The ESSE Messenger
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The ESSE Messenger A Publication of ESSE (The European Society for the Study of English Vol. 25-2 Winter 2016 ISSN 2518-3567 All material published in the ESSE Messenger is © Copyright of ESSE and of individual contributors, unless otherwise stated. Requests for permissions to reproduce such material should be addressed to the Editor. Editor: Dr. Adrian Radu Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania Faculty of Letters Department of English Str. Horea nr. 31 400202 Cluj-Napoca Romania Email address: [email protected] Cover illustration: Gower Memorial to Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Picture credit: Immanuel Giel Contents Shakespeare Lives 5 Europe, like Hamlet; or, Hamlet as a mousetrap 5 J. Manuel Barbeito Varela 5 Star-crossed Lovers in Sarajevo in 2002 14 Ifeta Čirić-Fazlija 14 Shakespeare on Screen 26 José Ramón Díaz Fernández 26 The Interaction of Fate and Free Will in Shakespeare’s Hamlet 27 Özge Özkan Gürcü 27 The Relationship between Literature and Popular Fiction in Shakespeare’s Richard III 37 Jelena Pataki 37 Re-thinking Hamlet in the 21st Century 49 Ana Penjak 49 Reviews 61 Mark Sebba, Shahrzad Mahootian and Carla Jonsson (eds.), Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing: Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse (New York & London: Routledge, 2014). 61 Bernard De Meyer and Neil Ten Kortenaar (eds.), The Changing Face of African Literature / Les nouveaux visages de la litterature africaine (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009). 63 Derek Hand, A History of the Irish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 65 Hobby Elaine. The Birth of Mankind: Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 67 Brigitte Wallinger-Schorn, “So There It Is:” An Exploration of Cultural Hybridity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011). 69 Sonia Baelo-Allué, Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction: Writing Between High and Low Culture (London: Continuum, 2011). 71 Robert Sheppard, When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry: Episodes in the History of the Poetics of Innovation (Exeter: Shearsman, 2011). 73 Julian Barnes, ed. Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs. (London and New York: Continuum, 2011). 75 Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford, Oxford UP, 2009). 76 Laurence Raw, Exploring Turkish Cultures: Essays, Interviews and Reviews (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). 79 The ESSE Messenger 25-2 Winter 2016 – Page 3 / 107 Contents Interview 81 “I don’t think the world was ever disenchanted. It still is enchanted.” 81 Zsuzsanna Tóth 81 Points of View 91 Brexit – Personal Reflections on the Referendum Campaign and its Aftermath 91 Robert Clark 91 Notes on Contributors 104 The ESSE Messenger 25-2 Winter 2016 – Page 4 / 107 Shakespeare Lives Europe, like Hamlet; or, Hamlet as a mousetrap J. Manuel Barbeito Varela University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain Abstract1: This is an essay on imagination and the politics of reading. Imagining reality is the inventive way of seeing everyday life; reading is performed in this paper by applying the logical framework of a classic – Shakespeare’s Hamlet – to one of the great problems of the contemporary world – immigration – and by responding to this in terms of justice. Proceeding as a close reading of the first two lines of Hamlet – in a sense, the paper is a footnote to this opening of the play –, the essay implicitly addresses old critical questions like why should we read a classic? or how to cross the frontiers between distant historical periods, how to surmount the historical specificity that separates Shakespeare’s texts and his critics’ writings? The answer given in this essay to these questions is also an invitation to pursue the kind of effort made here to do justice jointly to a text of the past and to a burning issue of the present. A politics of tradition. Rigorous intellectual discipline is not enough; it is also necessary to make an ethico-political decision not to avert one’s eyes from real issues, not to hide behind the screen provided by our world, but to do all we can to change the increasingly negative current social attitudes towards immigrants. The argument is carried out with the tools for thinking provided by thinkers like Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek. Keywords: Immigration, spectrality, identity, justice, alterity; Shakespeare, Lacan, Derrida, Badiou, Žižek. Like Hamlet, Europe today is faced with the question “to be or not to be.” Like Hamlet, Europe tragically does not know what to do. Like Hamlet, Europe is haunted. And, like The Tragedie of Hamlet, Europe’s drama begins with a question concerning identity: ‘who’s there?’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet I.i.1) I. Now, who asks this question? Hamlet opens with a touch of true genius,i and a mouse-trap for the contemporary audience.ii Right at the beginning of the play, a significant though inconspicuous inversion of roles takes place: instead of the sentry who is keeping watch at the defensive walls of Elsinore, i.e. at the dividing line between the inside and the outside,iii it is someone who arrives that asks the question demanding 1 This essay was written in the context of the research carried out by the Discourse & Identity Group (GRC2015/002, GI-1924, Xunta de Galicia). The ESSE Messenger 25-2 Winter 2016 – Page 5 / 107 Shakespeare Lives identification. Can you imagine an immigrant doing this at the doors of Europe today?iv Why does Barnardo and not the sentinel, Francisco, ask “Who’s there?” Simply, because Barnardo has seen a ghost haunting the place, while sentinel Francisco has not.v And Barnardo, knowing that ghosts are restless, asks yet another question that confirms the real source of his fears: “have you had a quiet guard?”vi Therefore, his question “who’s there” is not prompted by the fear of an answer like: “Fortinbras, I am here to reclaim the crown.” Rather, it is motivated by the dread of receiving an answer from a “thing” that cannot be grasped, classified, identified: from a ghost.vii II. What does the tragedy of Hamlet consist of? Hamlet is the tragedy of a modern prince who does not know what to do because he is convinced that his father has been murdered by his uncle but he cannot prove it before a tribunal. This prince is certainly in need of instruction; and here the ghost enters ready to teach prince Hamlet what he must do.viii Unfortunately, though properly, the ghost’s lesson is truly spectral: Hamlet’s dead father returns to ask his son to revenge him.ix But this is precisely what Hamlet should not do because the modern prince must base his rule on the institution of justice and this is incompatible with revenge.x Hamlet’s father was spectralised not only by death, but by history as well: his advice is a thing of the past.xi III. Europe today That the human mind produces monsters is a well-known fact. We do this when we conceive the other as the source of all our problems, the cause of our lack, even the embodiment of evil itself.xii It is a canny trick, useful to bring people together against an external threat, to justify our behaviour towards strangers, and to mask the real nature both of our world and of our darker motives. Looking directly into the heart is hard and can perhaps be unbearable: think of the monstrous heart breaking out of the chest of the man lying on the dining table (not in the operating theatre) in the film Alien. But Horatio warned of the serious danger of averting one’s eyes from the heart of the matter: while everyone is expecting an external attack, it may well be that “something is rotten” inside. (Hamlet I.v.90)xiii Let me ask you to imagine. Not an ideal world as John Lennon asked us to do in his famous song, but reality itself: imagine that Europe is surrounded by a frontier in which we have placed sentries to demand those who arrive: “stand and unfold” (Hamlet I.i.2) yourselves. Now imagine that the same inversion that takes place at the beginning of Hamlet is rehearsed today, at this very moment, at the borders of Europe; and that the immigrants, instead of our sentinels, ask the question “who’s there?” Do we know what to do? For we must choose: between listening to (and if we do so we are “bound... to obey”)xiv our own vindictive ghosts inciting us to take revenge on others, whom we have construed as the monstrous causes of our “sea The ESSE Messenger 25-2 Winter 2016 – Page 6 / 107 J. Manuel Barbeito Varela, Europe, like Hamlet; or, Hamlet as a mousetrap of troubles” (Hamlet III.i.59) or to follow the road of justice and attentively listen to the question they have for us: “is there any human being in there?” “To be or not to be” just, “that is the question.” (Hamlet III.i.56) IV. The mousetrap Like the great epic poems,xv the tragedy of Hamlet opens by formulating the main topic and confronting the audience with the core of its subject right at the beginning of the oeuvre.xvi This opening is a mousetrap designed to catch the conscience of the contemporary audience. The mechanism of the trap consists of an inversion of roles: the question is asked, not by one occupying the position of authority and in charge of checking the fitting identity of each element of the system, but by someone else who arrives at the place and faces authority from a disturbed position.