The Present Word. Culture, Society and the Site of Literature

Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle

John Walker

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781907975615
• eBook ISBN: 9781351191975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"This book addresses three key areas of intellectual enquiry: literary criticism, cultural critique, and philosophical theology. Once closely related, especially in the Catholic tradition, they often appear to be separate and unconnected domains in the modern university. The work of Nicholas Boyle is one of the most significant recent attempts to reconnect them. Responding to that initiative, The Present Word challenges this fragmentation of knowledge. Several of the essays reflect a major change of emphasis in literary studies over the last two decades: the reconnection of an idea of literary criticism closely related to the experience of reading, and the wider societal and political concerns addressed by Cultural Studies. Contributors also debate, from both perspectives, whether theological concepts can illuminate the secular culture in which literature is written and read. John Walker is Senior Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, London, where he served as Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture from 2006-2009."

PART I
Literature and Criticism

CHAPTER 1
The Human Epiphany

Reflections on Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

Martin Swales

In Who are we now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney Nicholas Boyle makes the case for the study of literature by invoking ‘the Leavisite belief that literature is uniquely able to express our condition and guide our response to it.’¹ Central to that belief is Leavis’s sense of, to quote Boyle again, ‘that initial immediacy between word and thing and moral meaning’, which is ‘something given and not capable of further analysis.’² In this paper I want to look at two plays — Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris — which, I venture to suggest, incarnate that Leavisite condition of literature, as Boyle formulates it.

Let me begin by drawing attention to a number of (in my view, at any rate) intriguing overlaps which, while they may not be particularly weighty in and of themselves, do allow the two texts to debate suggestively with each other. Both plays tell of a daughter whose life is threatened by her father, but is whisked away in the nick of time to a foreign country which provides comfort and security. In both plays the Delphic oracle is consulted, and it foretells that the return of the child to her original home will bring healing and redemption. Both plays explore the contrasting values of two different realms and cultures (Sicilia versus Bohemia, court versus countryside in The Winter’s Tale; Greek versus Scythian, civilization versus barbarism in Iphigenie auf Tauris). The conciliatory endings are brought about when, in different ways, a statue becomes a living human creature. Both plays engage with psychological themes (Leontes’ jealousy, Orestes’ guilt), but psychological analysis is not their primary concern. Shakespeare is content to leave the onset and the cessation of Leontes’ madness largely unexplored and unexplained, and Goethe spends little time on Orestes’ liberation from the curse and on his re-interpretation, at the end of the play, of the words of the oracle. And finally: both plays display a degree of self-consciousness in respect of their own genre; Shakespeare invokes the old tale that provides a sounding board for the tale he has to tell, and Goethe constantly reminds us of the ‘Herkunft’, both thematically and generically, of the drama he puts before us.

I want to turn now to the more profound issues of tragedy and its overcoming. Both plays end with a victory, and that victory, that achievement of moral meaning is hard won. Perhaps I may recall Boyle’s phrasing of that immediacy which informs Leavis’s commitment to great literature; it is, he says, an immediacy ‘between word and thing and moral meaning.’ The last phrase needs teasing out, I think. Clearly, literature can have all kinds of meaning — sociological, sexual, political, theological, and many of them will generate moral implications because they are located in and derive from the sphere of human interaction. But what comes about in The Winter’s Tale and Iphigenie auf Tauris is moral in a more profound and exacting and affirmatory sense; the meaning is moral because it embodies a disclosure and celebration of the relatedness and good will that can prevail between people. That is the human epiphany that I have invoked in the title of this paper. And it is the more radiant because of the darkness that has to be overcome.

What, then, is the darkness in The Winter’s Tale? First and foremost, of course, one thinks of Leontes’ jealousy. It is a terrifying condition, and the very language which expresses it is contorted, crabbed, awash with malign meanings.³ Here is Leontes talking to his son Mamillius:

Come, captain,
We must be neat; not neat but cleanly, captain:
And yet the steer, the heifer, and the calf
Are all called ‘neat’ — Still virginalling
Upon his palm? — How now you wanton calf!
Art thou my calf?

(27–28)

Animal and human worlds commingle. Hermione’s fingers touching Polixenes’ palm are akin to those of somebody playing a keyboard instrument; but not any key board instrument, rather virginals with the bitterly ironic echo of virginity and con tamination by sexual play. For Leontes, betrayal becomes the way of the world:

[...] many a man there is, even at this present,
Now, while I speak this holds his wife by th’arm,
That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence
And his pond fished by his next neighbour, by
Sir Smile, his neighbour.

(30)

The mind manically generates metaphors of the wife as some well of depravity, infinitely available sexually to all-comers. Frenetic interpolations abound in an outpouring of pornographic disgust. And when Camillo disputes his master’s so-called evidence, Leontes lists tiny physical details and then lurches into an insanely negative ontology:

Is this nothing?
Why then the world, and all that’s in’t, is nothing:
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia is nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.

(33)

One can feel the language starting to spin out of control in this destructive litany. This, then, is the core of darkness that is so memorably evoked and exorcized in The Winter’s Tale. And it is important to note that that darkness is not confined to Leontes. We will meet it again later in the play when Polixenes turns on Florizel, Perdita and the Shepherd. Violence lurks everywhere. At one point Leontes threatens to have Paulina burnt. She says — with studied rhetorical overkill — to the penitent Leontes:

What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
What wheels? Racks? What flaying? Boiling?
In leads or oils?

(61)

And Autolycus seeks to terrify and to ingratiate himself with the Clown and the Shepherd by offering a grisly account of what is in store for Florizel:

He has a son, who shall be flayed alive, then ’nointed over with honey, set on the head of a wasp’s nest, then stand till he be three quarters and a dram dead; then recovered again with aqua-vitae or some other hot infusion [...]

(98)

Of course this last set piece, placed as it is in the mouth of a genial rogue, sounds in the comic mode. But what is invoked is the possibility of untrammelled brutality. Such piecemeal abuses of the human body have been decreed by tyrants in the past. They have occurred; and who can be sure that they will not recur?

What, then, of the darkness in Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris? The first and most obvious answer has to do with the past — with the curse laid on Tantalus and on his human descendants through the generations of the House of Atreus. It is a past of which Iphigenie speaks at length to Thoas in Act I. It is a past which she re-visits in the Song of the Parcae, the ‘Parzenlied’ as she begins to despair. In Act II, when Orest appears, we encounter a doomed creature:

Soll ich wie meine Ahnen, wie mein Vater
Als Opfertier im Jammertode bluten:
So sei es!

(165, ll. 576–78)⁴

[Should I, like my ancestors, like my father,
Bleed as a sacrificial animal to a wretched death:
So be it.]

And that almost voluptuous sense of entrapment comes to the fore when he discovers that the Priestess of Diana on the island of Tauris is none other than his own sister:

Gut, Priesterin! Ich folge zum Altar:
Der Brudermord ist hergebrachte Sitte
Des alten Stammes [...].
Im Kreis geschlossen tretet an, ihr Furien,
Und wohnet dem willkommnen Schauspiel bei,
Dem letzten, gräßlichsten, das ihr bereitet!

(183–84, ll.1228–46)

[Good, priestess! I shall follow to the altar:
To kill the brother is an established custom
Of the ancient tribe [...].
In a closed circle step forward, you furies,
And bear witness to the welcome spectacle,
The last, most dreadful one that you have prepared.]

The notion of tradition, of that which is ‘hergebracht’ and of ‘Sitte’ — of customs, rites, rituals — is central to the carnage that passes through the generations of the House of Atreus. And it would seem that, some one hundred and sixty lines before the end of the play, the old mechanisms will continue to prevail. The Greeks understand it to be their mission to return the statue of Apollo’s sister Diana to Greece. Thoas is implacably opposed. Orest says that the only solution can lie in single, armed combat. He urges Thoas to select the best of his warriors as opponent in a duel. Thoas objects that this has never been part of the traditions of Tauris:

THOAS
Dies Vorrecht hat die alte Sitte nie
Dem Fremden hier gestattet.

OREST
So beginne
Die neue Sitte denn von dir und mir!
Nachahmend heiliget ein ganzes Volk
Die edle Tat der Herrscher zum Gesetz.
(208–09, ll. 2045–49)

[THOAS
Ancient custom has never granted this privilege
To strangers here.

OREST
So let the new
Custom begin with you and me!
A whole people, by observing it, will change
Their rulers’ noble deed into a holy law.]

The proposal is that a new custom — one predicated on blood-letting and violence — can be brought into being, and that new ritual will be repeated and will thereby be both legalized and sanctified by the people. Behind this moment we register that whole complex nexus of the violent and the sacred that Rene Girard has so cogently analysed.⁵ What is horrifying about Orest’s proposal is the fact that it issues not from obsessive passion or divine decree; rather it is the deliberate invention of human beings, a choice made to establish conventions and rituals that will be binding on future generations. Sittlichkeit reifies into Sitte.

Just how powerful such mechanisms are is revealed in Act I. Thoas, perhaps piqued by Iphigenie’s refusal to marry him and shocked by her revelation of her lineage, decides to re-instate a custom that, during the time that Iphigenie has spent in Tauris, has been abolished — the custom that any strangers coming to the island shall be sacrificed to Diana. Iphigenie resists; but Thoas insists on the sanctity of custom and ritual:

Es ziemt sich nicht für uns, den heiligen
Gebrauch mit leicht beweglicher Vernunft
Nach unserm Sinn zu deuten und zu lenken.

(163, ll. 527–30)

[It is not seemly for us to interpret and shape
With our easily swayed reason the sacred custom
In accordance with our purposes.]

From Arkas and from Iphigenie herself we learn that Thoas is a profoundly decent and generous man. Yet even he can be swayed by rage or disappointment to reach decisions that are inhumane. He only appears in Acts I and V; and the theme of his anger is constantly sounded. In his soliloquy in Act V Scene 2 we hear him disparaging his own kindness and goodness and Iphigenie’s sanctity:

Entsetzlich wechselt mir der Grimm im Busen;
Erst gegen sie, die ich so heilig hielt;
Dann gegen mich, der ich sie zum Verrat
Durch Nachsicht und durch Güte bildete.

(200, ll.1783–86)

[Savagely anger courses through my breast;
Firstly towards her, whom I held to be so holy;
Then towards myself who, by goodness and forbearance,
Taught her how to betray.]

Here he comes close to destroying everything that he has believed in. The darkness that has been so much part of the Tantalid curse seems to be poised to unleash itself again. The danger is real that Thoas could be ‘ein König, der Unmenschliches verlangt’ (201, l.1811) [a king who demands inhuman things]. And Iphigenie genuinely takes a huge risk when she tells him the truth about the Greeks’ plan to steal the sacred statue.⁶ Yet, in the event, the disaster is averted. The words of the oracle are re-interpreted: the sister who is destined to return to Greece is not the statue of Apollo’s sister Diana but Orest’s sister Iphigenie.

How, then, are we brought to believe in the conciliatory conclusions which crown both The Winter’s Tale and Iphigenie auf Tauris? In Shakespeare’s play redemption comes primarily from the natural world, but it is a natural world that, in the great sheep-shearing scene, is sustained ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: LITERATURE AND CRITICISM
• PART II: PHILOSOPHY, THEOLOGY AND THE UNIVERSITY
• Index