Phantom Rights: Conversations Across the Abyss (Hugo, Blanchot)

Guerlac, Suzanne

doi:10.1353/dia.2000.0018

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…He also expresses anxiety that these revelations might percolate into his subsequent poetic production. (2000, 79–80)Hugo asks Shakespeare ‘What is the connection between the work you are now doing in heaven, and the work you once did on earth?’ Hugo reports that Shakespeare's ghost responded: ‘No; I look. No; I listen.…”

Section: A Séance Of Subconsciousmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…He also expresses anxiety that these revelations might percolate into his subsequent poetic production. (2000, 79–80)…”

Section: A Séance Of Subconsciousmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Juan Daniel Millán makes a convincing case in his article ‘Master William's Hamnet: A New Theory on Shakespeare's Sonnets’ that the poems were directed at himself as he processed the grief of losing his son (2000). To be clear, I do not think that it is necessary to uncritically adopt Millán's reading in its entirety to glean an important possible significance of the poems.…”

Section: The Sonnets and The Sonnementioning

confidence: 99%

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Immortal codes: genetics, ghosts, and Shakespeare’s sonnets

Day

2023

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

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This essay is built around three narratives of Shakespeare, code, and immortality: the first, the parallel between the passage of encoded genetic material in the body and the cultural transmission of text which converge in the reproduction of Shakespeare's sonnets into the medium of DNA, potentially collapsing a metaphorical relationship into a literal one; the second, the supposed conveying of information from a deceased Shakespeare to a superstitious Victor Hugo through the tapping out of code onto a tabletop during a nineteenth-century seance; and third, one in which I consider an alternative-or perhaps parallel-reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in which the author himself intends, against all odds and rationality, to preserve his deceased son in the form of sonnets that have more frequently been read as love letters to a young male lover. KEYWORDS Shakespeare; biosemiotics; ecocriticism; umwelt; holobiont; artificial intelligence; genetics; afterlives 'We are surrounded by traces of the past, a veritable garden of ghosts.'-Ana Tsing, et al. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Tsing 2017, g65)In 1596 Shakespeare's son Hamnet was buried in the churchyard of Stratford upon Avon. Over the next three years, often sidelined from the theatre by plague, Shakespeare composed sonnets which were likely revised until their publication in 1609. The sonnets, which obsess over reproduction, fading youth, encroaching mortality, and frustrated succession, are rarely read in terms of Hamnet's death. In 1853 Victor Hugo-in a gesture that revealed much more about his own consciousness than that of his supposed interlocutor-summoned the ghost of Shakespeare in a tabletop séance. Hugo asked questions about the nature of genius, the importance of artistic work, and attempted to glean insight into the life of the mind beyond the borders of the body. The responses emerged in the form of encoded tapping which were shaped in Hugo's mind-a mind that was well versed in the works of Shakespeare-into responses he attributed to his literary predecessor. In 2013 Shakespeare's sonnets were amongst the first texts translated into DNA, eclipsing a clean border between body and text and possibly achieving something akin to the immortality Shakespeare sought for his lost son. These three moments exist on a continuum that is revelatory as to the texture of poetic, biological, and maybe even technological emergence as we enter an era in which the supremacy of human consciousness is questioned even as scientists and engineers seek to simulate that very consciousness in machines. Each of these three instances concerns the passing of encoded

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Section: A Séance Of Subconsciousmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…He also expresses anxiety that these revelations might percolate into his subsequent poetic production. (2000, 79–80)…”

Section: A Séance Of Subconsciousmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Sonnets and The Sonnementioning

confidence: 99%

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