Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

70
William Shakespeare
the remembered drama suggests his surplus of signification; he figures
as both his own former and current selves, as Jacob Freud, as Caesar, and
as Caesar’s ghost. The disjuncture between John and all that he represented
and represents opens a space that only a ghost could be powerful
enough and free enough to fill, so Freud, like Shakespeare, renders the
father a ghost—Caesar’s ghost, John’s ghost, his own ghost—conquering
him, but at the same time attesting to his inescapability.
“Playing the part of Brutus” exerted a deep attraction for Freud, and
implicit in the appeal was the literal nature of Brutus’ crime. According
to the historical myth Freud would propagate, it is the condition of a
more primitive society to perform actions that in later civilized society
are repressed. The story of Julius Caesar—part myth, part history—
exists on the cusp of civilization; the father–son conflict is partly actual
and partly symbolic. Yet because Brutus is identified in action, he must
fail where Freud, heir to his ambivalence, succeeds: repression of the
parricidal wish enables Freud to internalize the father, in the form of
taboo law or superego. Brutus’ offer to sacrifice himself for Rome as
he had sacrificed Caesar (3.2.46–48) signals his attempt to become the
father through reenactment. But having once committed himself to
the process of history by taking action, Brutus cannot sidestep history’s
unfolding consequences and choose the world of the symbolic.
The concluding words of Totem and Taboo summarize the claim for
action’s priority over symbol: “ ‘In the beginning was the deed’ ” (207).
Yet in this instance of what Cynthia Chase calls “Freud’s chronically
oedipal textuality” (67), what seems a valorization of action is undermined
by debts of textual reference. Freud quotes Goethe’s Faust, who
misquotes the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the Word”). The
chain of reference begins not with “the deed” but with “the Word,”
and Freud seems to devote himself to an unending textuality (Chase
67). The importance for Freud of Julius Caesar—and of drama generally—lies
in the unique function of the medium of theater to unite text
with action, deed with word. Not only is Brutus’s action within the
text literal, but the textual word itself becomes deed in performance, as
it did for the young Freud playing the part of Brutus; theater, “acting
out” the drama of the psyche, makes manifest much that remains
occluded in a text. Freud’s mature theater, by contrast, becomes more
purely symbolic and internal, and his history becomes the created
myth of Totem and Taboo. Devoting himself to the world of the text,
he can claim any role as his. 23