Time passes, class texts are read, dissected, deconstructed. Suddenly in the epochs of literary criticism, a new theory emerges. Schools of thought form and take shape and eventually find themselves in the subconscious of the reader, who now has the option of understanding his literature with a new interpretive strategy. One of the new schools of though, one that is slowly developing in the academic ichor, is post-colonial theory. The post-colonial method does not wade in the shallow-end. It is a discourse of marginalization; an examination of point-zero between the colonizer-colonized relationship; an upheaval of the delimited; a discovery, or unearthing, of the displaced. Time enough has passed: Shakespeare’s Othello must face the possibly now of drowning in the deep end of this method, the possibility of post-colonial death above western eyes. This paper will explore the ways in which Othello represents the displaced Other – what Spivak calls the “subaltern” – the gyroscopic nature of his character, and the machinations of Venice that eventually destroy him.
The tragic in Othello echoes the Aristotelian caveat: “An imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself.” Yet, for the subaltern Othello, Anouilh’s Chorus in Antigone is more appropriate: “The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction.” Othello’s fall from grace goes unpurged, it is uncathartic, despite the dramatic finale:
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know’t
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Not set down aught in malice.
(V.ii.333-343)
Since the voice he speaks is not his own, the voice he employs remains unheard – regardless of its poetic achievement. The voice, close to its death, one that has granted its colonizer dominance, is an example of Gayatri Spivak’s influential essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Here, she asks, “With what voice-consciousness can the subaltern speak? Their project, after all is to rewrite the development of the consciousness of the nation… The notion of what [the subaltern] cannot say becomes important. The post-colonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss. In this they are a paradigm of intellectuals” (Spivak, 27-28). Time reverses itself, flips, and we find Desdemona’s father, laboring Othello to explain his backstory:
Her father lov’d me, oft invited me;
Still question’d me the story of my life
From year to year – the battles, sieges, fortunes
That I have passed.
(I.iii.128-131)
And though Othello reveals his past, the caves and deserts and rugged hills, the cannibals and the slaves and the slavery, Brabantio’s appetite for the exotic is never satiated, the gassy-eyed indolence of his heterochromatic spoon-fed intake can never be fulfilled since Othello, as a subaltern, can never fully come to terms with his past. Especially to a white man who represents the face of brutality, of displacement. Othello can never truly bare his soul. Gerald Early’s The Culture of Bruising outlines the Afro-American as one whose intellectualism is seldom believed without a white man’s giving him a handicap. “Blacks exist as neither fully empowered citizens nor entirely discounted aliens (Early, 249). On the one hand, Othello is to Brabantio a noble warrior, as equipped in battle as his is in storytelling; on the other, Othello is the shifty deceiver, a sorcerer kidnapper, the “black ram” who humps the father’s “white ewe.” In other words, this is the Othello Brabantio had assumed from the beginning: The beast, the savage, the non-human.
Damn’d as thou art, thou has enchanted her,
For I’ll refer me to all things of sense,
If she in the chains of magic were not bound
Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy,
So opposite to marriage that she shunn’d
The wealthy curled darlings of our nation,
Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou – to fear, not to delight.
(I.ii.63-71)
Othello’s mistake: In attempting to captivate Brabantio with honesty and with a cooperative voice and spirit, he only removes his sanctity of himself. He must subjugate himself not only to Brabantio but also the whole of Venice. Othello appropriates his own identity by a pre-arranged marginalization, whereupon he marginalizes himself, thus trafficking a body with many half-formed selves while seemingly never ailing the sores and wounds of his own nativity: “I fetch my life and being/ From men of royal siege” (I.ii.20-21). Caryl Phillips makes an interesting point: “There is no evidence of Othello having any black friends, eating any African foods, speaking any language than theirs… From what we are given it is clear that he denied, or at least did not cultivate his past.” Phillips forgets that for Othello this denial is part and parcel maintenance for social stability – however problematic. The strategy is a dangerous one and his execution of it slippery. As the post-colonial subject, the modus operandi is hybridization, defined by Bakhtin as “as mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another… by social differentiation” (Bakhtin, 358). Hybridity, then, acts as a motivational construct: The making of two Othellos. But this is a poor binary, a mismanagement of cultural mirroring since neither are fully formed, since neither know the voice of this one man’s soul. His marriage to Desdemona can be viewed as a part of this mismanagement: “She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d/ And I lov’d her that she did pity them” (I.iii.167-168)
To completely refute A.C. Bradley’s statement (“Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure among Shakespeare’s heroes [Bradley, 139]), Othello’s marriage is more or less out of the necessity of hybridity, a necessity for survivial. This is not romance. Marriage here is a means of blending. Othello’s is not given the richest and most succulent language in the play only to succumb to the amateur’s folly of excessive jealousy – as claimed by J.Y. McLendon. He acclimates his poetry (it is not a gift, but a labored mechanism), and succumbs to the vices of a pre-determining, harshly judgmental Venice (not from jealousy).
Let’s hear some caveats.
Brian Eno: “Culture is everything we don’t have to do. We have to eat, but we don’t have to have cuisines, Big Macs, or Tournedos Rossini (Eno, 317)
Frantz Fanon: “To speak…means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (Fanon, 17-18).
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o: “In my view language is the most important vehicle through which power fascinates and holds the soul prisoner” (Thiong’o, 9).
If the reader were to keep in mind these markers, forging them with the chronology of Othello’s language – from the hardness of the first two acts, to the glottic crack-and-seizure of the third and fourth, then lastly to the failed, irreversible speeches in the finale, one can trace the post-colonial subject as a man who has chosen language as a means to initiate himself within the confines of the Venetian culture, who has then taken it upon himself the assumptions of the culture, and who is finally punished for initiating himself at all. There is no winning for the post-colonial subject.
As Habib states in his glorious Shakespeare and Race, “The made-over speech voice of the Othello subject is always monologic, closed ended, not inviting talk, but blocking it” (Habib, 137). The language he employs (or borrows, really) accounts for a large degree of the outward self: Othello’s presentation, though monologic and blocking, is also stunningly beautiful, poetically disturbing, and overwrought with pain:
The tyrant custom, most grave senators,
Hath made the flinty steel [couch] of war
My thrice-driven bed of down. I do agonize
A natural and prompt alacrity
I find in hardness; and do undertake
This present war against the Ottomites.
Most humbly therefore bending to your state,
I crave fit disposition for my wife,
Due reference of place and exhibition
With such accommodation and besort
As levels with her breeding.
(I.iii.229-239)
Here, in the face of the majority (Othello against the Duke and the Senate who had moments before tabled issues of the Turkish fleet in Cyprus to administer the “proof” of the Othello-Desdemona union), Othello waxes poetic grace with a language not entirely his own, a language that cues a bending position. It is almost as if the language he has chosen is part of a larger rehabilitation to blend, to become a part of the hegemony already in full steam. The tragedy is that he damns himself (Habib, 123). The further Othello strives for identity, the less knowing he is of himself – lending himself bare to Iago’s tricks. One could argue that it is not the Cassio-Desdemona coupling that seizes him in a rage, but a matter of his manhood, a matter of the emasculated post-colonial male member already in torment, a matter of the strategic act of hybridity gone wrong.
Iago: Stand you a while apart,
Confine yourself but in a patient list.
Whilst you were hear o’erwhelmed with your grief
(A passion most unsuiting for such a man)
Marry, patience,
Or shall I say y’are all in spleen,
And nothing of a man.
Othello: Dost thou hear, Iago,
I will be found most cunning in my patience;
But dost thou hear most bloody.
(IV.i.74-91)
It is when Othello’s post-colonial crouching position as the hybrid (neither standing tall, nor a footpath finished) finally undoes itself, and reaches its full height of exposure does he finally succumb under the weight of his own identity, a reversal of his own history – which at this point is too late.
“Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state,
I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog
And smote him – thus.
(He stabs himself)
(V.ii.351-356)
In the end, what is perhaps the most problematic piece of this rich character is the richness itself. The crook-and-dent qualities Othello possesses – the Moor, the exotic, the black man married to a white woman, the man whose presentation is so complex and perplexing to both audience and Venice, so grandiose, yet also so disjointed, troubled and fraught with self-contrasting hues, self-doubting motivations, so indebted to the self by battles of inner and provincial multiplicity, so rendered by the saturnalia of j’accuse! Venice – is such that the heart of the problem is too many complicated notions of Othello himself. Post-colonial theory aside, the degree to which one is beaten, pummeled, and thrashed into modern issues of racial earth, one must step back from the text with wounds, bandages, and all, and consider: Is the play itself an unseen error of poetic masterstroke? Has the playwright created a character that provides elements too complex and dense for his own pen, the he instead complicates the package with a plotline of grotesque and fantastic complexity coinciding with vagaries of romantic density? Is the piece itself one large jumble, provided with characters with one too many coruscating features (why, really, does Desdemona marry Othello? What kind of man is a kind of man like Iago? How has Emilia gone this long without realizing the true character of her husband? And how, I mean come on!, how is she unable to comprehend the implicit evil in retrieving the handkerchief?) and a long both dramatically thrusting and subtle that that itself is a red herring unto the audience: A fluidly unrealized text, where in the wake upon its completion, one is posed with unfluid, yet baldly realized questions pocking the mind throughout.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Bradely, A.C. “The Noble Othello.” A Casebook on Othello. Ed. Leonard F. Dean. New York: University of Connecticut, 1961.
Early, Gerald. The Culture of Bruising. Hopewell: The Ecco Press, 1994.
Eno, Brian. A Year With Swollen Appendices. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1982.
Habib, Imtiaz. Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period. New York: University Press of America, 2000.
McLendon, J.Y. ‘A Round Unvarnished Tale:’ (Mis)Reading Othello or African Strategies of Dissent.” Othello: New Essays by Black Writers. Ed., Mythili Kaul. Washington D.C. Howard University Press, 1997.
Phillips, Caryl. The European Tribe. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987.
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Gen. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. London: Macmillan, 1988.
