Shakespeare's Hamlet by Tzachi Zamir;

Author:Tzachi Zamir;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2017-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

HAMLET’S CHIASMUS OF THEATRICALIZATION

The key to seeing the extent and significance of chiasmus in Hamlet’s language is to recognize that he finds himself, throughout, in an agonizing condition of cross-purposes that takes chiastic form. Shakespeare shows how a chiasmus of theatricalization lies in wait within the human imagination itself and how, by facing its challenges, that chiasmus can be harnessed to produce consciousness of an inner atemporality where inward being is disclosed. By the imagination’s inherent theatricalization I mean the back-and-forth movements between role-playing consciousness and a would-be non-role-playing consciousness that is never free from role playing. Hamlet’s meditative employment—his productive thinking—of chiasmus, right to left and left to right, AB:BA, ad infinitum, is his mirror held up to nature. The elements of chiasmus necessarily form an effectively infinite progression because, as Lisa Freinkel has nicely put it, “Repetition becomes inversion and inversion takes us back to where we started,” so that chiasmus initiates “an exchange that seems to have no beginning and no end.”12 Hamlet’s representations, to himself, of his chiastic condition constitute repeated attempts to grasp the totality of infinite progressions, and they repeatedly produce momentary inhibitions or suspensions of consciousness of the immediate external world. In other words, in Hamlet’s hands chiasmus becomes a compact, portable engine of infinite progression and of experiencing the impossibility of grasping the totality of such a progression. Judging by the intensity of his recurring to chiasmus we may well conclude that he knows, or at least senses, the blessings it can confer. He knows or senses that the failure it entails can somehow leave him with the residual consciousness of a self in an inward now. He knows, or senses as well, that paradoxically, the use of this instrument of momentary suspension can ultimately furnish the grounds for his experience and action in the world. Indeed, one of the abiding, creative paradoxes of Hamlet’s thinking (and his grasp of his—of humanity’s—condition) is centered in the back-and-forth movements of his theatrical chiasmata: these repeatedly disclose a resolute purposiveness within apparent vacillation. This paradox reaches a climax in his “If it be . . .” clauses concerning the now, in act 5. I will yet return to these clauses, but I note already that they, too, are tightly driven by the effects of chiasmus: “If it [A] be now, ’tis [B] not to come. If it be [B] not to come, it will [A] be now” (5.2.198–99).13

Hamlet’s most significant use of the chiasmus of theatricalization—serving virtually as a template for all his other employments of this figure—is his self-accusatory question concerning the player’s capacity to feel and to express emotion. After asking about that emotion, “all for nothing—For Hecuba?” he asks further:

What’s [A] Hecuba to [B] him, or [B] he to [A] her,

That he should weep for her?

(2.2.494–95).

Horatio says more than he knows when he describes the language of Hamlet’s retreat into theatrical disguise as “whirling words” (1.2.132). These chiastic whirling words consist of a layering of play-acting upon would-be non-play-acting upon play-acting, ad infinitum.

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