The MacGuffin: News and Comment (26/Jan/2004)
(c) Ken Mogg (2004)
January 26
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and E.T.A. Hoffman (1776-1822) were not the only German Romantic writers whom Hitchcock read, probably in their original language. There was also the poet and journalist Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). According to Donald Spoto, Hitchcock read Heine's early verse tragedy 'William Ratcliff' (1822) 'several times during the Selznick years' - again almost certainly in German. I have not been able to obtain an English translation of the play (and I doubt that Hitchcock obtained one, either), but here's a synopsis. The action is set in northern Scotland in the 17th century. Maria has lost two suitors to the murderous hand of William Ratcliff, whom she fears but really loves. Her latest groom, Douglas, succeeds at defeating and wounding Ratcliff. But Ratcliff finds Maria, kills her father, then her, and then he himself dies. Okay. Heine described the play as a 'great act of confession', so clearly we are entitled to look for the psychological meanings in it. For a start, Ratcliff is literally haunted by a sense of his ancestors being still present, just as Heine reportedly was. Father-figures torment or oppose Ratcliff. There's Maria's father, obviously. But also there's the wraith of Ratcliff's own father. At one point Ratcliff cries out: 'Cursed double, nebulous being,/ Stare not at me with those vacant eyes -/ With your eyes you would suck up my blood,/ Make me stiffen, pour ice water/ In my burning veins, make my/ Body become a night phantom ...' Hmm, shades of the ghost of Hamlet's dead father! More broadly, I would detect Hitchcock's perennial theme, the struggle of a character to come fully alive (impossible, but never mind!) and with the implication that it is the dead hand of the past that holds one down, finally. The classic figure in Hitchcock who feels such an aspiration to be invigorated and to 'be free[d] of the past' is, of course, Scottie in Vertigo (1958). And the classic victim of the past in Hitchcock is surely the figuratively (if not quite literally) cadaverous Norman Bates in Psycho (1960). In between Norman and Scottie comes Roger Thornhill in the comedy-fantasy North by Northwest (1959) - the Thornhill who late in the film is heard to say, 'I never felt more alive!' Now back to 'William Ratcliff'. Its author, Heine, once wrote: 'It is so hard to realise that people we love so much are dead. But then they are not dead, they live on in us and dwell in our soul.' According to commentator David Stivender, 'it is this same intuition that draws Ratcliff on to his final tragedy.' Note the implication that we feel pity and/or sorrow for Ratcliff. This is something that Hitchcock would have vibrated to, if I can put it like that. We know, for example, how moved he was when he read a biography of the sad life of Edgar Allan Poe. Equally, he was greatly moved by J.M. Barrie's ghost play about a young girl who stays ageless while her parents age and die, 'Mary Rose' (1920). On the other hand, it was typical of the realist in Hitchcock that he mocked all attempts to live in a never-never world of memories and an idealised past. The liberated Mark Rutland in Marnie (1964), destroying a cabinet of artifacts that had belonged to Stella, his dead wife, comes to mind. Tomorrow: more on 'William Ratcliff'.
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