Hamlet, Ritual, Modernity

De Grazia still, summarizing Lacan’s claim that Hamlet is about mourning: “‘I know of no commentator who has ever taken the trouble to make this remark . . . from one end of Hamle t to the other, all anyone talks about is mourning.’  It is no coincidence that Hamlet’s problem is also that of ‘modern society.’  The truncated and furtive rites of mourning in the play (the death of King Hamlet without final unction, Polonius’ ‘hugger-mugger’ burial, Ophelia’s abbreviated service) all gesture toward the present abandonment of the rites and ceremonies by which loss was once compensated.  Death, when not repair by rituals, leaves a gap or ‘hole in the real’ that activates the ‘scar of castration,’ the primary oedipal loss of the phallus.  The mourner tries in vain to patch the loss with imaginary projections or mirages (signifiers, images, symbols, embodiments), but it can never make good.”