Thoughts on Othello, Eros and Poiesis
The fascinations of Othello are many; perhaps most essential and foundational is Iago’s corruption of Othello’s mind, mainly by inflaming his erotic fantasies. This happens the more readily because Othello is a very passionate man, a man of appetites for battle and sexual play. He loves “not wisely but too well” he says poignantly but incorrectly, proving the side of the Renaissance debate that insists that erotic love undermines the warlike manly spirit.
But the main point for our studies of Western poiesis, particularly the link between idealization, image-weaving and the wasteland is that Iago functions in the play (with Roderigo, Cassio and others as well as Othello) like Lady Macbeth and Macbeth’s own ambitions: he displaces fact by plausible fictions embedded in erotic desires. The conquest of life by images, like Macbeth’s “fatal dagger” or Edmund’s vision of being Earl of Gloucester and even King of Britain is the core fact of Western creativity and culture; it is the antechamber and womb of virtual reality, the displacement of life by phantoms. There is a curious mirroring involved in Iago’s destruction of Othello by erotic jealousy because Iago himself is driven by a fierce feeling of unrequited service (an intense mirror of the feeling his mixture of lust and disdain give his wife, Amelia) and a failure of Othello’s love and loyalty to him. In effect, Iago is a woman scorned and his mixture of heated erotic imagination and misogyny keeps his character and through it, the entire play roiling once Othello overlooks him for promotion in favor of Cassio. In revenge, a lover’s revenge, Iago destroys Othello with the passion that torments him. He infects and possesses him with images of erotic jealousy and betrayal, ones he himself feels, leading Othello to destroy his dear ones and himself. The triumph of the image is a corruption both of eros and of war into suicide, a domestic harbinger of “that last dim battle in the West” when Arthur’s house divides through sexual betrayal, cynicism and outraged faith and the realm and elements collapse in upon themselves moaning in a dead white mist that de facto represents the tormenting fantasies of Othello and, with ambivalence added of Macbeth.
Unable to serve as Othello’s “place holder” (lieutenant), the site of his investment of erotic or warlike energy, Iago makes Othello, and secondarily Roderigo serve as “the garden for [his] will” assuming the male role via malicious deceits even as his confused sexual passions are served by the conceits by which he gets the dupes of his fiction to ‘invest’ (or “spend” in a common sexual metaphor) in him, serving both as their “purse” and goad. His reiterated, didactic but intense injunction that Roderigo “put money in [his] purse,” money that winds up in his pockets indicates his combination of avarice and erotic hunger. Iago is a whore and like the most gifted of that trade a genius at playing, elaborating and manipulating fictions of desire. A master of ambiguity, he incarnates the meiotic aspect of poiesis where the image splits from the reality and “nothing is but what is not.” Like the nightmare of displaced authority and rash judgment in Lear, he excels at reducing all relationships and acquaintances to “nothing.” This precisely is the suicidal aspect of poiesis and its transformative erotic nature. Divisive and polymorphic, it is “the thing [id] itself… a poor bare forked animal,” the place where art and nature intersect and man seeks to re-invent himself, for better or ill, adopting the generative act and all the paradoxes built into its biology.[1]
The play occurs mainly on Cyprus which in ancient times was dedicated to the goddess of metamorphosis and overmastering appetites: Aphrodite who was beloved to have stepped ashore there. As dismembered male genitals embodied in “a modest lovely goddess” Aphrodite alludes to the close connection between eros, artistic idealizing and traumatic transformation, — the horrible hybrid matter being hidden within the beguiling form. This can take a comedic turn as in the “Pygmalion” story (the sculptor was a Cyprian devotee of Aphrodite), a lethally punitive one as in Hippolytus or simply a brutally instructive one as in the Women of Trachis.[2]
Iago’s destruction of Othello by destroying his mind with images of erotic betrayal is a quintessential art work. The network (weaving or web, magike tekne) of related images center on comments like “a black ram is tupping your white ewe” leading to Othello’s tormented vision of men and women as “goats and monkeys,” a powerful, precise and unsettling image whose sensual excess and metamorphic disorder recalls Laertes’ entranced and over-heated description of the French horseman Lamord (“the death”) as a centaur, “incorpsed and demi-natured with his beast,” a figure of lust that generates the symbolic cluster of poison, pearl, and treacherous, adulterous “union” (embodied in the image of Lamord) that climatically elaborates the play’s thematics.
Embodying and suffering the agonies of a hybrid culture, Iago, jealous of Cassio and Othello for various reasons including his obsessive jealousy about his wife generates an almost endless stream of vivid metaphors for coitus, many of them hermaphroditic, auto-erotic and associating the sex act with ‘putting money in your purse.’ One simile refers to the body as the “garden of the will” that is tilled and impregnated by its desires and schemes. The obsessive quality of Iago’s harping on this theme reflects the self-generating, self-perpetuating nature of image-making: energy pours into the image which like the monster jealousy, like a vampire drains and possesses the mind (or culture) that generates and worships images. It is a deadly, narcissistic process like drowning, like falling through a looking glass. The West is the culture of the spectacle (theatron) and Iago is one of its grand producers of demonic images that, like Geraldine in “Christabel” possess and displace their host.
Iago’s possession of Othello is a form of sexual intercourse (there is an evocative, modern and obscene English phrase for this form of hostility) and so is poiesis itself and the process of metamorphic idealization it unfolds. Apt for Iago’s obsession with money it is a process of investment, — of psychic energy and desire in the image extrapolated from the individual or culture it re-presents. It is interest that lives off its principal until both ‘die’ together, the “ranks of death” being the underbelly of imagery’s glittering visions and wit. The image gradually drains life from its generating source and then possesses and displaces it: the image becomes real the body simply a resource, like that of Orpheus; like taxpayers. Just so the image created by Iago of Desdemona sporting with Cassio displaces their reality for the image-deranged Othello who becomes the host desecrated by his jealous officer. The projection by which Christian civilization, a culture of aesthetic rituals blames its self-creating poetics on its own host, the Jews, whose derekh its magic negates is recapitulated in the ambiguities and deceitful liminality of arch-liars like Iago whose nature is cloven, a paradox, a hybrid beast or satyr “with witchcraft in its wits and treacherous gifts,” the promise of salvation through revelation of the fiend, the fiction that exists in the mind of the seducer and leaps into the credulous like a virus.
Even Iago’s designation as Othello’s “ancient” (flag or banner carrier) indicates his role as a bearer of imagery, a form of relational RNA. The image carrier strives to displace the lieutenant and even his General and to a great extent succeeds. The play carries the tragic logic of image work and its denouement from idyll to apocalypse to elegy.
Regarding my hypothesis of traumatic eroticized transposition within poiesis, a cultic extrapolation of meiosis note the tragic tetrad formed by Iago, Othello, Desdemona and Amelia; Iago is linked powerfully to his ‘husband’ (master) and wife and re-makes the situation of Othello in his image as the Moor weds the image-weaver and appoints him as his lieutenant the better to pour his poison into his ears.
Othello and Desdemona are prime targets for Iago’s work because of their full blown, very public somewhat smug and impatient passion (he takes her, and she gives herself, without her father’s consent or knowledge). They become the garden for his dazzling array of suggestive metaphors and hints, the poiesis of his will. The situation is another of Shakespeare’s variations on the theme of the “un-weeded garden” of lust: “things rank and gross in nature” and in art “possess it merely.”
Othello encapsulates the trajectory of image work and, in the nature of the bond of African Moor and Italian Christian encodes the hybrid quality that makes a culture prey to the metamorphic drive of poiesis. The idyllic phase is the intense, infatuated passion of Othello and Desdemona; they are the world; his role as the great General and hers as the dazzling woman of passion whose beauty and goodness disarm all critics. Under the pressure of jealous Iago’s image-weaving (the image is hungry for life), the apocalyptic phase of poiesis ensues as Othello responds with increasing horror to the image Iago presents of Desdemona, one that possesses Othello and disorders his marriage as Iago displaces Desdemona. The tragedy ensues when the image and its accompanying passions destroy nature, disorder mind and reality leading to the elegiac phase that accompanies the death of the individual or cultural body and the short-lived triumph of the petrifying, lifeless image, the demonic Iago, his transient, symbolically homosexual union with Othello and the bodies on the bed. Strangling displaces intercourse, a mutation in which the female body becomes a phallus squeezed by the female/male clutch till it yields its breath; a transposition suited to the depths of metamorphosis to which Shakespeare drives the action through Iago a man whose interesting name hints at the core love-hate in the West’s confounded breast. This epitome of poiesis also is an apt homage to Aphrodite’s transformative power that is given full play in Sohpocles’ great play on Herakles, “the Women of Trachis” noted above.[3]
This pattern of poiesis, this trajectory of traumatic possession by imagery or rhetoric ensuing in displacement and death is the essence of the West which remains obsessed with possessing and displacing its original source, Jacob. Esau is unstable[4] and so is poiesis, the overmastering Greek element in our culture and the engine of its suicidal self-transformations and obsession with identity theft and morbid eroticism.
[1] King Lear 3.4.108-10, c.f. 2.3.5-21 where Edgar reduces himself to “nothing” to survive malicious games
[2] See Ovid for the Pygmalion story, Euripides for Hippolytus and Sophocles for Women of Trachis.
[3] See also the core myth related by Hesiod, Theogony 90 – 256 (U of Michigan, Lattimore translation). I have explained that the alternative genesis for Aphrodite, by Zeus via ‘Dione’ (female form of Zeus) is lightly veiled hermaphroditic generation and auto-eroticism, a less violently magical conception of the love goddess and her resistless transformative power, intrinsic to poiesis.
[4] Comment by Ishmael on Esau’s plot for them to kill Isaac and Jacob as elaborated by R David Adani in Midrash HaGadol. His point has been proven for ninety years by the Western powers inflammation and use of Islamic jihad against the Jews and against their own nations as the suicidal aspect of poiesis fulfills itself. “And he took Machalat the daughter of Yishmael…” When Esav the wicked saw that Yitzhak blessed Ya’akov, he sought to kill Ya’akov, as is said “And Esav said in his heart…” [“May the days of mourning for my father {i.e. His death} draw near; then I will kill my brother Jacob.” Toldot (Genesis 27:41).
”What did he do? He went to Yishmael and said to him, “Let us join together, I and you, and we will rule the whole world.”
He said to him "Why and how?" Esav said to him…”a brother can kill his brother because of the inheritance, that we found with Kayin, who killed Hevel his brother and thus it is permissible for you to kill your brother Yitzhak, who deprived you of all your wealth and of all that you had, and I also will kill my brother, and afterwards we will inherit the entire world, and the two of us will rule all that belonged to Avraham our father.” [A remarkable prevision of Modern-postmodern great power geopolitics]
Yishmael said to him, “I can’t believe your words, because you are not stable.” Esav said to him, “If I will take your daughter, will you believe me?”
Then, immediately, “And he took Machalat, the daughter of Yishmael for a wife …” [“in addition to his {Canaanite wives} as a wife for himself”]. Toldot (Genesis 28:6-9). Esau’s use of Cain’s murder as a legalizing precedent is as mad as is the subsequent credulity of Ishmael who accepts sexual possession as a test of validity anticipates the dynamics of Othello written several centuries after this commentary whose insights on character and persuasion glance near the core of poiesis as well as cultural polemics.