Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Thursday, 29 November 2007
You come most carefully upon your hour. One of the more astonishing effects of the first scene of Hamlet is its compression of time, all time, within the 174 lines of its length in the second quarto. Time, and especially its passing, might be the metatragic theme of both theatre and music. Five or six hours pass within the first scene's duration, but there's more: we are, chronologically, in twelfth-century Denmark, but also England at the turn of the seventeenth century, and of course we are also in the theatre, now, as the play itself runs its course. In tragedy and music we are in all human time; its passing, whether a few hours, a few months, a year, or all eternity, is the tragic recognition.
We are also in Imperial Rome, as Horatio points out, trying to interpret the Ghost's appearance:
In the most high and palmy state of Rome
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell
The graves stood tenantless and all the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;
At stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse. (1.1.112-119)
Horatio equates the decay of the body with the decay of language. One final layer on Hamlet's palimpsest of time: the biological duration of the human body. Like the gibbering Romans, the ghost of Hamlet's father is for all important purposes incorporeal: Marcellus, Horatio and Bernardo try to strike the ghost with their weapons upon its second appearance, and are unsuccessful: the gibbering and squeaking of the dead, of the ghosts, though present, are beyond mortality. And are, as such, reminders of the audience's and the reader's own awareness of their presence in time, historical, biological and with an end: only to be left with their own gibbering spirits in the streets.
Part I of the Organum is here; recent entries here. I last wrote about Shakespeare in the following November 2005 post on Troilus and Cressida.
Troilus and Cressida
Chaon Cross and William Dick in the
Chicago Shakespeare Theater's 2007 production of
Troilus and Cressida. Photo: Michael Brosilow.
In the list of Shakespeare plays that nobody ever reads, Troilus and Cressida must be somewhere near the top -- below King John and Cymbeline, perhaps, but certainly above Pericles and Coriolanus. But it's a play that captured the attention of one of the 20th century's most influential Shakespeare interpreters, Jan Kott, and in the 1960s the play enjoyed several major productions as its apparent anti-war message fit into the ideological stances of several directors like Joe Papp and Peter Hall. In addition, its ending, which leaves several of the play's plot points unresolved and ambiguous, have made it next to impossible to fit it into a Shakespearean genre; it has the reputation of being the most "20th century" of the middle-period plays. Even in the early 17th century, editors of the quartos and the folio were uncertain whether to label it a "history" or a "tragedy," and my trusty Norton Shakespeare categorizes the play as a comedy, a funny place for a play the final act of which is drenched in blood and mangled corpses.
The anti-war message is, for us, one of the most significant. Seven years into the Trojan War, the Greeks are still at the walls of Troy; the rationalist generals Agamemnon and Odysseus are in a Hamlet-like confusion as to what to do next, while the Greek warrior Achilles, accompanied by his very, very close friend Patroclus, sits to the side, mocking the others. Inside the walls of Troy, where chivalry instead of rationalism controls the behavior of the citizens, Priam and his sons continue to gird for battle. His son Troilus has fallen intensely in love with the fair Cressida, whose uncle Pandarus plays go-between for the young lovers. Troilus and Cressida experience one night of sexual bliss before a deal is made to exchange Cressida for Aeneas, a Trojan commander who is being held captive by the Greeks. Chivalry has its limits, and Troilus gives Cressida up to the Greeks without so much as a by-your-leave; spying her in the Greek camp, Troilus is driven mad with jealousy and the play as a whole ends with grotesque savagery, never mind rationalism and chivalry. As the foul-mouthed gadfly Thersites has it in 5.2, perhaps with the cause of the war, Helen, in mind as well, "Lechery, lechery; still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion."
Young lovers Troilus and Cressida are trapped in the web of the chivalric code and Machiavellian scheming that drive the play, a web that allows desire no purchase. In large part, this is because the physical body, like the physical world, can't admit the possibility of transcendence that their joined desire can provide; the world of the play, as Troilus puts it, is a place:
... where injury of chance
Puts back leave-taking, justles roughly by
All time of pause, rudely beguiles our lips
Of all rejoindure, forcibly prevents
Our lock'd embrasures, strangles our dear vows
Even in the birth of our own laboring breath;
We two, that with so many thousand sighs
Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves
With the rude brevity and discharge of one
Injurious time ... (4.4.33-43)
The "lock'd embrasures" of sexual coupling provide more than sexual release; it's closer to the jouissance that Lacan describes; for Michael P. Clark, writing in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, jouissance "discloses an intricate interdependence between sexuality and the symbolic that subordinates the body to the law of the signifier. Because the position of any subject vis-a-vis the symbolic is marked by a lack or what Lacan calls a 'fading' before the object of desire, relations between the sexes are always structured according to some missing or third element that makes the relation, strictly speaking, 'impossible.'" In Troilus and Cressida, the third element is two-fold: society and the limitations of the human body itself; it is bodied physicality in community, viciously circumscribed by the accident of time, that prevents the consummation, the jouissance, that the sexual act represents for the lovers.
Troilus himself worries that his mind and his body may not be able to contain the sensual fulfillment that the object of his desire, Cressida, promises. Indeed, he trembles on the brink of erotic oblivion:
I am giddy; expectation whirls me round.
The imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense; what will it be,
When that the watery palates taste indeed
Love's thrice-repured nectar? death, I fear me,
Swounding destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtle-potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness,
For the capacity of my ruder powers:
I fear it much, and I do fear besides
That I shall lose distinction in my joys ... (3.2.17-26)
Troilus' love poetry in 3.2, directed towards his sweet Cressida, only grows more fearful from here: fearing the loss of identity in the sexual moment (death, "Swounding destruction," "I do fear besides / That I shall lose distinction in my joys"), he finally warns her, "This is the monstruosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite and the execution confined, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit" (3.2.82-85). This is also the tragic observation that holds the two spheres of the play, the sexual and the social, together: just as the sexual act fails to provide the yearned-for release, neither the rationalism of the Greeks nor the chivalry of the Trojans are able to contain the ferociousness, the violent cowardice (especially when the "noble" Achilles kills the unarmed Hector) of the battle scenes in the fifth act.
Any contemporary reading of the play has to take into consideration the character of Cressida -- a virgin at the beginning of the play who has been delivered into the hands of the enemy by the end of it through Troilus' cruel betrayal of her. This is a grown-up Juliet, though, who was always smarter and more insightful than Romeo. For the Greeks, Cressida is simultaneously sex toy and mature woman, who can use her sexuality to manipulate the crude Greek commanders; in the camp scene (4.5), in which Cressida meets her captors, she's even got Ulysses on his knees, begging for a kiss (a scene echoed in the final tableau of Pinter's The Homecoming, a play with which Troilus and Cressida shares several parallels); immediately after her exit, though, Ulysses condemns her as "wanton" and "sluttish."
Troilus and Cressida contains some of Shakespeare's greatest love poetry; I'm thinking particularly of Troilus' first description of Cressida in the first act of the play, echoes of which will resonate with anyone who has ever fallen in love, unable to get the object of his desire out of his mind:
I tell thee I am mad
In Cressid's love; thou answer'st "she is fair";
Pour'st in the open ulcer of my heart
Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice.
Handlest in thy discourse, O that her hand
In whose comparison all whites are ink
Writing to their own reproach, to whose soft seizure
The cygnet's down is harsh, and spirit of sense
Hard as the palm of ploughman. (1.1.53-61)
But this is a tragedy, and the impossibility of true union with that object is the ineradicable terror of the race. The language of the play is harshly physical, and it ends with Pandarus wishing his own venereal disease on the audience, but there's no escaping it. As Ulysses sees it in 1.3, it's not necessarily desire that destroys us, but that desire joined by earthly will and power that traps us in the bloody cycle of our days:
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey,
And last eat up himself. (1.3.119-124)
And the Trojan War still has another three years to go by the end of the play. No wonder we yearn for the arms of our Troilus, our Cressida; and how tragic that we can never disappear there.
Posted at 9.05 am in /Organum
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