Eating on the Insane Root: The Uncanny and the Sublime in Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Abstract

At the conclusion of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the entrance of Macduff, bearing Macbeth’s severed head on a pike, sets off mirthful celebration. Evil, it seems, has been mercilessly punished and all that had been foul in Scotland is now fair. There is, however, something excessive and incongruous about this gruesome thing, the sightless head that was Macbeth’s, juxtaposed against the optimism of the victors. For us, who have watched Macbeth’s precipitous rise and decline, we find scant comfort in the synecdotal assassination of a man who saw so deeply and intensely into an abyss of horrors. The profound ambivalence−a complex affect mingling revulsion, desire, terror, and regret-we experience in witnessing Macbeth’s precipitous rise and fall, I believe, can be accounted for by synthesizing Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny and theories of the sublime put forth by such figures as Immanuel Kant, and Edmund Burke. Macbeth’s persistent and strange power, then, emerges from its awareness of a compulsion to unearth the “old and long familiar” (what Freud would later deem “the uncanny”), as well as its poetic power to intimate the infinite, the unknowable, the unthinkable−that is, the sublime. In the end, we are left to ponder the greatness of Macbeth’s visionary capacity, the uncanniness that transforms “horrible imaginings” into all-too-real deeds, and the utterly compelling staging of evil that, through a man who dared to eat “on the insane root,” signals towards an infinite, untotalizable whole that overflows the mind’s capacity to grasp it.