Beyond the Pleasure Principle Read Online Free PDF

variety: not cohesion, but expansion, not contraction and concentration, but extemporaneous performance.
    Both are, like their creator, master play-makers. Rosalind plays for and with her beloved, Orlando; Falstaff for and with his beloved, Prince Hal, who in the end bitterly spurns him. By playing they expand the interpretations of reality, they show us that it could be many other ways than it is commonly conceived. They show that what is taken seriously by all of the serious-minded people can also be laughed raucously away. And they suggest the corollary too, a truth that Freud knew very well: that what the sensible people commonly laugh at or ignore can be invested with enriching sense.
    The Falstaff of
Henry IV
Parts I and II is a great jester, a player like no other, but in his jest at least he is entirely benevolent. As he says, he is witty in himself and the cause of that wit is in other men. Hal, the future King of England, who thinks that he is Falstaff's pupil and that he has learned all the fat man has to teach, has a rancid wit, is prone to cruelty and is aiming for control. Falstaff's humour is expansive: he gets people around him to say and think things they never would have without him. Hal's humour contracts and reduces. He skewers people on the point of a word, insisting that all that matters about Falstaff can be summarized in his rather self-serving use of one word, ‘instinct’, or that Frances, the apprentice tapster, is no more than a walking linguistic hitch, the infinite repetition of the word ‘anon’. Hal tries to force people back in the direction of repetition, because that is where he can know and manipulate them. And, Freud would say, because back to repetition is where they, and we, all wish to go.
    In the tavern scene, a magnificent psychoanalysis that exceeds every analysis yet attempted, Falstaff jumps gaily into the Oedipalcircle, filling the role of Hal's father. ‘Do you stand for my father,’ says Hal, attempting to precipitate and control his own transference, ‘and examine me upon the particulars of my life.’ Will Hal remember or repeat? Work through or stay clutching the past?
    What ensues is a splendid dialogue between Falstaff and the Prince; at issue is who will be the Prince's true father, Falstaff or the cold usurper, Bolingbroke. On some level, every psychoanalyst, no matter how humane, must hope for some level of benign influence over the patient. Falstaff being Falstaff, that is a man who has no repressions, and who makes what is latent in others overt in himself, drives directly and humorously for that power. He sets in by trying wholly to displace Bolingbroke, the merely natural father. Thus Falstaff takes the part of the old usurper: ‘That thou art my son,’ he says to Hal, ‘I have partly thy mother's word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip that doth warrant me.’
    Beneath the Groucho-style abuse, there's a point. Who could know – before DNA testing, at least – who his biological father was? And if the identity of the biological father is up for grabs, then surely the role of spiritual father is open to competition as well. So Falstaff sets about advertising himself as a better ideal for Hal than his own father. There is, says Falstaff, ‘a virtuous man whom I have often noted in thy company, but I know not his name’ (
Henry IV
, Part 1, II, iv).
    Prince
: What manner of man, and it like your Majesty?
    Falstaff
: A goodly portly man, i' faith, and a corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage.
    But the prince is having none of it. He's afraid to take the exchange further, afraid even to toy with the idea that Falstaff is putting into play. Quickly – we see where the power lies in this analysis – he usurps Falstaff's position and takes the role of his own father. All of a sudden, the space of extemporization – ‘it is a real lived experience’,