Vygotsky, Hamlet and Barthes

As I read this piece, I started to wonder about how today, we often take up a different view of literature than Vygotsky's. This is also probably because Vygotsky is looking at this as a developmental psychologist, trying to look at Hamlet in terms of the psychology of the actor that he talks of. Roland Barthes came to mind immediately, and made me think of how the author's intent disappears within the varied interpretations that can be made by readers and critics, based on their viewpoints. This frees us from interpretive tyranny. Vygotsky comments on the ambiguity of Hamlet, and says that it is a naturally constructed mystery. Discounting the views of critics who often deem Hamlet as irresolute, he says that the obscurity of the play and the way in which the device of Tragedy s drawn out within the play obscures and veils the judgments that critics make of Hamlet's character. He says that people who read the play exercise too much imagination while critiquing it, as opposed to looking into life and its unresolved riddles, in order to understand Hamlet's conditions.

This is probably why Vygotsky says Hamlet is a hard character to play. The constant procrastination in the play towards killing the King is dragged out by situational aspects like the King praying, or him killing Polonius by accident. However, rather than showing how Hamlet is a procrastinator or an irresolute, weak man, this shows how the Tragedy is designed temporally in order to display a "stress of passions" and drag out the pathos and dilemmas of the protagonist. We cannot judge a dramatic hero or merely what he says, according to Vygotsky; we need to look at what he says in relation to what he does, and see how the relationship between these two things contribute to this stress and passion.

Vygotsky's criticism of critics is rooted in the fact that they often disregard that the way in which a tragedy is dragged out depends on how we look at the play. We cannot just look at Hamlet from the outside as detached readers. We need to look at the play in a detached manner, as well as through Hamlet's eyes, in order to understand how the device of the tragedy is dragged out in this play due to the psychological state that embodies Hamlet's inner essence. As opposed to Macbeth, which conceptualizes a tragedy at a faster pace, the way events in Hamlet unfold are a function of the way Hamlet himself thinks, and the way we view the play through his eyes. If we look at the way the tragedy drags out, Vygotsky says it is because Hamlet becomes a slave to situation, as opposed to just being weak-minded.

All this being said, I still think that I would approach this from a post-structuralist perspective, and say that Barthes and Saussure provide a way look at literary text to help us create diversified meanings from it to add to the interpretive flavor that art in general has taken up in our reality today. However, when it comes to expression through art, I wonder how far we can let subjectivity go. If something extremely spurious were to enter society and give people ideas and create chaos, can we do anything to help? Is it then, wiser to look at art from a more organic perspective like Vygotsky does rather than relying so much on the varied (but also forgiving) possibilities engendered by poetic license?  There could be many different reactions that emerge from looking at a play in terms of form as a detached readers and through an embodied perspective, as if one was the protagonist.