Hamlet, the subject or self, is himself a product or construct, an artifact hiding a lack, a fiction covering an absence. As Garber attests, uncanny experiences, essentially the return of the repressed in Freudian terms, haunt the subject as undecidable, undermining the subject as a unified, sentient whole. This notion of repetition applies to literary memory as the psychic system deflects the representation of an initially traumatic event through repressing it, altering it, absorbing it or displacing it into something else. Predicting these repressions or displacements that develop akin to those experienced pathologically in the repetition of trauma, a text gives rise to a literary history, a social conditioning grid that initiates and fashions individuals to be functional members. New Historicism aims toward surmising the distribution of power and the service of ambitions that dictate the portrayal of the past called history.
History is a narrative, depicted in language that is protean and arbitrarily assigned value.
This inflection is to the culture, permitting one a sociohistorical vantage, a perspective that cannot achieve objectivity or truth. In fact, the belief in the attainability and subsequent validity of these objectives itself has a history, a great and powerful Oz hid behind the curtain, permitting the individual to see a version that is in fact that, a version, politically and ideologically charged. Coddon s essay concerning the politicization of subjectivity in Hamlet seems informed by deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and Marxist approaches, demonstrating the present indeterminacy of New Historicism, its status as in flux and unasserted distinctive identity. Drawing from deconstruction, Coddon portrays historical consciousness as a construction, conditioned by our own time and place to believe it was, the factuality of events a pious wish dependent upon reference to social modes of empowerment. Madness results for the Elizabethans from the internalization of disobedience, from the redefinition of reason, a reason usually tempered with subjectivity.