This paper was jointly presented in 1998 in Sydney at the Literature and Psychoanalysis Conference entitled Corporealities. Energies, Affects, Selves
Kay:
For over ten years now, John and I have taught an evolving series of subjects in two interdisciplinary areas, ‘Literature and Medicine’, and ‘Psychoanalytic Theory’. These subjects come together for us when we discuss the representation of embodiment that insists both on the fleshly materiality of the body, and the ubiquity of unconscious fantasy that underpins being-in-the-body. For us as literary critics, the literary text provides, at its best, a dream-like intensity of representation of these issues, and psychoanalytic theory a powerful mode of interrogation of them (as literary texts can interrogate and psychoanalytic ideas). We found it more interesting and in some ways easier to teach this material jointly: as well as the pedagogical advantages of team-teaching, the inevitably gendered nature of embodiment is perhaps best treated when each gender can provide (and interrogate) a speaker, essentialist as it may seem to say so. Much of the material we worked with in teaching and writing about these issues was explicitly directed to the consideration of ‘the body’— we looked at a lot of autobiographies of illnesses (sometimes called pathographies), for example. But we also looked at major classic works of literature, on the grounds that if there was any ‘truth value’ in these ideas, then they would be useful in making sense of classic literature as well as more obviously relevant material. A major focus of our interest in the work we did with students was to consider ways in which the body might represent unconscious wishes and anxieties in texts, and we often read Shakespeare’s sonnets to explore this possibility. But it is really with Shakespeare’s plays that one can often see an elaborated tracing through of the way that the body can, as Mary Douglas puts it, stand for any bounded system (1966, p.115). Contemporary Shakespeare criticism is interested enough in the corporeal, but it concerns, in a way, the body as stage or even as toy. Dressing up, cross-dressing, and body play form the focus of interest in this sort of work (for example, Garber,1993). It did not seem to us that this sort of critical work engaged with the most compelling or irrational experiences or the corporeal, as Macbeth certainly does. Macbeth announces its concern with the body’s interiority with the very first words spoken by a human character: ‘What bloody man is that?’ These words, after the disturbing rhythms of the Witches in Act 1, sc. I, are disconcerting, not only because they embody a reality of war, but also because (though we mightn’t become aware of it for a while) they plunge us into a world where realities are reversed, or perhaps inverted: insides are outsides, and men and babes (in opposition to what we argue is the conventionally gendered attribution) are ‘bloody’. In this paper, John and I trace the imagined body projects of this frightening, fascinating play.
John:
Contemporary readings of corporeality in Shakespeare, then, have tended to concentrate not so much upon sexuality or sex, as upon gender. Gender, to put it briefly, is the social register of sexuality. It concerns the characteristics that a society or group attributes to the masculine or the feminine. In the world of clan warfare created by Macbeth, it is ‘manly’ to deal with sorrow by action. Tears, on the other hand, are ‘womanly.’ Defined in this way, gender is not so much a motif or theme in Macbeth as a structural premise of its action. From Lady Macbeth’s challenge ‘Are you a man?’ to the first murderer’s ‘we are men, my leige’, to Macduff’s ‘But I must also feel it as a man’, the notion of manliness is sounded unequivocally in a play otherwise much concerned with equivocation. ‘What is a man?’ is a question that the drama puts with a boldness and clarity few other Shakespeare tragedies bring to their ethical or moral concerns. It was this aspect of the play that caught the attention of Samuel Johnson when he remarked on Macbeth’s response to Lady Macbeth’s incitements to murder:
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
This is a line and a half which Samuel Johnson says, ‘ought to bestow immortality on the author, though all his other productions had been lost.’ (Johnson, 1968, p.297) But in context, Macbeth’s aphoristic response is not the clinching ‘distinction of true from false fortitude’ Johnson values so much. ‘What beast was’t then/ That made you break this enterprise to me?’ returns his wife in a flash. ‘A man’, is also a beast, a savage, a tiger: if you look into the heart of a man, she is saying, you find desire. You were a man when you conceived the idea of the murder, because it is intrinsic in man to want, to desire, to seek to exceed. There can be no decorum of manliness in her view: the manly is that which, by definition, exceeds containment. In other words masculinity or manliness cannot be encompassed within realms of decorum ‘becoming’ . It is in places like this, then that the play poses its questions about gender, and makes them unanswerable. Macbeth is thrilled by her response (‘what cannot you and I perform?’). There is something in the nature of man, that is, that responds to the invitation to excess, to horror. Gender does not take us far in thinking about Lady Macbeth’s famous invocation to the spirits. ‘Come to my woman’s breasts and take my milk for gall’ she pleads: the prayer or appeal is not to an exchange of milk for semen, but for gall, for a fluid apposite precisely because this innermost secretion of the body - bitter, foul - is non-gendered, neither masculine nor female. She asks for her blood to be ‘thickened’, and the reader might make a passing association with that apparent thickening of the blood that makes an erection. (When she later speaks of the ‘spongy’ officers to Macbeth there is a matching association of effeminacy with the flaccid penis.) She then speaks of ‘the access and passage to remorse’ and here one might think of, or fantasise, that it is the vagina and the womb that she fleetingly alludes to. But in praying to be hardened, Lady Macbeth does not ask explicitly to become a man, though she certainly asks for her body to be transmogrified. At the very moment when she asks that she be blinded from seeing the consquences her ‘keen knife’ has performed, she sees it as a gaping ‘wound’, an opening in the body of the other. This is quite different from that delirium of savagery evoked in the play’s opening description of the battle, in which Macbeth ‘bathe[s] in reeking wounds’. One is imagined as an orgy in which the perception of self and other is obliterated, the other as a heightened perception of agency. In no other play is the body so insistently imagined as the nexus of power. Hamlet never thinks that he must remake himself into another substance if he is to carry out his revenge and kill the king. But for Macbeth and his wife, it is the body which experiences ambition and desire, and the body that must be transformed. ‘I am settled, and bend up each corporal agent to this terrible feat’. The deed to be done is experienced by both of them as a bodily project, one that demands a kind of remaking of their corporeal essence. The play represents fear and desire as bodily experiences: ‘horrid images unfix’ Macbeth’s hair; his ‘seated heart’ seems to have left its proper mooring and now ‘knocks’ at his ribs. When there is such insistent knocking at the castle gates after the murder, this is tantamount to turning the space of the castle itself into a terrified body, so that the palpitations of a single state of man are graphically written large on the stage space itself for a time. It is the body, too, upon which the consequences of the deed are felt: ‘Amen stuck in my throat’, says Macbeth with horror.
It is the interior consitutents and spaces of the body that this play insists upon. If it generates ‘manliness’ as a ethical or moral focus, no less clamorous and unmistakable is the image of blood which it thrusts before us. Only rarely in Macbeth does the word ‘blood’ have the meaning of lineage, as is common in the history plays (for example, Macbeth’s reference to ‘the fountain of your blood’, II, iii, 97, but even here it is imagined as a fluid). No: in this drama it is the material substance, the fluid, blood, which from the opening of the second scene of the play – ‘What bloody man is that?’ – is forced into the foreground of the reader’s consciousness. Blood is an interior constituent of the body brought improperly out into the exterior: improperly, in the sense that it figures always when it is outside the body, on the sword, on the face, as a horror, a violation. ‘Now does he feel/His secret murders sticking on his hands’, remarks the minor character, Angus, in Act 5, scene ii. The verb ‘to stick’ so pervasive in the play, makes palpable the hideous transmogrification of a substance that, no longer contained within the body and mixing with the air, has become ‘thick’, ‘gory’, a glossy lacquer that ‘gilds’ the grooms’ faces and makes Duncan’s body, ‘his silver skin laced with his golden blood’, shine in parodic escutcheon of his nobility. The older critics spoke much of the natural order of the play, and it is this through this relentless figure of blood displaced that the ‘unnatural’ is represented most palpably.
The play’s concern with blood and the body is most obviously yet enigmatically represented in the witches’ cauldron.
Round about the cauldron go,
In the poisoned entrails throw... (IV, i, 4-5)
The witches make their gruel ‘thick’ (that word again) from these entrails body parts, eyes, toes, fillets, livers and gall, the blood of a bat, a baboon’s blood, and
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch delivered by a drab...
What is the play seeking to give representation to in these hardly very frightening jingles? This is Frankenstein territory. Perhaps rather Donne’s nearly contemporary poem, ‘Love’s Alchemy’ gives us a clue:
...no chymic yet the elixir got
But glorifies his pregnant pot...
The witches’ cauldron, this might suggest, figures as a parodic body, and still more specifically as a parodically gestating womb. It is out of this ‘bubbling’, fermenting, gestating womb that the apparitions emerge, among them, most critically, ‘the bloody child’. This bloody apparition then commands the transfixed king to be ‘bloody, bold and resolute.. for none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth.’ (IV, i, 95-6). It is a conspiracy or pact of the unnatural. It is as if we have been invited into some kind of psychic or emotional space that overwhelms or engrosses or takes over the feminine, or that seeks to replace the natural order of the mother and child by its own fabrications. It is the play’s clearest indication of the fantasy that is at work in it. Most readings of the play, we think, seek in some way or other to contain this horror of blood, of the inside become outside. Graham Bradshaw, whose brilliant account of the play is called ‘Imaginative Openness and the
Macbeth-terror’ calls them ‘providential readings’ (
Bradshaw, 1987) They suggest that there is a resilient and resurgent nature against which Macbeth and Lady Macbeth throw themselves and which – an outward feature of the world as much as an inner presence in their psyches – ultimately defeats them. This view has much going for it: as we shall suggest later the play itself seems in the end to wish to contain the psychic forces it has unleashed. But such views, as Bradshaw has argued, evade or dodge the horror at the play’s centre. Freud, you recall, sought to define the ‘riveting power’ of
Oedipus Rex by an appeal to the unconscious fantasies the play was releasing from repression. In an analogous fashion, we seek to throw light on the unconscious sources of the peculiarly horrified fascination or complicity which we hold to be at the centre of the experience of
Macbeth. This play, like
Oedipus, draws upon identifications and fantasies, but because these are concerned with the interior of the body, it is Klein and post-Kleinian psychoanalytic thought that provides us with our understanding.
Kay:
The plot of Macbeth seems almost to act as a counterpoint to the classically Kleinian fantasies that structure its development. The ideas about the body’s bloody spaces and potential which are elaborated in Macbeth are almost invariably directed to greedy fantasies of generativity, and about what can be discovered or gained by ripping the body open. Writing in 1930, Melanie Klein argues famously that
At the period of which I am speaking , the subject’s dominant aim is to possess himself of the contents of the mother’s body and to destroy her by means of every weapon which sadism can command... The child expects to find within the mother’s body (a) the father’s penis, (b) excrement and (c) children, and these things it equates with edible substances...The excess of sadism gives rise to anxiety, and sets in motion the ego’s earliest modes of defence. (Klein, 1986, p.96)
After the opening scene with the three witches, Act I, scene ii of Macbeth shows the character celebrating a masculinity which is distinguished by this sort of sadistic ripping open of the body. To Duncan’s first words, ‘What bloody man is that?’, the bloody man responds with an ecstatic account of how ‘brave Macbeth... unseamed [Macdonwald] from the nave to the chops’, which emphasises the way that Macbeth himself is bloodied in the act. The fascination with the bloodying of the assailant’s body foreshadows many such episodes in the play. But in this first scene, the bloody traces of attacks do not horrify as they later do. In this scene, opening the body, ‘bath[ing] in reeking wounds’, does indeed reveal treasure. Macbeth is immediately rewarded with Cawdor’s title. The way is opened for the orgy of sadism to which Macbeth proceeds. The fluid internal body which the opening scenes image as the soldier’s natural object is normally associated with the feminine, the maternal. Women’s bodies are conventionally represented as readily bleeding, leaking, secreting , available for entrance (Grosz, 1994); maternal bodies open wide, and can legitimately be ripped open in emergency. They are the obvious point of desire for the greedy child. Like the child, the manly soldier forces his way into the resisting body, but the resisting body which opens under soldierly assault is also manly. Macbeth thus considers the point of cross-over, where the hard body of the soldier shows its manliness precisely by colonizing femininity, both as attacker and attacked. Like the woman, the soldier offers his body for attack and entrance, and the sadistic manliness of ‘unseaming’ an enemy takes on a needle-point-like action which is almost delicate. The soldier’s body, weeping, bleeding, covered in the life-blood of others, becomes uncannily like the quintessentially female body, which leaks heavily invested fluids, blood, milk, whose bodies must open for life to continue. When the ‘good and hardy soldier’ of I ii, collapses, he does so like a lady: ‘But I am faint; my gashes cry for help’. Thus the violent attacks on birth, death, and generativity in Macbeth substitute a military body-narrative for the maternal one, and soldiers take both parts. A natural maternal order cannot be imagined in the body projects of untrammeled masculinity. Here, bleeding must inevitably be ‘a breach in nature’. The bloodied bodies of babes and old men that feature in this military narrative focus the play’s central paradox: in Macbeth’s fantasy, masculinity creates a dynasty by killing. The blood that flows when this happens (‘who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’) never stops: ‘I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er’. The country itself haemorrhages (‘Bleed, bleed poor country’). This is one way of suggesting that the perversion of embodiment and generativity that ensues when the projects of Fascism take over the body, as Klaus Theweleit argues (1987). Maternal bleeding, by contrast, is periodical, and self-regulating: it stops regularly in menstruation and after childbirth. Bodies are bloodied but not damaged by maternal blood. The birthing woman may be bloodied but unbreached. The babe is also born bloody, but unharmed. No soldierly imagination encompasses this. Banquo, a successful father, can speak of sacred generativity in a warmly imaginative way:
This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet does approve
By his loved mansionary that the heaven’s breath
Smells wooingly here. No jutty, frieze,
Buttress nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle.
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed
The air is delicate.
But even in this loving tribute to good generativity, the maternal figure is imaged as masculine (‘His pendent bed and procreant cradle). In the rest of the play, a maternal openness, with a natural movement from maternal interior to infant interior, becomes instead a ‘line of kings’, a hateful patriarchy that must be attacked through the ripping up of (male) abdomens and the murder of little boys. Generously expressed milk turns to gall, that obscenely deep cadaveric product. In the what might be thought of as the genital or the intersubjective realm, body fluids can be shared to create a new reality. Milk, blood, semen mix readily. In the primitive sadistic realm, body fluids must be violently stolen, and accessing them confers death on the donor. To make the point in Winnicottian terms, the object attacked in this masculine fantasy does not survive destruction. A hole that is made will remain. But in this paper, we want to identify precisely what it is about these fantasies of sadistic access to the maternal body that horrifies. Blood and bodily interiority are not necessarily horrifying in themselves. Macbeth makes it abundantly clear that the normal wounds and violent deaths of soldiers are acceptable, can even be noble (‘Had he his hurts before?’ asks Old Siward of his son). Melanie Klein observes and describes the violence of such fantasies, but she does not really explain the attendant horror. Building on Mary Douglas’s anthropological insights about boundaries and the role of the body in society (1966), Julia Kristeva’s ideas about abjection give some insight into the strength of the revulsion: she argues that transgressive crossing of borders between what should be inside and what should be outside is what appals (Kristeva, 1982). Gall never should be milk. But Macbeth identifies and elaborates on the bloody new-born babe, which, crossing body boundaries, is the exception to Kristeva’s rule of abjection. This child, which should delight, becomes a figure of terror in the perverse masculine body-project. Macbeth is structured by images of bloodied babes and children: dismembered babe who provides the finger for the spell, the babe with its brains dashed out, the bloody babe who rises from the cauldron, and most shockingly, the Macduff child, murdered onstage. When the figure of the displacing babe is crossed with the image of the opened body, the two meanings of ‘blood’ come together: vital fluid, and lineage. A bloody babe in this sense is, exactly, bloody blood. Lineage goes forward and backward from birth, the line ‘stretch[es] out to th’ crack of doom’. The bloodied body, the ‘ripped’ maternal body is thus in a sense indestructible, the gateway of history. Freud described the forgotten or repressed memory of the maternal genitals as the place we have all been before but cannot remember, ultimate uncanniness. It is certainly more usual to focus discussion on the infant body than on the maternal genitals. Writing in 1977 about Freud’s reference to the continuity between intra- and extra-uterine life, however, W. R. Bion says:
I want to say something which sounds just like saying something for the sake of saying it; and perhaps it is. ‘Bloody cunt’. ‘Bloody vagina’. The first phrase is... part of a universal language. It is not sexual; it is not physiological or medical; it is something quite different. But ‘bloody vagina’ might be the sort of thing about which doctors talk, probably obstetricians or gynaecologists. (Bion, 1987, p.234)
In this startling association to the problem of pre- and post-natal embodiment, Bion goes straight to the unspeakable ‘universal language’ of history, the ‘bloody cunt’, behind the respectable body of story and physiological-political incarnation. Born into history, babies feel what Bion here names ‘thalamic fear’. The fear, ‘something to do with... what later turns out to be the genital structures’, is related to the meeting of birth, past and future
... the shadow of a future we don’t know any more than we know the past, a shadow which it projects or casts before. The caesura [of birth] that would have us believe; the future that would have us believe; or the past that would have us believe -- it depends on which direction you are travelling. (Bion, 1987, p.237).
This passage is in Bion’s most enigmatic style. But it exactly summarizes the issues in Macbeth. Past, present, future, blood, birth and bodily orifices, from vaginas to gashes, cast terrifying shadows over Macbeth’s ability to think and act, forcing him into violent and primitive fantasy. The opened body of mother or soldier focuses the moment between past and future, taking the subject, via the bloody contents of the body, directly into poorly understood pasts and unimaginable futures. The disorganizing awareness of the opened body as the still point between history and futurity plunges the play into ferocious rages. Bion describes the effect of making this connection more generally, as producing psychic ‘turmoil’. At the beginning of Macbeth, this impending turmoil is imaged in non-specific, environmental terms: ‘Thunder and lightening’; ‘the earth hath bubbles as the water hath...’. Bion notes
A person... who is very angry with somebody else might find that his intellectual and angry expression is nourished by these archaic factors which he cannot express but which make the angry expression much more alive if he calls the other person a ‘bloody cunt’. It will almost certainly lead to a great deal of turmoil...
Bion’s transgressive attention to the linguistic link between the bloody female orifice and an obscene description for a contemptible person provides an explanation for the moral degeneration of Macbeth in the course of the play. For an adult to enact the unconscious fantasy of transforming the maternal space into a bloody wound or pulp is corrupting, and those who witness an individual treating others as no more than ruined or ruinable orifices express this imaginatively by equating the aggressor with the bloodied things he makes. The destruction of the other contaminates the self. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth introduce this way of thinking into this play: from unseaming Macdonwald, Macbeth moves to transform Duncan and then Banquo and the Macduff family into no more than bloodied passages to his own secure incarnation as monarch. In doing so, he becomes, in almost a comic way, no more than ‘a bloody cunt’ himself. In the final confrontation between Macduff and Macbeth, the hatred that flows between them embodies this sort of ‘turmoil’. Each sees the other as a hole, of which the bloodying will allow passage to another reality. Macbeth defiantly reflects that ‘gashes/ Do better upon others’, and tells Macduff ‘My soul is too much charged /With blood of thine already’; Macduff replies’ ‘I have no words... thou bloodier villain than terms can give thee out’. The relentless play of the imagery of blood, gashes, and worldlessness here seems very close to Bion’s ideas. Macbeth describes himself as invulnerable in terms related very strikingly to birth:
Thou losest labor:
As easy mayst thou the intrenchant air
With thy keen sword impress as make me bleed (V, viii, 9-11).
Macduff’s fury begs for the sort of linguistic relief Bion imagines; he is desperate to inflict the bloody gashes upon Macbeth, to make him into a disgusting absence that he has no words for. Macbeth’s bloody villainy makes others into gashes, and finally rips out of his body what he has ripped out of others, transforms him from an ‘intrenchant’ king into a severed head, a gash. The actual death of Macbeth, however, is not represented vividly at all.
John:
Macbeth then may be said to seek to wrest the future from out of the mother’s womb. It is impossible, of course. Traditional readings of the play stress the bleeding country’s recuperation, its return to a state of stability, its expulsion of the destructive element: nature’s assertion of its providence. In our terms, one might say that the play emerges from the psychotic dimension or domain into the depressive position. If he is able to revenge himself on Macbeth, Macduff declares, he will be free from the ghosts of his wife and children, who otherwise haunt and torment him. He will bring himself, and the play, out into the realm of the everyday, of the communally-sanctioned. He can do for himself what Macbeth can never do. When in the last scene of the play he enters the stage carrying Macbeth’s head, the surrounding commentary never dwells on blood, or horror, but rather on the social and ethical consequences of this deed. The verse, indeed, is rather bloodless. Macbeth is called ‘this dead butcher’, a phrase that recapitulates the themes of carnage, of the knife entering the innards of the body, that have recurred in the play, but now only in the register of the banal. A butcher deals in blood, with slaying, but as commonplace, routine, so that any acknowledgement of the psychological thrill or complicity there might be in slaughter is refused. An account of the play which dwells, like Malcolm and the victors, on the restoration of order and the expulsion of the ‘unnatural’ does not take account of the curious, the infinitely seductive, tone of Macbeth’s final speeches. These are quite different from his earlier ones: no longer hectic, agitated, disturbed, syncopated with the heart’s palpitations, they have a peculiar breadth and serenity. We begin to hear this note in Macbeth’s speech even before the conspiracy to bring about the death of Banquo. ‘Night thickens/ And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood. /Good things of day begin to droop and drouse...’ It is as if Macbeth’s imagination, discovering its affinity with the occult and savage, finds from this imagined union fortification and even a sense of legitimacy. In the speeches towards the end of the play - those that everyone knows, such a note is sounded even more memorably. Indeed, the question to ask is why Macbeth’s speeches towards the end of the play are so memorable, so much engraved on everyone’s mind? This would not be the case if they were the ravings of a frenzied tyrant, a demented bully, like Hitler in the last months of the bunker. Instead it is as if from his incursions into evil, Macbeth has brought back knowledge. He speaks of life as ‘full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing’, picking up such moments in the play as ‘Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds/ And memorise another Golgotha/ I cannot tell...’. But the verse in which this vision of turbulent and mindless violence (‘doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe’) is evoked, is itself measured, stately, dignified, spacious. There is no ‘strutting and fretting’ in Macbeth’s own description of the actor. This is speech which from which all protest has been emptied out. Dynasty, time and history have been emptied of meaning, but Macbeth contemplates this without flinching.
Kay:
In Macbeth, the ‘live anger’ that Bion imagines comes together with the problem of historicity and embodiment: bloody babes, unseamed men, exsanguinated kings. The play can be read as considering paranoid-schizoid rage and terror about the materiality of the body’s contents, and their effect on a secure sense of self. The ‘caesura’ of the body’s opening, in birth or in death, the ‘bloody vagina’ of the gash, when contemplated, forces the play into a two-sided contemplation of past and future. ‘It depends... which way you are travelling’, notes Bion. One might say that the plot of Macbeth shows the world of the play ‘passing through’ the sadistic phase and severely taming the epistemophilic impulse, returning to ‘reality’ with the victory of Malcolm, that unenquiring man.
REFERENCES
Bion, W. R. (1987). ‘On a Quotation from Freud’, Clinical Seminars and Four Papers. London: Karnac Books.
Bradshaw, Graham (1987). Shakespeare’s Scepticism. Brighton, Harvester.
Douglas, Mary (1966). Purity and danger : an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London, Routledge & K. Paul.
Garber, Marjorie (1993). Vested interests: cross dressing and cultural anxiety. New York, HarperPerennial.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994.
Johnson, Samuel (1968). Selected Writings. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Klein, Melanie (1986). The selected Melanie Klein. (ed. Juliet Mitchell) Harmondsworth : Penguin.
Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror. New York, Columbia University Press.
Theweleit, Klaus (1987). Male fantasies. Cambridge, Polity Press.
