Iago's twisted love

All apologies for the long wait between blog postings. After the previous instalment written about David Foster Wallace, I fell victim to a serious bout of the blues. I can be a little sensitive sometimes. There are some matters that are difficult to talk about, and the suicide of my favourite author is one of them. Occasionally I have considered writing interpretations of some of the songs off Nirvana’s album In Utero or Faith No More’s album King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime, but I suspect that they may be equally depressing and that there are anyway mysteries best left unexplained. (If a reader does want me to provide an interpretation of “All Apologies”, they can ask in the form of a comment and I might acquiesce.)

Today I thought I would write about a poet that everyone knows – Shakespeare. In particular, I thought I would write about Othello. “What for?” you might ask. “Hasn’t everything that has ever could be said about this play already been said?” To be sure, most of us studied this play in school and most of us feel that we have a good understanding of what the play is about. It’s about jealousy: jealousy is Othello’s fatal flaw (as alcohol is Cassio’s fatal flaw) and it is this flaw that Iago takes advantage of when scheming to drive Othello into murdering his bride. In fact, there is a lot more to the play than this – many years ago I worked out a fairly involved interpretation of the play, incorporating studies of the way it contrasts Chistianity and Paganism, human and animal, but for the life of me I can’t remember it. This essay will not be particularly profound but it may offer an unusual new perspective on the play.

Certainly Othello is about jealousy. Love has two aspects, the spiritual and the carnal – when Othello is assured of Desdemona’s love he is living within the temple of Christ but when he succumbs to jealousy his imagination becomes infected with images of animals. Jealousy does not admit the possibility that the unfaithful lover might genuinely love another; jealousy concerns itself only with the sordidness of illicit sex. In his later plays, not only in Othello but in Hamlet and King Lear, Shakespeare often presents women’s sexuality unflatteringly and this led, for instance, Joyce to propose, in Ulysses, that Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway had slept with Shakespeare’s brother. Othello (and Troilus and Cressida) are, however, the two plays that most directly deal with the theme of sexual jealousy.

There is a mystery to Othello though. Why does Iago commit himself to Othello’s destruction, a catastrophe that overwhelms him as well? Coleridge uses the phrase “the motive hunting of a motiveless malignancy”. Early in the play Iago himself gives this as a reason

                                                [..] I hate the Moor;

                        And it is thought abroad that ‘twixt the sheets

                        He’s done my office. I know not if’t be true;

                        Yet I for mere suspicion of that kind,

                        Will do as if for surety.

Iago’s suspicions are obviously baseless, Othello is plainly not someone capable of having an illicit affair with Iago’s wifef Emilia, and it makes one wonder if Iago’s sordid imaginings of Othello sleeping with his wife have another foundation. Iago is undoubtedly paranoid. Perhaps (and this is where I am going to propose my bizarre theory) Iago is not jealous of Emilia but of Othello himself. Perhaps Iago hates Othello because he loves him.

This admittedly screwy interpretation of the play occurred to me when watching Kenneth Branagh’s film adaption of it. In Act 3 scene 3, Iago successfully replaces Desdemona as the most important person in Othello’s life, as co-conspirator in his plan to murder her; Othello calls Iago “my lieutenant” and Iago replies “I am yours forever”. At this point -in the film- they embrace. Iago’s expression (he is portrayed by Branagh himself) points to the fact that he genuinely means what he says and the implication is patent. His wish to destroy Othelllo springs out of a kind of twisted passion. As  Lajos Egri summarizes Othello: “Jealousy destroys the thing it loves.”

At the end of the play, Iago refuses to give any explanation of his actions, saying “Demand of me nothing: what you know, you know; From this time forth I will never speak a word.”

Some literary critics, as some literary critics do, have wondered if Shakespeare was homosexual. It was Oscar Wilde, perhaps unsurprisingly, who opined that some of the Sonnets were addressed to a man. Personally I think this theory is bullshit. Shakespeare wrote too convincingly about sexual jealousy of the heterosexual sort for him not to have experienced it himself. (This does not mean that he might not have made the villain in Othello a crypto-homosexual.) The passage that, to me, proves Shakespeare straight does not come from Othello though, or even from Romeo and Juliet. It is this passage from Troilus and Cressida when Troilus finds out that Cressida has slept around him with Diomed.

                        This she? No; this is Diomed’s Cressida.

                        If beauty have a soul, this is not she;

                        If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies,

                        If sanctimony be the gods’ delight,

                        If there be rule in unity itself,

                        This is not she. O madness of discourse,

                        That cause sets up with and against itself!

                        Bifold authority! Where reason can revolt

                        Without perdition, and loss assume all reason

                        Without revolt. This is, and is not, Cressid!

                        Within my soul here doth conduce a fight

                        Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate

                        Divides more wider than the sky and earth;

                        And yet the spacious breadth of this divison

                        Admits no orifex for a point as subtle

                        As Ariachne’s broken woof to enter.

                        Instance, O instance! strong as Plutos gates:

                        Cressid is mine, tied with bonds of heaven.

                        Instance, O instance! strong as heaven itself:

                        The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved and loosed,

                        And with another knot, five-finger-tied,

                        The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,

                        The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics

                        Of her ‘ereaten faith are given to Diomed.

Troilus and Cressida is, like Othello, about jealousy – with this difference. Othello’s jealousy is baseless but Triolus’s jealousy is justified. In Elizabethan times, cuckolds were figures of ridicule and this difference between the two plays, that Triolus is a true cuckold but Othello is not, is the reason why Othello is a genuine tragedy but Troilus and Cressida is not,  is in fact a satire – and why commentators on Shakespeare have had difficulty categorizing it. This is something that Joyce does not suggest. If Shakespeare himself was cuckolded, perhaps it was something too painful for him to directly address? And perhaps the only way he could attempt to do so was through satire?

In my next posting, I will get back to the business of my literary theory. I don’t know yet what book or film I will analyse but, hopefully, my gloom will lift and I can start to write something more normal. 

An Appreciation of David Foster Wallace

Recently I saw The End of the Tour, the biopic about the interviews that David Lipsky conducted with David Foster Wallace in the wake of the publication of his acclaimed work Infinite Jest. To be honest, for much of my life I have had mixed feelings about Wallace. I remember that, when I first heard about his suicide (I was in Respite at the time), I decided to blame myself. I thought that some comments I had made about him to some acquaintances– that Infinite Jest was a massive hoax perpetrated on a credulous public – had somehow got back to him and that he had killed himself as a result. This was, I admit, a pretty bizarre and ridiculous delusion but was typical of my mind-state then.

In the years since his death, I have accepted that I actually do quite like Wallace quite a bit. I still have some issues with Infinite Jest but I think his short stories are era-defining works of art. I have read a fair few, thought not all, of his other books: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, Consider the Lobster, his graduate thesis on fate and free will, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (a highly apposite title I think). Oblivion, in particular, is probably my all-time favourite book, especially the story “The Soul is Not A Smithy”. (I am tempted to perform a critical analysis of this work but, for once, I think I might do too much of a disservice to the story by murdering it through interpretation.)

The End of the Tour is an interesting film in more ways than one. It possesses a dynamic that is subtle but unmistakable – in the early part of the film Lipsky and the audience are teased by the idea that Wallace might be gay. This slight worry in the viewer’s mind is exacerbated rather than eased by the fact that Wallace talks incessantly about getting laid and about masturbation. Is the famous author trying too hard? As the film goes on, however, the two men relax around each other, recognizing that both are genuinely straight, and the audience relaxes with them. This odd narrative tension, creating doubt about a character’s sexuality and then allaying it, is by the way something I have observed in other films and plays (although I cannot quite at this moment cite any as examples).

Wallace was something of a rock-star author and his concerns were far reaching. He was interested in addiction, depression, Wittgenstein and the workings of the mass media. He struggled with depression his whole life. In story after story, he argued persuasively that mental problems were the consequence of the familial situation, and he specialized in presenting characters virtually paralysed by self-critical self-consciousness. One of his principal themes, though, which I want, perhaps perversely, to single out, was masturbation – Wallace wrote about it a lot. Wallace's chief concern with respect to this was to show the central role that sexual fantasy plays during the act of jerking off. Obviously no stranger to the private joys of onanism himself, Wallace was suspicious of people who didn’t wank as much as he did. From “Mister Squishy”, for example, this description of the unsympathetic Laleman: “Sometimes, on the rare occasions when he masurabated, Laleman’s fantasy involved a view of himself, shirtless and adorned with warpaint, standing with his boot on the chest of various supine men and howling upwards at what lay outside the fantasy’s frame but was probably the moon.”

Wallace was profoundly engaged with the problems and pitfalls of sexual relations but sexuality itself was something that he seldom touched on. There are, as far as I can recall, no gay characters in his fiction. The closest he comes to describing one is in the story “Good Ol’ Neon” in which the narrator, who describes himself quite ‘honestly’ (if that is the word) as a fraud (and feels more of a fraud for admitting that he feels one), diagnoses his shrink as a repressed homosexual: “It was pretty clear that there were some major sexual insecurities and maybe even homosexual ambiguities that Dr. Gustafson was subconsciously trying to hide from himself and reassure himself about, and one obvious way he did this was to sort of project his insecurities onto his patients…” The narrator dislikes this and his prescription is brutal. He considers telling his shrink in a note that Gustafson is “a deeply repressed homosexual or androgyne and had no real business charging patients to let him project his own maladjustments onto them, and the truth was that he’d be doing himself and everybody else a favour if he’d just go over to Garfield Park and blow somebody in the bushes and try honestly to decide if he liked it or not.”

The narrator of “Good Ol’ Neon” is not as smart as Wallace and, oddly, it is this lack of self-knowledge that saves him from being a total fraud. How much worse to be Wallace himself!  Towards the end of the story, Wallace introduces himself into it, describing himself in the third person: “considerable time having passed since 1981, of course, and David Wallace having emerged from years of literally indescribable war against himself with quite a bit more firepower than he’d had at Aurora West”. In what way indescribable? The suicide that carried Wallace off at the end was not his first attempt: he had very nearly killed himself when at College and had been institutionalised and put on suicide-watch as a result. I don’t believe that the reason for Wallace’s severe depression in early adulthood is publicly known but, in The End of the Tour, he describes it as a spiritual crisis and goes into no more details. Can we conjecture that, in some literally inconceivable way, he’d had a homosexual experience at University and it fucked him up for the rest of his life? Certainly false rumours circulated about Wallace. One rumour about him was that he had been a heroin addict. In the film, Wallace repudiates this rumour in the strongest possible terms, saying that he would never ever put anything in his arm. “My only addiction has only ever been television.”

I am not seriously suggesting that Wallace had a homosexual experience at College, although this would be a simple and superficially plausible explanation for his clinical depression and his obsession with masturbation. Real life is more complicated than that. In the real world, heterosexual men simply don’t have homosexual experiences – unless they have been raped, if not literally than psychologically. Wallace’s spiritual crisis remains a mystery, at least to me. But such a crisis is not uncommon – arguably TS Eliot had some kind of spiritual crisis before he wrote The Waste Land and  resolved this crisis by finding God. It seems that something similar happens to a lot of great artists and it is tempting to view such crises as sexual ones; it is an idea that I think people often think but never say aloud. All this raises the question. Would you rather be gifted or happy?