Again about Othello

The trouble with having a style is that you may produce something that looks finished and polished when it really is nothing of the kind. My attempt at an answer to elskuligr a few days back was one such thing; I was falling asleep on my feet as I wrote, and I managed to miss nearly every point of importance I wanted to make. But my unfortunate facility gave the piece a deceptive air of polish. A less generous opponent than elskuligr might well have asked me what I was really trying to prove, since it is not clear at all.

What I really should have said, then, is something like this. For the impact of Othello on reader and spectator, we do not need to know that Iago is a Spanish type. We do not need to know that Spain was England's enemy as Shakespeare wrote, that every Englishman regarded her as the great perturber of European peace (nor that the Spanish, with more justification, saw Elizabeth's England in the same light); that negative ethnic cliches about intrigue and poison were universally believed. We do not even need to know that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic (the evidence is overwhelming), that his admiration for Italian city states such as Venice was pretty nearly boundless, that he tended to shift on Spain alone the poisoner-intriguer ethnic cliche that other contemporaries tended to spread equally between Spain and Italy (think of Webster's hideous picture of Italy); not even, perhaps, that Turkey was regarded pretty much as what was left of the West looked at Hitler about 1940. We do not need to know any of those things, because Shakespeare has distilled from them all those elements that are universally relevant to human experience rather than merely local. We do not have to resurrect dead slanders against Italians or Spaniards to feel the full force of something like Iago: my God, how many underhanded, ambitious, resentful, destructive persons can be found in the average office, the average workplace? How many of us have seen a popular and admired person admit into his/her company someone wholly unworthy of it, and the ruinous results? We do not need to feel the terror of Turkey to understand that the fall of a personality as full, rounded, beautiful and bold as Othello is a catastrophe that diminishes us all: Shakespeare has brought out his excellence, not only in such magnificent language as "Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them!", nor even in the way he masters a violent riot merely by stepping in, but in the memorable romance with Desdemona - if such a woman, everyone understands, falls in love with such a man (and how eloquently he describes their falling in love, in the presence of all the great men in Venice!), he must be worth what he seems. In other words, the central experience afforded us by a great drama such as Othello does not depend on local associations: because it is rooted in universal experiences, it can be understood pretty much across the board.

THE most god-awful joke in the history of the universe...

...is worse than you think. http://carbonelle.livejournal.com/184280.html. Just hold on to something.

(no subject)

I think I have got straight, to my satisfaction at least, what makes Italy, and especially Rome, so special. It is not even beauty; it is what beauty points to. Think of Samuel Johnson's famous meditation on the isle of Iona:

We were now treading that illustrious Island, which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge, and the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish, if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona!

True, noble, and beautiful. But if a man can get so much out of a small, tempest-tossed monastic island in the north seas, what can one get out of Rome? Piety would feed not only on the memory of St.Peter and St.Paul, not even on the succession of Popes and great ecclesiastics, but also on wholly local saints such as St.Frances of Rome or St. Philip Neri. Patriotism? I still remember my grandfather taking me to see the French cannonballs embedded in the walls in the Gianicolo Park, where in 1848 Garibaldi and his volunteers held back an overwhelming French enemy for a month, and Goffredo Mameli, the writer of our national anthem, died of gangrene from a wound at twenty. Art? No city in the world compares. Science? Enrico Fermi, one of the greatest scientists in history, established his group of brilliant researchers in the 1920s in Via Panisperna, and the group was ever since known by the name. Rome has the most ancient Jewish community in the world - and one of the few which is neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi - the memory of great musicians from Palestrina to Liszt and Respighi, the grief and horror of the Second World War, great parks, buildings from every style and age from pre-classical to twentieth century modern (Palazzo Civilta' del Lavoro, in the EUR quarter, has often been used as the background or inspiration for science fictional or supernatural settings) - everything loaded with grandeur, emotion and significance. And then there is the rest of the country. A person who travels through Italy travels through his or her own life, in every way that is significant.