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The knocking at the gate in Macbeth
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
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129 The knocking at the gate in Macbeth. In February 1976, eight months after his mother’s death, Joel undertook a critical analysis of Macbeth in an essay for English 1B. He was a good student, intelligent, engaged, and comfortable with the sometimes arcane and peculiar terms in which academic critics discuss literature. Despite their peculiarity—maybe because of their peculiarity—in these terms he could respond to the loss of his mother, writing about her without openly writing about her. Joel’s point of attack in the essay is Macbeth’s state of mind when he delivers his soliloquy in act 5, addressed to the black vast after he learns that Lady Macbeth is dead: She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. 130 Macbeth’s words emerge from a split in the world, according to Joel, a division between our normal moral order and the one in which Macbeth overcomes his scruples and murders King Duncan to seize the throne. Joel develops this thought by means of a detour through Thomas De Quincey. De Quincey . . . wrote an essay, “The Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” in which he discusses the significance of the knocking at the gate, following the murder of Duncan, as awakening us to the fact that the murder has occurred in a state of detachment—in a world of its own: the knocking brings us back into the world of nature, good, and all that stuff. It is a situation of intense opposition to the moral order and it is seen to be one in which the characters, falling out of Grace, are alienated from the world. They have no control over the ultimate results of their actions, their words speak greater truths than the meanings they’d intended, it goes on and on.61 A state of detachment. A world of its own. Where in this is Joel’s mother? Where is Joel? Let me remember: the words of people in a counterworld like Macbeth’s speak greater truths than the meanings they’d intended. 61 Letter, February 1976. Joel describes the essay in his letter. ...