Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

Thomas J. Cousineau

Mimetic Desire and Chiasmic Form: Reading Hamlet after Girard

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ABSTRACT  

René Girard’s essay, “Hamlet’s Dull Revenge: Vengeance in Hamlet,” illuminates aspects of Shakespeare most enigmatic play in ways that continue to prove stimulating.  This is particularly true of his discussion of the reciprocal nature of conflict and revenge  as this applies to the various pairings of male characters in the play. Less satisfying perhaps are his speculations about Shakespeare’s and Hamlet’s possible motivations.  His contention that “the tedium of revenge is really what he [Shakespeare] wants to talk about” and that he purposely wrote his play with two audiences in mind (a crowd that wanted the catharsis associated with a revenge play and an enlightened audience who shared his distaste for revenge) is highly  problematic, as Shakespeare scholar Richard Levin has argued in his New Readings vs. Old Plays.   The principal difficulty is that presumed authorial motivations end up sounding remarkably like the critics own preoccupations.  A similar problem may be noted in Girard’s assertion that Hamlet – echoing his creator, in this respect --  delays in acting upon his father’s command because he no longer believes in the legitimacy of revenge.

            In this paper, I will propose an alternative Girardian reading of Hamlet based – not on speculations as to  Hamlet’s or Shakespeare’s motivations -- but on the empirically observable relationship between the plot of Hamlet, which, as Girard correctly observes, is generated by mimetic desire, and the scenic construction the play (the echoing relationships among paired scenes), which is based, in a strikingly systematic way, on the rhetorical figure of chiasmus.  I will conclude by arguing that the structure of Hamlet, which takes the form of a diptych created by the interplay of  similar scenes, serves as a transcendent, utopian alternative to its plot, which culminates in a slaughter provoked by the conflict of similar desires.

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Tom  Cousineau is Professor of English at Washington College in Maryland (USA). He has also spent a good part of his teaching career as a Visiting Professor of English at various French universities. A graduate of Boston College, he received his doctorate from the University of California at Davis, where he wrote a dissertation on Samuel Beckett’s novels. The author of Waiting for Godot: Form in Movement, After the Final No: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, and Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist Fiction, he has also edited “Beckett in France,”  a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies, and currently serves as editor of the newsletter of the Samuel Beckett Society.   His new book, Three-Part Inventions: The Novels of Thomas Bernhard, is forthcoming.