This scribbling is for my purpose. I'll be teaching Othello soon, and want to get some ideas down. I've never taught Shakespeare, but I think this play while complicated will be very teachable i.e. easy to get students interested, even immersed in the aesthetic swirling of this play--so much is going on! I've quite a bit of time to simply scribble before formally planning anything. I'm reading Hazlitt, Goddard, G. Wilson Knight, Bloom, Bernard McElroy, Jan Kott's fabulous Shakespeare Our Contemporary, and Millicent Bell's Shakespeare's Tragic Skepticism. The students are undergraduates, so I want to approach with close reading rather than beat them about with wonky theory. Theory can open up new worlds of a text, but you really need to read it with a clear head first. Scribbling begins:
Valences of "honesty": trust, and virtue/chastity. William Empson counts 52 occurrences of the word (or its variations). The increasing irony of such a word as the play moves along. To be true, or to be false. To be black or white. Is this a black and white world? Or can something be both? Is this a grey world? Can you trust what you see, what you hear? Are things what they seem? Appearance/Reality becomes the major philosophical concern of this play:
The tragic exploitation of the gap between appearance and reality. Deception vs. honesty.
Motivations of Iago--that old question. Is he a devil, or man who hates himself and the world? A man who would have agreed with Hamlet that the world seemed "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable," seeing abject fecunity everywhere: "tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in / nature / Possess it merely."
Is this a cosmic play? Is it trapped, as G. Wilson Knight claims, within the boundaries of its own literality? I'm tending toward the former.
Cosmic rhetoric (language of heaven and hell) and also the animal/bestial rhetoric.
Moving more toward a reading of Othello's tragical skepticism. Certainly Othello is tragic in the Classical sense. Edith Hamilton tells us that "[t]ragedy's preoccupation is with suffering," and certainly in Othello we have suffering. But the stakes are always immense, if not cosmic, in the very best tragedies. We need "[t]he suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly" (The Greek Way). Othello suffers greatly. But what do I mean by tragical skepticism? If we do read Othello as cosmic rather than literal--dealing with the universal as well as the particular--then the tragic letdown has to be ultimate.
Things are not, cannot be, what they seem in this world. Stanley Cavell wrote that skepticism was "that anxiety about our human capacity as knowers that can be taken to open modern philosophy in Descartes". Cavell links this anxious awareness of the limitations of human perception to tragedy: skepticism becomes "the playing out of tragedy" and tragedy "the working out of skepticism" (see In Quest of the Ordinary). We're talking about disappointment, about getting exactly nowhere. I think of Thoreau's quiet desperation.
Anxieties of appearance and perception--how fascinating and troubling in a play steeped in race. Things aren't black and white. We want to keep the world black and white! No philosophical or biological miscegenation allowed!
Tim Morton's definition of irony as an aesthetic exploitation of a gap between levels of signification really cleared up many vague ideas about irony I had previously been pretending to understand. From Timothy Morton's Realist Magic, near the end of Chapter 2: "Magic Birth":
Valences of "honesty": trust, and virtue/chastity. William Empson counts 52 occurrences of the word (or its variations). The increasing irony of such a word as the play moves along. To be true, or to be false. To be black or white. Is this a black and white world? Or can something be both? Is this a grey world? Can you trust what you see, what you hear? Are things what they seem? Appearance/Reality becomes the major philosophical concern of this play:
"I am not what I am."
"Speak of me as I am."
"Men should be what they seem."Moral vs. intellectual truth. Does one prevail? Do both fail? Shakespeare vs. Iago. Which author/manipulator wins? What is the significance of Iago's silence at the end of the play? Are Othello's last words to be trusted i.e. are they honest words?
The tragic exploitation of the gap between appearance and reality. Deception vs. honesty.
Motivations of Iago--that old question. Is he a devil, or man who hates himself and the world? A man who would have agreed with Hamlet that the world seemed "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable," seeing abject fecunity everywhere: "tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in / nature / Possess it merely."
Is this a cosmic play? Is it trapped, as G. Wilson Knight claims, within the boundaries of its own literality? I'm tending toward the former.
Cosmic rhetoric (language of heaven and hell) and also the animal/bestial rhetoric.
Moving more toward a reading of Othello's tragical skepticism. Certainly Othello is tragic in the Classical sense. Edith Hamilton tells us that "[t]ragedy's preoccupation is with suffering," and certainly in Othello we have suffering. But the stakes are always immense, if not cosmic, in the very best tragedies. We need "[t]he suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly" (The Greek Way). Othello suffers greatly. But what do I mean by tragical skepticism? If we do read Othello as cosmic rather than literal--dealing with the universal as well as the particular--then the tragic letdown has to be ultimate.
Things are not, cannot be, what they seem in this world. Stanley Cavell wrote that skepticism was "that anxiety about our human capacity as knowers that can be taken to open modern philosophy in Descartes". Cavell links this anxious awareness of the limitations of human perception to tragedy: skepticism becomes "the playing out of tragedy" and tragedy "the working out of skepticism" (see In Quest of the Ordinary). We're talking about disappointment, about getting exactly nowhere. I think of Thoreau's quiet desperation.
Anxieties of appearance and perception--how fascinating and troubling in a play steeped in race. Things aren't black and white. We want to keep the world black and white! No philosophical or biological miscegenation allowed!
Tim Morton's definition of irony as an aesthetic exploitation of a gap between levels of signification really cleared up many vague ideas about irony I had previously been pretending to understand. From Timothy Morton's Realist Magic, near the end of Chapter 2: "Magic Birth":
"Beginnings thus involve a peculiar brand of irony that I call apoleptic. We’re all fairly familiar with proleptic irony: the irony of anticipation in which we know something that a character in a narrative doesn’t know yet. Now meet its weird sister, apoleptic irony. Apoleptic irony is the retroactive irony we feel when a narrative’s ending causes us to look back differently at the narrative. The gap between what we thought we were reading and what we are now reading is exploited. (While teaching I describe irony as gapsploitation: the aesthetic exploitation of a gap between 1+n levels of signification. Which is more of a mouthful than “gapsploitation.”) What is ironic about Alanis Morisette’s song “Ironic”? [66] What’s ironic is the fact that none of the examples she gives are examples of irony. There is a gap between what the song says it is and what it actually is...
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