This basically an isolated close reading of certain lines from Hamlet V.i and V.ii, representing the VERY beginning phase of a longer project I am working on. I am interested in what I see as two competing conceptualizations of death as they are presented by Hamlet in the plays final act--death as conservative and linked to the earthly realm versus death as an absolute negation, the meaning of which falls completely in the transcendent dimension of the "beyond." I want to think about this juxtaposition within the larger framework of Hamlet criticism, but also in conjunction with some texts and ideas I have been thinking through lately: Hegel's distinction between "absolute" and "abstract" negation in the _Phenomenology_, Bataille's reading these points in Hegel in terms of "general versus restricted economy"; Derrida's reading of Bataille's reading of Hegel, and some thoughts on sovereignty and "decision" via Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Should be a breeze, right?...
I will refer to the understanding of death posited by Hamlet in V.i as conservative or regenerative, bound to the earthly order and preoccupied with sovereignty that is palpably human in nature. Following Hamlet and Horatio’s entrance upon the jovial debates of the gravediggers that opens the scene, the sight of Yorick’s skull incites a lengthy and somber meditation on the inevitably of death for every man, regardless of any individual’s terrestrial station in life. Musing on the inexorability of death each human faces, Hamlet puts down the skull of Yorick and addresses Horatio concerning the possibility of regeneration inherent in one’s death: “To what base uses do we return, Horatio!/ Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of / Alexander, till ‘a find it stopping a bunghole?” (V.i.202-204). While the sovereign station of kinship is debased in this juxtaposition with Alexander’s remains as filling a hole in a barrel, the emperor nevertheless is “conserved” as his earthly body returns to the earth to fill a present void (literally, the hole in the barrel is a concrete instance of lack or nullity). When Horatio protests that Hamlet is wasting time in considering this interpretation of death, Hamlet elaborates:
…Alex-
ander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth
to dust , the dust is earth, of earth we make loam,
and why for loam whereto he was converted might not
they stop a beer barrel? V.i.208-211
While Alexander’s kinship does not prevent him from escaping the natural force of death, the end of his earthly life does not thrust him into a state of absolute nothingness, but rather his remains are regenerative and actually supplement a hole, or figure of lack: the bunghole. Moreover, in whatever capacity the divine or non-corporeal soul of Alexander is severed from his earthly body, the body of the emperor itself returns back to the earth from which it came—“Alexander returneth/ to dust, the dust is earth”—and in this sense his death is both conservative and productive because “of earth we make loam.”
Hamlet continues:
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O that earth that kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall t’expel the [winter’s] flaw!
But soft, soft awhile, here comes the King,
The Queen and courtiers. V.i. 213-218
Another figure of earthly sovereignty is here invoked, that of Caesar, and again Hamlet imagines his corporeal body as replenishing a hole or void through that body’s conservative return to the realm of the terrestrial. It is significant that Hamlet has recourse to the heroic couplet form in this speech, as the structure of the verse in lines 213-215 mirrors the recursivity Hamlet attributes to death.
That is, the couplet form implies a sense of movement within bounds and a meticulous balancing of meter that is further regulated by the constraints of an aabb rhyme scheme. The second line of each couplet is thus dependent upon, and reminiscent of, the line that preceded it. The verse produces coherent meaning—and there is movement—but it is movement that plays upon the relationship of sameness and difference; it is a recursive movement, a conservative movement. As the body of the two earthly kings perish but return in a different state to fulfill new earthly functions, so too does the couplet form manifest this constrained and conservative movement that is balanced, yet contains variation within that very balance. This somewhat symmetrical description of the ways in which the earthly bodies of sovereigns are regenerated through the natural process of earthly decay and reproduction is broken off though, with the physical entrance of the actual kingly body that preoccupies Hamlet’s thought throughout the play—Claudius.
This version of death is sharply contrasted in the following scene, the concluding scene of the play, and once again is elucidated in a conversation between Hamlet and Horatio. After a messenger has delivered the news of the impending dual to be fought between the prince and Laertes, Horatio advises Hamlet to decline or postpone the battle, dissuading, “ You will lose, my lord” (V.ii.209). Hamlet’s response at first seems to evince that he has made a definitive decision to act and proceed with the dual:
Not a whit, we defy augury. There is a special
Providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be [now],
‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if
It not be now, yet it [will] come—the readiness is all.
Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what it is to
Leave betimes, let be. V.ii.219-224
As he speaks of the inevitability of death once again, Hamlet has shifted from an emphasis on the natural process of death, decay, and regeneration to an understanding of death that is linked with the realm outside of human consciousness and agency—death is now conceptualized in terms of “augury” and divine circumscription. Whereas the version of death centered on the return of the earthly kings Alexander and Caesar in terrestrial terms was juxtaposed with a conservation of matter, now Hamlet speaks if Divine kinship and the “special/ Providence” of a Christian God in his allusion to the New Testament parable in lines 219-220 . Again, death is associated with sovereignty, but this time, is an absolute kind of death, one left completely to the will of the divine that does not adduce any redemptive or regenerative effects.
Rather than a decision to act, what Hamlet actually posits is a resignation to a fate that rests solely in the will of the transcendent sovereign: “If it be [now],/ ‘tis not to come.” In other words, if the certainty of death is brought to full presence now, its possibility is collapsed and nothingness awaits. The next clause in line 221 at first appears to be the opposite of this pronouncement because of the syntactical arrangement of these repeated terms: “ if it be not to come, it will be now.” Yet, this attempted inverted parallelism does not produce any new meaning—the frustrated chiasmus only reiterates the previous point: if nothingness or non-action awaits, then the certainty of death is now. This jumbled syntactical “decision” is not a resolution of a thesis and its antithesis, but an iteration that conceals meaning rather than making sense present.
At the very end of this line, Hamlet does offer what can be seen as the antithesis to the duality between present certainty of death and future indeterminacy: “if/ it be not now, yet it will come.” If the present moment does not harbor this moment of certainty in death, then it will occur in the future. In the progression of these three statements, Hamlet has now mapped out an explicit dichotomy between the effects of death in the present moment and a future state that we saw was not marked by a distinction between being and nothingness in the regenerative and conservative treatment of death in the previous scene.Howeer, the syntactical arrangement of the verse is not exactly a progression per se; and the map is circuitous at best. The oscillation and repetitious (dis)symmetry of these lines plays out Hamlet’s indecisiveness and is marked by an excessive iteration of similar words that does not produce new meaning, in the same way that Hamlet’s “decision” to embrace the possibility of death in the dual with Laertes is not a decision at all. His resignation to divine determination of death is not a movement forward, but a compliant stasis, just as the convoluted verse arrests the reader’s movement through the lines and thwarts a manifestation of meaning.
This “absoluteness” of death—or a death characterized by complete nullity and negation—is confounded by Hamlet’s next enigmatic assertion to Horatio, “ Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is’t to/ leave betimes, let be.” Essentially, Hamlet argues that since at death, consciousness ceases, then no one will be cognizant of that which he has left behind, therefore there really is no decision to make; in the absolute annihilation of death, one has nothing to lose.
This version of death is divorced from the earthly regeneration inherent in bodily death that Hamlet suggested in V.i , and here an interpretation of death falls entirely beyond the realm of human understanding. Just as the form of the verse mirrored the content of death’s effects in the previous scene, here too we see a juxtaposition of the formal qualities of Hamlet’s speech mirroring the concept he posits: in the same way this absolute nullity of death is beyond human comprehension, the iterative repetition and consulted syntax of the verse conceals meaning rather than producing significance.
Evidence of Hamlet’s resignation to God’s control over death and his state of mental stasis is confounded in the final words of this short speech, “let be.” Here we have a pseudo-repetition—or a modified echo-- of the opening lines of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy of III.i. Hamlet begins at III.I.55, “To be or not to be, that is the question” and proceeds to ruminate about whether it is better to live in this harsh earthly world, or to die. At this earlier moment in the play, the possibilities inherent in the experience of death are a question, and a decision is on the line. He questions whether the soul reaches a new spiritual plane at death and fears “the dread of something after death” (III.i.77). Hamlet comes to the conclusion that no human would choose to live unless they feared the effects of death in the transcendent, spiritual realm. However, when Hamlet arrives at this final scene in the drama, the question has been answered, and no decision is to be made. Death is inevitable, controlled by divine will, and ends in an absolute negation of human consciousness in a state of certain indeterminacy. The lyrical movement of the inquisitive soliloquy collapses in this syntactically static speech that ends with the iterative “let be,” and this conception of death is the converse of the earthly, regenerative, and conservative function of death Hamlet posits in the previous scene.
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