On Hamlet's Crypt: Effi Briest, Asta Nielsen, and Britney
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ON HAMLET’S CRYPT ON HAMLET’S CRYPT: EFFI BRIEST, ASTA NIELSEN, AND BRITNEY SPEARS AUTHOR • VIOLA KOLAROV ARTIST • SUSANNE LANCKOWSKY Cet article examine la façon dont on représente l’instinct comme un fantôme et comment on le transmit de cette manière. Il entre dans les détails de deux thèses fonda- mentales. La première dit qu’on ne définit pas l’instinct à travers l’héritage humain puisque l’instinct n’est pas This contribution looks at the way instinct is transmit- une structure évaluable et, en plus, il ne se soumet ni ted and represented as ghost appearance. The essay elab- au processus du deuil ni à celui du développement. La orates two basic theses: first, that instinct is not defined deuxième dit que les œuvres littéraires classiques, ainsi by creaturely heritage, since it is not a testable structure que celles populaires peuvent servir à transmettre un in itself, nor subject to mourning and developmental fantôme chargé de l’héritage instinctif. Cet étude repré- processes; and second, that works of fine literature and sente un modèle de lecture des généalogies fantômes qui pop oeuvres alike may serve as carriers of a ghost trans- combine les familières reproductives avec les familiales mission charged with instinctive heritage. The study reproductives puisqu’il fait appel aux traditions telles represents a model for reading ghostly genealogies that que le roman de l’adultère, de la philosophie continen- complement the familiar and familial reproductive ones tale, de la psychanalyse et de Disney. as it draws on traditions such as the adultery novel, con- tinental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and Disney. Viola Kolarov, enseigne l’allemand à l’Université Johns Hopkins, ainsi qu’à l’Université de New York avant de Currently based in Berlin, Viola Kolarov has taught in s’installer à Berlin. Elle publie des textes sur Shakespea- the German Departments of the Johns Hopkins Uni- re, sur l’art contemporain, sur le cinéma et sur la culture versity and New York University. She has published on populaire. Son prochain livre, intitulé Shakespeare and Shakespeare, contemporary art, film, and pop culture. the Autobiography of the Machine Age, propose des Her forthcoming book, “Shakespeare and the Auto- nouvelles réflexions sur Goethe, sur la traduction/trans- biography of the Machine Age,” rethinks Goethe, the mission de Shakespeare en allemand, ainsi que sur la German translation/transmission of Shakespeare, and tradition littéraire allemande, dans le contexte de media the German literary tradition in the contexts of media technology. technology. Originaire de Berlin, Susanne Lanckowsky s’inscrit à Originally from Berlin, Susanne Lanckowsky entered l’Académie des beaux-arts de Karlsruhe sous la direc- the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, class of Franz Ack- tion de Franz Ackermann en 2007. Après 2009, elle ermann, in 2007. Since 2009 she has shown solo and in participe à de nombreuses expositions individuelles et group on numerous occasions and studied abroad with collectives. Elle étudie à l’étranger pendant un semes- prestigious scholarship support for one semester at the tre à Faculdade de Belas Artes Universidade do Porto Faculdade de Belas Artes Universidade do Porto, Portu- au Portugal, ainsi que à la Escuela Nacional de Pintura, gal, and for another semester at the Escuela Nacional de Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda au Mexique grâce à Pintura, Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda in Mexico. des bourses prestigieuses. • ISSUE 2-1, 2011 • 80 KOLAROV & LANCKOWSKY ON HAMLET’S CRYPT “I’m plagued by fear at my duplicity. core of our deepest longings that, although shattered I don’t have the right feelings.” by later stages of development, remains and retains the Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest (1895) libidinal and instinctual draw of our individual desti- nies. As a method and practice of media transmission, “I am a plaything. psychoanalysis was founded as the receiver of Goethe’s That I have feelings has been forgotten.” discovery3 and provided a new forum for writing on Asta Nielsen as Hamlet (1920) and from crypts that remained compatible with modern discourses that shunned fiction.4 Another historical line “I know I may be young, of crypt succession goes from the presumed adulteress but I’ve got feelings too.” Mary, Queen of Scotts, who embodies the loss of con- Britney Spears, “I’m a Slave 4 U” (2001) tinental European heritage, to the new maritime world order pursued by Queen Elisabeth of England,5 through In crypt transmissions, the borders between recipients, Effi Briest’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s sacrifices to Ger- otherwise scrupulously maintained by Oedipal identi- man unification (the first one, in the nineteenth century), ties, signatures, biographies, narratives, and languages to Asta Nielsen’s embodiment of WWI trauma and the of pure and perfect translatability, disappear, not be- local-globalist tragic reception of Britney Spears’ work. cause they are destroyed or in any way tampered with, As an effect of the crypt, however, every story, as work but because the distance between receivers is so great of fiction, becomes the forecourt or preface6 to another that the crypt can replicate itself perfectly without en- story consolidated under names like Effi Briest or Brit- dangering the Oedipal edifices. Thephilosopheme crypt ney Spears, names that, after Shakespeare, travel intact was revalorized by Laurence Rickels in the course of over abysses of creaturely ruin, transmitted through his engagement with psychoanalytic writings on aber- various media. 1 rant conditions of mourning. Most generally, the crypt Sufferers of war and love neuroses proved particularly holds stowaway loss in the pre-Oedipal phases or layers suitable media receivers of a black and blueprint like of libidinal organization, which remains preserved in- Shakespeare’s Hamlet, perhaps because Freud began to tact because the crypt is unrecognized and unmourned, think the neuroses while reading the play or, better yet, and capable of instant replication upon contact with because instinctive life simply finds a way to transmit 2 host Oedipal structures. The neotenous state —both itself over vast expansions of time and place via tech- premature sexuality and retention of early features in nical difficulties or chronic breakdowns. What makes the mature form—of the crypt’s inhabitant makes it the neurotics such good recipients of crypt transmissions is perfect candidate for development in the novel, film, the internal split that drives them. Friedrich Nietzsche and pop culture. is the only—at least to my knowledge—philosopher- Our ability to identify with the crypt’s inhabitant, heir informant of this condition, which he also likened to to our most intense pre-Oedipal pleasures and traumas, pregnancy, thus giving us the first inkling of an artifi- may go back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the play about cial womb. The first “artificial” replication of a womb the prince who failed in the succession of Oedipal pow- is recorded in the myth of the Immaculate Conception er structures, while retaining his childhood features in where the ear becomes the receiving and conceiving adult shape. J. W. Goethe first noted and developed this organ. Shakespeare also used the ear as replica of the highlight of the play in his educational fantasy novel, womb and its functions: the organ receives the weapon Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meisters Appren- that kills the king and “Father and Mother” Hamlet, fa- ticeship). The Hamlet image Goethe conjures is of a flow- ther and mother being one flesh at the moment of con- er’s violent metamorphosis into a tree whose branches ception, as Hamlet tells us in act 3, scene 1. When “Fa- and roots shatter the fragile vessel that nourished it. The ther and Mother” is replaced by “Uncle and Mother,” allegory reflects what psychoanalysis discovered at the Oedipal identities split. • ISSUE 2-1, 2011 • 82 KOLAROV & LANCKOWSKY Ella Freeman Sharpe’s interpretation of the play pro- Nietzsche associated his ability to pick up ghost mes- jected the breakdown of Hamlet’s psyche, conceived as sages with ‘having small ears,’ normally reserved for the proxy for Shakespeare’s condition, into the characters ‘eternal feminine.’ As recipient of a crypt transmission, in the play.7 She recognized only Ophelia, the feminine Nietzsche’s corpus proved interchangeable with media double of Hamlet, as a legitimate narcissistic object, but genealogies that likewise recorded the ‘birth of music’ as the play abounds with them. Her suicide, argues Sharpe, ‘ear poison.’ The undisputable power of the dead over represents Hamlet’s fate in miniature. Since Hamlet is the present and the future feeds on the melancholy dis- unable to act, his suicide is illicit and indirect, brought position Nietzsche did not share with some of his po- about by so many unconscious events.8 The beloved, litically extremist readers. Even his self-professed get- as a cluster of repressed items from the unconscious ting over the fatal first book and document of his war consolidated under the name Ophelia, remote-controls neurosis, Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik Hamlet’s fate from the position of her suicide. Their (The Birth of Tragedy) means not much more than his relationship is the prototype of all crypt transmissions willingness to rewrite the future and the past. Melan- where transmitting and receiving instances replicate cholia, often implied in or as the state of encryptment, one another in the place of their difference. The absence is on the contrary, an intensified and prolonged mourn- of Ophelia’s mother shows the way in Hamlet’s un- ing that requires the admission and administration of conscious to a place where the unwanted get dumped. a death wish against something or someone who once Ophelia is dumped, twice, as a girl and as her father’s stood nearby, inimical to the crypt’s transmission.