The Unbearable Lightness of Memory: From Hamlet, Prince of Denmark to Jorge Luis Borges’ Shakespeare’s Memory

Abstract

The Romantic poet Novalis once rhetorically asked: “Where are we really going?” “Always home.” For a Shakespearean scholar like Borges’ Sörgel in “Shakespeare’s Memory”, the path towards “home” turns out to be the exploration of a most unusual gift, the very memory of the great Elizabethan. The process is similar although not identical in scope to Hamlet’s attempt to realign time through keeping alive the memory of his murdered father. My aim in this paper is to explore the process of preserving memory and its relation to identity, mourning and dread in “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” and Borges’ “Shakespeare’s Memory”. The theoretical framework is defined by the concept of “eternal return”, as examined by Nietzsche and Mircea Eliade.

Keywords

• curse
• Eliade
• eternal return
• Nietzsche
• memory