International Journal of Arts and Sciences 3(4): 34 - 51 (2009) CD-ROM. ISSN: 1944-6934 © InternationalJournal.org

The Art of World-Collapse: Othello, Heidegger, and the Veils of Illusion 1 Derek Gottlieb, University of Iowa, USA.

Abstract: While Shakespeare’s Othello has occasioned substantial and various forms of criticism over the centuries since its first performance, the majority of that criticism has viewed the play either in terms of the Aristotle’s theories on the genre of Tragedy, or in terms of the cultural values and constructions of the characters in the work. Neither of these approaches, however, seeks to see the work in terms of its interaction with an audience, or the way in which it functions as a work of art, broadly speaking. By bringing Martin Heidegger’s writings on art and poetry to bear upon Othello, we may see some of what the critical tradition has heretofore overlooked: the means by which the play operates in the experience of its performance—the way in which tragedies come to achieve their human significance.

1. Introduction Traditional approaches to literary criticism, which tend to treat individual works of literature as particular instances of a larger generic sample comprised of various essential characteristics, often overlook or suppress the disjunctions and divergences between the work and the genre. So it has been with Othello. It remains therefore to undertake an accounting of what occurs in the interchange between the play and the audience in the moment of Othello’s smothering of his innocent wife. The nature of the audience’s horror, the suddenness of its upwelling, and the relative longevity of its persistence as the audience leaves the theater tell us a great deal about the way in which literary art reveals our being to ourselves as such.

2. The State of the Art and Literature Review “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!” cries Iago to Othello even as he incites his noble master into a perplexed abstraction. Scholars of Othello in particular and of Shakespearean tragedy more generally often point to this juncture in the play—act three, scene three—as the point at which Othello commits his “tragic error” or succumbs to his “tragic flaw,” depending upon which translation of Aristotle’s term “hamartia” a given scholar chooses to follow. While it is certainly clear that after this exchange with Iago, Othello lends substantial credence to the possibility of his wife’s infidelity, the way in which scholars treat Othello’s transformation unintentionally narrows the interpretive 1

All citations of the play itself come from the Folger edition: Shakespeare, W. (1993). Othello. New Folger Library. B. Mowat. New York, Washington Square Press.

International Journal of Arts and Sciences 3(4): 34 - 51 (2009) CD-ROM. ISSN: 1944-6934 © InternationalJournal.org

possibilities inherent in the play and diverts attention from some of the most relevant questions pertaining to what Michael Gelvin has called “the paradox of tragedy”: “our obvious appreciation of what should seemingly be censured and rejected: the suffering of a noble person” (Gelvin 1976). Most scholars “solve” the paradox with which tragedy presents us by either ignoring it completely in favor of a more abstract reading based on the text’s material existence and its cultural particularities, or by merely dissolving the paradox—justifying the hero’s suffering by pointing to its utility in terms of the audience’s moral instruction or by ascribing the suffering to the hero’s “tragic flaw” or an intellectual error. But in both dissolving and ignoring the tragic tension, we often find ourselves favoring our cerebral, post hoc understandings of the drama at the expense of our more immediate, less cerebral reactions, which also have an important validity. In the aftermath of a tragedy, in other words, in our studies and in our libraries, we seek to make sense of the play in terms of our generally rational and positivistic understanding of lived experience, when, according to a variety of 19th and 20th century theorists, tragedy itself might serve precisely to undermine the solidity of that conception of our experience. Each of the aforementioned approaches, both the future-oriented moral view and the flawed-hero one, end up consoling us to a certain degree, implicitly promising that despite the apparently inexplicable destruction of a great hero, the world’s order remains intact. H.B. Charlton (Charlton 1948), for example, seeks refuge in the greater good: ultimately, the audience gains “spiritually” from the hero’s downfall, and thus tragedy serves a function of our species’ moral improvement. The hero’s suffering—and our thrilled horror as we watch it unfold—makes sense in light of humanity’s betterment even if, crucially, the audience in the theater does not immediately comprehend the fact. Likewise, many translators of Aristotle, in rendering hamartia as the protagonist’s “tragic flaw”(Hyde 1963), have set off what Leon Rosenstein (Rosenstein 1977) has called the “hamartia hunt,” a means of understanding the tragic hero from a merely pathological perspective. This approach rests on the assumption that negative outcomes must have rationally discernible and equally negative causes, and it seeks to identify the dysfunctional element within the protagonist himself. In both cases, the scholar attempts to correct the audience’s initial reaction, which is one of shock and bafflement, either through rendering the protagonist pathologically dysfunctional or through rendering the audience’s horror merely its own brand of mistake: the audience only experiences its horror as a negative thing, the Charlton approach implies, because it does not yet understand the rational benefits of experiencing that horror. As clean as the above approaches seem, and as hoary as are their pedigrees in academia, each approach falls short in one important sense: neither one seriously attempts to account for the audience’s deeply personal fascination and empathetic involvement with the drama as it appears on stage. Neither approach attempts to cope with the play as a play—that is, as a performance enacted in time before a live audience. In lifting the work from its natural habitat, as it were, and reflecting upon the text from a great cool remove,

International Journal of Arts and Sciences 3(4): 34 - 51 (2009) CD-ROM. ISSN: 1944-6934 © InternationalJournal.org

scholars and students of literature tend to conceal the “thingness” of Othello beneath a film of assumptions about the ways in which art, and literary art in particular, has meaning, specifically those assumptions that privilege rational reflection in the process of sense-making. From such a perspective, the audience’s immediate bafflement and its horror are treated as failures of understanding rather than as potentially authentic responses in their own rights. But in order to fully grasp Othello as a work of art, a critic must account for that which baffles and explain why, with a period of reflection, the bafflement slides into some other form of understanding. But first, we must take issue with the shortcomings of the several narratives about Othello that so many years of earnest scholarship have bequeathed to us in terms of understanding the tragedy. Each of these narratives points, albeit in different ways, to the same conclusion: Othello ought to have been able to avoid or overcome the particular circumstances that led to his destruction. Some scholars, as we’ve noted above, choose to focus directly on Othello’s character, seeking to explain the pathology of his failure to see both Desdemona’s purity and Iago’s iniquity. Other scholars choose to focus on the enigmatic Iago himself, but as we will see, even these studies, through attempting to explain Iago’s motivations, find themselves impugning Othello’s inability to see Iago for what he is. Inherent in every study of Iago is an implicit condemnation of Othello. And inherent in every condemnation of Othello is an implicit metaphysical proposition—in our modern world, there is no such thing as an inevitable fate. Our world bends to our control such that any destruction we suffer must be the natural consequence of a failure on our part, either intrinsic or circumstantial. I argue that none of the narratives hitherto offered satisfactorily describes the action of the play, and much further, that the play itself in its immediacy serves rather to explode, however temporarily, this very metaphysical foundation upon which all scholarship on the play has heretofore proceeded. John McClosky and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in separate studies, arrive at similar and similarly useful conclusions about the underlying nature of Iago’s desire to “poison” Othello’s delight. Many other scholars, though, seize upon one of the various reasons for his malevolence that Iago himself provides, none of which, taken by itself, proves indubitable. In 1.1, Iago explains to Roderigo that he hates Othello because the general has promoted Cassio, a “counter-caster,” to the position of lieutenant rather than the ostensibly more deserving Iago, “his moorship’s ancient.” That Cassio later arrives in Iago’s sights as the second half of the latter’s “double knavery” seems to lend credence to this proposition. However, in the course of his plan, Iago goes far beyond merely displacing Cassio as lieutenant; in fact, he achieves that particular goal at the end of 3.3. But Iago carries his plan forward until the completion of Othello’s destruction, a destruction which eliminates Iago’s position. And while it is indeed possible that Iago’s desire to revenge himself on Othello requires no rectification of the initial slight, Iago’s disproportionate response seems to point to alternate or additional motivations. At the end of 1.3, for example, Iago informs the audience in soliloquy that “it is thought abroad that twixt my sheets, / ‘Has done my office.” Rumors fly, apparently, that Othello has

International Journal of Arts and Sciences 3(4): 34 - 51 (2009) CD-ROM. ISSN: 1944-6934 © InternationalJournal.org

slept with Emilia, which in itself provides plenty of reason for Iago to hate his superior. But here, as before, Iago proposes a proportionate response, as far as revenge goes: to be “evened with him, wife for wife” (2.1.321). And yet, Iago never takes a step in the direction of satisfying this aim. He never attempts to bed Desdemona himself. Each time he offers the audience a potential motivation for his diabolical plot, the shape of his actions seem to contradict the veracity of the claim. Still other scholars point to the soliloquy at the end of 2.1, in which Iago mentions that he also, like Roderigo, loves Desdemona as motivation for toppling Othello. But this claim seems the most flimsy of all. Not only does the soliloquy segue immediately into Iago’s base wish to be evened with Othello wife for wife, but also and more obviously, Iago’s plan involves Desdemona’s death. The claim that Iago locates his motivation in his love for Desdemona falls apart immediately. In fact, as we have seen, the working-out of Iago’s plan contravenes every one of his stated goals. Given, then, that Iago gains nothing that he sets out to achieve from the success of his plan—not, ultimately, his lieutenancy; not his cuckolding of Othello; not Desdemona’s love—how are we to understand that which stands behind his diabolical scheme? The more successful critics, like McClosky (McClosky 1941), for example, often end up relying on some highly ethereal or abstract quality within Iago himself to explain his actions—like his inherent “hatred”—rather than pointing to any of the possibilities that Iago himself lays out in his several soliloquies. And in this regard, no critic has improved on Coleridge’s declaration that Iago is motivelessly malignant (Barnet 1956), which hints in a much more useful direction. In order to believe in the veracity of any one of Iago’s stated causes for his hatred and in the stated goals of his plot, one must overlook daunting evidence to the contrary, as delineated above. In order to accept Coleridge’s characterization of Iago, meanwhile, one must accept that some human actions, some human decisions, are idiopathic, without cause. The latter, surprisingly, seems the more palatable of the pair. The progressive working-out of Iago’s plan deconstructs its own etiology; the plan outgrows any possible origin; the plan requires only its own momentum and becomes its own justification, not in terms of its ends but as an action itself. The nature of Iago’s plan presents an all-out attack on our own notion of the relationship between effects and their causes. When we see an effect—like the destruction of a great man—we immediately seek its cause. Iago’s continual thwarting of his own apparent ends robs us not only of a conventional means of understanding his character, but also of our faith in rational etiology itself. And yet, it seems much more plausible that we as a culture have overvalued the cause-effect relationship than that Iago’s actions are explicable by any one goal-oriented propositional statement. The story we repeat to ourselves that all effects must have rational and discernable causes seems to blanch in the face of this play. Why does Iago do what he does? In the most complete sense of the phrase, we cannot say. Far, then, from Othello’s downfall shining forth some inherent weakness in his character from which the audience might learn, rather the opposite takes place. As much as the audience might wish to label Othello gullible, we have difficulty seeing his character as a

International Journal of Arts and Sciences 3(4): 34 - 51 (2009) CD-ROM. ISSN: 1944-6934 © InternationalJournal.org

fool. After all, the text, the script itself, thwarts Iago’s own attempts to account for his actions. Even with the considerable benefit of dramatic irony, we in the audience cannot explain the ensign’s actions. That ages and ages of scholars have proven likewise unable to satisfactorily account for Iago’s behavior suggests that here, Othello bears none of the special blame which we tend to attach to tragic heroes generally. Critics like Charlton, and like E. K. Weedin, whom we’ll encounter shortly, find themselves compelled to ignore certain elements of the text in order to preserve the prevailing understanding of tragedy as a work that serves a moral and metaphysical function for the audience. In order to achieve such a reading, Othello must, in effect, destroy himself; his suffering must be more pathetic than terrible. The audience must occupy a particularly removed position, a height, from which they might pity the hero. But it is Iago’s character that defies such a reading. He is more than the Elizabethan figure of the malcontent—less gleeful and more earnest in his destructive bent. A pitiable tragedy requires that the audience conceive of the tragedy’s shape well in advance of the hero. We must know what will happen to the hero and how it will come to pass. And in these tragedies, while we feel for the protagonist as he strides unwittingly toward his doom, our pity contains a measure of reproach: we can see the end; so should he. Through our foreknowledge, we elevate ourselves above the hero—the hero may be great in the context of the stage, but we hold him to ourselves as somewhat complicit in his own destruction, as blameworthy. Iago’s protean scheme, however—his constant restating and contradicting of his own motivations and plans—prevents us from condescending to Othello. While we who hear the soliloquies know of Iago’s evil, the absence of its clear motivation and the amorphous quality of its manifestation precludes us blaming Othello for missing it. There remains, however, the issue of Othello’s reasoning process. While we cannot scorn at Othello’s blindness to the treachery beside him, scholars have found much to blame in Othello’s vulnerability to Iago’s murderous seduction. Many critics, notably E.K. Weedin (Weedin 1975), seek to pin such a mistake in the Moor’s reasoning process on Othello’s loving “not wisely,” with the attendant implication that, all things being equal, Othello might have avoided such an error. Weedin cites the distinction between ratio superior, a form of reasoning in which “reasoning” as such is almost unnecessary, as truth and knowledge arrive in a rightfeeling burst of intuition, and ratio inferior, of which laborious ratiocination is a hallmark. If a conclusion requires extensive and conscious reasoning, elaborate workingout, it’s likely of the inferior variety. Weedin locates Othello’s mistake in “descending” from the ratio superior of his early-acts love for Desdemona to Iago’s hateful ratio inferior. Othello’s love for Desdemona is pure, requiring no evidence, the critic argues; Othello’s doubt of her virtue, though, which rises in earnest in the third act, is of that inferior type, which necessitates the extensive proofs Iago offers. Clearly, Weedin seems to say, had Othello been aware of the difference between the superior and inferior forms of reason, he might have recognized the trap into which he was falling and hence avoided

International Journal of Arts and Sciences 3(4): 34 - 51 (2009) CD-ROM. ISSN: 1944-6934 © InternationalJournal.org

his disaster. Adequate reflection once again seems to have solved the problem of explaining the tragic action. But in fact the very basis of Othello’s doubt rests in the ratio superior, in the same source from which springs his love for Desdemona. Othello does not face a choice between superior and inferior forms of reasoning, as Weedin claims. Such a choice seems easy, and it comes with a clear moral directive: reason rightly, and Othello can avoid his destruction. Reason rightly, and we in the audience will likewise live well and prosperously. But the audience does not leave the theater with a moral in its collective mind; it leaves the theater a little sick to its collective stomach, still plagued with a dread it cannot quite name. Far from facing a simple choice between correct and incorrect forms of reasoning, Othello faces an impossible choice between competing and mutually exclusive narratives, each of which calls to him from out of the highly intuitive, rightfeeling ratio superior. Weedin is correct to assert that Othello’s love for Desdemona seems above doubt in the first two acts; never does he privately question the reasons for his own love, nor the reasons she has for loving him. In fact, when the Duke presses him for an explanation in the first act, Othello’s rational account simply falls flat: “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them” (1.3.194-5). When charged to explain the cause and origin of the love that he and Desdemona bear one another, Othello renders a proposition in reasonable terms, but the audience cannot help but feel the insufficiency of his explanation. Like Iago’s malevolence, the romantic love that springs up between Othello and Desdemona defies a logical accounting. Indeed, it seems true to Othello’s mind—and to the audience—precisely because it arrives via the ratio superior, as the kind of truth that requires no explicit support. Weedin would differentiate between the way Othello views his love for Desdemona and the way Othello comes to view her infidelity, and the kind of reasoning on which each depends, but in doing so he misses the point. Othello does not come to believe in Desdemona’s infidelity primarily because of the reasons that Iago offers. Instead, he comes to believe that Desdemona has been unfaithful because it is Iago who is offering the reasons. Othello’s confidence in Iago rises from the same source and presents itself in the same way as does his love for Desdemona, as something that requires neither cause nor justification, as something treated as a given, as a premise and a lens according to which his world appears to him as a world. “Honest,” in fact, is an epithet that Othello attaches to Iago’s name a full nine times over the course of the play, including three times in the second scene of act five, following Desdemona’s murder. Iago’s honesty requires neither consideration nor evaluation nor proof. The truth of Iago’s honesty appears almost transcendently to Othello, intuitively, in the form of the ratio superior. When Iago poisons Othello against Desdemona, then, what we in the audience witness is not a competition between two unequal forms of reasoning, in which Othello makes the wrong choice, nor is it a question of any flaw within Othello. Rather, we witness the

International Journal of Arts and Sciences 3(4): 34 - 51 (2009) CD-ROM. ISSN: 1944-6934 © InternationalJournal.org

explicit struggle between two contradictory givens in Othello’s life, two truths on which he depends for the sense-making of his world. In constructing the conflict in this manner, Shakespeare renders Othello both great and human, without forcing the audience to view him as either one or the other. In order to understand the way in which an audience experiences such a tragedy in its temporality, without condescending to the hero through delineating the villain’s motives or impugning the hero’s perceptivity, we may rely in part on Martin Heidegger’s writings on the nature of worldhood.

3. The Worldhood and the Frailty of Othello’s World As Heidegger posits, the human being understands his world primarily by means of being in it. One’s world discloses itself to a person in terms of the “nearness” to the person of the things therein. 2 The more engaged one is with his world, the more the entities of his world disappear for him as entities. The more one bursts into the house urgently needing the restroom, the less the intervening space between the front door and the toilet rises to his overt consciousness as something to be considered. There is only the need and the goal, and all the objects of the world have meaning in terms of that perspective. It is an extreme example, but in those moments of dire need, one’s world reduces itself to a minimal state, and the entities of the universe appear only according to their relevance to one’s world-of-dire-need. Insofar as a given object—the painting on the living room wall, say—is irrelevant to the task at hand, so does it conceal itself in the background. Only through disengagement, through pulling back, might one hold up to himself the objects of his world—but only in a de-natured, de-worlded way. One may thereby deliberately foreground those items, or truths, or objects which one ordinarily takes as givens, but in doing so one removes them from any context in which they have their meaning. In an analogy to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, one cannot both see an object as a foreground entity and understand its worlded significance at the same time, for to pull back and see an object is to remove it from one’s world as such, and to place it into the universe instead, a shared but impersonal and undefined space. As with objects in the above example, so with beliefs. We speak of “questioning our faith” at times, and those times are characterized by a meditative quality, a quality of inaction. While we are questioning our deepest beliefs, we cannot meaningfully act in the world to which those beliefs pertain. In fact, we have stepped outside of our world as we hold it up in an “over-against” relation to ourselves. When we no longer question, we step back into our world, and those beliefs, those bottom-line faiths, retreat once more from our consciousness—they rather shape the significance of that which we see and do 2

“The Being of those entities which we encounter as closest to us can be exhibited phenomenologically if we take as our clue our everyday Being-in-the-world, which we also call our dealings in [umgang] the world and with entities in the world. . . . The kind of dealing which is closest to us is as we have shown, not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its of kind of ‘knowledge’.” Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. New York, Harper & Row.

International Journal of Arts and Sciences 3(4): 34 - 51 (2009) CD-ROM. ISSN: 1944-6934 © InternationalJournal.org

and plan, but we no longer “see” them as entities. We step back into our private world, and the taken-for-granted, the background, the familiar, causes the world to light up as a world. Both Othello’s love for Desdemona and his faith in Iago are such baseline facts for the hero that we might call them beyond doubt. These facts are familiar to him, invisible buoys according to which he navigates his life and ones that function precisely because of and through their invisibility. They comprise the background for Othello. None of Iago’s proofs of Desdemona’s infidelity, as many have noted, are in themselves or even collectively sufficient to condemn Desdemona; but then, Othello does not murder his wife because her infidelity has been logically established for him. Iago’s coup comes about simply because he, as part of Othello’s background, revokes the background status of Desdemona’s honesty. In accusing or impugning Desdemona, Iago converts Desdemona’s fidelity from a background fact, an invisible footing, to a foreground one. Desdemona’s chastity, her own honesty, rises as an entity to be considered from an overagainst position. Iago holds up the prospect of her infidelity as he might do a painting, and Othello faces his wife’s virtue as an object rather than as the plain and unconscious assumption it had previously been. In this moment, at the very instant at which Iago first uses the world “cuckold” (3.3.197), the background quality of his narrative defeats Desdemona’s. Despite Othello’s claim that he’ll “see before [he] doubt[s]” (3.3.221), he already, even here, treats Desdemona’s fidelity differently than he treats Iago’s honesty. Desdemona’s bygone virtue is already of a new and different quality because Iago, whose own virtue remains part of the background, has raised it into the foreground and has thus transformed it into something to be weighed and considered objectively. And when Iago wrights the kind of narrative in which various facts-as-entities—that Cassio acted as the go-between in Othello’s courtship of Desdemona, for example—assume their significance in terms of Desdemona’s infidelity, that infidelity suddenly manifests itself as corporeally, as really, and as visibly as any ipso facto entity might. Thus the “truth” of Desdemona’s infidelity rises for Othello out of the background of his world itself. Othello has no reason to perceive or suspect Iago’s dishonesty, for, as we have seen, Iago’s malevolence appears idiopathic, even to us. And without such suspicion, Othello has no defense against the slanderous falsehoods Iago levels against Desdemona. Without such suspicion, there is no decision for Othello to make as regards Iago’s honesty. Iago’s honesty simply lies behind the realm of Othello’s decisionmaking. That is not a fault: we all have that which we accept as true without requiring its constant probation. We assume that the planet Neptune exists, and continues to exist, though few of us, ourselves, have ever detected it in the night sky. We even assume on a day-to-day basis, like Othello does, sometimes mistakenly, that our spouses are faithful to us, not by reciting to ourselves affirmations of the fact, but simply through the ways in which we conduct ourselves in the world, in the fact that we share bank accounts and household duties and the like. In our acting upon the assumption, we render it true in the sense of establishing a grounding for ourselves. To hold oneself in a perpetual state of

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radical doubt of absolutely everything is to prevent the very possibility of being in the world. It is to be inhuman. Equating the obvious error in Othello’s conclusion with an error in his reasoning rests on the problematic assumption that proper reasoning incontrovertibly leads to accurate conclusions. As we’ve seen, however, reasoning as we conceive of it operates not as an abstract principle or process, but within the world of the one-who-reasons. While scientific methodology attempts to divorce this human tendency from the investigation of the phenomenal world, the existence of the method itself reifies the very tendency it would circumvent. Insofar as Othello’s reasoning hews to this particularly human model, he is neither more nor less flawed than any member of the audience; he is merely and alltoo human. While certainly the truth of the situation lies within the possibility of his comprehension, the bare fact of his failure to comprehend it does not require a cause rooted in any kind of dysfunction or pathology. In the most important sense, his evasion of his fate in the context of the play would require a literally superhuman sensibility. As such, labeling him a “flawed” hero or a “flawed” character is terribly misleading—it focuses the scholarly world upon the execution of a narrow analysis of Othello’s character. But it is also false to the audience’s experience in the theater: this wringing of the text in order to extract Othello’s flaw elevates the audience over the hero—it renders the hero contemptible, beneath the audience, and the reading thereby acquits the audience of its implication in the drama. This reading reduces a sublime work to a morality play—it removes from the drama the character of tragic art: the ritual of the performance, the gathering together into their “thingness” those elements through which our worlds take on their significance, the calling of the audience into a new relation to the world, the hurling of the audience members out into the ungroundedness of existence. The audience of this tragedy may later take comfort in such a removed reading; it may at length come to imagine itself superior to Othello’s character, above his jealous and animal nature; it may come to deny its kinship with the hero. But in the theater, in the immediacy of the performance, the audience cannot help recognizing that even if dramatic literature is not a strict mimesis of lived experience, it is the audience itself onstage, the audience itself seduced by Iago’s poisonous slander, the audience itself committing and avenging the tragic crime. “This is the most immediate effect of Dionysian tragedy,” Nietzsche says, “that. . . the gulfs between man and man give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the heart of nature” (Nietzsche 2000).

4. Thinghood, the Work of Art, and Tragedy The scholarly methods employed for centuries have heretofore been characterized by the solitude of the scholar within his or her study and the materiality of the text open on the desk. Regardless of how we view this text in our isolation—as a cultural artifact produced by a particular member of a particular society and communicating the power dynamics inherent in the social constructions of race, class, and gender; or as, in

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Derrida’s words, merely “black marks on white paper” (Derrida 1972), a system of symbols to be read even as the reader is concurrently constructing his or her own text; or in any of the myriad other conceptions of textuality over the eons—this isolation, our lonely consciousness, remains the defining element. We as isolated (though cultured and so constructed) individuals approach and take hold of the open book on the desk in its denatured objectivity. That is literary scholarship. In treating texts as texts, as universal objects, even if ones possessed of infinitely protean significances, traditional scholarship overlooks an important social element in the performative act of reading. Literary art has another mode of being, one that goes beyond the black marks on the white paper, one that calls to the many and not merely to the one. We do not need to imagine or appeal to authorial intention in order to feel something broadly transcendent in the text, something that appeals in a public voice as well as a private one; neither do we need the corroboration of other readers in order to privately generalize the significance of the work to a public audience. We may, and do, fool ourselves habitually, but our readings, however individually generated, we understand as shared readings, as connective significances. Nowhere, obviously, is this phenomenon so prominent as in the audience of the performance of a play, where a script is read both to and by, as it were, the consumers of the text. We in the audience are both individual in our private seats and collective in the light of the same experience. And in this way, despite the common assumption that reading is a private activity, the literary work stands before both the one and the one-of-the-many. In order to move beyond the traditionally narrow view of the being of literature, we must treat literature as a member of the arts in general, as well as a member of written or linguistic art in particular. Heidegger’s ideas on poetry, dwelling, and the work of art provide us with a conceptual framework through which to approach the experience of watching a performance of Othello. Through an investigation of “things” in opposition to entities, and through seeing works of art as one kind of “thing,” and further, through reading Othello as one such work of art, our responses to the play’s performances, both internal and external, may come into clearer relief. Against the universe of entities Heidegger posits the concept of the world of things, of which art is one kind. In his essay, “Das Ding,” originally published in 1951, the philosopher identifies the ways in which things come to comprise and to shape our worlds. He describes the operational force of things as an almost gravitational bond that draws and binds together—or “gathers,” in his own terminology—the four boundary elements of the world, as humanity understands them: the earth and the sky, the divine and the mortal. In the passage below, Heidegger explains how a jug becomes, through its gathering-together of these elements, the kind of entity according to which and by which humans “dwell”—a thing: In the gift of outpouring that is drink, mortals stay in their own way. In the gift of the outpouring that is libation, the divinities stay in their own way, they who receive back the gift of giving as the gift of the donation. In the gift of the outpouring , mortals and divinities each dwell

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in their different ways. Earth and sky dwell in the gift of the outpouring. In the gift of the outpouring, earth and sky, divinities and mortals dwell together at once. These four, at one because of what they themselves are, belong together. Preceding everything that is present, they are enfolded into a single fourfold. In the gift of the outpouring dwells the simple singlefoldedness of the four. ….. The gift of the outpouring stays the onefold of the fourfold of the four. And in the poured gift the jug presences as a jug. The gift gathers what belongs to the giving: the twofold containing, the container, the void, and the outpouring as donation. What is gathered in the gift gathers itself in appropriately staying the fourfold. This manifold-simple gathering is the jug’s presencing. Our language denotes what a gather is by an ancient word. That word is: thing. The jug’s presencing is the pure, giving gathering of the onefold fourfold into a single time-space, a single staying. The jug presences as a thing (Heidegger 1971).

Far from existing simply as a substance with properties, the jug “presences as a thing” by virtue of its gathering quality, by virtue of the shaping role it plays in the world of Dasein. In its “nearness” to the human, in the way people come to dwell in their world through it, the jug discloses itself as a jug with all of the attendant connotations of thinghood. In its factuality, it is both entity and equipment, but in terms of its being-forpeople, its thingness rests in its equipmental aspect, the mode of its being that pertains to the delineating and navigating of the human world. As much as it discloses itself as a thing, it simultaneously operates to disclose the Being of the human being. The work of art, particularly poetic art, is possessed of this same thingly quality: it performs an identical gathering function in the human world. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger notes that art reveals itself as art to the extent that it calls the Being of humans into some new relief. Says the philosopher, “The working of the work does not consist in the taking effect of a cause. It lies in a change, happening from out of the work, of the unconcealedness of what is, and this means, of Being.”(Heidegger 1971) Art, in the role it plays in humanity’s self-disclosing, reveals itself as a kind of thing, the type of entity that has meaning in a worlded sense and that also brings humanity to sense its world as a world. Humans’ Being discloses itself in and through the work of art. Heidegger furthers this idea in the continuation of the passage quoted above: Poetry, however, is not an aimless imagining of whimsicalities and not a flight of mere notions and fancies into the realm of the unreal. What poetry, as illuminating projection, unfolds of unconcealedness and projects ahead into the design of the future, is the Open which lets poetry happen, and indeed in such a way that only now, in the midst of beings, the Open brings beings to shine and ring out (Heidegger 1971).

The notion of the “Open” is an important one—it is the ungroundedness of the world that remains concealed within and by the operations, the activities, of daily human life. As such, the Open brings “beings to shine and ring out” through disclosing to beings the wagering, risk-laden nature of their Being. As the above passage indicates, the Open is always present “in the midst of beings,” but it is not always visible as a pre-ontological condition. Art raises the Open into a kind of ineffable visibility that remains inseparable

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from the work of art itself. Art reminds the human, though not in a logically articulable way, that humanity exists primarily in a world, not mainly in a universe. We have subtly segued into treating poetry as one kind of art which performs all the thingly, gathering functions of art for its audience. Heidegger refers to the great poets as “the more venturesome” because of the effect of their “saying” in terms of bringing the Open into a sort of substantiality for their audience. The saying that is more fully saying happens only sometimes, because only the more venturesome are capable of it. For it is still hard. The hard thing is to accomplish existence. The hard thing consists not only in the difficulty of forming the work of language, but in the difficulty of going over from the saying work of the still covetous vision of things, from the work of the eyes, to the “work of the heart”. . . . The more venturesome are the poets, but poets whose song turns our unprotected being into the Open. Because they convert the parting against the Open and inwardly recall its unwholesomeness into a sound whole, these poets sing the healing whole in the midst of the unholy (Heidegger 1971).

Heidegger here notes the height of the stakes of poetic speech, particularly of the greatest examples thereof. He speaks of poets as “the more venturesome” because it is they who risk everything that is to be risked in the accomplishing of existence. The “saying” of these poets hurls “our unprotected being into the Open.” We in the audience implicate ourselves in the venture of the poets—we are those whose Being sheds its protection as a precondition of the wager; we are those who, in the hearing of the saying, experience something akin to the new weightlessness at the edge of the earth’s gravity; we are those whose Being, in a lonely and powerfully worlded sense, “comes to shine and ring out” in our interaction with the work of art. The members of the audience of a tragedy such as Othello experience precisely this vertiginous unconcealing of the worldhood of their worlds. As a thing, the tragedy gathers together into a single space-time all that which concerns the Being of the audience members, and it simultaneously hurls them, unprotected, into the Open. Through the thingly quality of the tragedy as a poetic work of art, the members of the audience experience, both in their isolation and in their unity as a single audience present in the same time-space, what Heidegger calls “the full draft” of the Open—the breathless ungroundedness of their worlds.

5. Re-Viewing Othello: the Audience and the Grounding of Ungroundedness While Friedrich Nietzsche, the other great thinker to follow this theoretical vein, employs Hamlet in order to depict the nature of the interaction between a human being and the Open, Othello provides an ideal example of the way in which the audience experiences the draft of the Open through art. Inasmuch as we’ve sought to divorce an understanding of Othello from the character- and teleology-driven methods employed by many critics—the ones that treat tragic art as a kind of mimetic representation of the

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audience that serves the purpose of, in Aristotelian terms, purging that audience of pity and fear—we will here focus on the ways in which Othello as a poetic tragedy exposes the worldhood of the audience’s world. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche first introduces the substance of what he would later term in Ecce Homo, “the most abysmal idea”: In this sense, the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities, does not get around to action. Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man. (Nietzsche 2000).

“True knowledge” exposes itself as a result of Hamlet’s dual action—withdrawing himself from his world and holding that world up to the light, as it were. While some scholars have found it ironic that Nietzsche, the man who proclaimed the death of God, should make propositions about “the eternal nature of things,” the philosopher is in fact making an existential claim, not a metaphysical one. When Hamlet understands that he cannot change anything in the eternal nature of things, he means the ungrounded condition of his very Being—the pre-ontological existence of the Open. Within his world as a world, all the moral imperatives that attend Hamlet’s task of revenge operate from out of the background. In the visible foreground lies only the ghost’s command. But through his penetrating insight, Hamlet raises the background of his world into his field of vision, and he finds his world itself to be a type of diaphanous film beyond which lies the Open. His “true knowledge,” the knowledge that kills action, consists of understanding that his world rests on a frail human ground, not a transcendent one. He grasps the ungroundedness of his world, and his grasp thereof, as Nietzsche says, “outweighs any motive for action.” The metaphysical frailty of his world blunts the call to action. But he does, of course, come at length to act. At the end of the play, Hamlet returns to his world and plunges himself back into the revenge tragedy that he seems to know will lead to his demise. For him, as for everyone else, the world in its worldhood remains the will’s only navigable medium, and better the ungrounded world than the paralyzed state of constantly thinking the most abysmal idea. In Hamlet, we in the audience watch the hero strut and fret and ponder and die, but Hamlet is a far less affecting play than Othello. Hamlet may experience Aristotle’s anegnorisis, the “tragic realization,” the “true knowledge” of the Dionysian man, but in a very crucial sense the audience is not implicated therein. In his own play, Hamlet functions as an analog for the audience, and the audience may only experience the full draft of the Open through Hamlet’s character—indirectly, then, and by analogy.

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Othello’s audience, meanwhile, famously struggles and squirms at the performance. Of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, this one notoriously implicates the audience in the destruction on the stage. The audience, I argue, senses all of that which renders the end inexplicable—Othello’s blamelessness and Iago’s idiopathic evil at the fore—at the same time as it witnesses the violence and finality of the last act. And more: the audience understands that the vision of existence rendered in the drama pertains to them as well. The poetic art of the tragedy shines forth to the audience the full scope of the human being in all of its terrifying uncertainty, its perpetually malleable substantiality. In his final speech, with Desdemona lifeless on the stage beside him, Othello speaks of himself as one “not easily jealous, but being wrought / Perplex’d in the extreme” (5.2.395-6). Iago has worked Othello’s world as one would work a metal—because Othello’s world is by definition subject to such a working. Circumventing the defenses of reason by lurking already beneath and within them, acting out of an idiopathic and indiscernible spite, Iago transforms the things of Othello’s world without ever acting upon the entities in their bare essence. He takes a world in which Cassio’s kissing of Desdemona’s hand is a courtesy and makes it one in which the gesture reeks of lust. Cassio’s objective action, as an entity, becomes an entirely different thing within Othello’s world. The universe remains in its factuality, but Iago’s insinuations alter the world through which the entities of the universe take on their meaning, their significance, their thinghood. As the audience can see, the universe never changes. It is blameless Othello’s world that writhes and contorts. Othello never takes Hamlet’s retreat from his world, never thinks the most abysmal idea himself. The audience, though, in their seats at the theater, witnesses not the descent of a noble mind into madness, not a passionate fit of jealousy, not the corruption of reason by diabolical forces. As Othello blows out the candles and advances upon his sleeping wife and methodically carries out his murderous plan, the audience and not the hero feels the full horror of the most abysmal idea. As Desdemona pleads to “say one prayer,” with her husband’s hands already upon her, the audience takes in its collective breath, a physiological, emotive response to the incomprehensibility of the murder. What it cannot understand, the audience nonetheless witnesses; with Desdemona’s murder, the audience finds itself thrown into the full ungroundedness of existence, operating for a brief time in that which lies beyond rational cognition’s ability to control or contain. In the way Othello revenges himself upon his wife within a world imagined and concocted by Iago, the audience members confront the uprearing of the Open, both the insubstantiality and the necessity of worldhood in general. As we have seen, ages of criticism have sought to present an understanding of Othello in terms of either Iago’s vengeful motivations or Othello’s psychopathology. But such understandings work actively to conceal behind a reinforced screen of metaphysical comfort that which is most present in the performance of the play, that which pertains most deeply to the play as a work of art. At the performance, we see and experience quite the opposite of metaphysical comfort. In the immediacy of the performance, the audience finds itself robbed of the usual means of consolation. It cannot entirely censure the immorality of the hero and thus privilege itself above the hero’s fate; nor can it, as it

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watches Desdemona’s limbs grow still, attribute Othello’s deception to any overt flaw in his inherent character, which would likewise provide the audience a place of refuge. Rather, in the silence of the stage as Othello gazes into his wife’s lifeless face, the audience recognizes viscerally that a great man, without relinquishing any of that which makes him great, has both committed and suffered a terrible crime. The simple proposition that good things happen to good people, and also of its logical contrapositive, that if bad things happen to someone then that person is not good, fails us here. The audience both witnesses and experiences the more-than-plausible explosion of metaphysical and epistemological certainties of all kinds—the expectation of eternal justice, the existence of knowable truth, and the infallibility of proper ratiocination chief among them. Ultimately, then, it is not Othello that suffers the tragic realization of his play. Iago has certainly wrought the circumstances of Othello’s world into such a shape that it renders the closing calamity inevitable, but it remains to Othello a world navigable by the same means and standards of behavior according to which he has made his way thus far. Having murdered Desdemona, he understands the gravity of his error, of course, but he has not been unmoored from the tethers of his world. In fact, in his final speech, he says: And say besides, that in Aleppo once, When a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog, And smote him, thus. [he stabs himself] (5.2.413-7)

Othello, in turning his blade on himself, recognizes within his own unity both the onewho-traduces and the one-who-avenges. The system, his world, within which he has had his Being as such, remains, even as it demands his own destruction. Even as he recognizes in himself the enemy of the state, he simultaneously remains the state’s protector. The roles abide, even as his part has changed. He dies at his own hand, but he has not come to Hamlet’s “true knowledge”—Othello never hints that he has glimpsed the Open as such, the groundlessness of the ground upon which his own Being continues to shine forth. Rather, it is the audience that experiences the throw into the full draft of the Open. The audience is this play’s tragic hero. Nietzsche calls it “nausea,” the result of the stare into the abyss, and while Hamlet may experience exactly this nausea, Othello as a play shines forth for the audience the nauseous abyss by gathering together into their essential onefoldedness the very poles according to whose opposition we have understood the world of the play: the Venetian and the turbaned Turk, the revenger and the traducer, the saint and the whore, the loyal friend and the mortal enemy. Our Being, the audience realizes as the ungroundedness of the background rises before us like a primordial Atlantis, depends on that which is fundamentally ephemeral and unstable: the truths we hold most near to ourselves—our world. Our mortal enemy is also our loyal friend; the

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traducer is also the revenger. Like the sky and the earth, these apparent opposites belong to one another. While Othello dies in the same world in which he lived, it is the audience that has lost the comfort of the dauntless veracity of the background; it is the audience that stares the ungroundedness of existence in the face. The audience is Othello’s Hamlet, the ones who must both suffer “true knowledge” and then cope somehow with it.

6. Conclusion The traditionally solitary quality of the practice of literary criticism has certainly contributed to the dearth of serious attention paid to the phenomenological elements of tragic art. In the absence of such a focus, the findings of the generations of scholars to work on Othello appear perfectly sensible. Tragedies do feature the destruction of great characters, where great and omniscient are by no means synonymous. The heroes do often evince a kind of complicity in their own destruction. But in the critical movement from seeing a flaw in the hero of a tragedy to seeing tragedy as a genre that by definition features a flawed hero, the audience and the experience of the performance fall by the wayside. The former dwells in the experience of a play: the confrontation with the Open takes on a more horrifying aspect through the exposure of the flaw in greatness. The latter, though, requires no performance and no experience in order to render a diagnosis—diagnosis, in fact, comes to replace genuine critical inquiry as a goal. These critics enshroud themselves with the veils of illusion. They maintain a safe distance from the full draft of the Open. In an ironic turn, their focus on identifying and articulating the essential nature of tragedy by necessity causes them to miss it completely. Once removed from the immediate context of the play’s performance, scholars, critics, teachers, students, and casual thinkers alike once more call down to themselves the veils of illusion necessary to the active navigation of their worlds without recognizing their actions as such. In their removal from the performance, the play retreats into its textuality; it ceases to “say more sayingly,” the way it does on stage. The immediate experience of the play, though, having once thrown the audience out into the “widest orbit of the Open,” as Heidegger terms it, compels the members of the audience to will those illusory veils as illusions. For a tenuous instant, the audience faces existence in its most chilling extremity, and the audience wills once more its world—in all its necessary frailty, unprotected and unshielded. The tragedy hurls the audience into the liminal space within which either the affirmation or the negation of their Being as such is required. That is Hamlet’s gaze into the abyss, as well. The tragedy of Othello calls its audience, but not its hero, into the full draft of the Open, the state in which the audience members must willfully make the venture of themselves as beings in order to bring their world back into its worldhood. Following the applause and the curtain calls, it is the audience, not Othello, that must rise from the seats and file up the aisles, and, perhaps pausing to exhale deeply by the door, choose to take up once more the gossamer background as a solid and opaque truth. And

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it is they who hear the tragedy calling after them, in Nietzsche’s voice: “That is your world! A world indeed!—” (Nietzsche 2000).

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