[In the following essay, Fawkner maintains that absence is the central structural theme of Macbeth and analyzes the protagonist as a character who remains distanced from his actions.]

3.1 THE ASSASSINATION OF INTENTIONALITY

As I now approach the dramatic crisis of murder itself, my criticism will situate itself inside what is loosely known as the “noble-murderer interpretation.” This is the reading favored by actors like Garrick and Olivier and discussed by quite a number of significant critics. The basic idea, here, is that Shakespeare's genius does not bother to stage the banal notion of a bad man entering evil but of a very good man entering evil. However, and this is a crucial dimension of the current enterprise, I do not myself read this transition (in the noble-murderer reading) from good to evil as a “fall” from good, as a common type of tragic “tainting.” I do not think that Macbeth at any point “becomes evil” in order to become a murderer (although murder in itself obviously is evil). I think, with John Bayley, that it “is essential to the hypnotic tension of the play that Macbeth should not seem in any ordinary way ‘responsible’ for his actions.”¹ (The stress here is on “ordinary”; one is not freeing Macbeth from responsibility.) In short, my position is this: anyone arguing that Macbeth “turns evil” and that this inner darkening is the crucial trigger device for the murder and the tragic action is not only misconceiving Shakespeare's dramatic design but also disfiguring the imaginative and aesthetic potentials of the play.

In fact, that type of secondary-school reading also disfigures most of the enormous psychological potentials of Macbeth. Several critics are generously willing to acknowledge the greatness of the play, while at the same time voicing the curious prejudice that Shakespeare is a poor psychologist who sacrifices psychological truth for the sake of dramatic effect. One is willing to recognize the feeling of tragic greatness, but finding that this greatness does not fit any logocentric model of psychological causation, one decides that the play is successful in spite of its psychology. I hold precisely the opposite view. I think there is a very special psychology in this play, and I think that critics replacing this psychology (which is beyond their ken) with their own “temptation-and-fall” theories (taken from popular logic) are simply transforming the play into something that is more immediately manageable for them than it really is. E. E. Stoll has argued that the tragic thrill comes from seeing the good man falling into horror, but that Macbeth's deeds would be more in keeping with psychological realism had the hero had some real cause to dislike Duncan.² This, to me, is the silliest possible notion. If Macbeth really has had a grievance, then the whole play called Macbeth, far from being one of the most brilliant dramas ever devised, would sink into mediocrity and indifference. In this same vein and fashion, Gustav Rümelin tells us that Shakespeare “exaggerates” at the expense of real “psychological truth” but still somehow creates a play that is his most powerful and mighty tragedy.³ In his review of these two positions, J. I. M. Stewart limply follows suit (with respect to this particular issue) by stating that Shakespeare was always prepared to use a “non-realistic” move⁴ and that tragic fall might be related to the fact that “everybody” is subject to weak moments of exposure in which some “lurking” evil runs through us.⁵

The idea that Macbeth is “treacherous” (in the ordinary sense) is no doubt promoted by his tendency, shown from the outset, to speak in asides. The “Cumberland” aside (1.4.48-53) is a case in point here: “Stars, hide your fires! / Let not light see my black and deep desires.” But two things need to be said about the incriminating asides. First, the “Cumberland” aside, as the only really “evil” one, is almost certainly an interpolation—as Granville-Barker, Fleay, and others have observed (KM, 25).⁶ I suspect that this interpolation was introduced by someone with precisely the kind of attitude exemplified by Stoll and Rümelin above: that Shakespearean psychology had to be “improved” (indeed introduced!) so that tragic intentionality could be “made clear.” Second, the hero's tendency to speak in asides is not necessarily a social event, denoting undercover action and withdrawal, but a technical necessity: Shakespeare wants to display a transition toward introversion, and the only way of giving the audience access to this introversion is to use asides and soliloquies.

My own view is this: that Macbeth never has had the intention to murder Duncan, and that throughout the play he never has any such intention. His intention is not only absent, it is structurally absent.

Absence, generally, is structural in Macbeth; and absent intentionality is the specific form that tragic crisis gives to this general absence. I cannot really see how the play as a whole can function in its specifically Shakespearean form of suggestion without there being a (conscious or unconscious) recognition of this peculiar organization.

In a sense—and this is what is truly terrifying in Macbeth—there is simply nothing of the murderer in the hero. Partly, this murderous emptiness inside the murderer can be explained in terms of constitutional weakness; one can posit a failure of nerve, of proper disposition, or even (as we have seen in Bayley's criticism) of dramatic suitability: the hero's mind is “unfitted for the role that tragedy requires of it.”⁷ But things can be taken much further—in a sense logically have to be taken much further. The murderous emptiness is not only the function of “weakness” but a function of strength—of an intensity of mind that is unprecedented. Tragic paralysis, in Macbeth, is not a merely passive event; on the contrary, it is highly active. Tragic action, while being interiorized so as to mostly take place inside the mind, does not dissipate its energies there, become mere misty sluggishness. Macbeth wrestles with a spell, and in a sense with a paralyzing one; but the paralysis affects his bodily actions and military readiness, not his mind. The spell, far from being something that drugs his intellect, is something that keenly awakens it to unprecedented acuteness and sensitivity. What this extra-lucid intellection now comes to engage with (as I shall argue in a moment) is the activity of an unthinkable watchfulness: Macbeth begins the weird process of watching the absence of his own intention (to murder).

Because of this Shakespearean move, the scene presencing the hallucinated dagger cannot (as Olivier and others recognized) be turned into a conventional horror scene, full of mere knee-knocking and guilt. In Olivier's performance, there was no melodramatic recoiling from the air-drawn dagger, and the soliloquy was spoken as if in dreaming. Delivering his speech as drugged whisper, Olivier managed to create a sense of total unreality. Although Macbeth appeared as a man of immense sensibility, this sensibility did not sensitize him to the murder itself but made him rather indifferent to it (indifferent to its presence). Sensibility was now directed toward something else. His comments after returning from the king's chamber were delivered in a strangely flat tone, signifying a lack of real self-involvement.⁸ It might be argued here that Macbeth is not actually interested in murder but in the aura of absences around it, that he is not hypnotized by murder as action but by the ever-receding (non)supports in which it is embedded. Macbeth's intellect is from this viewpoint a deepening of a process identified by Margaret Ferguson in Hamlet: the hero's tendency to be attentive to the passive rather than the active: “Hamlet does not inquire very deeply … into the meaning of his action [when killing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, etc.]. This seems odd, since he has shown himself so remarkably capable of interrogating the meaning of his inaction.”⁹ In spite of the larger inclination toward action of Macbeth, the remark remains relevant for him too—for as I will be continuing to argue, action for him tends to presence itself in terms of inaction. This fact applies to all the temporal phases: past action, present action, and future action. Thus the “dialectic” between action and inaction as it surfaces in Hamlet is here taken down into a deeper state of reciprocation, for here one side of the dialectic is often sensed to actually amount to its polar opposite.

The idea of Macbeth as one immersed in “ambition” seems to me to be a red herring in this general context. We are told that he is exceedingly ambitious—so ambitious, in fact, that he is prepared to commit a terrible crime against a sovereign who is politically innocent and not even an ordinary “political enemy.” But while Lady Macbeth is the ambitious one, and the one trying to persuade her husband that he is her equal in this respect, Macbeth hardly ever displays political behavior that betokens ambitious thoughts. The end of the “If it were done” soliloquy is interesting from this viewpoint:

                                                                                                                                            I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on th'other—

(1.7.25-29)

From the orthodox perspective the meaning is that ambition is pure cause, the only cause. There is a circle of ambition, so that ambition itself causes ambition. But if ambition is circular and solipsistic in this sense, the circularity (“Vaulting”) surely refers to effect rather than cause. Ambition is circular as effect. In Macbeth there are in a sense only effects (as I shall presently argue). The ambition is “vaulting” and circular because it has no punctual source or origin; it does not originate from any empirical fact, whether of treacherous mind or political actuality. The “ambition” is ultimately empty of substance, of empirical content; and for this very reason it is nonambition. Macbeth does not say that he has “only ambition”—or only an ambition that, sadly, happens to be vaulting. He says that he only has vaulting ambition. It does not overleap its target (since it has none), it “o'erleaps itself.” It traces only the formal presence of its formal possibility. It “falls on th'other—” … what? Side? In any case it falls on something else, on something beyond itself, on something that has nothing to do with ambition.

I would now like to forward the first of the three main critical notions in this subsection. This is the notion that the idea of the murder is stronger for Macbeth than the murder, and that he therefore in a strange way has to perform the murder in order to murder the idea of it.

This line of reasoning presupposes certain assumptions similar to those made by John Bayley. “Macbeth may seem simple enough, but it is also in fact the play with the clearest and most terrifying discrepancy between inner consciousness and action.”¹⁰ This fracturing of the spirit, leading to extreme inwardization, is what I have been identifying as “metaphysical servitude”. In fact Bayley at one point happens to use this very word (“servitude”) in a similar fashion: Shakespeare shows us social chaos but he also shows us chaos in the mind, “its nightmare servitude to an irrevocable act.”¹¹ My commentary would only add this single qualification: that it is not to the act that Macbeth ultimately is the slave, but to the idea of it. This difference may seem slender, “academic.” But in fact the whole drama pivots on it—and it is by ignoring this very difference that criticisms tend to prematurely wreck their logic. It is clear that if the “servitude” of the tragic hero is a servitude to the idea rather than to the actual act as such, the servitude can precede the act and thus in a sense come to be viewed as causal.

There are two main ways of explaining the crucial difference between a murder/idea nexus where murder is dominant and a murder/idea nexus where idea is dominant, and I begin with a procedure that discusses this particular notion in relation to the cardinal concept of the entire play: Truth.

Those favoring the theory of ambition will no doubt point to units such as: “Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor: / The greatest is behind” (1.3.116-17) and “Two truths are told, / As happy prologues to the swelling act / Of the imperial theme” (1.3.127-29). The first of these units appears to indicate that Macbeth is now ambitiously looking forward to the remaining third of his monarchial career; but while I can agree with the fact that he certainly is looking forward, I cannot agree with the idea that he is looking forward mainly in terms of ambition. The forward-looking is engineered logically, not emotionally. If a gypsy looks in a crystal ball and tells me I win eight hundred dollars next Wednesday at seven o'clock, and that I win eight million dollars the following Wednesday at seven o'clock, then it is not particularly surprising that I will be looking forward with a thumping heart to that second Wednesday evening if the first Wednesday evening to my surprise brings me in exactly eight hundred dollars and exactly at seven o'clock. But what does this new thrill depend on? It depends exclusively on my quite normal ability to perform cognitive acts of simple induction. This is precisely the mechanism that Shakespeare is working with in Macbeth: and the brilliant point about it all is that subjectivity as causal agent in an important way can be bracketed. My hopes, just like those of Macbeth for the crown, are in a sense not monitored by a subjective act of will. Although we have come to desire the promised thing, the “approach” of that thing, its coming into the horizon of our ownmost view, its closeness, is not a function of desire. Instead a rather abstract and lofty mechanism of logic out there in the world has presenced these bewildering hopes; they are, as such, beyond my control and influence. Indeed, there can only come into action the sense of a really self-determined subjective mastery through a negation of the hopes: only by resisting them can I gain back the initiative that right now has slipped away into chance, weird predestination, or whatever you want to call it. “Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor: / The greatest is behind.” If the lines are spoken with the gluttony of poorly concealed expectation, then Macbeth, I admit, is already implicitly a murderer and a villain, a new Richard III. But I do not think the lines should be spoken with the dark glow of intense ambition radiating from the eyes, and I do not think that Macbeth in any significant way recapitulates Richard III. The words might better be spoken in stunned, mechanical, incredulous reverie.

The idea of the “happy prologues” does not really endanger this reading, for “happy” does not necessarily at all refer to an emotion (a growing happiness inside the cogito “Macbeth”) but, indeed, to “prologues.” It is not happiness (as a subjective state of mind) that is at stake here, but the idea of happiness; and this idea is an ideal: happiness as the completion of the perfectly drawn metaphysical circle Glamis-Cawdor-King. The happiness lies most of all in the completion of the circle, in the happy presence to itself of the circle's possible realization. The “prologues” are happy because their identities as prologues are quickly being enhanced by the general turn of events.

The second way of discussing the ascendency of “idea of murder” over “murder” is to call attention to certain psychological states involving delinealized temporality and reversed causation. Macbeth, we know, suffers right from the first encounter with the sisters from a “fit”—call it a “murder fit.” But this fit is not an emotion or passion in which he suddenly, like Mr. Hyde, realizes that he wants to murder; instead the fit is a state where he realizes that his identity-as-murderer is already formed “out there” in logical space. The entity Macbeth-as-murderer “exists,” immediately, as a ready-made thing out there. It is premature and trivial to call this thing an “idea” or a “thought”—because Shakespeare is perhaps in the final analysis shaking our confidence in being able to state what an idea or a thought is. What is a thought? What is an idea? These questions do not simply follow the Macbeth-problematic as “interesting points” to be made about a finished dramatic experience; rather, these questions are internal to the dramatic experience as such—not as questions, but as movements charged with questioning possibility.

The “fit” that seizes Macbeth can be compared with the one that seizes many people who come to a precipice. What is interesting here is the mechanism of “original reaction” or “originary fear.” It is related to what I discussed a while ago as “originary healing.” The psychological mechanism only appears in humans, though certain higher apes have similar tendencies. In this type of experience, there is not first a perception of the abyss, then a fear of it, and then a readiness to jump off—in order, as it were, to cancel the horrible swelling of the fear. Instead there is from the outset a sense of vertigo: the very first perception of the abyss is the perception of one's horrible fate at its bottom. That, precisely, is what the abyss is all about: that all along it has been waiting for you there; or, to make things more gruesome and Shakespearean: that all along you have been waiting down there. “You.” A corpse. The fallen you waits for you, just as in our play the fallen Macbeth (who already has murdered Duncan) “waits” for the not-fallen Macbeth. In a sense greets him, quite solemnly. “Hail Macbeth!” The existence of specters in such a world does not at all surprise one from this viewpoint: corpses, rising from the abyss; an absolute beyond speaking from inside the bosom of one's tightest self-presence.

This mechanism can be theorized in minute detail with reference to the hero's system of reflexes. Macbeth does not first feel that he might eventually want to murder Duncan and then see the bloody scenario in front of him and then finally find himself in full flight from the feeling/thought/image. This reassuring sequentiality is what afflicts Mr. Smith in the common horror story; but Macbeth is not Mr. Smith and Shakespeare is not “into” horror stories. What happens to Macbeth, instead, is that he begins with the horror/flight. He begins not with the flight from something, but just with “from”: the flight-from. He does not begin with the horror of something, but just with “of”: horror-of. Gradually he has to “fill in” the missing object, make it present and self-present.

My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man,
That function is smother'd in surmise,
And nothing is, but what is not.

(1.3.139-43)

Here, it is not only that the consequences of murder have not yet been fully grasped; murder is not “fantastical” merely because it is unreal and unfamiliar as a fully developed notion. The unit “fantastical” instead indicates that murder at this point refuses to be, precisely, “a fully developed notion.” Thought, still, has not formed the idea “murder,” and conversely “murder” is not yet part of thought but part of what is “fantastical.” “Murder,” from this viewpiont is weird (“fantastical”), and the important word sequence “thought, whose murther” (which hits the spectator as word sequence, not idea) indicates that thought itself is drawn into the dangers, risks, and unrealities of “murder,” that “thought” and “murder” are coimplicative—but in a way that cannot yet (or perhaps ever) be understood.

The idea I am trying to promote, here, is that repulsion in a difficult sense is primal and originary in Macbeth; repulsion is “causal” as it is in cases of deathward anguish near the precipice. Because one is so frightfully repelled by the horrible abyss, one is sucked down into it. Analogously: because noble Macbeth is so frightfully repelled by the idea of murder, he is drawn relentlessly into it.

The important soliloquies of the opening act are all structured by this primacy of repulsion. Thus Shakespeare does not make us feel that Macbeth is a pulsional man, full of the blood-hot passion of murderous desire, and that metaphysical deliberation is some kind of hesitant latecomer, some mere process of deferral. Instead Shakespeare makes us feel that repulsion “organizes” pulsion, that the repulsive reflex is so dominant and intense that whatever eventually gets done in the name of its opposite (in the name of murder) really in a fundamental way is structured, determined, and limited by that original and irremovable repulsionism.

This queer organization can be felt in the important “If it were done” soliloquy. Here, already, and under the influence of Lady Macbeth's manipulations, the hero is beginning to try to think out his revulsion in terms of its opposite: “real” desire to murder. But precisely because revulsion still plays the leading part—the part it remains playing for the duration of the tragedy—the soliloquy does not take Macbeth where “he”/murder would have liked it to go.

3.2 SOLILOQUY

If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if th'assassination
Could trammel up the consequence …

(1.7.1-3)

There is pragmatic calculation here, a man prepared to overlook transcendental issues (“jump the life to come,” 1.7.7) in order to carefully consider the worldly consequences of a mean deed. So goes the common reading. And it will be supported by critics like Bertrand Evans, theorists who argue that Macbeth has no moral awareness at all, and that this soliloquy reveals the shallowness of his moral capacities.¹² We are told that Macbeth in no true way is raising moral objections to murder in this soliloquy, that his moral logic is lame and insufficient.¹³ I agree entirely. But for the opposite reasons. Why is this pro-and-con soliloquy empty of moral substance? Evans says it is because Macbeth lacks moral sensibility; I say that it is because Macbeth has moral sensibility. The moral debate is superfluous (and thus structurally empty for Macbeth as “dialectic” or inner tug-of-war) precisely because he has absolute insight into the immorality of the deed. If Evans's notion of Macbeth as a moral idiot were true, we would have no tragedy at all. In Shakespeare's complex organization of the tragic mechanism, the very murder requires an absolute recoil as a first trigger for its later effectuation. For Evans the hero's rhetoric only indicates that the murder is assessed as being “particularly risky,”¹⁴ and the unit “We'd jump the life to come” is identified as a “casual” pronouncement.¹⁵ Macbeth's feeling that the murder will be blown in every eye is said to refer to the villain's fear of punishment as a consequence of universal protest.¹⁶

If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if th'assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all—here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come.—But in these cases,
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague th'inventor: this even-handed Justice
Commends th'ingredience of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.

(1.7.1-12)

The trouble with distortions and simplifications of Macbeth's tragic mind is not only that the hero's subtle character gets ruined but also that we end up with a falsification and sentimentalization of the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Because Bertrand Evans thinks that Macbeth is a moral idiot, he also thinks that Lady Macbeth knows Macbeth in a very deep manner. Indeed, in their conjoint “understanding” of Macbeth as a moral idiot (and therefore also a pathetic coward) Evans and Lady Macbeth form a perfect pair. Their readings of the man Macbeth and of the particular nature of his inner predicament are equally acute. This “superlative wife,” we are informed, reads Macbeth like a “primer.”¹⁷ His expressed reluctance to proceed with the evil plan is the function of “lame” rationalization, a pathetically “whining” set of excuses.¹⁸ She only has to tell him the “plain truth”¹⁹ and show him how to avoid getting caught in order to demolish his dams of resistance.²⁰

Shakespeare, of course, is really doing something utterly different in this soliloquy. Murder is a completely monstrous thing for Macbeth, and the soliloquy ends up in the constatation that murder is out of the question. It may seem that this decision is a function of the foregrounding of all the nasty “consequences” of murder; yet as the end of the speech indicates, the final sensation has nothing to do with “consequences” but with the apprehension of a vast visionary nothingness in which the nullity of motivation and the nullity of desire are beginning to be indistinguishable.

                                                                                                                                  his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu'd, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And Pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's Cherubins, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.—I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on th'other—

(1.7.18-28)

Although murder (and not merely its “consequences”) is prominently horrible for Macbeth in the soliloquy, he permits some distant part of his mind to mechanically go through what amounts to an elaborate hypothesis of murder: quite simply to clarify the absurdity of the deed's possibility. The academic silliness of taking various linguistic units at their surface value quickly emerges from a consideration of “We'd jump the life to come” as it appears at the beginning of the speech (1.7.7). Far from indicating a callous readiness to obliterate the transcendental horizon, this unit merely indicates the highly provisional suppression of that idealist notion. It is obvious that instead of being a worldly pragmatist caring only for mundane consequences the hero is in deep levels of his being profoundly conscious of the transcendental dilemma. Macbeth remains a transcendentally oriented figure throughout the play. And, what is more, all his moments of crisis are in the final analysis monitored and organized by his intense transcendentalism—the very transcendentalism that Shakespeare troubled to clarify in his opening scenes. Indeed, none of the hero's moments of tragic crisis are adequately grasped if they are not viewed in relation to the hero's sustained idealism. Although he starts, in this soliloquy, with a lower-than-divine sphere of reference (“here, / But here”), it is eminently clear that the latter parts of the speech reveal a very strong sense of divine infringement: “The deep damnation of his taking-off” (1.7.20). In his misreading, Evans fails to see that rhetoric overpowers “meaning.” If you look at the end of the soliloquy, with all its images of “heaven's Cherubins” and nakedly new-born Pity, it is easy to see that the generally moral and religious frame of reference is precisely what is most vivid and important in Macbeth's state of mind. Who, in this speech, is not in “deep damnation” if not Macbeth?

But if part of the soliloquy can be viewed as a function of the very moral inclination in Macbeth that certain critics refuse to acknowledge, another part is a function of a vaster mechanism that is still not fully developed but which can nevertheless be intuited at this early stage. This mechanism is perhaps best described as a form of staging. Macbeth begins a highly imaginative process of self-projection where the extravagance of image and sentiment at once flattens and deepens the sense of personal involvement. This involvement, now at one and the same time growing more shallow and more troubled, is an engagement with a “new” Macbeth, or a Macbeth on the “other side”—a person somehow possible at the farther side of “murder,” behind and beyond its reality. In this staging—theatrical in an almost melodramatic manner that will not fade in subsequent scenes—it is not merely the question of nonmurderous Macbeth learning how to project himself into the cold-bloodedness of murder; rather, it is the question of quite stable Macbeth learning how to become the absence-from-Macbeth that he already to some extent is on account of prophecy and on account of the weird “original guilt” promoted in the what-is-not soliloquy.²¹ The more absent Macbeth learns to become, the more does he become present to the self-absence that already is his odd destiny and tragedy. This process of increasingly melodramatic and forced staging can be related to Bayley's notion (discussed recently) that the hero is unfit to play his part in tragedy. Michael Goldman thinks along similar lines when he speaks of Macbeth “learning to perform” the murder, “as an actor might.”²² In psychoanalytic terms: the more one “plays” being “the murderer” (whether positively or negatively, whether “sincerely” or hypothetically), the less does one have to answer for murder personally. But the play's mechanism does not exactly parallel the Freudian notion that revulsion from murder secretly indicates murderous desire; here, rather, it is the other way around: desire, curiously enough, betokens revulsion, betokens what I have referred to as “originary revulsion” or “originary repulsion.”

Two main “levels” can thus be identified in the “If it were done” soliloquy—and both of them unbalance the “stage-villain” reading forwarding this great speech as a discourse on worldly obstacles. First there is the clear view of Macbeth as a morally conscious man—a view deliberately and elaborately staged by Shakespeare. Macbeth, searching his heart, finds that murder is not tolerable as a political deed or human act. But precisely because Macbeth is so obviously moral, precisely because he himself is so profoundly conscious of his own ingrained idealism, the “moral dimension” of his thought is almost automatized: he does not have to carefully think out the reasons for not murdering Duncan but instead merely has to call them into view. Indeed, we feel that part of his mind is absent from this cataloguing of moral considerations. As we have seen, there are critics who prematurely rationalize this slight absence in Macbeth from the moral issues as a “moral lack.” But the lack is not a moral lack but a lack. Just that, a vacuity and minus. Macbeth listens to himself go through a routine act of logical argumentation, but what interests him is the astonishing fact that he can at all deliberate such matters in a reasoning manner. As the sense of dreamy unreality intensifies, he can fuel the absence-oriented process by permitting his sense of slipping foothold to merge with the “deep damnation” in Duncan's “taking-off.” Macbeth actually himself takes off, joining those equally unreal creatures in the aerial corridors of sightless couriers and heavenly cherubim.

It is clear by now that the “If it were done” soliloquy simultaneously forwards the sense of two opposite movements—and that discourse, deconstructing the oppositionality of this (dialectical) opposition, unifies and separates the “two” motions in one and the “same” operation. On the one hand the act in which Macbeth makes “murder” more present as an imaginatively developed structure of mind is indistinguishable from his desire to explode that structure and ride recklessly away on the fantastical improbability of its reality. On the other hand, and conversely, the very negation of murder has a striking suggestion of being an imaginative effort to dig into its possible reality, to discover its possibility as real. The real equivocation, in summary, is not produced by the pros and cons of murder, by advantages and disadvantages, but by the fact that the collapse of dialectical oppositionality opens a “unified” sphere of precarious suggestion in which the entire corpus of the soliloquy can work at once for and against murder. Macbeth desires the absence of his presence to murder, but he also desires the presence of his absence from murder. From the deconstructionist viewpoint these “two” movements are (1) the same thing, and (2) not the same thing. The space “between” these two last alternatives is unthinkable, or is to be thought only in terms of unthinkability. The space “between” these two last alternatives is not a space. It cannot be intellectually “visualized”—but exists “in” (or through) discourse as a non-spatio-logical “instance.”

“Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings” (1.3.137-38). Yes. But the presence of the horrible imaginings themselves is at once a move in the reassuring direction of “present fears” and a move away from what can be present. It is this “double” (and yet not double) movement that I shall consistently track throughout Macbeth: that Macbeth in servile fashion frantically presses all entities into their reassuring presence; but that this presencing in a sense is a mock-presencing of mock-presences, since “what” is made present is somehow always already intuited as empty of (full) presence. Thus Macbeth in a sense walks into a trap (the trap of “presence”); but since he has darkly foreseen the abyssal absence in the bosom of all presence, we may be entitled to feel that his self-entrapment is partly self-organized. Macbeth rids himself of “Macbeth,” paradoxically, by setting out to find him: he vaguely realizes that the prey, once caught, will vanish and thus cease to bother him.

3.3 THE DAGGERS OF ABSENCE

“Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings” (1.3.137-38); “It is the bloody business which informs / Thus to mine eyes” (2.1.48-49); “My strange and self-abuse / Is the initiate fear, that wants hard use” (3.4.141-42). Vainly, Macbeth will attempt to rationalize the unbalancing of presence by trying to explain it (to himself and to others) in terms of lower-order mechanisms: inexperience, guilt, and so forth. As I have pointed out, Macbeth often follows the cue of Lady Macbeth in attempting such rationalizations—and, as I also have pointed out, the critics who themselves have a vested interest in bringing down the entire play to lower-order logic inadvertently come to share the sterile “either/or-ness” of the logical Lady. Macbeth's submission to Lady Macbeth's general initiative is at its most conspicuous degree of dishonesty in the Ghost scene of act 3:

LADY M.
Sit, worthy friends. My Lord is often thus,
And hath been from his youth: pray you, keep seat;
The fit is momentary; upon a thought
He will again be well. If much you note him,
You shall offend him, and extend his passion;
Feed, and regard him not. Are you a man?
MACB.
Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that
Which might appal the Devil.
LADY M.
                                                                                                                                  O proper stuff!
This is the very painting of your fear:
This is the air-drawn dagger, which, you said,
Led you to Duncan. O! these flaws and starts
(Impostors to true fear), would well become
A woman's story at a winter's fire,
Authoris'd by her grandam. Shame itself!
Why do you make such faces? When all's done,
You look but on a stool.

(3.4.52-67)

A moment later:

[MACB.]
Do not muse at me, my most worthy friends,
I have a strange infirmity, which is nothing
To those that know me.

(3.4.84-86)

The infirmity “is nothing.” That is an interesting unit. Indeed the word “in-firmity” is itself of interest, strategically placed as it is.²³ But primarily, here, the infirmity is nothing to the “worthy friends,” to “those that know me.” One implication of this statement is that the Macbethian “fit,” as unthinkable “infirmity,” is a meaningless “nothing” once translated into the world of Lady Macbeth and the “worthy friends.” The fit simply does not exist there, for it is not even possible there. But the stress on the unit “know” is also significant. The fit is meaningless once translated into the world of those that “know me.” This unit is related to a previous one, appearing right after the assassination:

[LADY M.]
                                                                                                    —Be not lost
So poorly in your thoughts.
MACB.
To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself.

(2.2.70-72)

Self-knowledge (and by implication also self-presence) is not compatible with the Macbethian condition. To know Macbeth is to be excluded from the dimension in which the in-firmity reigns. This situation cannot be reduced to a mere question of guilt, that he does not want to “know” about his naughty misbehavior; nor can it be reduced to a question of insanity, that the fit is loss of self-presence in the medical sense. Although both of these “explanations” are moderately relevant and operative, they do not at all cover the main thrust of the dislocation that Shakespeare is working with: Macbeth's encounter with the unthinkable, with the absolutely weird and uncanny.

Lady Macbeth's “diagnosis” of Macbeth's ailment is clearly reductive. But while she (with certain critics) is blind to the naiveté in this mechanically organized pseudodiagnosis, the hero is not. Indeed, a striking feature in his entire tragic comportment is that he is “convinced” while still remaining unconvinced. He is “convinced” that he wants to murder Duncan, “convinced” (by Lady Macbeth) that the deed will come off well, “convinced” that present fears will be less than horrible imaginings, “convinced” that his nerves will steady as political treachery becomes habitual, “convinced” that guilt is the cause of the hallucinated air-drawn dagger—but throughout all this conviction he remains secretly unconvinced. There is no conviction in Macbeth: and this, exactly, is what defines his metaphysical servitude. In metaphysics one is not convinced about anything; one doubts. And most of all one doubts oneself.

By being excluded, structurally, from the Macbethian fit and from the “radioactive” zone governing it through the Weird Sisters, Lady Macbeth is blind to the deconstruction of binary opposites that now unbalances presence and the possibility of presence. She thinks Macbeth ought to decide to be either sane or mad, either courageous or cowardly. Macbeth protests right in the middle of his fit that he is “a bold one” (3.4.58), and he is absolutely right—since Shakespeare, obviously, is forcing us to grasp an absolute quaking that is not a function of mere “fear.” Her intellect remains at the level of empirical positivism: “When all's done, / You look but on a stool” (3.4.66-67).

Through the curious sex-anthropology in this play, with its inversion of sexual distributions and of patterns of gender domination, Lady Macbeth comes to assume all the obnoxious aspects of patriarchal thinking. She patronizes Macbeth, seeks to bring him back into the logical system of masculine dialectic, male dominance in the name of order: “Are you a man?” (3.4.57). But this cheap trick of trying to coax Macbeth back into dialectical heroism founders on the fact that Macbeth's masculinity is not reducible to logical masculinity, to dialectic as mastery. There is a type of masculine affirmation, or affirmative masculinity, in Macbeth that outruns Lady Macbeth, “vanishes” from her presence and possible imagination. This masculinity, always already in touch with the weirdly androgynous (as monitored by the sisters), is only moved by her appeals to logical common sense in the most superficial way. Lady Macbeth's tragedy is that she thinks her cheap appropriation of Macbeth in the name of “male” logic prior to the murder (“you would / Be so much more the man,” 1.7.50-51) actually has a profound effect on him—actually could match the completely different influence exerted by the sisters. Again it is relevant to consider how Macbeth's tendency to be “convinced” reflects its opposite. But Lady Macbeth, dull to the play of opposites inside the soul of her husband, mechanically goes on dispatching her favorite medicine: the crude appeal to “maleness:” “What! quite unmann'd in folly?” (3.4.72).

Having assumed the pseudoheroic qualities of the dialectical male (“unsex me here,” 1.5.41), and having turned this maleness into the presence of what is “masculine” (“fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full / Of direst cruelty!”, 1.5.42-43) Lady Macbeth organizes her own presence as that which must necessarily be absent from the depth-formula of the play: equivocation. As one negotiating sexual difference as a dialectical difference, she cannot in any vital sense engage with the sexual play of the drama; she can only play that play melodramatically, by means of overacting: “Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor! / Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter! / Thy letters have transported me” (1.5.54-56).²⁴ There is a tonal difference between this discourse and that similar one used by the Weird Sisters to greet the hero (1.3.48-69), and while the latter greeting casts a spell over him, the former almost has the effect of putting him off. Lady Macbeth speaks univocally, pointing to the target of what will need to be present, pointing to self-presence in ideal presence; but Macbeth is already attuned to a quite different appeal—so that his wife's effusions are slightly boring, almost embarrassing. When he finally agrees to move along with her empirical project (which she wants to make present immediately), he is much like a husband who agrees to go on a holiday with his wife while secretly realizing that he is not going to enjoy himself and that he has not really swallowed the “convincing” arguments for the enterprise. Ironically, by having prematurely abandoned her femininity in a simplistic fashion, Lady Macbeth removes herself from participation in the “woman's story” that she derides: “O! these flaws and starts … would well become / A woman's story” (3.4.62-64). The play Macbeth, as equivocal discourse promoted by the sisters, as undialectical action evading patriarchal logocentricity, is in a certain sense exactly that: “A woman's story.” Lady Macbeth not only fails to be able to actively participate in this story/play, not only becomes more and more disconnected from its principles and possibilities; she also is shown to be permanently falling away from a dialogue with its protagonist, from any vital proximity to him.

“O proper stuff! / This is the very painting of your fear: / This is the air-drawn dagger, which, you said, / Led you to Duncan” (3.4.59-62). The connection that Lady Macbeth establishes here is important: not only does Shakespeare make us feel that the fit in the banquet scene (3.4) is related to the dagger-fit (2.1); he also makes us feel that Lady Macbeth's radical uncomprehension of the entity “fit” antecedes the murder as such: she is not only out of touch with a tormented post-murder Macbeth full of “remorse,” but also out of touch with the very Macbeth who saw murder as such presence itself in terms of its opposite (repulsion-from-murder) and absence (absurdity).

Significantly, it is Lady Macbeth who interrupts Macbeth (at the end of his “If it were done” soliloquy) at the very moment when he has realized that his attraction to murder is in an originary way organized by its unattractiveness, that he thinks about murder (more and more obsessively) because his purity of mind utterly forbids such thinking. But when Macbeth has come to the consolidation of the idea that “murder” is a cognitive circuit in his mind, no more than a self-determined nothingness, Lady Macbeth interrupts this line of thought and immediately turns things down into the lower-order levels of relevance: getting the business done, moving along the path of ambition without further inhibitions. The “surrender” of Macbeth to her acts of “persuasion” is less interesting here—on account of the emptiness of the surrender, its quality of theatrical staging—than the mind of the hero as, quite unaffected by the token-commitment to “murder,” it goes on exploring the future in terms of the absence of murder/future/commitment.

The soliloquy on the air-drawn dagger is now obviously a speech of great importance. The dagger makes its entry as an utter stranger (“Is this a dagger, which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” 2.1.33-34)—and, most strange of all, as an absolute stranger also to the business of murder!

So absent indeed is Macbeth from murder as volitional enterprise that he requires that pointing dagger as an indispensable connective link that is to attach him to the possibility of murder. He needs the dagger to connect him with the dagger; he needs the pointing of the dagger to feel its point. I am saying, in other words, that the hallucinated (and therefore “absent”) dagger presents Macbeth with the intention that he should have had.

The dagger is a dagger of intentionality. It points to the chamber; it signals the direction of an intention. But the intention is not in the subject, not in Macbeth. It is in the dagger, in the not-Macbeth. The dagger becomes present to Macbeth as Macbeth's absence from it.

Is this a dagger, which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee:—
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling, as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.—
Mine eyes are made the fools o'th'other senses,
Or else worth all the rest: I see thee still;
And on thy blade, and dudgeon, gouts of blood,
Which was not so before.

(2.1.33-47)

The contradictory structure is obvious. On the one hand, Macbeth already knew the way he was to go (“the way that I was going”); on the other hand, the dagger has to point out this way. The dagger is a supplement. The marshalling is at once a supplementary necessity and an absurd surplus, it is at once purely dispensable and purely indispensable.²⁵ On the one hand, the supplementary dagger (in hallucination) gives Macbeth the murder weapon he requires for murder's possible presence; on the other hand, he already has at his immediate disposal this very dagger that is to bridge the gap between nonmurder and murder—indeed he draws it and places it beside its visionary partner.

Curiously, but not insignificantly, we are made to feel that the absent dagger is more present than the present one. The one that Macbeth draws for comparative contemplation is a kind of inert equivalent that nevertheless is no equivalent: it lacks the power of its visible/invisible copy. The secondary (hallucinated) dagger acquires a hyperontological primacy, and the prime weapon itself—the one to be used in the butchery—remains behind in a world of uninteresting secondariness, drained of drama, equivocation, and tragic vision.

It seems to me, however, that the absent dagger (of hallucination) slides into the finite, real, and material dagger that Macbeth is ready to use. In this way, the absence of the dagger is carried over into the gesture of murdering itself: so that in an important sense that murder is never truly actual, never truly present. The air-drawn dagger fills with alien intention a Macbethian intentionality that is at bottom structurally empty; but conversely, the very unreality of that hallucinated weapon preserves murder as something nonempirical and “distant” in Macbeth's inner drama. It is interesting from this viewpoint that Macbeth “forgets” to leave the daggers he uses near the corpse (much to the surprise and frustration of his wife, 2.2.47). It is indeed as if the act of being hypnotized by “the dagger” continues to be operative even when “real” weapons have replaced “air-drawn” ones. Macbeth trembles at the sight of his bloody hands and bloody daggers (a fact suggesting mere retreat and repulsion); but as I shall argue later, there is a process of attraction beneath the fear—which is precisely why there is more than “fear” in motion here. Macbeth sticks to blood/hands/daggers, and he does so, I suggest, because these things maintain the work of absence (from murder) that the air-drawn dagger (as something absent) has inaugurated.

From an orthodox viewpoint, the sudden appearance of “gouts of blood” on the dagger (2.1.46) seems to call forth the horrible future of the impending deed: the knife's transformation from spotless innocence to gory sacrilege. But in my view a more suggestive movement is also being dramatized: the further filling of empty and absent intention with the “stuff” of its required order. Just as the hallucinated dagger provided Macbeth's absence-from-murder with a modicum of suggestive presence-to-murder, so the reddening of the abstractly dangling blade signals a deepening of a presentation of intentionality as such. Macbeth sees his intention gather into intention—into sanguine reality of purpose—but this very hardening, coloring, and materializing takes place outside him, in a sphere not quite inhabited by any self-present presence.

In summary, then, the dagger shows Macbeth the way, but it is of course Macbeth who is showing Macbeth the way. The “first” Macbeth, as heroic master committed to idealistic “struggle to death” for transcendental recognition, has an absence of intent to murder Duncan; the “second” Macbeth, the metaphysically servile cogito, has a full and self-present intent to murder. But this second, servile Macbeth, who is self-present and fully intentional, is quite absent, has to be “created”: has, indeed, to be dramatized and staged. Hence the dream of that self-presence and full intentionality will remain punctured by the spacings of dramaturgy and creative nonpresence. Macbeth seeking to clutch the dagger is Macbeth seeking to clutch Macbeth, desiring the palpable presence of his own self-present thought, some creature who could be the absolute monarch of his own intentionality. Yet as I have tried to show in this analysis, this act of wanting to presence a self-present cogito carries with it traces of the originary resistance to this process. I see the “air-drawn dagger” as such a “trace.”²⁶ By pointing, it traces into the future what full presence has lacked from the outset.

Notes

1. Shakespeare and Tragedy, p. 191.

2. Quoted by J. I. M. Stewart in “Steep Tragic Contrast: Macbeth,” in Shakespeare: The Tragedies, ed. Clifford Leech (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 106.

3. Ibid., p. 108.

4. Ibid., p. 119.

5. Ibid., p. 114.

6. Muir argues that the eye-versus-hand imagery “is Shakespearian” (KM, 25); but it could be argued that the too-obvious Shakespearean stress here is exactly what looks suspicious. The passage contains the Shakespearean building blocks, but does it contain the Shakespearean way of assembling these blocks?

7. Shakespeare and Tragedy, p. 69.

8. See Bartholomeusz, Macbeth and the Players, p. 259.

9. “Hamlet: Letters and Spirits,” p. 299.

10. Shakespeare and Tragedy, p. 69.

11. Ibid.

12. Shakespeare's Tragic Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 200-201.

13. Ibid., p. 201.

14. Ibid., p. 202.

15. Ibid., p. 201.

16. Ibid., p. 202. I should perhaps emphasize, here, that I am in favor of retaining the Folio punctuation. This is not the place to undertake a critique of the “emendation” currently institutionalized; all I can say at this moment, by way of a general remark, is that the grammatically “correct” punctuation that we now have is an ontologizing construct that spoils a number of crucial spacings in the text. The cryptoromantic and ultra-ontologizing “bank and shoal of time” instead of “bank and school of time” is another interesting “improvement”—especially from the viewpoint of a critique of metaphysical presence.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., p. 203.

21. It may be objected that in discussing a process of “absencing” in Macbeth, I am contradicting my main thesis: that the hero gradually shifts over into a quest for metaphysical presence. But matters cannot be oversimplified. It all very much depends on what we mean by “Macbeth.” There certainly is a Macbeth who in the most alarming and conspicuous manner falls into a quest for presence. But the name “Macbeth” is never reducible to a presence: “other” Macbeths are operative “offstage.” In addition, as I argue all along, the structural impossibility of (metaphysical) presence, of presence as absolute self-presence, ensures the production of an absent Macbeth by the production of a present one.

22. “Language and Action in Macbeth,” p. 146.

23. Cf. “Thou sure and firm-set earth” (2.1.56).

24. Macbeth eventually makes his wife's melodramatic tone his own for a while: “Bring forth men-children only!” (1.7.73). Could it be argued that this tonal mimesis too is fragile?—that it too is not altogether convincing?

25. Calderwood's definition of the Derridean “supplement” involves “an excess added to a sufficiency, but paradoxically, because its presence implies a prior insufficiency, also a replacement of a lack” (If It Were Done, p. 57). This process, as I argue too, is true for the play as a whole. The general movement traces the paradox of the work of the “supplement.” “Each fulfillment creates a lack to be filled,” and the “fullness of final presence—the apparent closure of an end—fades even as it appears” (ibid., p. 69).

26. See the discussion of “trace” in Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), p. 192.

Bibliography

Bartholomeusz, Dennis. Macbeth and the Players. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Bayley, John. Shakespeare and Tragedy. London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

Calderwood, James L. If It Were Done. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.

Derrida, Jacques. Parages. Paris: Galilée, 1986.

Evans, Bertrand. Shakespeare's Tragic Practice. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

Ferguson, Margaret W. “Hamlet: Letters and Spirits.” In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, pp. 292-309. New York and London: Methuen, 1985.

Goldberg, Jonathan. “Language and Action in Macbeth,” In Focus on Macbeth, edited by John Russell Brown, pp. 140-52. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.

Leech, Clifford, ed. Shakespeare—The Tragedies: A Collection of Critical Essays. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

Muir, Kenneth, ed. Macbeth: The Arden Edition. London and New York: Methuen, 1951; University Paperback 1983.

Stewart, J. I. M. “Steep Tragic Contrast: Macbeth.” In Shakespeare: The Tragedies, edited by Clifford Leech. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965.