Companion to an Untold Story

Lady Macbeth

131 Lady Macbeth. Joel’s essay asked a version of the question I have asked (see Chain, chain, chain): How did Macbeth assess, how did he feel about his wife’s death? I want to draw from his answer an insight into Joel’s feelings about his mother, and through them to answer the questions Joel’s actions posed to me. I know that I will not discover an answer, of course. I will only make myself another link on the chain of interpretation. Me : Joel : Mother :: Joel : Macbeth : Lady Macbeth. Joel’s discussion of the play begins with Macbeth’s soliloquy: I call your attention to “Macbeth” V.v.17: “She should have died hereafter. . . .” What do you notice about it? What you notice about it is that there is no clear referent. “It” should be carefully tied to a noun or noun phrase. But, ignoring my grammar for the moment, what is notable about the opening of this soliloquy? It is ambiguous! Yes! Every critic who has discussed the soliloquy has mentioned that the line is ambiguous as if the word, “ambiguous,” were terrifying and the task of resolving the ambiguity an heroic deed. One writer is so awe-struck with the ambiguity of the line that he insists that Macbeth means all the standard 132 interpretations at once and is “groping for meanings.”62 The standard meanings are: 1) She would have died eventually anyhow; 2) It would have been better for her to have died some day in the future when things would have been more peaceful, etc. The diction is too grand, too compatible with the armchair mood in which the play is normally experienced, to allow Macbeth to have meant anything so mean, so despicable as what the line seems to say: “Stupid wench—she should have died hereafter: there’s a time for everything and this was certainly not the time for her to go and croak.”63 Joel’s word “armchair” is intriguing: he uses it to reject a critical attitude identified by one meaning of the word (unengaged, remote, theoretical) while he sits in the same chair (vicariously living through another’s experiences). He will think about his mother’s suicide, that is, in the guise of Lady Macbeth’s. Joel rejects the critical resort to ambiguity by the armchair critics and passionately engages Macbeth’s barbarous remarks, taking the lines to mean what they seem to mean, that Macbeth believes he is a fit judge of the right time for someone else to die: The fact is . . . that Macbeth had become, by that time, enough of a tyrant, sufficiently over-confident and egomaniacal to have thought himself an adequate judge of when people should live and die. It didn’t suit him for his wife to die at that moment. Why? God only knows—the guy was a loony, you know. Anyhow, that’s what he meant when he said it. But by the time he’s progressed to the final word of the second line (“There would have been a time for such a word”) he is no longer 62 Joel is quoting L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes: And an Approach to “Hamlet” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 131. 63 Letter, February 1976. 133 talking simply about the death of his wife: He’s moved on to a level of abstraction in which lives and deaths are only syllables and words making up the “tale told by an idiot.” Here again is the division in Macbeth’s world, with a level of living and a level of abstraction from it. Can I imagine the same sort of division in Joel? Despite the differences between the life circumstances of the undergraduate literature student and those of the king of Scotland, Joel draws himself into parallel with Macbeth. His emotional state was a version of Macbeth’s. He, too, confronted a death, that of his mother. Like the “loony” Macbeth, he was “bonkers,” for he was suffering at the time of this analysis from penetrating memories of the very sort that later led him (in Time travel) to that self-description. And at the end of his discussion of the play, he describes his ego as “boundless,” implicitly comparing himself to the “egomaniacal ” nobleman. For both Macbeth and Joel time is compressed, and death is not the distant thing it might be for most men. Macbeth can only...