For several days I had been putting off one reply. Nothing difficult about it. I had known from the start what I wanted to say, had drafted it in my head many times over. But the moment I sat down before the screen and the cursor began to blink, my hand stopped.
That day I did everything else as usual. Saw patients, wrote prescriptions, answered the urgent calls at once. Only that one thing—the easiest one—my hand would not go to. It was not that I could not write it. Not that I would not. I meant to, and it would not come. The three are plainly different, and yet the moment I try to explain the difference, the words tangle.
That I took Hamlet down from the shelf that evening was nearly an accident. Hamlet is not a man without capacity. He runs Polonius through behind the arras without a flicker of hesitation; he sends the two friends who came to sell him off to England, to be executed there. He can do anything. Only one thing—killing his uncle—he cannot. For four hundred years people have called him irresolute. To me that word has always sounded less like an answer than like a way of looking away.
It can, in fact, look like a common story. A man who can neither kill his unfaithful wife nor leave her, who can do nothing either way and falls apart over drink. A man like that we already understand. Prison frightens him; the children stay before his eyes; he hates her and yet cannot only hate, some attachment lingers. The reasons all lie outside him. He can be understood, then, but there is nothing in him to look into. That figures, we say, and it ends there.
Where Hamlet parts from that man is a single point. Hamlet has not one reason outside himself. He is a prince; his revenge is just. No prison waits for him, no child to stay before his eyes, no lingering tenderness toward his uncle. He even has the chance to kill, more than once. There is nothing outside, and still the hand is bound. Which means the reason is inside—and the moment you begin to look in there, you see no bottom. And what made that bottomlessness is a single fact: the uncle is not simply an enemy but a mirror.
A Mirror for an Enemy — Freud
What would Freud have called this binding? In one passage of The Interpretation of Dreams he marks Hamlet briefly, almost in passing. Hamlet’s trouble is not irresolution. He can do anything—except kill the man who put away his father and took his place at his mother’s side, the man who shows him, realized before his eyes, the repressed wishes of his own childhood. The uncle has carried out, in the world, the very wish Hamlet harbored in secret toward his father as a boy. To cut him down is to cut himself. And so the loathing that ought to drive the revenge turns and points inward—toward the reproach that he is no better than the criminal he means to punish.
Here the play’s joke shows itself. The Oedipal wish in itself is common. Everyone holds such a wish as a child and, by pressing it down, becomes an adult. Most people keep it buried in the unconscious all their lives. Nothing ever touches it. But before Hamlet stands the man who actually did it. The thing he only dreamed of and buried—killing the brother, taking the brother’s wife—the uncle has done in his place. A worn, common wish becomes the worst of traps because of one stand-in. An ordinary man can bury the wish and be done; Hamlet must watch his own wish sit across the table wearing a crown, every day. There is nowhere to bury it.
So what Hamlet cannot do is not the one killing. If he moves to kill the uncle, conscience steps in his way: did you not hold the same wish? But if he does not kill, the same conscience steps in again: you, who forsook your father’s command. Whichever way he turns, the voice that condemns him arrives first. Kill, and he goes down; spare him, and he goes down. It is a trap with no exit. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, he says.
This far it is clean. So clean it troubles me. Freud’s scheme explains only the one thing—the not-killing of the uncle. What it does not explain is the whole man staining dark. How does a local paralysis, the failure to kill one man, make the entire world look like an unweeded garden run to seed, make being alive itself a weight, draw him at last toward death? Reproach alone will not carry this total darkness. In “Mourning and Melancholia” he calls Hamlet up once more and, even there, does not look into the melancholy itself. He uses him briefly as a mirror to light another man’s theory, and goes on.
So the question narrows to one. Why is Hamlet melancholy? That he cannot kill his uncle—granted. But why does that blockage sink the whole man? Into the place Freud left unclosed, other hands reach.
The Severed Love — Jung
Jung would have seen that melancholy the other way round. For Freud, the repressed seeping to the surface is a breakdown—what should have been pressed back down has leaked out and turned to illness. For Jung, the unconscious rising is not a leak but a thing that rose because it meant to. Of depression he wrote that it is a state in which consciousness has emptied and the unconscious gone active, and that its contents take their effect only once they are raised into consciousness. The energy has drained from the outer world and gone down, inward. That going-down is not illness but a descent. So Hamlet broke not because the unconscious rose, but because he could not take in what rose. Taken in, it would have transformed him; not taken, it only caved.
But what was it Hamlet could not take in? Here Jung would have pointed to the mother. The image of woman a man carries within, he says, is always first shaped by the mother; the first to bear the image of the soul is always the mother, and later the women who move his heart inherit it. For Hamlet there is a moment when that image collapses—a mother remarried to his uncle before a month was out. Frailty, thy name is woman: the line is aimed at the mother. But the heart of what Jung would have seen is that it does not stop at the mother alone. Her betrayal is the trigger, and beneath it the whole buried image of woman wakes. Once woken, it is laid over every woman before his eyes.
Ophelia is the proof. Ophelia has done nothing wrong. And still Hamlet casts her off as cruelly as he casts off his mother. Get thee to a nunnery. The mother alone will not explain that cruelty. Through Jung it comes clear: what Hamlet hates is neither his mother nor Ophelia but the defiled image of woman within him, laid over both at once. The love that should have gone out and reached one woman, blocked by that broken image, winds back inward. Love that could not get out—that is his melancholy.
A Surface Hardened by Collision — Yi Je-ma
Follow the two of them this far, and one thing keeps catching. Did all of this really happen inside the man alone? Hamlet was not melancholy from the start. Even Freud writes that he was sound to begin with. The melancholy begins with the very event of the uncle killing the brother and taking the mother. Which means it is not something Hamlet raised alone, but something that came up in the place where one man, Hamlet, struck against another, his uncle.
Yi Je-ma (李濟馬) would have looked into that place of collision. It is what he looked into all his life. When one person meets another, a kind of surface (面, myeon) forms between them. If one side has hardened in some direction, that surface hardens with it, and on a hardened surface even what is sound looks bent. Yi Je-ma held that this bending is not a matter of resolve. As light bends passing through hardened glass, it is not will but optics. That Hamlet saw himself in his uncle was not a thing he chose to see. The terrible accident that the two men held the same wish hardened the surface where they met into a mirror.
A surface once hardened spreads to every other. The mother hardened, and that hardening passed to Ophelia. That Ophelia, though innocent, takes on the mother’s face is not because Hamlet is cruel but because he has come to see the world only through the hardened surface. Yi Je-ma wrote that when good and evil grind against each other within one house, ruin follows, and when the loyal and the fawning contend, slaughter is certain. Elsinore is that grinding surface. The two who collided draw more and more people onto it, and at the end nearly all of them die there.
But a surface is not a thing that can be changed. The father is already dead, the mother already remarried. There is no way for Hamlet to undo the hardened place. What Yi Je-ma offered was not a way to defeat the surface either. He spoke only of stepping aside, for an instant, into another grain just before the flow sets into the hardened path. There is no point of arrival. Each time it returns to the same place; not once is the round won. Only, at the very instant of hardening, to step aside, once. Hamlet never reaches that stepping-aside. He hardens in place upon the hardened surface and pours out, in the place of action, words, and again words, and words.
A Door That Will Not Close — Buddhism
So the three so far stand, in the end, in one place: asking whom Hamlet struck against, and how he hardened. Freud’s mirror, Jung’s woken image, Yi Je-ma’s hardened surface—all of them take the collision as given. Whom he struck, what hardened, how it spread.
But one shelf over stand the books that bring the question itself down. Buddhism would have asked: is that surface even there? The prison Hamlet believes he is shut inside—is it not something he has gripped as real? To clutch the figure in the mirror as oneself, to embrace the hardened surface as the true thing, to suffer upon it—that itself is attachment. Buddhism has no method for solving the surface. It has only the road of setting it down. That there is no method to solve it is not a flaw; it is the nature of the place.
Hamlet has gone as far as the threshold of that road. Holding the skull of Yorick the jester, asking where the lips have gone that once kissed him, he glimpses that everything alive returns to a handful of dust—the instant the hardened surface goes wholly void. But he cannot set down what he has seen, and grips it again as thought. Asked what he reads, he answers: Words, words, words. He saw impermanence, but had no way to set it down, and so even the glimpse hardens back into doubt, into words. Buddhism, then, exists for Hamlet only as a door that will not close—a door that, opened and entered, would make the prison vanish, before which he fingers his own words in the place of the handle.
Neither Filled Nor Emptied
And so, four hundred years on, Hamlet does not close. Close him with irresolution, and the hand that drew the sword is left over; close him with Oedipus, and the hesitation that could not kill is left over. Close him with any single word, and something spills past it. That we keep failing to explain him by one thing is not because his melancholy is a blank to be filled. It is not a blank but a thickness. The many layers within one man, and the surface two men hardened where they met, lie folded together at once, so that nothing single covers it. The three pile that thickness up, each in turn; only Buddhism says to set even the thickness down. But Hamlet never sets it down. He dies inside that not-setting-down. Had it been a hole that fills, someone would have filled it and finished long ago. Had it been a thickness that empties, it would have emptied long ago. Neither will do, and so for four hundred years he stays just where he is.
I closed the book and sat again before the screen. The cursor was blinking in the same place. Only, the stopped hand was a little less strange to me now. The place where one can and yet cannot—everyone sits there once. Mine, mercifully, was one reply. No surface hardened by collision, no kingdom in the balance. Slowly, I wrote the first line.
