Beyond the Pleasure Principle Read Online Free PDF Page B

says Freud of the transference, ‘but one made possible by particularly favourable conditions, and purely temporary in nature’(‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’, p. 41) – where identities are in flux, closes down. And when it does, Hal shows that he is truly Bolingbroke's son, for he is just as cold and ruthless and cruel as his father. ‘Wherein is he good,’ Hal says of Falstaff, ‘but to taste sack and drink it? wherein neat and cleanly but to carve a capon and eat it? wherein cunning but in craft? wherein crafty but in villainy? wherein villainous but in all things? wherein worthy but in nothing?’ (II, iv).
    Falstaff, never outdone, comes back with his most plangent lines: ‘If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damn'd; if to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh's lean kine are to be lov'd’ (II, iv).
    Falstaff is self-serving here: he wants to be in favour when Hal takes the throne. But he is more than self-serving, too. For if Hal could actually imagine the situation that so revolts him, that he finds so unbearable, the one where he disowned Bolingbroke and took Falstaff for a father, then he might offer an entirely different sort of rulership.
    Falstaff demystifies Bolingbroke: in the mock-play, Hal's father is not an omnivorous god out of Freud's
Totem and Taboo
, but a man in jeopardy, elevated beyond his prowess, whose situation can be seen humorously, ironically. Rather than play the father as heavy primal man, the hoarder of women and the slayer of sons, Falstaff offers the vision of a father who is himself confused, flawed and mortal. Underneath, he suggests, all fathers may be so. They are not to be maligned for their weakness, but understood, forgiven, laughed at and then laughed with. As Falstaff plays the role of Bolingbroke, we understand, so Bolingbroke merely plays the role of king.
    Hal takes in only a part of this beautiful lesson: he sees that all authority is based on playing, and he resolves to continue as a master player of the primal role. Made wholly sane by Falstaff, he might have tried to make his constituents sane by blending authority and humour in one personage, proving that they need not be separable.
    But Hal's mind is too small to encompass this kind of therapy, this inspired breaking and remaking of the paternal imago. In Shakespeare,children are all too much like their parents and all too little like their lovers and friends. Hal insists at the end on turning the tables. He assumes the role of his father, and with a meanness that he, mistaking Falstaff utterly, takes for wit, he assumes his father's old cruel, domineering role, the legacy of the Bolingbroke clan. He turns Falstaff's jest into invective.
    Socrates showed that a man could both jest and wield authority – and it is the promise of this capacity that makes Falstaff into the Elizabethan Socrates. Says Montaigne of Socrates, ‘He was seen, unmoved in countenance, putting up for twenty-seven years with hunger and poverty, with loutish sons, with a cantankerous wife and finally with calumny, tyranny, imprisonment, leg-irons and poison. Yet that very man, when the dictates of courtesy made him a guest at a drinking match, was, from the entire army, the man who best acquitted himself. Nor did he refuse to play five-stones with the boys nor to run about with them astride a hobby horse. And he did it with good grace: for Philosophy says that all activities are equally becoming in a wise man, all equally honour him’ (
The Complete Essays of Montaigne
(trans. Screech), p. 1261). It's the inability to become that kind of philosopher king, not a Platonic but a Socratic monarch, that makes Hal so sad a figure.
    The man who kills his prisoners in France and who hangs poor Bardolph is the son of the grotesque father whose cycle Falstaff, the inspired psychoanalyst, tries to break. Perhaps Shakespeare can imagine no other kind of