Deconstructing Macbeth: The Hyperontological View

by Harald William Fawkner

Book by H. W. Fawkner

264 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1990

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book that includes the following sentence:

"I define ‘vanishing’ as presencing that presences without presence and without presences.” (pg 59)

I have had many discussions with friends about this line, and consider it something of a litmus test for what kind of a thinker they wish to be. On the one side are those who look at such a counterintuitive sentence and dismiss it as un-analytic gibberish capable of producing nothing practical at best, and dangerously irrational nonsense at worst. On the other are those who think for a moment, grinning at the oddity, and then decide to use it as a springboard into highly unusual dimensions of insight into a particular topic.

I could go either way.

The crux of this book's argument, as best as I can construct it, is that Macbeth is a "manifestly self-deconstructing play" so that "virtually nothing can be done to Macbeth that Macbeth has not already done to itself, explicitly." (pg 19) There is something "'obscene' in Macbeth's violent engagement with negativity" (pg 39) that most critics are too afraid to actually confront, a "core of darkness" that is frightening in a way that most abstract discussions of its dramatic features are never able to really capture.

To give a prosaic version of this, Fawkner has a problem with critics who attempt to pin down the witches in the play as representing 'Evil' or 'Truth' because:

One reason why it is futile to try to exactly determine the ‘function’ of the witches (in the finite, verificationalist, largely empirical sense) is that their status by no means was a stable and determinate thing in popular, monarchical, or scientific consciousness. Dover Wilson calls attention to this uncertainty: ‘The nature of the Three Weird Sisters has been much discussed by critics; yet it seems to have occurred to none of them that it was in all probability much discussed also by Shakespeare’s public.' (pg 52)

On a wider level, the play is constantly undermining any philosophical structures (such as either/or oppositions) that might allow a fixity of meaning not just for the audience, but for the characters themselves. As Fawkner observes, Macbeth is such a heroic, self-assured character throughout the play that everyone else seems to vanish into the background, as if they do not actually exist unless they have some relation to Macbeth. (Consider, for instance, how Fleance and Donalbain vanish out of the play, never to be mentioned again, once their lives no longer have relevance to Macbeth, despite both having connections either by prophecy or birthright to the throne that Malcolm retakes in the final act.)

A key feature of this is the aforementioned 'vanishing' which, once I was able to stop my incredulous laughter, does, admittedly, offer an interesting bit of insight into the play. As Fawkner understands it, 'presence' is not merely as simple as a character appearing on stage or being mentioned in the dialogue. After all, background actors can mill around onstage without the audience really considering their internal lives, whilst men like the initial Thane of Cawdor fight, live, and die entirely offstage. How real does the audience ever feel these characters are? For Fawkner:

Presence, in order to presence its presence and be momentarily self-present, must complete an act of appearing; but this act is precisely what keeps being withheld in Macbeth. Appearing is interrupted and prematurely erased, giving presences no time to perform their presencings, to be present. [...] [On the other hand] (Vanishing is a vanishing from presence, vanishing of presence, or vanishing presence.) (pg 59)

This instability grows more unnerving the more the play begins to pick apart at its own edges. Where does the knocking come during the murder of Duncan? Why does the Porter, after appearing for a single scene, tell us to "Remember the porter" before becoming the first of many characters to vanish from the play? Malcolm's final couplets sound hollow when the audience must remember Banquo's descendants must, somehow, become king. Furthermore, the more historically conscious chronicle readers would wonder why Donalbain's historical attack on Malcolm is omitted from the play's closing act.

These are my personal questions around which I based one of my finals essays, the research for which led me to this bizarre little book, rather than Fawkner's own examples since his own are often less interesting than the lens he develops through which to read the play. At times he does a good job of helping expose some of the bizarre features of the text, such as with a creative description of a kind of hyperontological quality like a radioactive "invisible fallout" (pg 64) created by the witches so that:

Vanishing is a negation of presence (though not in the mere sense of an empirical unpresencing of the presence). Shakespeare from the outset situates his hero in a sphere of action (and later thought) – where the world, as in the ‘haste’ of the battle, structures itself in terms of a loosening of fixedness, an unseaming of structurality. The mobile advance of Birnam Wood is the dramatic finalization of this general unfixing. (pg 62)

Fawkner's own examples, unfortunately, are more to do with his contention that Macbeth never really seems to intend to kill Duncan - it is just something that kind of happens to him, that he watches himself doing with conscious horror. For this Fawkner cites favourably Oliver's performance where "Delivering his speech as a drugged whisper, Oliver managed to create a sense of total unreality." (pg 79) so that:

repulsion in a difficult sense is primal and originary in Macbeth; repulsion is ‘causal’ as it is in cases of deathward anguish near the precipice. Because one is so frightfully repelled by the horrible abyss, one is sucked down into it. Analogously: because noble Macbeth is so frightfully repelled by the idea of murder, he is drawn relentlessly into it. (pg 84)

This is an interesting line of argument, but I feel that he overplays his hand by saying that "My own view is this: that Macbeth never has had the intention to murder Duncan, and that throughout the play he never has any such intention. His intention is not only absent, it is structurally absent." (pg 78) Though there is a truth in this, since I think I can detect a similar instability and lack of structure in the storyworld that Shakespeare evokes, on a more literal level the play as a dramatic text is extremely, and even in my opinion almost perfectly structured in such a way that the killing of Duncan seems inevitable from a dramatic point of view. What audience was ever surprised at the murder after the moment the prophecy was first heard? Macbeth's request that the "stars, hide your fires / Let not night seem my black and deep desires" hardly suggests that Macbeth is completely empty of a desire to kill Duncan, only that there is a vague and intense battle within himself whose outcome seems inevitable to us, even if it doesn't to himself.

Fawkner further undermines himself with claims that "Shakespeare does not make us feel that Macbeth is a pulsional man, full of the blood-hot passion of murderous desire, and that metaphysical deliberation is some kind of hesitant latecomer, some mere process of deferral." (pg 84). This emphasis on deferral is an interesting point, but the observation is taken too far to be convincing. Considering that the opening description of Macbeth is of him quite literally cutting a man in half with the most gorgeously carnal and vicious language I find this lily-white reading of his character highly questionable.:

For brave Macbeth—well he deserves that name—
Disdaining fortune, with his brandish'd steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valour's minion carved out his passage
Till he faced the slave;
Which ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,
And fix'd his head upon our battlements.

Macbeth is a warrior. A warrior with a rich and intelligent imagination, yes, but a warrior all the same, not some scholarly Hamlet coming to violence only belatedly in life. Furthermore, setting up a binary between repulsion and attraction to my mind seems rather antithetical to the deconstructionist project that Fawkner is attempting in the first place. Finally, if we consider his numerous protests seriously, then surely the fact that Macbeth keeps having to express his repulsion towards murder actually demonstrates that he is already very attracted to it, rather than the repulsion generating the attraction? Or at the very least it can be a mix of the two, which would undermine the binary by intermingling the hypercomplex contradictions of Shakespeare's all-too-human souls.

Details like this are the sort of quibbles that deconstructive treatises are built on, and I don't think it is unfair to suggest that an analysis this invested with the delicate ambiguities of language stand up to its own intense obsession with specificity.

Combined with other readings such as Steven Booth's King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy, Eric S. Mallin's Godless Shakespeare, or the brilliant discussion of King Lear's disappearing Fool in Stanley Cavell's Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare I think there is something powerful to be synthesised from some of Fawkner's at times airy observations, but I am unconvinced that the reading he offers he is as interesting as his method. Perhaps I need to read more Deconstructionists to find the precise words I'm looking for.

All the same, it says something that I felt the need to write a review for this book a year after I actually read it. There really is something deeply unnerving about this play in a way that is entirely unique not just in Shakespeare's corpus but in English literature as a whole. A real darkness, a real abyss that only becomes more disquieting the longer I stare at it. I'm grateful to Fawkner for trying to open up a way of studying that strangeness, but his own readings are too limited at the crucial edge of insight to justify the vague and obscurantist method of his writing.

Nevertheless, the pursuit goes on, and for those who share my deep uneasiness about the play this is definitely worth reading. After all, much as Ligotti might be suspicious of the more optimistic implication for the ego, I cannot help but agree with Fawkner's observation that:

Horror is bearable – indeed it is in a sense not even horror – if it is mastered, if it is controlled by the ‘I’ surveying its economy; hence it is the shift of horror to a sphere outside the self and its mastery that will truly horrify. (pg 69)

Perhaps Macbeth will never be mastered. Perhaps it is too strange to ever be really defanged. I cannot help, however, but consider its greatness as a work of literature is that it invites us, however cruelly, to still screw our courage to the sticking-place and try!

[Oscar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very technical and somewhat circular in its thinking. Dismissing Derrida out of hand and focusing exclusively on Heidegger's view in relation to this play I thought was a mistake.