Heiner Müller's The Hamletmachine
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Heiner Müller's The Hamletmachine

David Barnett

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eBook - ePub

Heiner Müller's The Hamletmachine

David Barnett

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The book...

  • Explains why such an obscure text has proven so enduringly popular
  • Explores the problems that the play offers for those wanting to stage it
  • Uses two specific productions to show how the play can engage different audiences in different ways

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781317274735
Subtopic
Drama
Edition
1
1
Surveying the scenes
The Hamletmachine is a striking text for a number of fairly obvious reasons. It is remarkably short: in the original and in translation, it barely reaches ten pages. It is, however, a complete play, and theatre-makers have to confront the question of how something so slender will engender a full production. Then, one has the problem of the scenes themselves: Müller does not make them easy to understand and their presentation is unusual, to say the least. This chapter focuses on their construction and deals with the peculiarities of each scene in turn before assessing the ways they work when taken together.
1 ‘Family Album’
Unlike all the other scenes, this one attributes no character name to the different types of text that follow. From the very outset, actors have no inkling as to who is speaking. This already difficult position is further problematized by the opening sentence, ‘I was Hamlet.’1 The speaker, whose identity is already a mystery, may no longer be Hamlet. A formulation like ‘I have been Hamlet’ would have marked a boundary: I have been, but am no longer. ‘I was Hamlet’ is not that definitive; the possibility of continuation is still present in the employment of the simple past tense in both the German original and the English translation.
It is worth dwelling on the first sentence because it is disorientating and open. The three opening words already propose a dynamic model of human identity, one capable of change. In past productions, the scene has been spoken by a single Hamlet figure; a single Ophelia; and several voices, split and in chorus. Each choice offers a different interpretation: that Hamlet cannot cast off his identity, that Ophelia can, or that identity is actually a multifaceted thing that has its various emphases and modes. Each permutation reflects a different model of what a self may be, yet we should not forget that Müller refuses to offer an answer of his own; the work is to be done by the theatre.
The scene hardly clarifies matters after its first sentence. A quick read reveals that it is composed of formally different blocks of text. The opening paragraph reflects on a funeral. The mention of Hamlet in the first line already suggests that it is the funeral of Hamlet’s father, Old Hamlet, who was murdered by his brother, Claudius, in Shakespeare’s play. The action described in the past tense does not occur in Hamlet and, to make things even more confusing, there are lines in the present tense, presented in block capitals. This temporal tension may suggest memories of the funeral breaking their way into the speaker’s attempt to tell a story, a past that will not go away. Yet that interpretation only applies if a production is employing a single speaker. The use of more voices does not pin such a reading to an individual.
The next section appears exclusively in block capitals and moves away from the variation on the Hamlet story that precedes it. In the German original, six of the eight lines are given in English. It is clear that block capitals signify something, but precisely what they might mean is never revealed by the text itself. The eight lines seem disconnected from each other, some reflecting on the speaking self, some on the state of the world. Again, it is disjunction and instability that pervade the passage.
The following section, presented exclusively in conventional type, is mostly delivered in the present tense: it is a dialogue between the speaker(s) and Old Hamlet’s ghost, except that the ghost does not speak a single word.
A pattern then seems to emerge, in that another section of block capitals follows. Yet, thematically, it is quite different from the first one. This one takes the form of a poem and employs a lyric ‘I’. The earlier fragmentary material is replaced by something with a little more coherence. The final section then returns to the allusions to the Hamlet story and is also interspersed with lines in block capitals.
So, what can be said about this peculiar opening scene? Its textual strategy aims to make one of the basic relationships in theatre problematic in that it is impossible to decide who is speaking the texts. From this unknowable position, the text itself assumes a special status. By refusing to attribute a speaker to the words, Müller no longer proposes a link between text and character. The text is thus allowed to ‘float’ above possible meanings without being attached to a particular person or identity. This raises questions about agency, of who does what. It is usually assumed that people who speak texts are in some way the texts’ masters: they determine what is said. However, on closer reflection, this only tells half the story. Any speaker, in even the most conventional of plays, is subject to a set of rules that determine what can and cannot be said. These are the rules of grammar, primarily, but also those of usage, of how words are deployed to create meaning. While grammar and usage both evolve over time, they nonetheless constrain any speaker’s ability to make sense. Anyone who has learned a foreign language will know that there are some things that can be expressed simply in one language, but not in another. In addition, speakers rarely create their own words. With the exception of neologisms, we use words because we have heard or read them elsewhere. As a result, we always reuse words and are limited by the meanings attached to them by other people in other places. It may then be the case that words ‘speak’ us, rather than us speaking words. This has important implications for agency: we are more limited in what we can express and, by extension, do. This aspect signals a connection with the play’s title: in what proportion is a person both a self-determining human being and a pre-programmed machine?
Müller’s opening scene highlights this problem by refusing to attribute a speaker to the spoken and by undermining the thematic and formal coherence of the scene. However, while the playwright signals that all language is ‘second-hand’ by definition, his remarkable use of words shows what can be done with language nonetheless. His acknowledgement of its restrictions and its reach points to a contradiction that runs through human identity: we are both imitative and original at the same time. This is an important corrective to the apparent autonomy granted to individuals in drama. Müller tempers this idea by revealing everyone’s debt to the past, a motif to which I will return in Chapter 2.
It is tempting to read the five sections of the scene as the five acts of Hamlet, but there is no correlation between Shakespeare’s action and the texts of ‘Family Album’. At most, one might understand the format as a nod to Shakespeare’s five-act structure and remember Müller’s interest in textual destruction: this is what is left of classical dramaturgy in 1977. That the five acts still survive echoes the precarious opening, ‘I was Hamlet’: they are present, but in such a different form that one has to ask what function they might still serve. I will return to this question at the end of this chapter.
2 ‘Europe of the Woman’
This scene is markedly shorter than ‘Family Album’. Its title is, at least partially, specific: it is not ‘The Life of the Woman’, but focuses on a geo-political category: Europe. This is not, then, about women’s struggles in general, but about the struggle within a particular context. Müller is not trying to address the developing world or even North America – he is constructing a network of connections that draw on Europe’s past in order to influence Europe’s future. This does not mean, of course, that The Hamletmachine cannot be performed elsewhere: its production history refutes that position. But just as an American classic like A Streetcar Named Desire can play worldwide, directors and producers should be sensitive to this play’s origins and concerns here, too.
The scene opens with some odd stage directions: ‘Enormous room. Ophelia. Her heart is a clock’ (89). The opening spatial designation is also a reference to E. E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room, a semi-autobiographical novel dealing with his internment in France during the First World War. The direction is thus both literal and metaphorical. The following mention of a character by name may give the impression that the play is starting to return to more conventional dramaturgical practice, yet the scene’s character attribution, ‘ophelia [chorus/hamlet]’ (89), already dispels the impression that Müller has chosen to stabilize his notion of character. The invitation to turn the monologue that follows into a choric text undermines the dominance of the Ophelia figure, despite the opening line ‘I am Ophelia’ (89). The switch from past (‘I was Hamlet’) to present is clearly significant, yet the inclusion of a ‘hamlet’ in the attribution suggests that things may be a little more complicated. The final part of the stage direction is an example of a feature that will recur in excess in the following scene: it is an image that defies the design team to stage it because it is metaphorical and not literal. Of course, designers could indeed hang a clock around Ophelia’s neck or attach an emblem above her heart, yet such literalism is not in keeping with the associative nature of the rest of the text. If the direction is not to be represented visually, one has to wonder what one does with it. I shall turn to this question in the discussion of Scene 3, below.
The speech itself is not as fragmented as ‘Family Album’. Indeed, it moves clearly from an identification of Ophelia with other female suicides, via the decision to stop ‘killing myself’ (89), to a series of described actions involving the destruction of the domestic sphere, a radicalization of the self and a move from the private to the public. This coherence, as discussed in the following chapter, is not unproblematic.
‘Ophelia’, the apparently singular speaker, assumes a collective identity in the opening lines. This is no longer an individual, but a type. As such, the repeated use of an ‘I’ that follows has the power of more than one voice. This was already acknowledged in the attribution at the start of the scene, but it is not a chorus of equals that delivers the lines. For one, Hamlet is male, and so the sincerity of his delivery is called into question. Is this an attempt to sympathize with the woman who killed herself in response to his actions in Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Is he trying to assuage his guilt? Is this the tokenistic behaviour of a liberal? The answer, which the text does not give, is perhaps not important; rather, it is the fact that Hamlet is actually speaking the Ophelia lines that is significant.
3 ‘Scherzo’
‘Scherzo’ is a term taken from classical music. It is an Italian word that means ‘a joke’ and often denotes a comic movement in a larger work. By setting the scene thus, Müller gestures to a contrast between the subject matter and its performance.
The scene is almost entirely composed of stage directions that evoke a grotesque or nightmarish scene. In part they refer back to the description of the female suicides in ‘Europe of the Woman’. While some of the directions are potentially performable, as when Hamlet views the dead women with the distance of a visitor at a museum, others are not. ‘On a swing the Madonna with breast cancer. [. . .] The breast cancer shines like a sun’ (90) defies literal representation and, like the opening to the previous scene, may suggest that Müller is trying to do something other with his stage directions than simply have them performed, as is usually the case when scripts offer descriptions of scenes, costumes, entrances and exits. That is, the stage directions may have a similar status to the spoken text in a play like this. Neither type of text maps easily onto the conventional modes of delivery and performance. Müller is perhaps p...

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