Hamlet: An Interpretation 5

Sophocles is not absolutely one of my heroes. He is the most conformist of all great Greek playwrights. Oedipus Tyrannos is not one of my favorite plays. The construct of Oedipus Tyrannos is that the garden of the city-state of Thebes is an "unweeded garden" more or less and the personage who needs to be weeded out is "Oedipus" because he has unintentionally committed an act of hubris (incest) which causes Thebes to be an "overweeded garden." Hubris is often used as a reason for character assassinations in the Media nowadays, but sooner and later you realize the very people accusing other people of hubris are titanically proud and arrogant people themselves. In fact, it is almost arbitrary how people assign blame in America. Blame has to do with scapegoating. As Wittengstein once observed, "If you can be just, be just. If you can't, be arbitrary." More or less what he said. But these people do not even think about justice because they are Postmodernists which pretty much means you are a solipsist. Some of these people contract a deadly disease and think everything is a joke. Objective diseases do exists. STD'S are what makes us civil to each other.

On a more serious level, Aristotle in his Poetics, outlined the main structure of most plays. There is the setting, the protagonist, the antagonist, the conflict, and the recognition, and the resolution. Personally, I never follow these structures. I much prefer the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett. But at the same time, these structures exist as metastructures in even the most avantgarde novels. In Hamlet, the recognition occurs very late in the play because of transferrence. He is transferring his desire to kill his father to a whole serious of other characters. He is literally like a serial killer, transferring the castration-anxiety that the father has projected and phallicized on the son as revenge for wanting to kill the father. Instead of killing the father, Hamlet ends up killing psychologically or otherwise those who are often very close to him. Anthropolgists speak of the "scale of affections." He ends up killing 10 or 12 people. I'm from MIT and I can't count. The repetition compulsion caused by early childhood trauma compensated for by his sublimation of his true father finds no outlet. But Hamlet can get hobbies and go through an "agon" that helps him deal with these problems but he doesn't.