statement is days God doth not show himself. He hideth himself" (my emphasis). This no man knoweth if Elias and made more radical by Another Jew: "Verily, challenged itwas but the shadow of God that he the prophet did indeed see God. Peradventure one can tell how saw." The debate is extended through a Fifth Jew who insists, "No . . .There is no the most God worketh knowledge of any thing" (my emphasis). Wilde, in both theatre of disbelief the suspension of playwrights, self-conscious predicates is of certainty. "The very essence of romance and religion on the impossibility in The Importance of Being Earnest.74 God's province is remarks Algernon uncertainty," as Elaine Scarry comments, absolute, by any "precisely because he is unlimited The presence
specifying acts of representation."75

and physical pain indicates the value of of Scriptural wounding Scarry's discussion inWilde's play and in the theatre generally. John the Baptist as a site of representation the body of the believer must If an object of belief, such as God, cannot be represented, serve as evidence of that belief, in effect, turning belief inside out. The theatrical the altar for example, in which the wounded body is to be displayed, resists and makes visible the shape of belief."76 Jokanaan repeatedly "externalizes formuch of the play he is present on stage only as a disembodied visual representation; context

74 The Complete Oscar Wilde, 75 The Body Elaine Scarry, Press, 1985), 206. University 76 Ibid., 204.

Works, 323. in Pain: The Making

and Unmaking

of

the World

(New

York:

Oxford

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Alan L. Ackerman

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in Salom? the silver platter that frames the severed head serves voice. Ultimately, function, for Jokanaan's resistance both has and has not been effective. paradoxical

Like "The Fisherman and his Soul," this relentlessly visual drama associates the lust of the eyes with death. Significantly, both Jokanaan (in a cistern) and the little mermaid (in the sea) resist entering a space where they can be seen. "Who is this woman who is looking at me?" asks Jokanaan when he is brought forth by force. "Iwill not have her does she look at me with her golden eyes, under her gilded look at me. Wherefore I know not who she is. I do not wish to know who she is."77The "lust of the eyelids? seems to eyes" (ascribed to virtually all of the characters in the play but Jokanaan) what Kant calls "accessory" or "dependent" beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). presuppose view, beauty "concerns only form," so if it is connected with "the agreeable as in the beauty of a human being, the purity of a (the sensation)," (desirability) of taste is impaired. "If a judgment about beauty ismingled with the least judgment interest," writes Kant, "then it is partial and not a pure judgment of taste. In order to we must not be in the least biased in favor of the play the judge in matters of taste, Herod's lust for Salome's indifferent about it."78 existence but must be wholly thing's leads him to a crisis of the spirit ("What she has done is a great crime. I am sure body In Kant's
that it was a crime against an unknown God."79), culminating in an execution of

invisibility. herself as Wilde

Salom?

is crushed

beneath

soldiers'

shields

instead of being decapitated

first planned.

appeals not to a notion of Despite his reputation as an aesthete, however, Wilde as opposed to the Kantian, aesthetic purity but to a notion of freedom in the Hegelian, sense. Once Jokanaan emerges, he is fixed by the reifying gaze; like the little mermaid in "The Soul of and Sybil Vane, he has a body as white as ivory. Yet, as Wilde writes is unjust to everybody, Man Under Socialism," "Despotism ; including the despot... are both and the watched The watchers is quite degrading" all authority (1087). The in Salom? because all are equally isolated or lacking in consciousness. imprisoned
lusts of the body result in "a crime against an unknown God" (574). And Salom?

herself crosses a horrifying boundary or threshold as she plants her living lips upon the dead mouth of Jokanaan. Herod, of course, is trapped by his word to commit a deed that will condemn him for the rest of history. "It is true, I have looked at you all "Your beauty troubled me. Your this evening," he says to Salom?. He continues: has grievously troubled me, and I have looked at you too much. But Iwill look beauty at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors at you no more. Neither should one look for mirrors do but show us masks" (571). The lust of the eyes that the is Herod self-consciousness. Indeed, so resistant to consciousness precludes is self-conscious. drama's climax makes of him an inverted Claudius. At least Claudius the play-within-the-play As Herod rises from watching (Salome's dance), he reverses call for light, crying: "Put out the torches. Iwill not look at things, Iwill not Claudius's suffer things to look at me. Put out the torches!" (574).
77 The Complete Oscar Wilde, 78 Immanuel Kant, Critique 558. trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing

Works,

of Judgment, Works, 571.

Company, 1987), ?16 and ?2. 79

Oscar Wilde, The Complete

VISUALIZING HAMLET'S GHOST /

Like Hamlet, herself. And, Salom?

141

is both the "observed of all observers"80 and a deadly spectator like Hamlet, she is a self-conscious performer whose stepfather/ spectator has incestuously married her mother. Salome's gender, therefore, is both less and more than most previous critics have recognized. While the play important an exploitative, the masculine gaze through the character of Herod, represents a more sophisticated audience can experience kind of seeing, especially ifWilde's is realized in production. Although doctrine of the "truth of masks" the play has and feminist readings, as John Paul Riquelme invited both misogynist compellingly shows, in writing conceptions
The Herod's

the part for the middle-aged Sarah Bernhardt, Wilde of the role and of the audience's likely response":
of the and audience's our own vision to the caused dance ... by a mature In Bernhardt's dancer affects as

"affects our

refraction relation

the

issue

of we

casting

Salom?,

an obvious the contradictory form of doubling experience through the actress becomes the performance old, in which during something an not. that the actress's makes doubling possible Through unveiling to recognize from its conventional chance view itself as different of

of young and linking that she obviously is the audience has the itself.81

to this reading, Salom? occupies a borderline space in According and conventional ways of looking. Riquelme also notes that in was famous for playing male roles and, especially, for playing her attraction to the "subtle" and "torturous" herself explained by remarking, "It is not male parts, but male brains

terms of both gender the 1890s Bernhardt Hamlet. character Bernhardt of Hamlet,

that I prefer."82

Herod's conception of the mirror as a reflector of things outside the self, superficial indicates an inadequate conception of the relation between mind images or masks, and reality; in this sense, his remark is not unlike Hamlet's relatively pedestrian to the players. Wilde's instructions intelligent use of the metaphor profoundly becomes evident in "The Fisherman" shown the Mirror of Wisdom:
It reflecteth into are who

in which

the Soul,

travelling

independently,

is

all things and on earth, save only the face of him who that are in heaven looketh it reflecteth looketh into itmay be wise. Many other mirrors not, so that he who of Opinion. This only is the Mirror of Wisdom. And there, but they are mirrors they nor is there this mirror know hidden from them.83 possess everything, anything it. This

The central paradox in this passage is in the word Mirror of Wisdom does not reflect; it is an emblem between self and other, not the ordinary chiasmic own wiser And the first sentence echoes Hamlet's . . / Than are dreamt things in heaven and earth,.

"reflect," for properly speaking the for knowing through the interplay relation of self to itself in a mirror. "There are more words to Horatio, of in your philosophy."84

80 Hamlet (3.1.150). 81 and Wilde's The Modernism Aesthetic "Shalom/Solomon/Sa/om?: John Paul Riquelme, Politics," Centennial Review 39.9 (1995), 575-610. Also see Larry Kramer, for a "feminist" "Cultural and reading, Musical Hermeneutics: The Salome Complex," For a reading Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990): 269-94. as both Romantic see Peter Conrad, of the play and pictorial, and Literary Form Romantic Opera of California Press, 1977). (Berkeley: University 82 Sarah Bernhardt, The Art of the Theatre (London: The Dial Press, 1925), 137. 83 Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works, 260. 84 Hamlet, (1.5.168-70).

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In his influential work, TheMirror and the Lamp, M. H. Abrams describes a paradigm 1800 (or the publication of Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads) in the two common of literary criticism. Abrams's title identifies and antithetic history of mind: the first typifying much from Plato to the eighteenth metaphors thinking a of Romantic of creativity. Rejecting century, the second indicative conceptions shift around
"mimetic" model, he argues, "romantic predications about poetry, or about art in

like 'overflow,' signifies the internal [the lamp] which, general, turn on a metaphor made external."85 Wilde articulates this notion explicitly in "The Critic as Artist." "The highest criticism," he writes, "is the record of one's own soul." spiritual reality, and form, far from obtaining any absolute existence apart from the mind, is, as Hegel writes, "born?born again, that is?of the mind."86 The Romantic notion that the soul could be perpetually liked.87 Beauty is reborn, Fvichard Ellmann writes, was one that Wilde particularly world with characterized by "intellectual being and by freedom."88 self-conscious, fundamentally The natural world, on the other hand, is only a reflection of the beauty that resides in the mind: "[I]n its own being, a natural existence such as the sun is indifferent, is not
free or self-conscious."

The mind

invests

the sensuous

In a 1909 tribute to his fallen countryman, titled, "Oscar Wilde: The suggestively to Catholicism, Poet of 'Salom?'," James Joyce considers Wilde's deathbed conversion the act of spiritual dedication with which he closed the spiritual rebellion of his life:
. . and then his true soul, Christ,. gnostic the mantle of Heliogabalus. His fantastic trembling, through on the his opera variation but at of art and nature, [Salom?]?a rapport legend, polyphonic brilliant with the same time a revelation of his own psyche?his books epigrams sparkling . . . these are now divided booty.89 In his last book, De timid, he kneels Profundis, and saddened, shines before a

of Wilde's The metaphor of division levels, for the division operates on multiple legacy is viewed in relation to the rapport of art and nature in his play and the truth of his own soul that shone through the profligacy of his body. For Joyce notions of in his own later work by the and fragmentation, mediated and complicated wholeness of souls, are pervasive concerns. And nowhere is Wilde more poignantly transmigration in the Proteus chapter of Ulysses with a brief invoked by Joyce than, significantly, toWilde's Requiescat, the poem he wrote about his dead she is near" the poem begins. Stephen Dedalus, meanwhile, lightly, his own ghosts (not all of them of the dead), not to mention the antithesis of the life of the spirit. hypostasis," allusion sister Isola. "Tread is surrounded by the vexing "imp

in recognizing The spirit becomes self-aware self in other, a continual play of for the antithetical forces. Hegel's phenomenology extends logically into aesthetics,
85 The Mirror and the Lamp, 48. Abrams, 86 trans. Bernard Lectures on Aesthetics, G. W. F. Hegel, (1886, rpt. London: Bosanquet Introductory Books, 1993), 4. Penguin 87 Oscar Wilde, 220. Ellmann, 88 Lectures, 4. Introductory Hegel, 89 and Richard Ellmann (Ithaca: James Joyce, The Critical Writings of James Joyce, eds. Ellsworth Mason a troupe founded of the English Cornell University Press, 1959), 205. The first production by Players, on in 1918, in Switzerland for the purpose actor Claud of putting plays Joyce and the English Sykes was The Importance of Being Earnest.

VISUALIZING GHOST / HAMLET'S

143

... of the mind," for the mind or "beauty of art is the beauty that is born spirit only is of truth. This challenge of the very distinction between inner and outer realms capable a radical from the eighteenth-century thinkers Eliot had departure again constitutes writes: praised. Hegel
Now, genuine Genuine Nothing liberates fleeting this whole reality, of the empirical and outer world is just what is not the world of sphere a mere more but is to be entitled than is true of art... appearance strictly to be found the immediacy and of external is only of feeling object. reality beyond ... Art is ... the substance of nature and of mind is genuinely real but that which from the semblance and deception the real import of appearances of this bad and and imparts to phenomenal semblances a higher reality, born of mind.90

world,

The

over the outer. For Hegel is not substituted for or privileged the a metaphor an inner, hallucinatory "mind's eye" is not site but for the experience of inner and outer the spirit through sensuous between form.91 The binary opposition inner world down. Thus, "real works of art are those where content and form exhibit a thorough identity."92

breaks

The union between form and content in art, or between the human individual and nature in spirit, is, in short, deeply related to theories of subjective vision. Goethe had written that, "in directing our attention to... physical colours, we find it quite possible to place an objective phenomenon beside a subjective one, and often by means of the union of the two successfully penetrate farther into the nature of appearance."93 This view of phenomena, protest against the Enlightenment including human beings, as and objects of objective, scientific analysis, insists on the creative role of the subjects spectator or viewer in the act of seeing." "To see the object as in itself it really is,'"

teacher Walter Pater, "has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to with Pater's explicitly Hegelian realize it distinctly"94 Continuous of art, theory Werner Heisenberg's in 1927 ("On the Perceptual uncertainty principle, published Content of Quantum Theoretical Kinematics and Mechanics") that it is showed impossible for anyone to know at any instant the velocity and position of an electron, a problem of knowing a problem of seeing. For if an observer that is fundamentally shines enough light on an electron to see it, the light itself will change the electron's writes Wilde's velocity. The material [anschaulisch].95 world, assuming that it exists, is ultimately not "seeable"

Moderns,

If the poetic mind is a lamp, as Abrams and the suggests of both the Romantics then the world illuminate is altered in the very process of perception. they

incarnation in Emerson's of the mind's eye is realized metaphor as a transparent an idea that is both the poet himself and mystical. eyeball, physical 92 Wallace Press, (Oxford: Oxford 1975), 190. Hegel's Logic, trans. William University 93 Goethe, Theory of Colours, 57. 94 Walter in Art and Poetry, the 1893 text (Berkeley: Studies Pater, The Renaissance: University California Press, 1980), xix. 95 Von W. Heisenberg, Inhalt der quantentheoretischen "?ber den anschaulichen Kinematik (1836), this Mechanik" (Berlin: (1927), Spring-Verlag, Gesammelte 1985), Werke, 172. ed. W. Blum, H.-P. D?rr, and H. Rechenberg, Series A/Part

90 Hegel, 91 Later,

Introductory in "Nature"

Lectures,

10. for

of und I

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Alan L. Ackerman

Jr.

Consequently,

in a perverse twist of the Romantic epistemology, the mind is poten unsure, always isolated and alone. "The eye's plain version is a thing tially always Stevens.96 For the theatre, the problem of invisibility, then, apart," writes Wallace the further problem of the possibility of a communal experience or even of provokes when the lights come on. Claudius's any social experience. Plays?like ghosts?vanish "Give me some light!"97 dissolves the play-within-the-play cry, just as the dawn the specter or as the physicist alters the course of the electron. On the rising dissolves of the sun, ghosts depart to the borne nights, as ghosts, they come again. from which no travelers return; yet, on future

96 "An Ordinary Wallace Stevens, Poems and a Play by Wallace Stevens, 97 Hamlet (3.2.269).

Evening ed. Holly

in New Stevens

Haven" (New

in The Palm York: Vintage

at the End of theMind: 331-51. Books),

Selected