Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

66
William Shakespeare
foundation of society. The taboo, and hence the founding of totemic
culture, is rooted in primitive man’s ambivalence: “they hated the
father who stood so powerfully in the way of their sexual demands
and their desire for power, but they also loved and admired him”
(Taboo 184). “I would not, Cassius; yet I love him well” (1.2.81). “As
Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it;
as he was valiant, I honour him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him”
(3.2.25–27). Not surprisingly, more than a resemblance between the
Roman conspiracy and the primitive band of brothers connects Julius
Caesar with Totem and Taboo. Shakespeare’s picture of Roman society
demonstrates numerous elements of the taboo culture. It seems, in
fact, a historicized, literary, and also biographical illustration of much
of Freud’s created myth about prehistoric society. 20
The phenomenology of Julius Caesar suggests conditions leading
to the related taboos against demons and against naming the dead.
Brutus, appealing to the conspirators to “be sacrificers, but not
butchers,” cries out:
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar,
And in the spirit of men there is no blood.
O, that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit,
And not dismember Caesar! But alas,
Caesar must bleed for it.
(2.1.164–71)
Brutus sees the two entities of body and spirit as fundamentally
different, separate though lamentably not separable in a living person.
Attending to the differentiated fates of Caesar’s body, which is an
evocative prop in Antony’s funeral oration, though a mere “bleeding
piece of earth” (3.1.254), and of his spirit, which, “ranging for revenge”
(3.1.270) as Antony predicted, defeats the conspirators, the play
precisely illustrates the sort of dualism from which demonology
develops. The appearance of Caesar’s ghost indicates that spirit may be
detached from the physical essence. The peculiar potency of Caesar’s
name is a related phenomenon. When Caesar claims invincibility by
intoning, “For always I am Caesar” (1.2.209), or when the Plebian
supports Brutus with the nomination “Let him be Caesar” (3.2.52),
the name has been decontextualized and granted a kind of magical