Our Man in Paris: French academic shakes up 'Hamlet'

For the first time in 30 years, I got out my battered Macmillan edition of the works of William Shakespeare and read one of the plays from beginning to end after an amusing, maddening book by a French academic, Pierre Bayard, drove me to rediscover my youth as an Eng Lit student. Bayard, a specialist in literature, psychoanalysis, and the wild, unexplored frontier between the two, has written several books that manage to be funny and provocative, and less impenetrable than most works in the French lit-critical structuralist tradition.

For the first time in 30 years, I got out my battered Macmillan edition of the works of William Shakespeare and read one of the plays from beginning to end. An amusing, maddening book by a French academic, Pierre Bayard, has driven me to rediscover my youth as an Eng Lit student. Bayard, a specialist in literature, psychoanalysis, and the wild, unexplored frontier between the two, has written several books that manage to be funny and provocative, and less impenetrable than most works in the French lit-critical structuralist tradition.

One of his previous (delightful) books is a re-opening of a Hercule Poirot mystery, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, perhaps the most celebrated detective novel of all time. Bayard concludes that Agatha Christie and Poirot framed an innocent man. He re-examines the clues scattered through the book that were wilfully ignored or distorted by Christie/Poirot at the end. It is implausible, he concludes, that the charming village doctor, who is also the book's narrator, committed the murder.

Another of Bayard's works is called How to Improve Failed Works of Art. It suggests ways in which the reader can take pleasure from second-rate books by imagining how they would have been written by better authors or by undiscovered authors, such as themselves.

To simplify a little, Bayard has two central themes. The first is that all authors are unreliable narrators. His second is that every work is incomplete until the reader completes it, filling in the spaces from his or her own imagination, experience and unconscious mind.

Bayard has now turned his literary-psychoanalytical anglepoise lamp on to Shakespeare. His latest book, Enquête sur Hamlet (Editions de Minuit, €15), is a part-spoof, part-serious treatment of Hamlet as a whodunit. It asks the question: "Who really killed Hamlet's dad?"

One possible reading of the play, it concludes, is that Hamlet himself killed his father. Although there is much in the play that fingers Hamlet's uncle, Claudius, much is unexplained: Hamlet's delay in avenging his father; his obsession with death; his callousness; his aggressive attitude towards Ophelia. Some of these things make sense for the first time, M. Bayard argues, if you reach the conclusion that Hamlet – a serial killer anyway by the end of the play – also killed his dad.

My first instinct was to turn away from the book as psychobabble, a typical product of the over-theoretical French education system and the over-analytical French habit of mind. Shakespearean plots are all chaotic: what matters in the end, surely, is the poetry and language, the characterisation, the drama, the black humour, all suspended on the ramshackle plot like baubles on a Christmas tree.

By the end Bayard had persuaded me that his approach – part-jokey, part-serious, rather like the Great Man himself – went some way to explain why such a muddled play had become one of the most talked-about works of literature of all time. Even the greatest works contain the elements of quite different stories, which the writers do not consciously comprehend, Bayard argues. Far from making the works incoherent, this is what gives them their depth and resonance.

I went to see Bayard, 49, in his flat in northern Paris. He said that his dearest hope was that a reputable company would take up his idea and stage a production of Hamlet in which the "sweet prince" is also the murderer.

His re-opening of the case of poor Roger Ackroyd reached the conclusion, by the way, that the most plausible murderer was Hercule Poirot. Bayard maintains an open mind on this subject. He autographed my copy of the book with the following inscription: "For John Lichfield, whose innocence in the death of Roger Ackroyd remains to be proved."

French-bashers are making a grave mistake

The cemeteries of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in France are among the most moving places on earth – as eloquent a commentary on war as any footage of casualties from the Gulf. The desecration of the large cemetery at Etaples, near Boulogne, with anti-British slogans, in the second week of the Gulf war, produced outraged headlines in Britain – but more sincere outrage in France.

More sincere? I think so. The attack was manifestly the work of the far right, which has desecrated British war cemeteries in the past. The graffiti included a swastika. The daubs were condemned across the board in France (culminating in a letter of apology from Jacques Chirac to the Queen). This did not prevent some British newspapers from presenting the attack as representative of a wave of anti-British feeling.

The Times headline, under a front-page picture of the monument, read: "One in three French want Saddam to win." There was indeed a poll in Le Monde that suggested this – which is disturbing but not so surprising. If you add together the French far right and the far and romantic left (both fiercely anti-American) you assemble about 30 per cent of the electorate. Most French people in the poll said that they wanted the British and Americans to win – even though eight in 10 disapprove of the war.

To link the poll with the isolated attack on the cemetery was – to adopt the word used by the middle-of-the road newspaper, Le Parisien – "grotesque". A vicious anti-French campaign has been conducted for months now in parts of the British press. Nothing similar is happening in France, where coverage of the war has been balanced and accurate. Neither I, nor any British person I know, has been insulted or attacked because our governments disagree about the wisdom of invading Iraq.

B-52s' European tour bombs

The American rock group The B-52s have cancelled a brief European tour – to Paris and London – because they felt their name might cause annoyance. In fact, in Atlanta, Georgia, where they come from, "B-52" is a nickname for a woman with "big hair".

The real B-52s, the long-range bombers shuttling between Oxfordshire and Iraq, have discomfited the Swiss government. The US planes were asked to respect Switzerland's neutrality by taking a short detour around Swiss airspace. (The French, by the way, have imposed no such restriction.)

A Swiss newspaper, Le Temps, pointed out, however, that the country's military radar operators work only during office hours, 8am to 6pm, from Monday to Friday. Outside these hours, the Swiss government was forced to admit, there was nothing to stop the Americans, or anyone else, flying overhead – or even invading the country.