Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (review)

In his ambitious and wide-ranging book, Scare Quotes from Shakespeare, Martin Harries considers how a variety of figures in England "roughly from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth" (5), especially the two major economists named in the title, use the Shakespearean text as the privileged ground of a particular kind of intertextuality. The book suggests that when these various Victorians and modernists allude to Shakespeare, they participate in a process of "reenchantment" that underlies or underwrites the seeming rationalism of modernity itself. As Harries explains, when "Writers (or speakers, with fingers mimicking quotation marks)" use the so-called "scare quote," they "put distance between themselves and a word or phrase" (5). With this meaning in mind, Harries uses the term to refer to something even more particular: to an indirect allusion which, rather than serving simply as an invocation of Shakespearean authority, indicates instead "a struggle with a predecessor, and the location of an unresolved aesthetic, intellectual, or psychic dilemma in the later writer" (14). Specifically, Harries looks at how Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and others allude to representations of the supernatural in Shakespeare. Whereas modernity "imagines itself as coming after the disenchantment of the world, after the decline of magic, after witch crazes, night battles and ecstasies" (10), these supernatural allusions suggest how this project of disenchantment or progress remains haunted by its own converse. And, of course, "Shakespeare provides a privileged language" (1) for the implicit evocation of the supernatural in the later writers and thus for this whole process of reenchantment. Along the way, in addition to the two central figures, Harries also considers texts by several other writers including Walter Benjamin, Thomas Carlyle, R. H. Tawney, Henry James, and Christopher Hill, and begins the book with a brief cultural history of Henry Dirks, the inventor of a mechanism for representing ghosts onstage in Victorian England.

Thus this book has what might be called a telescopic strategy, in which extremely small and specific moments in the texts of earlier critics are read in great detail in order to open up a broader vision of cultural history. In particular, Harries reads Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte with attention to its famous reference to 1.5 in Hamlet (in which the revolution is figured as Hamlet's "old mole"), and Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace with attention to its references to Macbeth. Although he acknowledges in passing that his particular idea of the scare quote has some affinity with Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence (14), Harries claims that he considers only "a mode of intertextuality that belongs to a particular period" (5), stipulating more than once that his claims "are local ones" (131). Yet in a sense such qualifications are too modest, since Harries follows his readings of Marx's and Keynes's allusions to Hamlet and Macbeth with detailed readings of those two plays, which prove to be themselves always-already bound up in the broad historical processes of disenchantment and reenchantment within which they later figure as sites of allusion. The general topic of ghosts in Hamlet also provides Harries with the occasion to pursue the cultural history of the phantasmagoria, which originally referred to "an apparatus for the production of ghosts" (97n), such as that invented by Dirks, but which eventually, for Adorno and others, came to refer to a kind of "regression" within the modern (118). Correspondingly, the topic of witches in Macbeth provides an occasion for a discussion of witchcraft both in the early modern period and as an enduring figure of enchantment which "occupies the outer limits of the archaic" (159).

As this brief summary will perhaps suggest, this book synthesizes such an extremely wide variety of disparate materials that it sometimes seems not to come to rest within the textual...