2. “Oh, horrible, most horrible!”—Hamlet’s Telephone
Barnardo: Who’s there?
Francisco: Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.
Barn: Long live the King.
Fran: Barnardo
Barn: He.
Fran: You come most carefully upon your hour.
Barn: ‘Tis now struck twelve. Get thee to bed, Francisco.
Hamlet (1. 1. 1-5)[1]
And yet, you’re saying yes, almost automatically, suddenly, sometimes irreversibly. Your picking it up means the call has come through. It means more: you’re its beneficiary, rising to meet its demand, to pay a debt. You don’t know who’s calling or what you are going to be called upon to do, and still, you are lending your ear, giving something up, receiving an order. It’s a question of answerability.
Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book[2]
In our first chapter, we offered you the First Folio (1623) as the scene of a media event. Thus was “Shakespeare” launched as an ongoing splicing together of texts and readers, a viral recruitment of variously lively hosts, whom the Folio posits as friends to the textual corpus / corpse of “Shakespeare.” The First Folio stands for us as a strategically imperfect archive. It offers a partial Shakespearean impression that requires you to splice together looking and reading and to summon up, by that exchange, a Shakespeare phantom that you take as a referent. Read hard and you will, if you read rightly, glimpse the man, and so receive his impression. His words assume the aura of a code. The living, breathing, bios that he was becomes twinned with the biblion (book but also niche or slot in a library) that you keep circulating, enabling him / it to live on. [3] By this recruitment, we become “wetware,” the bio-semiotic motor or substrate to Shakespeare’s animation in our various presents.
In this chapter we offer an un/reading of Hamlet (1600-02) that posits the play as already a response to such recruitment and lesson giving by the un/dead. By its structure and handling of questions of reference the play seeks to capture the peculiar feeling that comes with finding yourself answering the call that John Heminge and Henrie Condell place, picking up the telephone from which issues a reproduction of a voice that is not itself, but which claims to be so, and which, worse still, you treated as such merely by agreeing to answer. The insistent ring, hum, ping, or drone of your phone, whatever stimulus it is that demands attention, stitches you into the telephonic structure of the call. You find yourself on the line, waiting, on hold to the phone (voice). To write as directly as possible and to risk nonsensicality, we posit Hamlet as already producing what we can name today the effect of telephony, and exploiting (right royally) the telephonic dialing up of distant voices for its dramatic effects. Hamlet is a telephone book.
Beyond capturing, in advance of the fact, the peculiar effect of telephony, we argue that Hamlet ventures an order of telephonic resistance or unreadability. It resists the call. Even as Hamlet (and we) find ourselves compelled to answer, the play refuses to capitulate to the weak sovereignty of a dead father-king whose voice comes back complaining about something or other he got in his ear. Voices go missing, get interrupted, dropped, relayed, recorded, rerouted, and augmented through various writing devices such as tables, letters, a dumb show, and by the human component to writing technologies, actors, messengers, secretaries. Media proliferates and pools. These devices may, or may not, appear on stage as props. Such voices appear then always as facsimiles of themselves, as reports, or reports of reports read aloud, making some voices distorted echoes of themselves and others hallucinations.
Hamlet proceeds as a parade of these fact/faux/similes, multimedia renderings or reproductions, the action held hostage by what’s not on stage, by what might, or might not, have happened, be happening, and remain to happen, as that is suggested by differently backed forms of evidence. By its ongoing deployment of different media, all of which fail, the play attenuates the call; strands us in the non-time of answerability, of finding-ourselves-recruited-before-the-call, of being entered into a becoming wetware. It worries protocols of evidence, acts of reading (and not reading) that seek to refer or to touch the world; draws attention to the way these readings are only as reliable as their backing—the physical substrates: wax, skin, paper (rags or vegetable), ink; the human witness that offers the report.[4] The play ruins Hamlet’s own drive for a textual forensics, C. S. I., “gotcha” moment in the staging of The Murder of Gonzago, both under and over-producing even as Hamlet seeks to shut things down; to set things straight. Such probing yields only phantom referents, fact/faux/similes of things that may or may not have occurred.
In offering the play to you as a telephone book, a fragmentary auto-archiving of what its like to find yourself “on the line,” we aim to account for the rich and varied responses to the play’s resistance, by reorienting critical attention to the play’s tactical unreadability. Critics and audiences have long noted the play’s obsession with writing technologies, with repetition, revision, reanimation, and revival.[5] But, largely, such critical and creative efforts, imagining that “every exit is an entrance somewhere else” or time-traveling un-Hamletings (filmic and critical), have sought to bandage up or smooth over disabling cruxes all in order to reduce the static the play generates.[6] They supplement the play in order to supplant its difficulties, generating a weak sovereignty over the text. The core difference between this wealth of artistic and critical fetish work and our approach lies in the way we resist the urge to minister to the text, positing the play, instead, as a self-rending multimedia archive that will not resolve into a single, sovereign performance or reading.
You can try to keep your text of Hamlet straight, lining up the terms, by reading the play’s writing games thematically, as Jonathan Goldberg has so deftly done.[7] You can divide the labor; bust the cruxes by editing them away; and then, with the text sedated, hallucinate a performance and simply declare, as does John Dover Wilson, What happens in Hamlet.[8] Like Steven Ratcliffe, you can dwell with the off-stage world that haunts the play to very productive effect.[9] You can claim the play as the first instance of the “whodunit” or the first film noir as Linda Charnes has done in a brilliantly anachronistic re-zoning of the play.[10] You can stitch the play to the confessional confusion of the period and yoke the mobility of voices to the “hic et ubique” of Hamlet Senior’s ghost.[11] You can even own up to the play’s uncanny repetitions and self-revisions; spell the action and the title backwards as Terrence Hawkes does in his still inspiring “Telmah,” finding therein a “jazz aesthetic” that doubles as a politicizing jouissance.[12] You can posit the play as a kind of psychoanalytic substrate or psychotropic flypaper on which editors and readers rend their wings, as Marjorie Garber does in her readings of the psycho/bio/bibliographical import of editing.[13] Or you can wax ecstatic and luxuriate in the muteness that comes with finding yourself recruited as wetware and imagine a salvific, new media history to come that would resolve all.[14] But as you do so, realize that you are generating a weak sovereignty over the text by refolding cruxes, managing an economy of reading and not reading, so that Hamlet coheres, and you can end the call, and put this telephone / book down.
But try as we might, even as we hang up, put Hamlet down, and tip toe away from its niche in the library / depository / crypt, lest that call come again, we’re never quite off the hook. Hence all the labor that goes into managing the call and the hallucinations of certainty or reference it produces. Problem is that no matter what feats of editing or parceling out of media we attempt, the structure of survivance to which Hamlet responds and which it archives (badly) sports objections to our attempts to sort the play into a series of mono-media operating on separate, static-free channels. We remain, then, like Hamlet, Horatio, Ophelia, and Marcellus, like Yorick, like all of the various objects pressed to use as imperfect answering machines in the play, going over and over the same telephonic cruxes the play generates. And these cruxes do not derive from some imperfect translation from stage to print and back that might one day be resolved to create a seamless set of reversible passages. Instead, the play exists as an irreducible set of problems generated by its archiving of what was already a multimedia platform, the public theater. Moreover, by its own auto-archiving, the text fractures itself. Always too much and too little, Hamlet repeatedly threatens not to happen even as it repeatedly does so.
In this chapter we offer an account of the play’s rending or disabling across different media, pursuing lines of questioning that the play paradoxically opens up by closing them down as it becomes a multimedia archive: the text (Q1, Q2, F1); the editions; the critical apparatus; the creative elaboration in plays, on film, and so on. For us, Hamlet designates not a play, but a burgeoning archive of the predicament of the citizen-subject forced to sift the differently mediated textual remains of acts past under the demands placed by a spectral sovereign-father whose call you have to take. Radicalizing John Dover Wilson’s What Happens in Hamlet, we refuse to hear the declarative cast to his title or even to process it as a question. Instead, we ask perversely what is the meaning of “what” and “what is the meaning of “happens”? What is the textual referent of Hamlet?[15] These questions may strike some readers as strange. Yet to assume the transparency of the statement “what happens in Hamlet” or even to turn that statement into a question is to operate still within the impossible forensics framework that drives Hamlet and Hamlet’s action. What happened? Murder. Who did it? Claudius. Only by questioning the basis of the question can we perceive the choreography by which Hamlet constitutes itself as an archive and its ash.[16]
First Words
The play begins, as you recall, with the posing of a question that is already an answer, a response to some thing. The action begins in reference to an absent word or sound, the intimation of a prompt or presence that comes before. A voice asks the dark to speak: “Who’s there?” Are you noise or presence? Will you, can you answer? Friend or foe? But already there’s a problem, a switch, a reversal. The yet to be named Francisco answers with a question: “Stand and unfold yourself.” Undo your cloak. Show your face. If I am to answer, you must answer first. We must both agree to be answerable. Barnardo answers the challenge not by name but by function. “Long live the King,” he proclaims, speaking as he who bears the sovereign’s mark. But which king is it exactly—Hamlet Senior, Claudius? Do such names even matter? There’s always a King, isn’t there? Perhaps it’s safest for the likes of you and I to disappear and present ourselves as soldiers merely—as they who put teeth in the sovereign’s mouth, who serve as mediators of sovereign violence. It’s safest to hand off the call; own up to your recruitment, and pass the receiver along to another. ‘Hamlet, we think it’s for you.’ Things settle down as Francisco posits the voice as the man he’s expecting and names him: “Barnardo.” Barnardo agrees to be himself. Then they’re down to familiarities, minor recriminations or thanks—Barnardo’s either late or very punctual—“’Tis cold…not a mouse stirring” (1. 1. 6-7). Go on, go in, and get to bed. Yet even as the matter seems settled, we know that the two men have merely postponed an installed uncertainty with regard to such challenges and answers, for Horatio and Marcellus are on their way up, coming to settle a question, to speak to a thing that keeps coming back, to a ghost that, so it seems, “would be spoke to” (1. 1. 44).
Already, then, by its beginning, the play offers itself as an insufficient archival response to a word or noise that precedes the first words of the play. In terms of the structures of survivance that give us our daily Shakespeares, we might say that Hamlet unfolds quite precisely as a self-rending attempt to remember the word that comes before the first word (what was it again?), ensuring thereby that that word be forgotten, held at bay. The play documents the afterlife of some thing that precedes it, which is finished, but whose facticity always exceeds the play’s attempts to reconnect its present to a moment that has passed.
In Derridean terms, we might say that what “happens” in the play derives from an “event” that produces not only “an act, a performance, a praxis, but an oeuvre, that is, at the same time the result and the trace left by a supposed operation and its supposed operator.”[17] By this completion or terminus, some thing lives on. Indeed, its completion or “cutting off” was what “destined [it] to this sur-vival, to this excess over present life.” The absent word or noise to which Barnardo responds figures this cut or cutting off, the trace of something that has past and this “cut assures a sort of archival independence or autonomy that is quasi-machine-like” placing us in a realm of “repetition, repeatability, iterability, serial and prosthetic substitution of self for self.” Within the play, this “quasi-machine-like” matrix generates a structure of repetition and replay that comes to write what follows; the action; its translation to other media platforms; its afterlife in critical discourse. The effect is “quasi-machine-like,” in Derrida’s terms, because even as we “live” the madness as our “own,” which is to say that it manifests as if “organic,” “eventful,” “human,” it responds to the afterlife or “sur-vival” of an operation (voice / event / noise / word) that appears to us only as a trace which would render it “automatic,” “machinic,” in- or “non-human.” The challenge remains, we think, to model the play outside or without such terms and so to tolerate the dis/ease it generates.[18]