In Puss in Boots we have the Lacanian Discourse of the Master, alias the metaphoric narrative: $→S1→S2→a. We begin in the Wilderness: the Miller’s son left, upon the death of his father, with nothing but a cat. However, upon his acceding to the cat’s request for a bag and a pair of boots, Puss, in the Proppian role of Donor, makes presents to the king on the young man’s behalf. At the conclusion of this phase, the Miller’s son is revalorized by the gift of fine clothes – he is now taken, on Puss’s say-so, for the Marquis of Carabas.
The transition to the next phase requires a triplet of tasks, carried out by Puss in the role of Helper: menacing mowers in a hayfield, reapers in a cornfield and unspecified further people in other places into telling whoever passes that the fields belong to the Marquis.
The second phase is the City – the ogre’s castle, where Puss, by verbal trickery, is able, again as Helper, to kill the ogre (the Villain).
The transition to the next phase is marked by a journey – of the Miller’s son in the king’s carriage. They arrive then at the New Place, the castle, where Puss, in the role of King, is able to show off the riches that apparently belong to the Marquis.
We then move directly to the final phase, the Garden, and the wedding of the Miller’s son to the princess (the Princess).
Things to notice: though the Miller’s son is the Proppian Hero, he never actually does anything. What is more, he has never suffered at the hands of the Villain, nor does he set out to win the hand of the Princess – he doesn’t even know there is a princess until Puss contrives for them to meet. In short, just as the ogre is the Villain, the Miller’s son is the Hero because of our feeling for the genre: the young man’s marriage to the Princess is our desire as intended readers rather than his as Hero.
Puss, though the main character, is not the Hero. He is the point-of-view character, the prism, if you like, through which we as readers view the action.
It seems to me that the way this story works may help us in understanding Hamlet. The play is a narrative: as such I would expect it to correspond to one of Lacan’s four types – but which one? My initial difficulty arose from not knowing where in the action of the play to locate the Garden: there seemed to be no still point, no episode of pleasure that invited that identification. Yet the Garden is simply a metaphor for the object of desire, and once we have realized that, we can see that the Garden is in fact the terminal phase of the play, which fulfills the desire that Claudius and Gertrude should be punished and civic order restored.
We begin in the Wilderness – outside, in the dark, a place of unexplained manifestations. Hamlet, when he appears, is in mourning and in despair: ‘O that this too too sullied flesh would melt’. He is estranged from his mother and the new king; he has apparently courted Ophelia, but is cut off from this also by the counsel of her brother and father.
Enter the ghost, as Donor, in this case donor of motivating information. Hamlet is made aware of Claudius’s crime; his desire, and ours as audience, is not only for the crime to be avenged, but also for the disturbance to the civil order, which was already apparent before the disclosure of the crime, to be redressed.
The transition to the next phase requires Hamlet to convince the court of his madness; a task performed through his interaction with a counter-gendered character (Ophelia). Then in the City (the court), there is a triple encounter with the Villain: Claudius put to the test by the players’ performance, Gertrude upbraided, Polonius killed.
Hamlet’s journey to England and back is the transition between the City and the New Place, where Claudius’s plans to murder Hamlet are laid bare first by Claudius himself (the poisoned rapier) and then by Hamlet (the treacherous letters), while the truth of Hamlet’s love for Ophelia is disclosed by Hamlet himself. Claudius and Hamlet thus share the role of King between them. A difficult task (the duel between Hamlet and Laertes) leads to the deaths of Claudius and Gertrude. The crime is avenged, and the entry of Fortinbras (the Princess) foreshadows a new stability.
Who is the Hero? I can’t help feeling that the Hero is the audience – that the fourth wall lies open to incorporate us in the performance. To me, the role of Hamlet is too polymorphous for it to be possible to identify him as Hero – partly, providing voiceover by way of soliloquy, he embodies the narrator, partly, as in his banter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or with Osric, he represents a character that appears elsewhere as the Hero’s wisecracking sidekick (like the cat Jiji in Kiki’s Delivery Service); mostly he is a proxy for the audience’s desire that the narrative should take its course.
I am led to wonder here how applicable such an analysis might be to others among Shakespeare’s later plays – The Tempest, for instance.
