하이너 뮐러의 '햄릿기계 Die Hamletmaschine' 연구 (A Study of Heiner Müller's Hamlet machine)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국외국어대학교 외국문학연구소
· 수록지 정보 : 외국문학연구 / 8호 / 395 ~ 436페이지
· 저자명 : 이창복

초록

이 작품은 『군들링의 삶 프로이센의 프리드리히 레싱의 잠 꿈 비명 Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preussen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei』과 함께 1977년에 쓰여졌다. 『햄릿기계』는 셰익스피어 Shakespeare 의 『햄릿 Hamlet』의 주인공의 이름을 그대로 이용하고 있어서 이 극작품은 이미 세계적으로 유명한 고전비극과 연관되어 있음을 말해주고 있다. 뮐러는 이 작품에 셰익스피어의 『햄릿』에 등장하는 인물들, 즉 주인공인 햄릿과 오필리어 Ophelia와 아버지, 어머니, 삼촌, 친구인 호레이쇼 Horatio, 그리고 그 밖에도 창녀, 봉기자들, 역사적 인물들을 등장시키고 있으나, 이 인물들은 뮐러에 의해 새롭게 변형되어 셰익스피어의『햄릿』에 등장하는 인물들이 지닌 의미와는 거리가 멀다. 덴마크의 폐허된 역사적 배경은 이 작품에서 시대적 상황을 나타낸다. 셰익스피어와 뮐러의 두 작품이 가진 주제적 연관성은 덴마크 왕실의 패륜적 비극상황에서 격어야 했던 햄릿의 고뇌가 동독의 현실정치에서 발생하는 파시즘에 의해 억압당하고 시달려야 하는 당시의 지성인들과 예술인들의 고뇌로 옮겨져 있다는 데에 있다. 뮐러는 등장 인물들 뿐만 아니라, 극의 구성도 전통 극작기법에 의해 구성된 셰익스피어의 『햄릿』과 같이 5막으로 이 극작품을 구성했다. 뮐러의 작품제목인 『햄릿기계』라는 단어는 그의 창작이 아니라 셰익스피어의 햄릿이 오필리어에게 보낸 사랑의 편지에서 인용된 것이다. 『햄릿기계』는 1956년의 구 소련공산당 제 20차 전당대회와 헝가리 민중봉기 이후에 동구의 사회주의 국가들에서 이념적 동요가 일기 시작한 역사적 배경에서 쓰여졌으며, 지성적 사색가의 표상으로 된 햄릿이란 인물은 이 시대에 살고있는 동독 지성인들에 대한 좌절의 대표적 인물로 나타난다.

영어초록

This paper presents a scene-by-scene analysis of the situation of Marxist intellectuals of the German Democartic Republic, portrayed by Heiner Müller as mechanistic beings who are criticized through the device of Shakespeare's Hamlet character with respect to the historical process.
Shakespeare's 『Hamlet』 provides a Hamlet-constellation in which the dramatic subject is destroyed under instruction to take revenge against the murderer and becomes a literary paragon for an intellectual as a melancholic and sceptic. Employing the tragic character of Hamlet, Heiner Müller develops 『Die Hamletmaschine』 as a self reflection and at the same time as an internal obsession of Marxist intellectuals and artists in the face of the historical process.
『Die Hamletmaschine』, structured as a classical drama composed of five scenes, is in fact a deconstruction of the classical genre. The main figures have no definite contours, and the scenes do not follow any logical chain of events, but provide only a meaning-complex. The two important interpretations of B. Brecht and F. Nietzsche belong to the traditional Hamlet reception. Brecht interprets Hamlet as a model of an idealist who is changed later into a cynic, and Nietzsche as an image of dionysian humans. Müller constructed his main figure from these two interpretations.
The first scene begins with the clause: "Ich bin Hamlet." A figure who says 'I' appears and defines himself through his own words that he was Hamlet. Hamlet, who appears in a state of schizophrenia, refuses the order of revenge of the murderee in order to escape from his orgin and the lecherous, rotten history of Europe. The act that rescinds his birth and the verbal incest with his mother can be taken as a token of this desire. The Hamlet/I reincarnates Hamlet in order to endow the Hamlet-constellation with new meaning and to destroy that. But he remains as an impotent melancholic in the sense of Brecht's reception. Ophelia appears as a projection figure of Hamlet's desire to search for a way out of hate and the destructive mania from the experience of disappointment. She represents oppressed women in history. The stage directions indicate that her cry emanating from poverty, hate and tribulation is not only her own voice, but the voice of Hamlet and the collective voice of the chorus. She gains destructive power from the suffering experience of oppression through history and destroys herself in order to destroy the Hamlet-paradigm. Like Hamlet, she is also a projection of the author, Heiner Müller, and an imaginary ideal figure of revolution.
Scherzo, an intermezzo, a play within the play, interrupts the revolt of Ophelia. It summarizes the first two sequences and prepares the theme of the next two sequences. It is a horror cabinet of identity through the uniting of angel and whore, sacrifice and murderer, and through the alternation between male and female. The solidifying in the embrace of Hamlet and the angel Horatio and the radiation of breast cancer of Madonna symbolize in a sense of eschatology the desire of Hamlet/I for destruction and at the same time for revolutionary change. In this way this scene displays the destruction of an ideology.
While the first scene selects as a central theme the positive break of historical continuum through the reflection of Hamlet history, the fourth scene puts the accent on the intellectual crisis of consciousness in the progress of history. The actor playing Hamlet refuses the existence of Hamlet and abandons his role. As the historical resistances are cited, they describe history as a revolt, as a movement of negation. However, the actor playing Hamlet cannot manifest himself as a subject of history, as dramatis persona. His consciousness is divided into both rebel and ruler; he wants to be a machine which has no pain and no ideas. It follows from that that he becomes disgusted with himself and the affluent civilization. The revolution appears to him as a nightmare. He returns as a bloody hound to the old bloody tradition and uses an axe to chop off the heads of the Marxist classics, Marx, Lenin and Mao. History falls into a timeless deep sea, into absolute silence.
In the last scene Ophelia appears as Elektra, as an avenging angel. The disgust of the actor playing Hamlet is transformed into Ophelia's hate. She becomes a female Hamlet-machine which rotates continually in order to destroy all of the traditional values of Europe. Alone on the stage, tied up by two psychiatrists, she proclaims her revolt and is waiting for her awakening. The author, Heiner Müller, smashes not only himself, but also the ideological continuum. Müller wrote his drama for the pleasure of catastrophe. His drama is always a product of crisis from one stage to another. His main interest in his writing is to destroy material things. Müller's Drama 『Die Hamletmaschine』 is composed on the basis of the negative dialectic and the aesthetic of destruction. Müller wrote 『Die Hamletmaschine』 in order to destroy Shakespeare's Hamlet. It is literature as an explosive device and as a potentiality of revolution.

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