These Little Moles of Language

Over the years, considerable philosophical importance has been attached to the figure of the mole in Hamlet. It has been argued that the mole represents a kind of consciousness, or at the very least a kind of unconscious, working somewhere beneath the surface of Shakespearean language. ‘Shakespeare in the Ear of Hegel’ in Ned Lukacher's Primal Scenes, for instance, as Royle notes in ‘Nuclear Piece’, ‘tracks the “mole” to a number of purportedly compatible sites: something deep in Hamlet's “character” [205] … something that is “still burrowing” [209] … and – last but not least – “Shakespeare” “himself” [235]’. Nothing could be further from Derrida's understanding of how Shakespeare watches over the English language. If the mole can indeed be thought of as an example of what Shakespeare’s texts do, then this mole traces the ‘slow mole-like advance’ Derrida speaks of in ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’.Margreta de Grazia has suggested that this ‘mole of the unconscious moves out of sync with consciousness, erupting sporadically to break new paths, like deconstructive writing itself’. In The Uncanny, Royle suggests that the mole-like character of Hamlet's language allows us to think beyond ‘conventional boundaries of characterology, scenes and acts, and imagery’, to think towards a kind of ‘dramaturgic or theatrical telepathy’. Such a ‘telepathy’ would then also account for what Royle in Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind calls ‘a sort of telepathic repetition of utterance, apparent displays of telepathy or thought transmission’ rife in Hamlet and elsewhere in Shakespeare, which ‘no amount of textual scholarship or editorial argumentation will efface’.

What I am concerned with on this occasion, however, is not only the mole-like, even telepathic, character of Shakespeare’s language, but how it depends on the idiom's ‘body’, its thick net of resonating and travelling sounds, letters and syllables. This resonant modality is what, in relation to the ‘imp’ in Poe’s writing, Stanley Cavell calls ‘these little moles of language’, it is ‘the implanted origins or constituents of words, leading lives of their own, staring back at us, calling upon one another, giving us away, alarming – because to note them is to see that they live in front of our eyes, within earshot, at every moment’.