Playing False: Representations of Betrayal (Cultural History and Literary Imagination) [New ed.] 9783034308670, 9783035305296, 3034308671

Citation preview

Betrayal has never gone out of fashion. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon – from antiquity to the present, from the realm of politics to the most personal relationships. This book gathers essays by scholars from the fields of philosophy, comparative literature, classics, English literature, German studies and film studies to develop a fresh dialogue on betrayal as a problem that, above all, concerns representation. In contradistinction to approaches that privilege a notion of betrayal as a political or personal event, the working premise of this book is that all betrayals presuppose representational strategies. What are the conditions, structures, masks and moves that allow one to play false? This question is posed with special attention to the theological, political, ethical and theatrical dimensions of betrayal, as they emerge in specific texts throughout the Western tradition. Works by Chariton, Seneca, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Kleist, Hamsun, Pound, Benjamin, Borges, Koestler, Roth, Bruno Dössekker alias Binjamin Wilkomirski and Fassbinder take centre stage in these diverse examinations of betrayal.

Kristina Mendicino is Assistant Professor at Brown University and Assistant Editor of The German Quarterly. Betiel Wasihun is Montgomery-DAAD Fellow and Tutor at Lincoln College, University of Oxford.

ISBN 978-3-0343-0867-0

www.peterlang.com

Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun (eds) • Playing False: Representations of Betrayal

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION

Playing False Representations of Betrayal KRISTINA MENDICINO AND B E T I E L WA S I H U N ( E D S )

Peter Lang

Betrayal has never gone out of fashion. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon – from antiquity to the present, from the realm of politics to the most personal relationships. This book gathers essays by scholars from the fields of philosophy, comparative literature, classics, English literature, German studies and film studies to develop a fresh dialogue on betrayal as a problem that, above all, concerns representation. In contradistinction to approaches that privilege a notion of betrayal as a political or personal event, the working premise of this book is that all betrayals presuppose representational strategies. What are the conditions, structures, masks and moves that allow one to play false? This question is posed with special attention to the theological, political, ethical and theatrical dimensions of betrayal, as they emerge in specific texts throughout the Western tradition. Works by Chariton, Seneca, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Kleist, Hamsun, Pound, Benjamin, Borges, Koestler, Roth, Bruno Dössekker alias Binjamin Wilkomirski and Fassbinder take centre stage in these diverse examinations of betrayal.

Kristina Mendicino is Assistant Professor at Brown University and Assistant Editor of The German Quarterly. Betiel Wasihun is Montgomery-DAAD Fellow and Tutor at Lincoln College, University of Oxford.

 

www.peterlang.com

Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun (eds) • Playing False: Representations of Betrayal

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION

Playing False Representations of Betrayal KRISTINA MENDICINO AND B E T I E L WA S I H U N ( E D S )

Peter Lang

Playing False

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY VOL. 20

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Playing False Representations of Betrayal Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun (eds)

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbiblio­ grafie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2013940713

Cover image: Ernst Fuchs, ‘Januskopf’ (Vienna, 1950). Etching in copper. ISSN 1660-6205 ISBN 978-3-0343-0867-0 (print) ISBN 978-3-0353-0529-6 (eBook) © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2013 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. Printed in Germany

Contents

Acknowledgements ix Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun

Introduction 1 Part I  States of  Treason – Theology and Politics

21

Joachim Harst

Perversions of  Judas. Betrayal in ‘Baroque’ Literature: Borges and Gryphius

23

Kristina Mendicino

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

47

Eric Dodson-Robinson

‘By a Brother’s Hand’: Betrayal and Brotherhood in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Senecan Tragedy

81

Horst-Jürgen Gerigk

Notes towards a Definition of  Betrayal: Koestler, Hamsun, Pound and the Doppelgänger in Nineteenth-Century Literature

103

vi

Part II  Enacting Betrayal – Ethical Stages

119

Ritchie Robertson

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

121

Betiel Wasihun

Eth(n)ical Betrayal: Kleist’s ‘Die Verlobung in St. Domingo’ and Roth’s The Human Stain 147 Bernd Blaschke

Betrayals and Their Af fects in Wilkomirski’s Fake Holocaust Memoirs Bruchstücke 181 Anne Julia Fett

Aesthetic Manifestations of (Self-)Betrayal in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden 203 Part III  Ambiguous Characters – Scripted Masks

227

Anna Henke

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

229

Rebecca Haubrich

Deceptive Letters: The Structure of  Substitution and Exchange in Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘Der Findling’

261

Gillian Granville Bentley

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe 285



vii

Felisa Baynes-Ross

Ambages and Double Visages: Betrayal in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde 313 Notes on Contributors

337

Index 341

Acknowledgements

The chapters of  this volume began as papers delivered at the conference ‘Playing False – Representations of  Betrayal’ at Lincoln College, Oxford University, 16–17 September 2011. The conference and the process of publication were generously supported by the Michael Zilkha Fund at Lincoln College, Oxford. The editors and authors of  this volume are also grateful to the DAAD and the University of  Notre Dame for additional support.

Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun

Introduction

You get the habit by being betrayed. What does it is betrayal. Think of  tragedies. What brings on the melancholy, the raving, the bloodshed? Othello – betrayed. Hamlet – betrayed. Lear – betrayed. You might even claim that Macbeth is betrayed – by himself – though that’s not the same thing. Professionals who’ve spent their energy teaching masterpieces, the few of us still engrossed by literature’s scrutiny of  things, have no excuse for finding betrayal anywhere but at the heart of  history. History from top to bottom. World history, family history, personal history. It’s a very big subject, betrayal. Just think of  the Bible. What’s that book about? The master story situation of  the Bible is betrayal. Adam – betrayed. Joseph – betrayed. Moses – betrayed. Samson – betrayed. Job – betrayed. Job betrayed by whom? By none other than God himself. And don’t forget the betrayal of  God. God betrayed. Betrayed by our ancestors at every turn. — Philip Roth, I Married a Communist1

You get in the habit of  hearing betrayal. But think of  the phrase representations of  betrayal: it is impossible to decide whether the genitive is objective or subjective. Turning from one word to the other, you might ask: is betrayal represented? Or do representations arise from, within, as a result of, betrayal? At stake in this volume are, on the one hand, representations of a relational structure called betrayal. On the other hand, the faith that betrayal (seemingly) controverts turns upon representation. Only when something can seem, can it betray or reveal what it is – and appear to be something other than what it is. Representation turns upon a breach within the structure of appearance itself, before anything can 1

Philip Roth, I Married a Communist (London: Vintage, 1998), 185.

2

Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun

be betrayed for what it truly is (not). To betray does not necessarily have to refer to a breach of  trust – the breach it involves is more primary. You might even claim that betrayal is the converse of representation. Betrayal can involve deceptive concealment as well as the disclosure of what was hitherto concealed – what should be apparent is not; what comes to appear should not. But this does not make its negative connotations a secondary matter. Representation as such does not cease to arouse doubts – as do appearances that are truly mere appearances. Since the Middle Ages, the ‘schlimme Nebenbedeutung’ [‘bad connotation’] of  the verb ‘verraten’ [‘to betray’] appears beyond doubt,2 and when one glosses it with related terms – deception, deceit, fraud, imposture, cheating, trickery, adultery, treason, high treason, traducement, lying – the ‘bad connotation’ remains. This is not to gloss over the dif ference between betrayal and representation. The former term is more often laden with a negative charge, a charge – perhaps even an accusation – that distinguishes it from the (closely related) structure of representation. But the articulation of  this distinction cannot be decisively revealed, disclosed or glossed. Turning from one term to the other, one quickly gets caught in the logic of  betrayal and its representation, already at the level of  the words that refer to it. One cannot even decisively distinguish between betrayal and betrayal – whereas in English and German, the verbs betray and (sich) verraten are as intimately entangled in revelation as they are in treachery, the verbs for betray in Ancient Greek and Latin, παραδίδωμι and tradere, refer first of all to handing or giving over, from the tradition [παράδοσιν] that had been passed down among the Jews (Mk 7:2–5), to the way the Apostles are described as given over [παραδεδομένοι] to the grace of  God (Acts 14:26).3 Judas’s betrayal of  Christ thus resonates with other traditions and transferals that lack those negative connotations this disciple’s role in salvation came to have, while 2 3

Cf. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 32 vols (Leipzig 1854–1961, Quellenverzeichnis Leipzig 1971), vol. 25, col. 985–92. For a discussion of  the ambiguity of  this verb, see Anthony Cane, The Place of  Judas Iscariot in Christology (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005), 19–23 and Almut-Barbara Renger, ‘The Ambiguity of  Judas: On the Mythicity of a New Testament Figure’, Literature and Theology 26/4 (2012), 1–17. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are ours.

Introduction

3

its ‘bad connotation’ stems from the Old Testament figure of  the masēr, who delivers someone from the inside of  the Jewish community to a politically and religiously foreign outside.4 On the threshold of religious and political communities, suspended between (at least) two meanings and languages, Judas’s handing-over of  Christ epitomizes the ambivalence of  the language(s) of  betrayal – whereby one must remember that translation, too, is (in)famously close to treason: traduttore, traditore. From text to text, language to language – in a single text and a single language – the sense of  betrayal and its (linguistic) representations turn. The proper sense of  betrayal – if  there is a single one that casts suspicion upon giving over (or revelation, or tradition) – has no name. There is no synonym that might, as the early Church Father Origen urges readers of  Scripture to do, ‘purify’ [καθαίροντες] the ‘homonyms’ [ὁμωνυμίας], amphibolies, ‘proper usages’ [κυριολεξίας] and periods that resonate with this term.5 Especially when it comes to the foundational betrayal of  Judas, who incarnates the ambivalence of  the betrayal that characterizes him. One of  the twelve disciples is both ‘disciple’ [μαθητής] and ‘devil’ [διάβολος] ( John 6:70). Though Peter, too, will at one point be called Satan, doubling the dualism.6 And when Jesus exposes Judas at the Last Supper as the one who will hand him over, the one to whom he directs his imperative, ‘Whatever it is that you do, be done with it as quickly as possible’ [ὃ ποιεῖς ποίσηον τάχιον, John 13:27], is at least two. In his commentary on the Gospel of  John,7 Origen underscores the necessarily ambivalent language of  this betrayal, writing: ‘To whom the “him” [of  Jesus’s address refers] is an amphiboly, since the Lord could have spoken to Judas himself or Satan’ [Τίνι δὲ ‘Αὐτῷ’

J. Duncan M. Derrett, ‘The Iscariot, MeSira, and the Redemption’, Journal for the Study of  the New Testament 2/2 (1980), 2–23, 4. 5 Origen, Commentarii in Genesim, in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus, 161 vols (Paris: Migne, 1862), vol. 12, 89. 6 See Mt. 16:22–3. 7 This is the first Church writing that devotes sustained attention to the figure of  Judas. See Samuel Laeuchli, ‘Origen’s Interpretation of  Judas’, Church History 22/4 (1953), 253–68. 4

4

Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun

ἀμφίβολον, ἐπεὶ δύναται αὐτῷ τῷ Ἰούδᾳ ἢ τῷ Σατανᾷ εἰρηκέναι ὁ κύριος].8 Addressee and word alike are an amphiboly, in a language where rhetoric and referent are indistinguishably intertwined. And as Origen continues to comment upon Jesus’s words, they appear suspended between a battlecry and a cry for help – to none other than the traitor or hander-over – in the divine economy of salvation.9 The language of  betrayal is essentially duplicitous – just think of  the Bible – at every turn. But at every turn, it is not the same thing: betrayal complicates any sense of  the same as well as any acts and actors that might appear in a story situation. Not only is betrayal an ambivalent act; the subject that should perform it, too, is split. In fact, because the who and what of one of the most crucial betrayals in the Western world are so indeterminate, it cannot have the character of a willed, intentional act at all. Instead, Origen calls Judas’s ‘handing over’ [προδοσία] a ‘mystery’ [μυστήριον]10 – and here one cannot forget the betrayal of  God. Not only is the kingdom of  God a mystery, too, that gradually (and punctually) betrays itself. Origen also suggests that the language of  theology can only betray the acts of  God with homonyms – words that are, like Christ’s imperative, at once the same and radically other than what they appear to be, splitting His acts between the familiar and the unspeakable. The ‘change of  heart’ [μεταμέλεια], ‘rage’ [ὀργή] and ‘passion’ [θυμός] of  God are not of  the same genus [συγγενής] as all other changes of  heart, rages, passions. Each ‘is a homonym, of which the name alone is common, but the logos of  the essence that is named is dif ferent’ [ὁμώνυμα δέ ἐστιν, ὧν ὄνομα μόνον κοινόν, ὁ δὲ κατὰ τοὔνομα τῆς οὐσίας λόγος ἕτερος].11 This divine logos is not a word, but an ef fect: one nears it

8 Origen, Commentaire sur Saint Jean, ed. Cécile Blanc, 5 vols (Paris: Cerf, 1992), vol. 5, 312. 9 ‘He called his antagonist to the fight, or [he called] the hander-over to assist the economy that would be salvational for the cosmos’ (προκαλούμενος τὸν ἀνταγωνιστὴν ἐπὶ τὴν πάλην, ἢ τὸν προδότην ἐπὶ τὸ διακονῆσαι τῇ σωτηρίῳ 〈τῷ〉 κόσμῳ ἐσομένῃ οἰκονομίᾳ). Ibid., 312. 10 Ibid., 306. 11 Origen, Jeremiahomilien in Erich Klostermann, ed., Origenes Werke, 12 vols (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1901), vol. 3, 177.

Introduction

5

by asking, for example, ‘what change of  heart is worked by God, what was worked?’ [τί μεταμέλεια ἐργάζεται θεοῦ, τί εἰργάσατο].12 But who could say, in any case, what is done? Perhaps – ‘what does it is betrayal’. The very same schism that tears Christ’s words between a call to Judas and a call to Satan, a call for help and a call to battle, shows that a breach can open in any account, even the most literal and concise one. The more it is reduced to the articulation of a mere doing, independent of doer, deed and purpose – e.g., ‘Whatever it is that you do, be done with it as quickly as possible’ [ὃ ποιεῖς ποίσηον τάχιον, John 13:27] – the less decidable it becomes. For this very reason, the familiarity of  betrayal as a religious, political and private category is deceptive. The name would be, at least according to a Christological logic, a homonym – and a pseudonym. ‘Adam – betrayed. Joseph – betrayed. Moses – betrayed. Samson – betrayed. Job – betrayed.’ By whom? Before this universal monotony, one might be tempted to turn to the verse Origen cites when he accounts for Peter’s refusal to allow Jesus to wash his feet:13 ‘Every man is an agent of  falsehood’ [πᾶς ἄνθρωπος ψεύστης]. Peter’s statement, ‘Never will you wash my feet’ [οὐ μὴ νίψῃς μου τοὺς πόδας εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα, John 13:8], is based on false assumptions and becomes false – literally ‘falses itself  through’ [διεψευσμένην] – when Peter concedes to Jesus. ‘Every man’, even one so close to Jesus as Peter, would thus appear to be an ‘agent of  falseness’. But this passage from the Psalms of  the Hebrew Bible – which Origen cites in the treacherously inexact Septuaginta translation – is turned inside out when Origen represents it so decisively. The singer of  the Psalm turns to the Lord, after having once ‘said in ecstasy: “every man is an agent of  falsehood”’ [ἐγὼ εἶπα ἐν τῇ ἐκστάσει μου ‘πᾶς ἄνθρωπος ψεύστης’].14 No longer ecstatic, for him the falseness of man becomes, if not denied, abruptly abandoned – the singer breaches his assumption of universal faithlessness.15 12 Ibid. 13 Origen, Commentaire sur Saint Jean, vol. 5, 226. 14 See Psalm 115:1–4, which we cite from the Greek Septuaginta translation of  the Hebrew Bible, since this is the translation Origen quotes. 15 It is literally neither syntactically nor logically related to what follows; the speaker leaps from pointing to his previous depths and speech, to posing the question how he might repay the Lord his favours.

6

Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun

His turn away from a seemingly false remark, as well as Origen’s return to it, cannot but make the universal truth of  the statement – and with it, the universal truth of  betrayal – suspect. Both turns of  the phrase are only possible because of a still more primary breach within the logic of  the false itself. Any assertion of  falsehood is already a truth in its own right. Any contradiction of a truth is a falsehood. When the Psalmist refuses his previous, true assertion of  the falseness of man, he falsifies it – but by falsifying it, he af firms the truth of  the falsehood he refuses. However one reads this passage, deception and veracity turn into, convert and controvert one another. If  this incessant turning appears universal in the most literal sense of  the word, its precondition is the minimal dif ference between true and false – a structural breach that precludes any syllogistic closure. In his own controversial, spurious commentary on the Psalms, Origen concludes that the sentence is aporetic, an impasse to any logical or philosophical verification.16 The logic of  falsehood leads to an aporia, or a privation (a-) of passage (poros), as do the betrayals of  the Western tradition, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Roth – dif ferently at every turn. ‘Othello – betrayed. Hamlet – betrayed. Lear – betrayed.’ No single version of  betrayal is representative of another, let alone betrayal as such. For the reader still engrossed by literature’s scrutiny of  things, it comes down to articulating the singular language, breaches and aporias of each dramatic configuration. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603) – to turn to a deceptively familiar drama of  betrayal – Hamlet cries ‘Treachery’ when his poisoned mother Gertrude falls and orders, ‘let the door be lock’d!’ (Ham. V ii 298–9). The treacheries and deaths of  the play culminate at a literally aporetic moment, where all passage is (b)locked. Before this, a proliferation of abortive journeys, false starts, departures and returns revolve around the death of  the former king Hamlet, the (re-)marriage of  Gertrude and

16

On the spuriousness of parts of  the Selecta in Psalmos, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘Die Hiera des Evagrius’, Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 63 (1939), 86–106, 181–206. See Origen, Selecta in Psalmos, in J.P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus, vol. 12, 1576.

Introduction

7

Claudius, and, above all, the madness of  Hamlet. Hamlet’s ecstasy, real and feigned,17 stands outside the register of verification and drives the events of  the play far more than Claudius’s crime (Ham. III i 160, III iv 138) until nearly all agents of  falsehood and truth have either died or gathered in the ‘Prison-House’ of  Denmark (Ham. I v 14, II ii 239). No way out truly opens; instead, the indeterminate treachery of  the drama that Hamlet decries is the ineluctably attractive aporia that draws, hinders and occludes its actors. The words treachery and treason will repeat with an unprecedented frequency in the fifth act,18 in a locked room, and in a way that, for all the false play of  Claudius, his subordinates and Hamlet himself, is reducible to no one agent of  falsehood. The final bloodbath culminates in a unison call – the only one in the text – ‘Treason! Treason!’ (Ham. V ii 310). With these words, an anonymous All responds to Hamlet’s stabbing of  the king. The exclamation is too vague to name one act or accuse one person, and it is too brief  to be characterized as a shocked declaration, an accusation, a call to arms or a call for help. Thus, it resonates with the way treachery spills and bleeds from one agent and patient of  falsehood to the next – from the poison the Queen drinks in lieu of  Hamlet, to Hamlet and Laertes’s mutual wounding with the same ‘treacherous instrument’ (Ham. V ii 304) that Laertes had coated with venom, to Hamlet’s stabbing and poisoning of  the King with the ‘poison temper’d by himself ’ (Ham. V ii 315). But what brings on the melancholy, the raving, the bloodshed? Such treason, attributable to no one, is also, ultimately, without advantage, intention or cause. Hamlet is a poetic work where betrayal on the political and

17

18

The undecidability of  Hamlet’s ‘madness’ is a commonplace in Shakespearean scholarship; for two very dif ferent readings, see Jaques Lacan, who accents the feigned aspect of  his madness in ‘Desire and the Interpretation of  Desire in Hamlet’, Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977), 11–52, and Karin S. Coddens ‘“Suche Strange Desygns”: Madness, Subjectivity, and Treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan Culture’, in Mary Beth Rose, ed., Renaissance Drama: Essays on Renaissance Dramatic Traditions (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990) 51–77. Before this, it only occurs four times, two of which appear in the Player’s speech on Hecuba: Ham. II ii 488–9, 556; III ii 168; IV v 119–21.

8

Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun

private stage operates beyond any readily identifiable motivations. Every individual caught in it dies, while sovereignty falls to Fortinbras of  Norway, who was otherwise uninvolved in the many intrigues of  the play. In this respect, the drama of  betrayal and falsehood in Hamlet dif fers sharply from the one to which the events in Denmark are compared from the very first scene: Julius Caesar. If  Horatio compares the Ghost’s appearance to the ghoulish (and portentous) nights that troubled Rome ‘a little ere the mightiest Julius fell’ (Ham. I i 114), the signs that disturb Denmark can have no such import. The King of  Denmark has already fallen, and the logic of prophecy and omen that foretold Roman political history proves unhelpful to the story of (young and old) Hamlet. At the end, Horatio distances the events of  the drama from those that fit into any fateful, temporal or logical chain. He proposes: And let me speak to the yet unknowing world How these things came about; so shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning, and forced cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall’n on the inventors’ heads. All this can I Truly deliver. (Ham. V ii 366–73)

Not only is the fugue of  fate absent; even the jointures of action, cause and purpose are disturbed in this speech. Although these terms still belong to Horatio’s vocabulary, they do so only to be qualified by their opposites, set in dissonance. The ‘act’ is echoed and followed by ‘accident’; ‘casual slaughter’ counters the purposiveness of  ‘cause’. Purposes – private and political – are not carried out, but fall instead upon the heads that contrived them in a phonic logic that controverts the relational structures of speech, argument and action. It is all too appropriate that the only ‘Caesar’ who is killed in Hamlet is a Player-Caesar – namely, Polonius, whom Hamlet stabs in his mother’s chamber in lieu of  King Claudius, and who says shortly before his death: ‘I did enact Julius Caesar; I was killed i’ the Capitol; Brutus killed me’ (Ham. III ii 97–8).

Introduction

9

With this, the stakes and roles of  treason, so important to Shakespeare’s own Roman play, are ironized, if not emptied out. But any drama of betrayal, theatrical and political, cannot be understood apart from the still more fundamental functions of  language and representation through which it is articulated. History from top to bottom – world history, family history, personal history – are evoked in Hamlet, only to be betrayed in a language that impurifies the homonyms, amphibolies and proper terms that make up its tradition. In the only other passage where Julius Caesar is mentioned – in the graveyard – Hamlet says: Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away; Oh, that that earth, which kept the world in awe, Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s f law! (Ham. V i 201–4).

The roads of all men, even for one of  the greatest Romans, lead to a dead end – an aporia, a banal stopgap. The parodic irreverence of  this quatrain resonates with Hamlet’s earlier reply to Polonius’s boast – ‘It was a brute part of  him to kill so capital a calf  there’ (Ham. III ii 99–100) – which had levelled the proper names of  Caesar and Brutus, together with the capital treason that twained them, to common names. But whereas the earlier sentence traduces and translates the names of  Caesar, Brutus and the Capitol into near-homonyms – and thereby opens them to further shifting – the graveyard verses, from the phonetic closure of  the rhyme to its rhetoric of  hole-stopping, tend towards a final limit. Towards the point, that is, where the movements of sense and motivation – the melancholy, the raving, the bloodshed ­– halt. To think betrayal to its end – along with the revealing, passing-over, trading and shifting of allegiance it names – also entails thinking the problem of an end and the emptiness of  that moment when the breaches that open passage and drive passion get stopped. The passage that Philip Roth’s traitor in The Human Stain (2000) chooses to take – to move to a Brutus of  the twentieth century – leads equally to a dead end. Roth’s protagonist Coleman Silk, a classics professor and Dean of  Athena College in the Berkshires, is emphatically lined

10

Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun

up in the Western tradition of  traitors, most revealingly so by the middle name he was given by his father: The father who had another way of  beating you down. With words. With speech. With what he called ‘the language of  Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens.’ With the English language that no one could ever take away from you and that Mr. Silk richly sounded, always with great fullness and clarity and bravado, as though even in ordinary conversation he were reciting Marc Antony’s speech over the body of  Caesar. Each of  his three children had been given a middle name drawn from Mr. Silk’s best memorized play, in his view English literature’s high point and the most educational study of  treason ever written: the eldest son was Walter Antony, the second son, Coleman Brutus; Ernestine Calpurnia, their younger sister, took her middle name from Caesar’s loyal wife.19

In the middle – at the heart of  these children’s names – are names from another history and another drama that pivots upon betrayal. And indeed, the many fathers of  Coleman Brutus Silk that resonate in his name – his own, as well as Shakespeare and Brutus – will come to haunt him. Ironically. Treacherously. Tragically. But if  the words from another text of  Roth – ‘betrayed by our ancestors at every turn’20 – appear to hold true here, the host of spectres that echo in Coleman Brutus Silk’s proper name preclude any identification of a traitor. As he distances himself  from his African American heritage – concealing and betraying it – in order to adopt a career of  letters, Coleman Brutus Silk amplifies the dissonance of  his name(s) himself. As one figure says of  Macbeth in Roth’s I Married a Communist: he ‘is betrayed – by himself – though that’s not the same thing.’21 It’s not the same thing as Judas’s betrayal of Christ or Claudius’s betrayal of  Hamlet, when Coleman Brutus Silk (is) betrayed (by) himself – as a self  that splits into dif ferences that preclude any inclusive definition or reconciling closure. Still, he is beaten down, not with his name, but with a single word: ‘spooks’.22 It is a word that he articulates in class to refer to ‘the two

19 Philip Roth, The Human Stain (London: Vintage, 2001), 92f. 20 Philip Roth, I Married a Communist (London: Vintage, 1998), 185. 21 Ibid. 22 Roth, The Human Stain, 6.

Introduction

11

missing students, who turned out to be black’.23 Perceived as a racial slur, ‘spooks’ – in his father’s spirit – triggers the downfall of  Roth’s Brutus, costing him his career, his reputation and his family. In more ways than one, he belongs among the others the word denigrates – although Coleman Brutus Silk had, for most of  his adult life, passed as a white Jew. The Shakespearean premise allows for the fatal end of  this passing to be glimpsed very early – though it is no fugue of fate, but Silk’s ‘revolt […] against the Negro fate’ that turns him back to the point he had so ‘passionate[ly] struggle[d]’ to f lee.24 You get in the habit of  being betrayed. Soon, passing is the everyday status quo for Silk. But the habit – or ethos – of  betrayal becomes an ethical problem in the novel that haunts him. Within the voice of  Silk himself (or the narrator Nathan Zuckerman, who, in indirect speech, represents and betrays the thoughts of  his protagonist), the accusations of  his father’s spirit echo: ‘The tragic, reckless thing that you’ve done! And not just to yourself – to us all. To Ernestine. To Walt. To Mother. To me. To me in my grave. To my father in his. […] Whom next are you going to mislead and betray?’25 Even if  the narrator and Roth himself strongly foreground that Coleman’s choice to pass as a white Jew was ‘strictly utilitarian’ and that it had ‘nothing to do with the ethical, spiritual, theological or historical aspects of  Judaism’ or ‘with wanting to belong to another “we”’,26 there is no doubt that Silk had manoeuvred himself into a moral impasse. But just as Hamlet’s and the Psalmist’s ecstatic proclamations of  treason and falsehood stand outside the register of verification, Silk’s betrayal precludes moral judgement. After all, the heart of  the tragedy of  Coleman Brutus Silk lies not so much in the betrayal towards his family, but primarily in the betrayal towards himself – which is itself (several) other(s). The betrayal of others and self-betrayal turn into, convert and controvert each other like the truth and falsehood of  the statement: ‘every man is an agent of  falsehood’. As the name Coleman Brutus Silk implies, both betrayals 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 183. 25 Ibid. 26 ‘Zuckerman’s Alter Brain.’ Interview by Charles McGrath. New York Times, 7 May 2000.

12

Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun

are less a matter of a fixed opposition with clearly demarcated boundaries, than the function of an articulation that can be shifted, varied, displaced. Everything pivots upon the specific way the relationship between the self and the other is inscribed in betrayals. Inscribed – by whom? In fiction, every voice is at least two – the (false) plays among writers’, narrators’ and protagonists’ words double or divide each speaking self. At least since Pindar, tellers of  tales have been accused of  telling lies.27 And, in a way, writers and narrators are always bound to betray that is to reveal and falsify the personae they represent. Any speaking per-sona – any sounding-through – is per se a mask. Any account that is made – fictive or factual – is also, to an undecidable extent, made up. From pseudo-biographies like The Human Stain to auto-biographies, the inscription of any life and any self  first makes it (other than) what it is. For this reason, turning from one genre to the other, it is impossible to decide precisely where the pseudos (‘false’) distinguishes itself from the autos (‘self ’). The fictional narrator of  The Human Stain is the double of  both its author and yet another, failed author: Coleman Brutus Silk. Zuckerman takes over (and over-writes) the book that Silk had begun about his own downfall, entitled Spooks,28 after Silk’s death – and after identifying with his protagonist, who himself wanted ‘to become a new being’, ‘to bifurcate’.29 Writing in his place, Zuckerman sets himself to transcribing the ‘book’ that was Silk’s ‘life’,30 which was ‘more white than the “whites”’ – and unwritten, blank. His personal story only begins to sound through when Silk’s performance as a white Jew (like Zuckerman) is revealed – by a narrator who, assuming an African American’s voice, performs black.31 Conjuring

27

Pindar speaks of  the ‘lies’ (ψεύδεσί) of  Homer in the twenty-second verse of  his seventh Nemean ode. See Pindari carmina cum fragmentis, ed. Bruno Snell and Herwig Maehler (Leipzig: Teubner, 1987). 28 Cf. Roth, The Human Stain, 43. 29 Ibid., 342. 30 Ibid., 345. 31 See Tim Parrish’s essay ‘Becoming Black: Zuckerman’s Bifurcating Self in The Human Stain’, in Derek Parker Royal, ed., Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 209–24, esp. 220.

Introduction

13

his dead double, ‘Coleman, Coleman, Coleman, you who are now no one [and] who now run my existence’, Zuckerman (ghost-)writes:32 ‘Writing personally is exposing and concealing at the same time, but with you it could only be concealment and so it would never work.’33 What fills in the blank, what blackens the page, what does it – is betrayal. The inscription of  Coleman’s biography turns upon a breach between his life and another’s, between his false performance and its exposure by a dif ferent persona. He can only be betrayed for what he truly is (not) in a work that denies as much as it af firms his personal whiting/writing. On the other hand, Zuckerman also betrays – exposes and conceals – the work of his author, Philip Roth. Biographically, Zuckerman corresponds closely with Roth, from his profession to his ethnicity ( Jewish-American); he is a self-avowed ‘alter brain’, or pseudo-self.34 And don’t forget his literal correspondence with the author of  The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. Roth starts this text with a letter to Nathan Zuckerman, asking him not only for his ‘candid’ opinion, but also whether to publish the (already-printed) book.35 The autobiography is crossed-through and double-crossed, when it closes with Zuckerman’s harsh response: ‘I’ve read the manuscript twice. Here is the candor you ask for: Don’t publish – you are far better of f writing about me than “accurately” reporting your own life.’36 Silk – betrayed. Zuckerman – betrayed. Roth is betrayed – by himself – but that’s never the same thing from person to person, text to text. There are other configurations in which the lines of pseudo- and auto-biography are drawn dif ferently. In his autobiographical-novelistic essay Le traître [The Traitor, 1958], the Marxist philosopher Gerhart Hirsch alias Gerhard Horst alias André Gorz alias Michel Bosquet – who is author, third-person

Remarkably, Zuckerman appears for the first time in Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer (1979). 33 Roth, The Human Stain, 345. 34 ‘Zuckerman’s Alter Brain.’ 35 Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (New York: Penguin, 1988), 3­–10. 36 Ibid., 161. 32

14

Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun

narrator and protagonist at the same time – betrays his own betrayal.37 Self-betrayal and self-revelation meet, as the Parisian thinker Gorz (et al.) personally writes that he was born into a Jewish-Catholic family in Vienna and survived the Holocaust at a Swiss boarding school. One day, he decides – similarly to Coleman Brutus Silk – to be what he was not: a Frenchman. Or rather, he decides to incorporate the ‘not’ – the ‘negation’ – of  being an ‘autre indif férencié parmi d’autres’ [‘undistinguished other among others’].38 This decision amounts to becoming many and to negating each one among several names. But his most personal metonymic chain does not lead to escape, although he traces betrayal – along with mysticism, materialism and writing – to ‘une même attitude fondamentale de fuite et de négation du réel’ [‘one identical, fundamental attitude of escape from and negation of  the real’].39 To be sure, he changes his name(s) and nationality, denies his Jewish background and abandons his mother tongue to distance himself  from his family – and not least from National Socialism. But any foundational f light is necessarily a contradiction in terms. As in Hamlet and The Human Stain, every passage is an impasse. The very moment of escape from any category cements it; the gesture of rejection makes an identity one’s own; the fictionalization produces the fact. The bonds at stake in betrayal, be they political or personal, do not depend upon pre-existing social categories, norms or even laws, but coincide with those singular moments of refusal that first make identification what it is (not). To ‘incarnate the negation’ cannot take place without equally incarnating the negated; the negation at stake is not absolute, but determinate. Indeed,

37 Significantly, the psychiatrist Wolfram Schmitt takes Gorz as a prime example for self-betrayal. Wolfram Schmitt, ‘Verrat an sich selbst. Selbstentzweiung und Selbstversöhnung’, in Dietrich von Engelhardt, ed., Verrat. Geschichte, Medizin, Philosophie, Kunst, Literatur (Heidelberg: Mattes Verlag, 2012), 197–213, 197. 38 ‘Être Juif, être Chinois, être Negre, être Nazi: il avait toujours souhaité incarner la Négation de ce qu’il était en tant qu’autre indif férencié parmi d’autres.’ André Gorz, Le traitre. Avant-propos de Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Seuil, 1958), 147. ‘To be Jew, to be Chinese, to be Negro, to be Nazi: he had always hoped to incarnate the Negation of  that which he was, as an undistinguished other among others.’ 39 Ibid., 163.

Introduction

15

André Gorz only partially negates one of  his ‘proper’, German names, then re-incorporates it literally. The name ‘André’ is a permutation of  the German root ‘ander-’ (‘other’); his becoming another becomes his first name. And ‘Gorz’ appears as the anagrammatic reduction of  ‘Gerhard Horst’ – insofar as the ‘z’ would be pronounced ‘ts’ in German: ‘Gerhard Horts’. On the threshold of religious and political communities, suspended between (at least) two languages, the false name speaks its proper truth. André Gorz is ‘another Gerhard Horst’ – just as Le traître is, in every sense of  the word, a true profession of  falsehood. To examine betrayal is to examine the forked tongues in which language is spoken and disclosure is made – or made up.40 The contributions of  this volume are divided into three groups, proceeding from the languages of politics and theology; to the relationships among betrayal, emotions and ethics; to the theatricality involved in playing false. Each section also intersects with the others, so that the theatricality that is traced in, for example, the final contribution on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde has everything to do with the political and social codes that necessitate role-playing and betrayal on the parts of its characters. The point of departure is Judas’s betrayal of  Christ. Joachim Harst’s contribution on the figure of  Judas in Jorge Luis Borges’s Tres versiones de Judas [Three Versions of Judas] shows the necessary interdependence between Judas’s betrayal and the revelation of  Christ – as it takes place both in the Bible and in Borges’s fiction of a theologian’s commentary. Contrasting Borges’s strategies of representation with those of  German baroque drama, Harst elaborates the duplicity through which salvation comes to light, as well as the irreducible dif ference and coincidence between the false disciple and true Messiah. In her chapter, Kristina Mendicino traces the function of  betrayal in Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phenomenology of  Spirit]. Although – or because – Hegel’s Christology presents ‘the life of  God’, as 40 In a recent special issue of  The New Centennial Review on betrayal, Richard Block and Michael du Plessis stress the linguistic permutations and traditions without which ‘betrayal’ cannot be understood. See Richard Block and Michael du Plessis, ‘A Treacherous Subject: An Introduction’, The New Centennial Review 12/3 (2012), 1–15.

16

Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun

well as the development of self-consciousness, as an ‘autokinesis of  form’, each conversion of spirit involves a moment of self-betrayal that is as crucial as it is understated. The absence of  Judas from Hegel’s text cannot conceal the way in which betrayal is the crux of  the system, without which spirit could not grasp itself. Turning to fratricide in Senecan and Shakespearean drama, Eric Dodson-Robinson compares Agamemnon and Hamlet to show the way in which cycles of  treachery and revenge resolve dif ferently within the pagan and Early Modern traditions. Despite important dramaturgical similarities between the plays, Shakespeare turns away from the inevitable, physical transmission of debt that perpetuates crime in Senecan tragedy, thereby betraying his indebtedness to the Judeo-Christian tradition. HorstJürgen Gerigk’s chapter on political betrayal and the double proceeds from the betrayals of  Knut Hamsun, Ezra Pound and Arthur Koestler in the mid-twentieth century to a closer examination of  the Doppelgänger in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The most intimate duplicity of  Stevenson’s strange case, in turn, sheds light on betrayals in the public sphere. The second part of  this volume includes four chapters that unfold the relationship between af fect and betrayal in four dif ferent genres, which formally constitute dif ferent matrices for the evocation and experience of emotions: drama, film, prose fiction and autobiography. The discoveries of  this section undermine the assumption that betrayal, even in its most calculated forms, can be considered apart from the emotional involvement of its participants. To the contrary, each case study discloses the emotional excess that drives and surpasses the calculations involved in every act of  betrayal. Ritchie Robertson’s juxtaposition of  Kantian practical philosophy with the dramatic œuvre of  Schiller shows how Schiller’s dramas put Kant’s ideal, ethical rejection of  betrayal to the test and articulate those aspects of  betrayal that exceed philosophical logic. His contribution, which bridges the considerations of politics in the previous section with those of af fect and ethics, is followed by a comparative literary study by Betiel Wasihun, in which she examines the problem of  betrayal in Heinrich von Kleist’s novella ‘Die Verlobung in St. Domingo’ [‘The Betrothal in St. Domingo’] and Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain. In both texts, figures who belong to neither side of  the socially constructed colour-line betray in committing

Introduction

17

themselves to one racially defined social group or the other – and through this self-betrayal, they are ultimately destroyed. Here, the ethnical and the ethical coincide in singular texts that expose the problem, not of  betraying one side or another in a political opposition, but of choosing a side at all. At the heart of  the betrayals she addresses is the emotional and cognitive dissonance that inevitably precipitates the decision to betray. Whereas Wasihun examines the fictional selves that populate the texts of  Kleist and Roth, Bernd Blaschke presents a study of  the fictional self  that Bruno Dössekker constructed in his fake Holocaust memoirs. First, he uncovers the many levels of  betrayal in this pseudo-autobiographical text – which exceed even the number of names and masks Bruno Grosjean alias Bruno Dössekker alias Binjamin Wilkomirski bore. Then, he pursues the emotional and ethical responses to the transgressive text of  Dössekker (et al.), which indicate a limit that nonetheless evades clear definition. For Dössekker blatantly claims a life he had not empirically lived within a medium that, on the one hand, should disclose personal truths, and on the other is necessarily constructed and therefore always fictional. The section closes with Anne Julia Fett’s study of  Fassbinder’s film, In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden [In a Year with Thirteen Moons], where the protagonist Erwin/Elvira Weishaupt attempts to reconstruct his/her life, undergoing a sex change for the sake of a lover who abandons him/her. Here, the problem is not whether one identity is true or false, but the way in which both Erwin/Elvira incorporate a double negation: his/her new identity and the old one are at once true and false, overlapping with one another on the same body. Fett not only investigates the emotions bound up with the self-betrayal of  the film’s protagonist, but also the way Fassbinder’s filmic technique betrays and thus undoes the melodramatic conventions that often solicit emotional identification among film audiences. Anne Julia Fett’s chapter works as a transition to the third section of  the volume, which is devoted to the formal, theatrical aesthetics involved in betrayal. The section begins with a chapter about Walter Benjamin’s essay on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Af finities]. In her contribution, Anna Henke shows how Benjamin’s usage of  the umlaut – a visual, diacritical marker – becomes a way to expose the opacity of  the literary text, which the critic must encounter (and betray) in order

18

Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun

to see and to speak anything of  the text at all. Benjamin’s argument pivots upon subtle shifts in rhetoric between synonyms such as Schleier [‘veil’] and Hülle [‘veil’], along with the graphic veiling that the umlaut performs à la lettre. It is the deceptive shifting of  letters – as graphic, phantasmatic phenomena – that Rebecca Haubrich addresses in her essay on Kleist’s ‘Der Findling’ [‘The Foundling’]. A visible anagram seduces Nicolo, the eponymous protagonist of  the narrative, to identify with Colino, the love interest of  his stepmother Elvire, when the letter-bearing dice that compose his own name spell out the name of another before his eyes. The chance appearance of  Nicolo’s letters gives way to his literal appearance as Colino on the day he attempts to rape Elvire. However, the logogryphic substitutions at play in Kleist’s narrative do not end (or begin) here. As Haubrich shows, Nicolo also resembles the biblical figure of  the antichrist, whose status as a substitutor manifests itself above all in the deceptive, undecidable dif ference between (his) logos and (His) logos. Following this pair of chapters are two contributions that speak to the issue of  betrayal and (theatrical) mimesis in Chariton’s ancient novel Callirhoe and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. In the first of  these essays, Gillian Granville Bentley shows the way Chariton’s ancient Greek novel draws on theatrical vocabulary in order to narrate political events in fifthcentury BC Akragas. Jealous political leaders manipulate the tools of  theatre to private ends in order to separate a pair of  lovers, thereby realizing Plato’s worst fear – namely, that theatre might slip from stage to life. In her chapter on Chaucer’s narrative poem, on the other hand, Felisa Baynes-Ross shows the way in which theatricality can reach an extreme that leaves no alternative to betrayal and renders every face or visage an opaque mask of ambiguity, or ambage. Betrayal becomes a structural necessity in a world where all behaviour and speech is governed by at least two codes at the same time. Criseyde’s infamous betrayal of  Troilus is no isolated case, but a rigorous consequence of a social setting in which no one is exempt from the practices of playing false.

Introduction

19

Bibliography Balthasar, Hans Urs von, ‘Die Hiera des Evagrius’, Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 63 (1939), 86–106, 181–206. Block, Richard, and Michael du Plessis, ‘A Treacherous Subject: An Introduction’, The New Centennial Review 12/3 (2012), 1–15. Cane, Anthony, The Place of  Judas Iscariot in Christology (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005). Coddens, Karin S., ‘“Suche Strange Desygns”: Madness, Subjectivity, and Treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan Culture’, in Mary Beth Rose, ed., Renaissance Drama: Essays on Renaissance Dramatic Traditions (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990) 51–77. Derrett, J. Duncan M., ‘The Iscariot, MeSira, and the Redemption’, Journal for the Study of  the New Testament 2/2 (1980), 2–23. Gorz, André, Le traitre. Avant-propos de Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Seuil, 1958). Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 32 vols (Leipzig 1854–1961, Quellenverzeichnis Leipzig 1971). Lacan, Jacques, ‘Desire and the Interpretation of  Desire in Hamlet’, Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977), 11–52. Laeuchli, Samuel, ‘Origen’s Interpretation of Judas’, Church History 22/4 (1953), 253–68. Origen, Commentaire sur Saint Jean, ed. Cécile Blanc, 5 vols (Paris: Cerf, 1992). ——, Commentarii in Genesim, in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus, 161 vols (Paris: Migne, 1862). ——, Jeremiahomilien in Erich Klostermann, ed., Origenes Werke, 12 vols (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1901). ——, Selecta in Psalmos, in J.P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus, 161 vols (Paris: Migne, 1862). Parrish, Tim, ‘Becoming Black: Zuckerman’s Bifurcating Self in The Human Stain’, in Derek Parker Royal, ed., Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 209–24. Pindar, Pindari carmina cum fragmentis, ed. Bruno Snell and Herwig Maehler (Leipzig: Teubner, 1987). Renger, Almut-Barbara, ‘The Ambiguity of  Judas: On the Mythicity of a New Testament Figure’, Literature and Theology 26/4 (2012), 1–17. Roth, Philip, I Married a Communist (London: Vintage, 1998). ——, The Human Stain (London: Vintage, 2001). ——, ‘Zuckerman’s Alter Brain.’ Interview by Charles McGrath. New York Times, 7 May 2000.

20

Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun

Schmitt, Wolfram, ‘Verrat an sich selbst. Selbstentzweiung und Selbstversöhnung’, in Dietrich von Engelhardt, ed., Verrat. Geschichte, Medizin, Philosophie, Kunst, Literatur (Heidelberg: Mattes Verlag, 2012), 197–213.

Part I

States of  Treason – Theology and Politics

Joachim Harst

Perversions of  Judas. Betrayal in ‘Baroque’ Literature: Borges and Gryphius

Yo suelo regresar eternamente al Eterno Regreso.1 [I tend to return eternally to Eternal Return.]

— J.L. Borges

Borges and ‘Baroque’ Literature Ten years before Jorge Luís Borges wrote his famous collection Ficciones [Fictions, 1944], he published an anthology of  biographical sketches under the title Historia universal de la infamia [Universal History of  Infamy, 1933]. In a way that would become characteristic of  his fictional style, these early attempts in the narrative genre conf late historical facts and fictional form. They are, as Borges writes pejoratively in the prologue to the second edition (1954), ‘a falsification and distortion’ of  historical anecdotes and ‘el irresponsable juego de un tímido que no se animó a escribir cuentos y que se distrajo en falsear y tergiversar (sin justificación estética alguna vez) ajenas historias’ [‘the irresponsible pastime of a timid person who didn’t dare to write short stories and who distracted himself  by falsifying and distorting (sometimes without aesthetic justification) foreign stories’].2 On another 1 2

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘El tiempo circular’, in Historia de la eternidad (1936), ed., Obras Completas 4 vols (Barcelona: Emecé, 1996), vol. 1, 393. All translations are mine. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Prólogo a la edición de 1954’, in Historia universal de la infamia (1935, 1954), in Obras Completas, vol. 1, 291.

24

Joachim Harst

level, the title itself announces a complex of problems to which Borges will repeatedly return in his later stories: the notion of infamy, personified in the figure of  the traitor, and the idea of a ‘universal history’, a timeless structure that endlessly repeats throughout history. The speculative connection between the two becomes apparent in a quote from Borges’s collection of essays called Historia de la eternidad [History of  Eternity, 1936], in which he engages with the idea of  ‘Eternal Return’ on a theoretical level. The Stoic idea that history proceeds in structurally analogous circles leads him to conclude that, ‘[s]i los destinos de Edgar Allan Poe, de los Vikings, de Judas Iscariote y de mi lector secretamente son el mismo destino […] la historia universal es la de un solo hombre.’3 [‘If  the destinies of  Edgar Poe, the Vikings, Judas Iscariot and my reader secretly are the same destiny, (…) then universal history is the history of a single man.’] As an illustration of  this idea, Borges sketches out a ‘fantastic tale’, which he claims to have invented a long time ago: ‘Un teólogo consagra toda su vida a confutar a un heresiarca; lo vence en intrincadas polémica, lo denuncia, lo hace quemar; en el Cielo descubre que para Dios el heresiarca y él forman una sola persona.’4 [‘A theologian consecrates his whole life to refute a heresiarch; he defeats him in intricate polemics, denounces him and has him burnt; in Heaven he discovers that for God, the heresiarch and himself are a single person.’] However, it will take thirteen more years until Borges publishes the tale, repeating the striking assertion of the identity of persecutor and persecuted: ‘En el paraíso, Aureliano supo que para la insondable divinidad, él y Juan de Panonia (el ortodoxo y el hereje, el aborrecedor y el aborrecido, el acusador y la victima) formaban una sola persona.’5 [‘In paradise, Aureliano knew that for the unfathomable divinity, he and Juan de Panonia (the orthodox and the heretic, the hater and the hated, the accuser and the victim) were a single person.’] From an eternal perspective, the binary logic of oppositions that seems to drive history merges into a truly uni-versal,6 and therefore 3 Borges, ‘El tiempo circular’, 395. 4 Ibid. 5 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Los teólogos’, in El Aleph (1949), in Obras Completas, vol. 1, 556. 6 At first sight, the term ‘universal’ seems to evoke uniformity, especially when one derives it from the Latin words ‘unus’ and ‘versus’ and translates, ‘turned into one’;

Perversions of  Judas. Betrayal in ‘Baroque’ Literature

25

many-folded and paradoxical, principle that threatens any simple notion of identity and repetition. What is more, by insistently anticipating and repeating itself, Borges’s writing demonstrates and performs this very problem of identity and repetition at the same time.7 The prologue to the second edition of  his Historia universal de infamia in 1954 also works through this issue. Twenty years after the first edition, Borges calls his first stories ‘baroque’ in a quite pejorative sense. Already the ‘excesivo título’ [‘excessive title’], he says, would proclaim the ‘naturaleza barroca’ [‘baroque nature’] of  the collection; he defines the term ‘baroque’ with reference to ‘la etapa final de todo arte, cuando éste exhibe y dilapida sus medios’ [‘the final stage of all art, when it exhibits and dilapidates its means’].8 In this precise sense, Borges’s prose indeed appears ‘baroque’, since it always exhibits and plays with its fictional character, just as baroque drama usually emphasizes its theatricality. Still, it is remarkable that Borges would call his first collection of short stories ‘baroque’, since one would assume that, even in hindsight, he would recognize it as the beginning and not the ‘final stage’ of (his) art. In fact, ten years after the second edition of Historia universal, Borges inverts his understanding of  ‘baroque’ art, describing it now as typical for the beginning of a literary career: ‘Es curiosa la suerte del escritor. Al principio es barroco, vanidosamente barroco, y al cabo de los años puede lograr […] la modesta y secreta complejidad.’9 [‘Strange is however, if one turns the elements of  this composite word around, it can also be understood as ‘the single one that turns’ – and would therefore signify a singularity that literally produces manifoldness. 7 In La Biblioteca de Babel, for example, Borges exemplifies ‘la naturaleza informe y caótica de casi todos los libros’ of  the infinite archive with a book that is ‘un mero laberinto de letras, pero la pagina penúltima dice Oh tiempo tus pirámides.’ Borges, Obras Completas, vol. 1, 466. This is also a verse of  the (later) poem Del infierno y del cielo: ‘¡oh Tiempo! tus efímeras pirámides’, in El otro, el mismo, in Obras Completas, vol. 2, 244. 8 Borges, ‘Prólogo’, 291. The entire passage reads: ‘Yo diría que es barroca la etapa final de todo arte, cuando éste exhibe y dilapida sus medios. […] Ya el excesivo título de estas páginas proclama su naturaleza barroca.’ 9 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Prólogo’, in El otro, el mismo (1964), in Obras Completas, vol. 2, 236.

26

Joachim Harst

the writer’s fate: in the beginning, he is baroque, vainly baroque, and only after many years he may achieve (…) modest and subtle complexity.’] If it is true that Borges’s early fiction is ‘vainly baroque’ in the sense of  ‘vain’ self-exhibition and autoreferentiality, this would also mean that in Borges, the ‘final stage of art’ and the beginning of  his literary work paradoxically coincide, as if in a circular, universal movement. Certainly, the pejorative qualification of  his early writings as ‘baroque’ is first of all a way for the author to distance himself  from his origins; at the same time, however, Borges confines himself  to criticizing it without even considering a revision. Any attempt to attenuate the ‘baroque nature’ of  his stories, he says in the prologue to Historia universal, would only mean to destroy them utterly. Thus, after denouncing their ‘lack of aesthetic justification’, Borges resolves to reprint them unchanged, invoking Pilate’s famous sentence, ‘quod scripsi, scripsi’ [‘what I have written, I have written’, John 19:22].10 While dissociating himself  from his ‘baroque’ work, Borges seems to af firm his auctorial identity all the more. Still, it may seem a strange gesture to invoke Pilate as witness for the unchanged reprint of  the collection; the more so, since the mere repetition – ‘quod scripsi, scripsi’ – does indeed change what Pilate says. In the New Testament, Pilate dismisses with this phrase the Jews’ demand that he change the inscription on Jesus’s cross from ‘Jesus of  Nazareth, king of  the Jews’ to ‘Jesus who claimed to be king of  the Jews’ ( John 19:21). In baroque readings, Pilate’s insistence on the original inscription is understood as an unwitting hint at its divine meaning: from the divine perspective, the humiliated Jesus indeed is the ‘king of  the Jews.’ Precisely his resistance to change his words, then, would change them by opening them for a second reading that reveals the divine truth in the mocking inscription. It is in this sense that the Italian Jesuit Emanuel Tesauro reads the biblical passage in his 1675 handbook on rhetoric:

10 ‘Atenuarlas hubiera equivalido a destruirlas; por eso prefiero, esta vez, invocar la sentencia quod scripsi, scripsi ( Juan, 19, 22) y reimprimirlas, al cabo de veinte años, tal cual.’ Borges, ‘Prólogo’, 291.

Perversions of  Judas. Betrayal in ‘Baroque’ Literature

27

Se tu odi colui che parla, altro non è che vna fredda & impronta af fermatiua; per dire: Io vò, che il Titolo della Croce si rimanga tal quale io lo scrissi. Ma se tu leggi l’Autografo della mente Diuina; egli è un Concetto arguto & ingegnoso. Peroche considerato che il Titolo della Croce i.n.r.i. fù scritto da Pilato per ischernire vn Re da bef fa: ma indettato da Dio per dichiarar Giesù Cristo Regio Capo della Chiesa: quel Motto qvod scripsi scripsi argutamente significa edder finita la scrittura del Vecchio Testamento nello spirare di Cristo in Croce.11 [If you listen to the one who says it (i.e. what I have written, I have written), it is nothing but a frigid and abrupt af firmation, saying: I want the inscription on the Cross to remain as I have written it. But if you read the autograph of  the divine spirit, it is a witty and ingenious conceit. For if you consider that the inscription on the Cross I.N.R.I. was written by Pilate in order to taunt a mock king, but dictated by God in order to reveal Jesus Christ, Head of  the Church, the verse Quod scripsi scripsi signifies wittily that the Old Testament is fulfilled by Christ’s expiration on the Cross.]

Thus Pilate, who condemned Jesus to the Cross as a false king, is also the one who af firms his true kingship, which is paradoxically realized in the Crucifixion. Certainly, he was not aware of  the inscription’s second meaning; but in baroque logic, this only proves that God was the ultimate agent of inscription, while the unbelieving Pilate is reduced to an ignorant handyman. The simple af firmation ‘quod scripsi, scripsi’, then, doubles the acting subject and reveals Pilate as an involuntary actor in the universal theatre of salvation. By quoting this passage from the Gospel of  John, Borges also alludes to a baroque notion of universal history; namely, the Christian notion of a ‘world theatre’ that restages the history of salvation ad infinitum.12 11 12

Emanuel Tesauro, Cannocchiale Aristotelico, ed. August Buck (Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1968), 63. The notion of  ‘world theatre’ is intimately connected with the problem of repetition. This can be illustrated by a passage from Benito Feijoo’s Teatro crítico universal (1726–39), which deals with the idea of  Eternal Return and is quoted by Borges in Discusión: ‘Uno de los delirios de Platón fue, que absuelto todo el círculo del Año magno […] se han de renovar todas las cosas; esto es, han de volver a parecer sobre el teatro del mundo los mismos actores a representar los mismos sucesos.’ [‘One of  the delusions of  Plato was that, when the Great Year comes full circle, (…) everything will be renewed; that is, the same actors have to reappear on the theatre of  the world

28

Joachim Harst

Just as Borges’s Historia universal de infamia deals with the relationship between infamy and universality, baroque ‘universal theatre’ makes use of  betrayal to demonstrate the truth of  the Christian revelation. In Pilate’s line, for example, the mere repetition of  the same verb and subject opens the words to their own contradiction. What Pilate thought he wrote, was in fact written by God; as af firmation of  the divine power, however, it also implies the fatal condemnation of every unbelieving subject. The ambivalence created by the repetition of  the same, then, reveals the self-deception of  Pilate (while af firming his sovereignty, he betrays himself as handyman) and thus opens the stage for God’s theatre of salvation. Here, everyone has to play his role – especially those who do not believe in God, who think they could resist his play, but finally are forced to betray themselves as ignorant accomplices in the universal history of salvation. In this sense, self-betrayal – which here involves working unwittingly against one’s own intentions and revealing what one really is – fragments individual agency, so that the ‘act’ of  betrayal rather seems to be the act of a ‘many-folded’, universal subject. Thus, Christian baroque universality presupposes betrayal, and even mere repetitions can have treacherous ef fects.13 If  Borges calls his early writings ‘baroque’, then, this might also refer to the baroque problem of universality and betrayal. This is all the more remarkable, since the notion of a ‘baroque’ style in contemporary

13

and represent the same events.’] Borges, Obras Completas, vol. 1, 277. In addition, Feijoo adduces the famous verses from Ecclesiastes: ‘Dice Salomón en el capítulo primero del Eclesiastés, que no hay cosa alguna nueva debajo del Sol: que lo mismo que se hace hoy, es lo que se hizo antes, y se hará después: que nadie puede decir: esto es reciente, pues ya precedió en los siglos anteriores.’ [‘Salomon says in the first chapter of  Ecclesiastes, that there is nothing new under the sun: that what is done today, is the same as what was done before and will be done afterwards: that no one can say: this occurred recently, for it already occurred all the centuries before.’] Feijoo, Teatro crítico universal, ed. D. Blar Moran (Barcelona: Real Compañía de Impresores y Libreros, 1775), vol. 4, 303f. See also Borges’ poem ‘Ecclesiastes I, 9’, in La cifra, in Obras Completas (Barcelona: Emecé 2010), vol. 3, 328. See my book, Heilstheater. Figur des barocken Trauerspiels zwischen Gryphius und Kleist (Paderborn: Fink 2012), esp. chapters 5–7, for a more detailed analysis of  Christian legitimization by betrayal.

Perversions of  Judas. Betrayal in ‘Baroque’ Literature

29

Latin-American fiction has hitherto only been applied to formal analogies between baroque and so-called postmodern structures of  thinking and writing;14 one scholar, for example, postulates an ‘aesthetic resonance between the crisis of mimetic representation that took place in the seventeenth century and the contemporary appreciation of style as message’.15 At a closer look, however, this baroque ‘crisis of representation’ seems to originate precisely in a will to ostentation, as it expresses itself, for example, in the scene of writing that opens in the baroque reading of  Pilate’s words: ‘quod scripsi, scripsi.’ Here, the written word becomes twofold and betrays Pilate in order to represent the divine author and the truth of  the Scripture. If, however, the divine author can only af firm himself in this utterly ironic way, in which revelation and betrayal coincide, representation threatens to dissolve into ambiguity: here, truth can only reveal itself  by betraying the one who asserts it, thereby placing both revelation and revealer in question. In this sense, the ‘crisis’ of representation would be the infinite process of distinction between revelation and betrayal that emerges from the idea of  Christian world theatre. Borges, I would like to suggest, draws precisely this consequence from baroque ‘universal history,’ when he deals with the problematic identity of  traitor and betrayed. In the following, I would like to discuss this analogy between baroque theatre and Borges’s fictional ref lections on universal history with reference to two specific texts. First, I will turn to Andreas Gryphius’s play Ermordete Majestät. Oder Carolus Stuardus König von Groß Britannien [Murdered Majesty. Or Charles Stuart King of  Great Britain, 1657, 1663] as an example for baroque strategies of representation that are characteristic of  the martyr play, which stages historical events as a repetition of  Christ’s 14 For a quick overview of  this tendency in scholarship with a focus on Borges, see Cristina Ortiz Ceberio, Recontextualización de la poética del siglo XVII en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Lang, 2008), 9–30; for a more theoretical analysis of  the term barroco see Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Buenos Aires: Ed. Sudamericana, 1974). The formal analogy between baroque and post-modern thinking is also the subject of  Christine Buci-Glucksmann: La raison baroque. De Baudelaire à Benjamin (Paris: Galilée 1984). 15 Ceberio, Recontextualización, 15.

30

Joachim Harst

Passion. Here, the infamous traitor is necessary to represent the Evil that is overcome by the martyr and to demonstrate the martyr’s salvation in his very condemnation. Since these scenes also imply a deliberate exhibition of  theatricality (usually including the appearance of ghosts and allegories), they transform the certainty of  faith into a theatrical demonstration. Thus, they mark a ‘final stage’ both in artistic and religious terms. Borges’s writings, I would like to argue in a second part of my paper, share this ‘baroque nature’, but they intensify the problematic relationship between betrayal and revelation. Especially striking is one of  his later stories, Tres versiones de Judas [Three versions of  Judas, 1944], as it carries the interdependence of  betrayal and revelation to the extreme of paradoxical identity. But precisely because Borges’s stories intensify this ‘baroque’ problem, they also dif fer from baroque theatre. While the latter employs betrayal to visualize the antagonism between Good and Evil, its radicalized form in Borges leads to the undecidability of salvation, which includes its invisibility and unspeakability – ‘infamy’ in the literal sense. And precisely along these lines, the universal theatre of salvation reappears in Borges as a Historia universal de la infamia.

Gryphius: Universal History of  Salvation One of  the major political events of seventeenth-century European history certainly was the execution of  Charles Stuart I, King of  England, in 1649, who was condemned to death for high treason because he waged war against the English parliament. Monarchists as well as anti-monarchists all over Europe sensed the enormity of  the execution and tried to come to terms with it in a f lood of pamphlets, essays, sermons and dramas. One of  the most inf luential monarchist treatises was the so-called Eikôn Basiliké (1649), the ‘image’ or ‘portrait of  the king’, which presents a (posthumous) monologue in which Charles defends himself against his accusers and movingly prays God to pardon their sin. Milton, on the other hand,

Perversions of  Judas. Betrayal in ‘Baroque’ Literature

31

wrote a blistering rebuttal under the title Eikônoklastês, ‘destroyer of images’ (1649).16 The opposition between monarchists and anti-monarchists thus articulates itself in terms that allude to visibility and, as a result, to a spiritual question that divided Anglicans and Puritans. While the latter followed Reformation theology and its prohibition of pictorial representation, the monarchist party saw the king as a representation, if not a direct successor, of  Jesus, whose kingship they regarded as the eidos, the ‘archetype’ and ‘image’ of monarchy.17 For this reason, the monarchist title ‘portrait of  the king’ is ambivalent. To be sure, the text presents first of all a literary portrait of  Charles I, but it also alludes to the parallels between his death and the Passion of  Christ and therefore highlights Christ’s traits in Charles’s image. The treatise’s famous frontispiece only emphasizes this analogy, supporting it with an allegorical reading of  the king’s crown.18 The engraving shows how King Charles treads with one foot on the earthly crown, while he seizes a crown of  thorns with his right hand. He thus replaces, as the inscriptions explain, the symbol of vanity with that of divine grace, which is said to be bitter and light at the same time. It is bitter because it announces the king’s martyrdom, and it is light, since it guarantees the crown of glory, on which Charles has already set his sights. In dying a martyr-like death, 16

17

18

See Jim Daems and Holly Faith Nelson, eds, Eikon Basilike. The portraiture of  His Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Suf ferings. With Selections from ‘Eikonoklastes’ by John Milton (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2005). See also Elizabeth Wheeler, ‘Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of  Self-Representation’, in Thomas Corns, ed., The Royal Image. Representations of  Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 122–40. See Karl-Heinz Habersetzer, Politische Typologie und dramatisches Exemplum. Studien zum historisch-ästhetischen Horizont des barocken Trauerspiels am Beispiel von Andreas Gryphius’ ‘Carolus Stuardus’ und ‘Papinianus’ (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985), 23–45; Günter Berghaus, Die Quellen zu Andreas Gryphius’ Trauerspiel ‘Carolus Stuardus’. Studien zur Entstehung eines historisch-politischen Märtyrerdramas der Barockzeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984). For a reproduction of  the frontispiece, see Andreas Gryphius, Ermordete Majestät. Oder Carolus Stuardus König von Groß Britannien, in Hugh Powell, ed., Trauerspiele (Tübingen: Niemeyer 1964), vol. 1, fig. 2; Berghaus, Quellen, 122. Hereafter, this edition will be cited by the abbreviation ‘CS A’ for the 1657 version and ‘CS’ for the 1663 version, followed by act- and line-number.

32

Joachim Harst

the king takes on the crown of  thorns and follows Jesus, proving to be his worthy representative and thereby gaining eternal glory. And indeed, he was canonized as martyr and saint after the restoration of monarchy in 1660. Obviously, the frontispiece represents the historical event of  King Charles’s beheading according to the structure of  the martyr-play. On another level, history itself in the baroque age is often understood as theatre. This ambiguity culminates in the double sense of  the scaf fold, which refers not only to the place of execution, but also more generally to the theatrical stage.19 Thus, the public execution exhibits an ambivalent notion of  history. On the one hand, the king’s beheading is an act that represents the revolutionaries’ autonomous intervention in history; on the other, it stages the event as part of  the all-encompassing tragedy of  history that is independent of any human actor or director. Its universal law is the fall of  the great who are crushed by their own power, but who can prove their greatness and holiness by maintaining spiritual constancy in their fall.20 The emblematic visualization of  the king’s fate as martyrdom, however, confronts some serious inconsistencies. Unlike Jesus, Charles was accused of  high treason, and thus the more serious defenders of monarchy are hard-pressed to explain why a traitor can still be a Christ-figure. One of  the more interesting solutions to this problem is provided by the German play Carolus Stuardus by Andreas Gryphius, allegedly composed in the year of  the king’s execution and published in 1657;21 a second edition of  the play with some major modifications followed in 1663. I would like to discuss it here as a representative example of  the baroque martyr-play and its way of dealing with the problem of  betrayal.

19

See Nancy Klein Maguire, ‘The Theatrical Mask/Masque of  Politics: The Case of  Charles I’, The Journal of  British Studies 28/1 (1989), 1–22. This ambiguity is also emphasized in Gryphius’ play Carolus Stuardus, which refers to the scaf fold repeatedly as ‘Schau-Platz’ [‘scene’, ‘stage’]. 20 In Carolus Stuardus, one of  the characters refers to this universal law as the ‘rasende verkehren | der ungewissen Zeit’ [‘furious perversion | of uncertain time’, CS 2, 42–3] – time itself would be the force that blindly drives the ‘perversion’ of  the opposites. 21 See Gryphius’s prologue to the play in Trauerspiele, vol. 1, 55.

Perversions of  Judas. Betrayal in ‘Baroque’ Literature

33

Like Eikôn Basiliké, the German play Carolus Stuardus employs the threefold crown-allegory to underscore the parallel between King Charles and Christ.22 In the last scene, as King Charles covers his head shortly before his execution, a bystander explains that his humble headdress is ‘die letzte cron’23 [‘the last crown’] – that is, an emblem of  the crown of  thorns that promises the ‘[d]er ewigkeiten cron’24 [‘eternal crown’] of glory. Here as in the monarchists’ treatise, Charles is depicted as a martyr who is unlawfully condemned and executed. But unlike the engraving of Eikôn Basiliké, Gryphius’s play discusses the question of  the monarch’s guilt, and integrates it paradoxically into its allegorical demonstration. In its first version, the play opens with a dialogue between two ghosts; the late Thomas Wentworth, Earl of  Staf ford, and the deceased William Laud, Archbishop of  Canterbury, bristle at the king’s unlawful condemnation and presage that God will take revenge upon the culprits.25 The prophecy, which is fulfilled in the play’s last scene by the allegorical appearance of  Vengeance,26 serves to frame the historical content of  the play and put it into the context of spectral, if not divine providence. At the same time, however, the ghosts’ loyalty to the king cannot be taken for granted, since both Wentworth and Laud were executed for high treason, although the king knew they were innocent.27 But instead of calling the king’s own innocence into question (and, as a result, his likeness to Christ), the regal betrayal of  his ministers serves only to highlight his innocence in the play. In an important passage, the king himself comments upon this problem in the following words:

For an analysis of  the play in the context of  the emblematic frontispiece from Eikôn Basiliké see Albrecht Schöne, ‘Ermordete Majestät. Oder Carolus Stuardus König von Groß Britannien’, in Gerhard Kaiser, ed., Die Dramen des Andreas Gryphius. Eine Sammlung von Einzelinterpretationen (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1968), 117–69. 23 CS 5, 419. 24 CS 5, 449. 25 CS A 1, 1–128. 26 CS 5, 497–544. 27 CS 1, 45–9. 22

34

Joachim Harst Der Höchst’ ist ja gerecht! und pf legt gerecht zu richten Auch durch nicht rechten Schluß / den Vngerecht’ erdichten. Wie Wentwort durch uns fil in nicht verdinte Pein: So muß sein herber Tod itzt unser Straf fe seyn. Wir müssen durch den Spruch / durch den er hingerissen: Vnschuldig / wider Recht / auch Blut / für Blut vergissen.28 [The highest is just, and judges justly, even by an unjust sentence that is made up by the unjust. Since Wentworth through Our judgement fell in undeserved pain, his bitter death has to be Our punishment. By virtue of  the very sentence that condemned him, innocently, unjustly, We, too, have to shed blood for blood.]

On the one hand, Charles acknowledges that the execution of  Wentworth and Laud was not justified. Hence, he understands his own condemnation as the divine punishment for the political murder of  his ministers. The justice of  God, then, reveals itself in the unjust judgement of  the revolutionaries. If, however, the sentence of  the revolutionaries is in fact divine punishment, then their accusation is falsified by the sentence of  God that speaks within it: if  God punishes him for his political crimes, the king reasons, then the accusation of  the revolutionaries must be unsubstantiated. Consequently, Charles can claim that he dies just as innocent as Wentworth and Laud, while his accusers are, like Pontius Pilate, ignorant handymen in God’s theatre. Hence, the martyr play employs a double betrayal to demonstrate the universality of  Christian salvation. First, it posits the open antagonism between martyr and intriguer, which returns here in the opposition between the king and the disloyal revolutionaries; furthermore, the intentions of  the revolutionaries are deceived by divine providence. Thus, the idea of  the martyr-play, the restaging of  historical events in the light of universal history, presupposes the self-betrayal of  the betrayer. He cannot know that his betrayal is no betrayal after all, but another role in a divine script that restages the history of salvation over and over again. As a result, in the logic of  baroque rhetoric and theatre potentially any death can be staged as a figurative repetition of  Christ’s passion. In 28

CS 5, 317–22.

Perversions of  Judas. Betrayal in ‘Baroque’ Literature

35

his funeral orations,29 for example, Gryphius sets the natural death of everyday people in analogy to the Cross and compares them to the martyrs of  his mourning-plays, thereby demonstrating their redemption to his audience.30 In consequence, Christian salvation becomes a truly universal story – everyone must die. If death, however, is the ultimate guarantee of redemption, it also imprisons the history of salvation in an endless repetition – everyone will die.31 Indeed, this endless repetition is af firmed to some extent by the Jesuit variants of world theatre. In plays by Bidermann, Caussinus, or Calderón, for example, the death of  the martyr is referred to as ludus (play). Since the Christian knows that everything on Earth is ephemeral, he does not take his death too seriously and does not seem to suf fer in torture. In fact, he even can be grateful towards his deceived executioners, as he knows that they have to do their job if  he wants to get to Heaven. As a consequence, the struggle between believers and pagans, witnesses and traitors, would have to go on as long as the Christian truth is to be represented by a potentially infinite series of martyrs. The ‘crisis’ of representation persists as long as history does. Gryphius, in contrast, refrains from drawing this radical consequence of universal salvation. In his plays, death remains painfully real and the executioners are not forgiven, although their role is necessary for the representation of  Christian salvation. This is why in Gryphius’s works the will 29 Andreas Gryphius, Dissertationes funebres oder Leich-Abdankungen, ed. Johann Anselm Steiger (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007). For an inspiring presentation of  the funeral orations see Nicola Kaminski, Andreas Gryphius (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998), 202–31. 30 Especially interesting is the case of  Magnetische Verbindung des Herrn JEsu und der in ihn verliebten Seelen, in which Gryphius compares the death of  Mariane Popschitz with the passion of  Christ. Furthermore, the exposition of  this analogy is structured after the martyr-play Catharina von Georgien and is analogous to Carolus Stuardus. See Hans-Jürgen Schings, Die patristische und stoische Tradition bei Andreas Gryphius. Untersuchungen zu den Dissertationes funebres und Trauerspielen (Köln: Böhlau, 1966), 269. 31 For an analysis of  the funeral speeches in the context of representation and repetition, see my Heilstheater, chapters 6 and 7.

36

Joachim Harst

to ostensible demonstration produces a dif ferent ‘crisis’ of representation. His plays strive to demonstrate the universal truth of salvation, but refrain from drawing the consequences; their demonstration evidently depends on Evil, without being able to acknowledge it. The result is a representation that becomes awkwardly self-conscious, in attempting to suppress that it actually is representation – a peculiar sort of self-critique. Carolus Stuardus, for example, ends with a terrible curse on all false judges and unfaithful subjects, and the 1663 revision adds an important scene, which shows the (anticipated) punishment of  the revolutionaries. Gryphius strives to give the representation grounding in the reality of suf fering and torture, but since the punishment of  the ‘traitors’ itself is anticipated (the restoration of monarchy takes place 1660, while the play is set in 1649), it also is denied representation. This will become clearer by taking a closer look at the scene of punishment. In this completely isolated scene, a character called Poleh appears onstage, driven mad by his bad conscience concerning the regicide. Scholars have debated ever since whom exactly this character might represent. It is clear, however, that he is one of  the king’s judges and, in the biblical register of  the play, a representative of  Pilate – or, as some argue, Judas.32 In his frenzy, he envisions the punishment of  his co-conspirators, which is simultaneously depicted in the background of  the stage; terrorized by this sight, he wants to leave the scene but is detained by the ghosts of  Wentworth and Laud, who block the exits. Confronted with their mute appearance, Poleh tries to understand what he sees. Have the innocent souls not been received in heaven? Why do they still haunt the earth? His answer to these questions is just as sophisticated as the king’s monologue: Nein Bischof f ! Nein! du bist zu selig nur verschiden. Nein Wentwort! Nein! du ruhst in unbewegten Friden! Mein’ Hertzens Angst vermumt sich nur zu meiner Pein; Erfreute Geister / ach! in euren Todtenschein.33

32 33

See Schöne, ‘Ermordete Majestät’, 147f. CS 5, 256–60.

Perversions of  Judas. Betrayal in ‘Baroque’ Literature

37

[No, bishop! No! You have departed in a too blissful way! No, Wentworth! No! You rest in quiet peace! It is only my heart’s fear that disguises itself, to increase my pain, delighted spirits, as your ghostly appearance.]

What Poleh sees on stage, then, are not the ghosts themselves, who peacefully dwell in heaven, but his bad conscience that masks itself like the ghosts, in order to increase his pain. In accordance with neo-stoic tradition, the scene presents the wounded conscience of  the king’s judge as immediate punishment for the regicide.34 The traitor not only deceives himself on account of  the betrayal, he also punishes himself  for it. In order to visualize this inner punishment, the play recurs to the ingenious artifice of  the ghost’s false appearance, which represents the pain of  the wounded conscience. This theatrical artifice is all the more necessary, since the historical punishment for the regicide occurred more then ten years after the fact – which was far too late to be staged in the play’s narrow timeframe. Furthermore, the punishment of  Poleh indirectly proves the King’s innocence: that Charles I is indeed a figure of  Christ was antithetically confirmed by the ‘anti-martyrdom’35 of  his judge. The demonstration of salvation depends once more upon the traitor. This dependence, however, is not acknowledged by the play – not even by way of negation;36 instead, it absolves itself  from any collaboration by making Poleh condemn himself. But this punishment, in turn, can only be visualized by the ghosts’ false appearance. The play then replaces one evil with another; only by way of  false representation can it claim to disrupt the infinite repetition of universal salvation. Shortly before, the allegory of  Religion itself descended onto the scene and declared: ‘Denckt Menschen! was euch wird in meinem Schein begegnen: | Ist Rauch und Dunst und Trug!’37 [‘Spectators, know that anything that appears in my

34 See H.W. Nieschmidt, ‘Emblematische Szenengestaltung in den Märtyrerdramen des Andreas Gryphius’, MLN 86/3 (1971), 321–44, 333. 35 Ibid. 36 Indeed, king Charles forgives his judges before he dies (CS 5, 322–30). Of course he can only do so because Gryphius makes sure that they are nevertheless punished. 37 CS 4, 331–2.

38

Joachim Harst

(Religion’s) disguise is nothing but smoke and fume and deceit.’] A ‘crisis’ of representation could not be more vividly represented. In this sense, Carolus Stuardus ‘exhibits’ and ‘dilapidates’ its theatrical ‘means’ in a way that one might call, with Borges, ‘baroque’.

Borges: Universal History of  Infamy As if  he were to carry this ‘baroque’ interdependence of salvation and betrayal to the extreme, Borges writes in a late story, La Secta de los Treinta [The Sect of  the Thirty, 1975], that in the ‘tragedy of  the Cross’ there were voluntary and involuntary actors. Involuntary were the Jewish priests, Pilate and the Soldiers; of voluntary actors, in turn, there were only two: the Redeemer and Judas.38 While the notion of  ‘involuntary actors’ sums up the problem of  baroque universal theatre as I have discussed it here with reference to Pilate and Poleh, the idea that Judas voluntarily promoted the history of salvation leads to its radical inversion. In the following, I will present Borges’s story Tres versiones de Judas as an example for the inversion and intensification of  betrayal.39 In this story, saviour and traitor are

38

39

‘En la tragedia de la Cruz […] hubo actores voluntarios e involuntarios, todos imprescindibles, todos fatales. Involuntarios fueron los sacerdotes que entregaron los dineros de plata, involuntaria fue la plebe que eligió a Barrabás, involuntario fue el procurador de Judea […] Voluntarios solo hubiera dos: el Redentor y Judas.’ Jorge Luis Borges, ‘La Secta de los Treinta’, in El libro de arena (1975), in Obras Completas, vol. 3, 46. ‘Tres versiones de Judas’, in Ficciones (1944), Obras Completas, vol. 1, 514–17. There are many more stories by Borges that deal with the relationship of  traitor and saviour. See, for example, ‘La forma de la espada’ and ‘Tema del traidor y del héroe’ in the same collection; ‘Los teólogos’ and ‘Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–1874)’ in El Aleph; and ‘El atroz redentor Lazarus Morell’ as well as ‘El tintorero enmascarado Hákim de Merv’ in Historia universal de la infamia. There also are many poems on the same subject.

Perversions of  Judas. Betrayal in ‘Baroque’ Literature

39

drawn-in and contracted into the same figure, thus amplifying the ‘crisis’ of  baroque representation. At first sight, the story presents itself as a critical commentary on the work of  Nils Runeberg,40 a Swedish theologian, who is concerned with why the story of  the Passion employs a traitor-figure in the first place: since Jesus is a public person who teaches in the synagogues, the Jews would not need to pay someone to reveal him.41 The Holy Scripture, however, makes no superf luous statements. As a result of  this, Judas’s treachery cannot be accidental, but must have a ‘lugar misterioso en la economía de la redención’ [‘mysterious place in the economy of  the Redemption’].42 Runeberg’s first attempt to assess the true role of  Judas in the history of salvation understands the betrayal as a symmetrical response to God’s humiliation in the incarnation: ‘El Verbo se había rebajado a mortal; Judas, discípulo del Verbo, podía rebajarse a delator (el peor delito que la infamia soporta).’43 [‘The Word had lowered Himself  to be mortal; Judas, the disciple of  the Word, could lower himself  to the role of  traitor (the worst transgression infamy abides).’] The voluntary abdication of  God’s divine qualities in the incarnation is answered by Judas’s equally voluntary renunciation of  his humanity; the infamous traitor becomes the mirror image of  God’s Son

40 The story is another example for a genre of  fiction that Borges has brought to perfection: the fictional commentary. In the prologue to El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941), he describes this technique as follows: ‘Desvarío laborioso y empobrecedor el de componer vastos libros; el de explayar en quinientas páginas una idea cuya perfecta exposición oral cabe en pocos minutos. Mejor procedimiento es simular que esos libros ya existen y ofrecer un resumen, un comentario.’ [‘The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages, developing an idea whose perfect oral exhibition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist and then to of fer a résumé, a commentary.’] Borges, Obras Completas, vol. 1, 429. 41 Borges, ‘Tres versiones de Judas’, 515. 42 ‘Ergo, la traición de Judas no fue casual; fue un hecho prefijado que tiene su lugar misterioso en la economía de la redención.’ Ibid. 43 Ibid. My emphasis.

40

Joachim Harst

– ‘Judas ref leja en algún modo a Jesús’ [‘Judas in some way ref lects Jesus’].44 From this perspective, the betrayal and ensuing suicide of  Judas appear as the sacrifice that renders mankind worthy of redemption. That Runeberg’s exegesis did not meet with widespread approval probably comes as no surprise. Confronted with the rejection of  his writings by all theologians, Runeberg revises his interpretation; a few years later, he publishes another ‘version of  Judas’, which the narrator calls ‘a perversion’ of  his earlier thesis.45 If  God, Runeberg argues, sacrificed himself  to redeem mankind, one must assume that his sacrifice was ‘perfect’ and complete. Thus, it would simply be careless to think that God incarnated himself in just any man. Adducing the prophecy of  Isaiah – ‘He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief ’ (Isa 53:2) – Runeberg concludes that God became man in the most radical sense: ‘Dios totalmente se hizo hombre pero hombre hasta la infamia, hombre hasta la reprobación y el abismo. Para salvarnos, […] eligió un ínfimo destino: fue Judas.’46 [‘He became man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of  being reprehensible – all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, (…) he chose a vile destiny: he became Judas.’] If  God’s sacrifice is to be divine and perfect, then he must incarnate himself in Judas, the very representation of  Evil. Infamy then would be the earthly appearance of divinity. It is easy to see why this extreme consequence is a ‘perversion’ of  the traditional interpretation of  Judas. Runeberg radicalizes the ‘baroque’ dependence of divine revelation on a traitor-figure, until Saviour and traitor merge and the divine sacrifice is transformed into a paradoxical act of self-betrayal. The ef fects, of course, are disastrous, for they render the history of salvation unrepresentable. Even if one accepts Runeberg’s thesis that Judas is the true Son of  God, one still has to assume the divine legation of  Jesus, because the argument rests upon the role of  Judas’s betrayal. 44 Ibid. The idea that microcosm and macrocosm correspond to each other (‘el orden inferior es un espejo del orden superior’, ibid.) is one to which Borges returns repeatedly in his stories; see, for example, Los teólogos, in Obras Completas, vol. 1, 553. 45 Borges, ‘Tres versiones de Judas’, 516. 46 Ibid., 517.

Perversions of  Judas. Betrayal in ‘Baroque’ Literature

41

If  Judas did not betray the Son of  God, but only a false Messiah, then he would not be the most infamous figure – and consequently, he would not be the only appropriate incarnation for God. Runeberg’s exegesis leads to the paradoxical conclusion that, if  Jesus is not the real Messiah, then neither is Judas. From this perspective, which comes quite close to the ‘divine’ perspective that I mentioned in my introduction, Jesus and Judas, saviour and traitor, are two aspects of  the same figure, or, more precisely: neither Jesus nor Judas would constitute the Messiah, but the abyssal interference of  betrayal and revelation that takes place between the two. The event of salvation is perverted into an endlessly repeating history of infamy. At this point, I think, Borges’s af finity to the ‘baroque’ problem of  Saviour and traitor becomes more complex. On the one hand, he evidently works through the interdependence of  the figures; on the other, he comes to radically dif ferent conclusions. While baroque plays employ the traitor to construct a clear antithesis between right and wrong and thus visualize the redemption of  the believer, Borges’s merging of  Jesus and Judas leads to its utter invisibility. For Borges, there cannot be an ‘image of  the king’, since the Messiah is not a figure, but the abyssal process of  ‘infamy’. In this sense, Borges draws the consequences of  baroque universal theatre. The ‘crisis of representation’ that I pointed out in Carolus Stuardus has led to a complete breakdown of representative structures. This also means that the ‘history of salvation’ does not refer to a specific period in time anymore. For Runeberg, Isaiah’s words are ‘la puntual profecía no de un momento sino de todo el atroz porvenir, en el tiempo y en la eternidad, del Verbo hecho carne’ [‘a precise prophecy, not of one moment, but of all the atrocious future, in time and eternity, of  the Word made f lesh’],47 since the process of revelation is infinite. In a similar vein, the story itself employs structures of verification that lead to a potentially infinite propagation of  betrayal. Hence (and this is a very ‘baroque’ consequence of  Borges’s writing), the infinite repetition of universal history can become an ambivalent proof  for the possibility of salvation.

47 Ibid.

42

Joachim Harst

So far, I have only paraphrased two of  the three versions of  Judas named in the title of  the story, but the abyss that opens in the second version of  Runeberg’s thesis will take another turn. As one might expect, the Swedish theologians do not pay much attention to Runeberg’s speculations. This time, however, Runeberg takes no of fence at their persistent silence; to the contrary, he understands it as a ‘miraculous confirmation’: God, he feels, has ordered this indif ference since he does not wish his ‘terrible secret’ to be revealed.48 Consequently, Runeberg ‘sintió que estaban convergiendo sobre él antiguas maldiciones divinas’ [‘sensed ancient and divine curses converging upon him’].49 And he realizes with horror that, through his reading, he himself  has betrayed the name of  God: ‘Ebrio de insomnio y de vertiginosa dialéctica, Nils Runeberg erró por las calles de Malmö, rogando a voces que le fuera deparada la gracia de compartir con el Redentor el Infierno.’50 [‘Drunk with insomnia and vertiginous dialectic, Nils Runeberg erred through the streets of  Malmö, praying aloud that he be given the grace to share Hell with the Redeemer.’] The destinies of  Judas Iscariot and his reader are ‘secretly the same destiny’ – in Borges, they ‘form a single person’.51 The propagation of  betrayal also extends to the narrator, who at first glance seems to report Runeberg’s works impartially, but in fact often hints ironically at the incredibility of  the theologian’s speculations;52 nor does he spare himself in his mocking irony. He opens his narration with the remark that Runeberg’s theses, which sprang from deep religious concern, ‘would seem like frivolous and idle exercises in irrelevance or blasphemy’,

48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. The full passage reads: ‘Runeberg intuyó en esa indiferencia ecuménica una casi milagrosa confirmación. Dios ordenaba esa indiferencia; Dios no quería que se propalara en la tierra Su terrible secreto. Runeberg […] sintió que estaban convergiendo sobre él antiguas maldiciones divinas […] Ebrio de insomnio y de vertiginosa dialéctica, Nils Runeberg erró por las calles de Malmö, rogando a voces que le fuera deparada la gracia de compartir con el Redentor el Infierno.’ 51 See Borges, ‘El tiempo circular’, 595. 52 Borges, ‘Tres versiones de Judas’, 514.

Perversions of  Judas. Betrayal in ‘Baroque’ Literature

43

if rediscovered by a literary person ‘in a salon in Paris, or even in Buenos Aires’ – say, Borges.53 If, however, Runeberg’s faith is necessarily betrayed when narrated, then the narrator (involuntarily) becomes another figure of  Judas – just as the narration betrays its narrator by accusing itself of aesthetic worthlessness.54 But why exactly should the report on Runeberg pervert his faithful exegesis into ‘blasphemy’, if it only repeats what he wrote? It is apparently the simple fact that the story repeats Runeberg’s exegesis without sharing his piety, or more precisely that it cannot share its piety because it merely repeats what Runeberg (allegedly) believed.55 In Borges, the act of narration itself is often designed as a repetition that echoes the recurring theme of  Eternal Return, and as such, it serves to prove and refute that which is narrated at the same time.56 Here, the ‘betrayal’ of  Runeberg may simultaneously verify and contradict the idea that traitor and betrayed ‘form a single person’. Once more, repetition proves to be betrayal – just as Borges’s rigorous dealing with betrayal and revelation leads to the problem of eternal repetition. The universal strategy of  his ‘baroque’ writing could therefore indeed be condensed in Pilate’s words: ‘quod scripsi, scripsi.’ 53

‘En un cenáculo de París o aun en Buenos Aires, un literato podría muy bien redescubrir las tesis de Runeberg; esas tesis, propuestas en un cenáculo, serían ligeros ejercicios inútiles de la negligencia o de la blasfemia.’ Ibid. 54 The phrase ‘ejercicios inútiles de la negligencia’ [‘futile exercises of negligence’] recalls the similar expression from the prologue of  Historia universal de la infamia: ‘ambiguos ejercicios’ [‘ambiguous exercises’], ‘sin justificación estética’ [‘lacking aesthetic justification’], ‘Prólogo a la edición de 1954’, 291. 55 The narrator emphasizes that he only reports Runeberg’s belief, ‘not his dialectics and proofs.’ Borges, ‘Tres versiones de Judas’, 514. 56 In a similar vein, the pseudo-academic references in the text support its thesis by suspending it: ‘Erfjord, en el tercer apéndice de la Christelige Dogmatik, […] anota que la crucifixión de Dios no ha cesado, porque lo acontecido una sola vez en el tiempo se repite sin tregua en la eternidad.’ [‘In the third appendix to the Christian Dogmatics, Erfjord (…) notes that the crucifixion of  God did not cease, for what happens once in time repeats itself without pause in eternity.’] Ibid., 516, n. 3. ‘Erfjord’ is a fictional character who returns in Los teólogos; the thesis that ‘what happened once in time repeats itself unceasingly in eternity’ (see above) has been presented by Borges in El tiempo circular.

44

Joachim Harst

Bibliography Berghaus, Günter, Die Quellen zu Andreas Gryphius’ Trauerspiel ‘Carolus Stuardus’. Studien zur Entstehung eines historisch-politischen Märtyrerdramas der Barockzeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984). Borges, Jorge Luis, Obras Completas, 4 vols (Barcelona: Emecé, 1996). Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, La raison baroque. De Baudelaire à Benjamin (Paris: Galilée, 1984). Ceberio, Cristina Ortiz, Recontextualización de la poética del siglo XVII en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Lang, 2008). Daems, Jim and Holly Faith Nelson, eds, ‘Eikon Basilike. The portraiture of  His Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Suf ferings.’ With Selections from ‘Eikonoklastes’ by John Milton (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2005). Feijoo, Benito, Teatro crítico universal (1726–39), ed. D. Blar Moran, 8 vols (Barcelona: Real Compañía de Impresores y Libreros, 1775). Gryphius, Andreas, Dissertationes funebres oder Leich-Abdankungen, ed. Johann Anselm Steiger (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007). ——, Ermordete Majestät. Oder Carolus Stuardus König von Groß Britannien, in Trauerspiele I, ed. Hugh Powell (Tübingen: Niemeyer 1964). Habersetzer, Karl-Heinz, Politische Typologie und dramatisches Exemplum. Studien zum historisch-ästhetischen Horizont des barocken Trauerspiels am Beispiel von Andreas Gryphius’ ‘Carolus Stuardus’ und ‘Papinianus’ (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985). Harst, Joachim, Heilstheater. Figur des barocken Trauerspiels zwischen Gryphius und Kleist (Paderborn: Fink 2012). Kaminski, Nicola, Andreas Gryphius (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998). Klein Maguire, Nancy, ‘The Theatrical Mask/Masque of  Politics: The Case of  Charles I’, The Journal of  British Studies 28/1 (1989), 1–22. Nieschmidt, H.W., ‘Emblematische Szenengestaltung in den Märtyrerdramen des Andreas Gryphius’, MLN 86/3 (1971), 321–44. Sarduy, Severo, Barroco (Buenos Aires: Ed. Sudamericana, 1974). Schings, Hans-Jürgen, Die patristische und stoische Tradition bei Andreas Gryphius. Untersuchungen zu den Dissertationes funebres und Trauerspielen (Köln: Böhlau, 1966). Schöne, Albrecht, ‘Ermordete Majestät. Oder Carolus Stuardus König von Groß Britannien’, in Gerhard Kaiser, ed., Die Dramen des Andreas Gryphius. Eine Sammlung von Einzelinterpretationen (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1968), 117–69.

Perversions of  Judas. Betrayal in ‘Baroque’ Literature

45

Tesauro, Emanuel, Cannocchiale Aristotelico [5th edn 1670], ed. August Buck (Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1968). Wheeler, Elizabeth, ‘Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation’, in Thomas Corns, ed., The Royal Image. Representations of  Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 122–40.

Kristina Mendicino

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

In an immanent philosophy of spirit, where dif ference and opposition spring from a primary diremption, only to reconcile once again, no moment of  betrayal could disturb the self-disclosing and self-concluding circuit. Every dif ference, every other that might emerge, would be a dif ference or an other of spirit: its dif ference, its other. Throughout the oeuvre of  G.W.F. Hegel, who traced the immanence of spirit to its last consequences, variations of  this circuit circulate. The course of  Hegel’s writings on logic, nature, consciousness, history and religion is hardly jarred by betrayal (his Christological system operates without Judas), so that betrayal would seem to be a non-function in the process of spirit. When Hegel does mention Judas in his earliest texts on theology, he characterizes him as merely, but passionately, avaricious, like Klopstock’s Judas, or Molière’s Harpagon.1 In his major published 1

The only times the word Judas appears in Hegel’s writings are in his early theological fragments. In ‘Das Leben Jesu’, Hegel writes, ‘[…] Habsucht scheint die Hauptleidenschaft des Judas gewesen zu sein, die durch seinen Umgang mit Jesu nicht einer besseren Gesinnung Platz gemacht hatte, und die wohl sein ursprünglicher Grund, Jesu Anhänger zu werden, gewesen sein mochte, indem er sie befriedigen zu können hof fte, wenn Jesus sein Messiasreich aufgerichtet haben würde […].’ [‘(…) Avarice seems to have been the primary passion of  Judas, which made no room for a better disposition through his traf fic with Jesus and which was probably the original ground for his decision to become a disciple of  Jesus, in that he hoped to satisfy it when Jesus would have erected his messianic realm (…).’] Hegel, ‘Das Leben Jesu’, in Herman Nohl, ed., Hegels theologische Jugendschriften (Tübingen: Mohr, 1907) 73–136, 124. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine. For an historical sketch of interpretations of  Judas, including the avarice stereotype, see Anthony Cane, The Place of  Judas Iscariot in Christology (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005) and Carl Daub, the author of  Judas Ischariot, oder das Böse im Verhältniß zum Guten, whom Hegel

48

Kristina Mendicino

texts, as well as his posthumously edited lectures, Hegel avoids all explicit acknowledgment of  the treacherous breaches upon which Salvation and the Church stand: the betrayal of  Judas, which inaugurates the Passion; the triple denial of  Peter, the rock upon which Christ founds his Church.2 Focusing on Hegel’s Die Phänomenologie des Geistes [The Phenomenology of  Spirit, 1807], I trace the rhetorical strategies by which he empties his Christology of  the treacherous fundament of  Christianity. I aim to shed light on the role of  betrayal within Hegel’s system of  Spirit – which will prove to be as crucial as it is understated.3 Betrayal does not belong to Hegel’s explicit discussions of Christianity. From the first pages of  the Phenomenology, however, it is plain that this exclusion has nothing to do with an attempt to repress the pain and negativity of  the incarnate God. In his preface, Hegel writes, Das Leben Gottes und das göttliche Erkennen mag also wohl als ein Spielen der Liebe mit sich selbst ausgesprochen werden; diese Idee sinkt zur Erbaulichkeit und selbst zur Fadheit herab, wenn der Ernst, der Schmerz, die Geduld und Arbeit des Negativen darin fehlt. An sich ist jenes Leben wohl die ungetrübte Gleichheit und Einheit mit sich selbst, der es kein Ernst mit dem Anderssein und der Entfremdung, so

2

3

praises in his 1822 ‘Vorrede zu Hinrichs Religionsphilosophie’, in Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, eds, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, 20 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–72), vol. 11, 42–67. All citations from Hegel’s works are, unless otherwise noted, from the edition of  Moldenhauer and Michel, which will henceforth be abbreviated Werke, followed by volume and page number. The complementarity of  Peter’s denial of  Christ and the betrayal of  Judas is underscored throughout the New Testament in their frequent juxtaposition to one another in the Gospels. The painstaking ef forts of  Hegel’s contemporary Daub to distinguish the two in his own study of  Judas only emphasize their – uncomfortably – extraordinary closeness. See Daub, Judas Ischariot, vol. 1, 4–18. In a very understated way, Jacques Derrida also suggests this when he writes, ‘Quelle dif férence entre ce point de vue (regard de judas) et celui de la dialectique spéculative, quant à la vérité la plus dévoilée? Quelle est, à table, l’écart entre Judas et celui qui est la vérité? Qui tient ici le discours le plus vrai? Quelle place revient donc à un Judas? Mais le discours de la vérité peut-il sortir de table? / Voire’, Glas (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1974), 41.

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

49

wie mit dem Überwinden dieser Entfremdung ist. Aber dies Ansich ist die abstrakte Allgemeinheit, in welcher von seiner Natur, für sich zu sein, und damit überhaupt von der Selbstbewegung der Form abgesehen wird.4 [The life of  God and godly recognition may well be spoken as the play of  love with itself; this idea sinks down to mere edification or even insipidness if  the seriousness, pain, patience and labour of  the negative is lacking in it. In itself  that life is indeed the unsullied equity and unity with itself, which takes neither being-other and alienation, nor the overcoming of  this alienation, seriously. But this in itself is the abstract universality in which its nature to be for itself, and thus also the autokinesis of  form, is disregarded.]

A clearer call to take negation seriously – as well as the movement of  form, itself a movement of negation – could not be made. And indeed, Hegel spares his Christology of no negativity; even Christ’s extreme of abandonment has its place as the necessary, total negation of  God that must precede any resurrection of  Spirit: ‘O God of mine, o God of mine, why have you left me utterly?’ [ὁ θεός μου ὁ θεός μου, εἰς τί ἐγκατέλιπές με; Mark 15:34].5 Hegel returns to this moment several times, writing, for example, in an early aphorism: ‘Gott selbst ist tot; die höchste Verzweif lung der völligen Gottverlassenheit.’6 [‘God himself is dead; the highest desperation of  the total abandonment of  God.’] In the lectures on aesthetics, Christ’s death and God-forsakenness are distinguished as the most extreme of all Gegensätze, or oppositions: Selbst der christliche Gott ist dem Übergange zur Erniedrigung des Leidens, ja zur Schmach des Todes nicht entnommen und wird von dem Seelenschmerze nicht befreit, in welchem er rufen muß: ‘Mein Gott, mein Gott, warum hast du mich

4 Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 24. 5 The moment of abandonment is narrated in both the Gospel of Matthew (27:46) and Mark (15:34). Christ’s words are first quoted in Aramaic, ελωι ελωι λεμα σαβαχθανι, then translated, ὁ θεός μου ὁ θεός μου, εἰς τί ἐγκατέλιπές με; (Mark 15:34). Eberhard and Erwin Nestle, eds, Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1984). All citations from the New Testament are from this edition. 6 This citation is taken from the ‘Aphorismen aus Hegels Wastebook’, in Hegel, Werke, vol. 2, 563.

50

Kristina Mendicino verlassen?’; […] Denn die Größe und Kraft mißt sich wahrhaft erst an der Größe und Kraft des Gegensatzes, aus welchem der Geist sich zur Einheit in sich wieder zusammenbringt […].7 [Even the Christian God is not exempt from the transition to the debasement of suf fering, yes even to the disgrace of death, and (he) is not freed from the pain of  the soul, in which he must cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ (…) For greatness and strength measure themselves truly against the greatness and strength of  the opposition out of which spirit brings itself again to unity in itself.]

In other words, Hegel’s texts would seem to comprehend and grasp even the ultimate Gegen-satz, or counter-sentence, to the godly logos that condenses the movement of spirit he reiterates in his oeuvre, again and again: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was by God, and God was the Word’ [ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν λόγος John 1:1].8 Of all sentences, Christ’s utterance may well counter any outspoken ‘Spielen der Liebe mit sich selbst’ [‘play of  love with itself ’] – not only as an expression of  the death of  God and God-foresakenness, but also as a form of negation that threatens any recuperation of spirit for itself. Hegel pairs the death and abandonment of  God with good reason. Ιnsofar as all that Christ says and does is the saying and doing of  God,9 like the Homeric heroes and gods, who do ‘ein und dasselbe’ [‘one and the same thing’],10 one would have to translate his words as God’s appeal to

7 Hegel, Werke, vol. 14, 234. 8 For its iterations in the Phänomenlogie des Geistes and in Hegel’s subsequent Wissenschaft der Logik, see Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 559 and Werke, vol. 6, 550. 9 Throughout the Gospels Christ reiterates the duplicity of  his and God’s deeds: ‘Just as the father of mine up to just now constantly works, so, too, do I work’, [ὁ πατήρ μου ἕως ἄρτι ἐργάζεται κἀγὼ ἐργάζομαι John 5:17]; ‘Truly, truly I tell you, it is not possible for the son to do anything of  his own unless he sees the father doing it: for whatever he does, these are the things the son also does likewise’ [ἀμὴν ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, οὐ δύναται ὁ υἱὸς ποιεῖν ἀφ’ ἑαυτοῦ οὐδὲν ἐὰν μή τι βλέπῃ τὸν πατέρα ποιοῦντα · ἃ γὰρ ἂν ἐκεῖνος ποιῇ, ταῦτα καὶ ὁ υἱὸς ὁμοίως ποιεῖ John 5:19]. Earlier, John the Baptist tells the Jews, ‘For he whom God sent speaks the words of  God’ [ὃν γὰρ ἀπέστειλεν ὁ θεὸς τὰ ῥήματα τοῦ θεοῦ λαλεῖ John 3:34]. 10 Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 532.

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

51

God: ‘O God of mine, o God of mine, why have you [who are I] left me [who am you], utterly?’ However, what works as ‘lächerlicher Überf luß’ [‘laughable superf luity’] in Greek epic is spoken here in deadly earnest, in a way that doubles God’s abandonment and empties both God and Christ of  their being. For if  Christ is asking why he has left himself, in asking why God has left him (or why God has left Himself, in leaving him), the one left speaking cannot be God or Christ anymore. And soon, language itself is abandoned, as ‘Jesus, releasing a great cry, expired’ [Ἰησοῦς ἀφεὶς φωνὴν μεγάλην ἐξέπνευσεν Mark 15:37]. This torn language tears a rift in language, logic and even spirit (one might even translate ἐξέπνευσεν with exspirited, which resonates in the Vulgate exspirivit). A spoken death of  God preempts the corporeal death of  Christ on the cross. But rather than commenting upon what this death sentence might mean for the logic of  Christianity, Hegel states that god-forsakenness, the death of  God, mark the extreme ‘Härte seiner Gottlosigkeit’, or ‘hardness of its godlessness’, from which alone ‘die höchste Totalität in ihrem ganzen Ernst und aus ihrem tiefsten Grunde, zugleich allumfassend und in die heiterste Freiheit ihrer Gestalt auferstehen kann und muß’ [‘the highest totality in its complete seriousness and from its deepest ground can and must resurrect at once in an all-encompassing way and in the most joyful freedom of its form’].11 This ‘tiefste[] Grund’ [‘deepest ground’] is, however, a treacherous abyss, insofar as God and Christ alike, in a mutual duplicity, are given up as empty terms in one and the same gesture.12 11 12

Hegel, ‘Glauben und Wissen oder Ref lexionsphilosophie der Subjektivität in der Vollständigkeit ihrer Formen als Kantische, Jacobische und Fichtesche Philosophie’, in Hegel, Werke, vol. 2, 287–433, 432–3. Incarnation itself is spoken of as an act of  betrayal, or ‘handing-over’ (παραδιδόναι), in Paul’s letter to the Romans: ‘If  God is for us, who will be against us? He, who did not spare his own son, but betrayed him for all of us, how could he not grace us, together with his son, with all things?’ [εἰ ὁ θεὸς ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν, τίς καθ’ ἡμῶν; ὅς γε τοῦ ἰδίου υἱοῦ οὐκ ἐφείσατο, ἀλλὰ ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν πάντων παρέδωκεν αὐτόν, πῶς οὐχὶ καὶ σὺν αὐτῷ τὰ πάντα ἡμῖν χαρίσεται Rom. 8:31–2]. For the specific linguistic complexity of παραδιδόναι, the verb for betrayal in New Testament Greek, see J.D.M. Derett, ‘The Ischariot, MeSira and the Redemption’, Journal for the Study of  the New Testament 8 (1980), 2–23.

52

Kristina Mendicino

In New Testament Greek, to ‘betray’ is ‘to give over’ [παραδιδόναι] in word or deed. In giving himself over to an ultimate semantic and ontological emptiness, God’s abandonment culminates the series of  betrayals and acts of  handing-over that make up Christ’s Passion.13 The ‘of fenbare Religion’ [‘revealed religion’] of  the Phenomenology is one that first of all betrays itself.14 And if  this betrayal seems abandoned in Hegel’s chapter on the ‘of fenbare Religion’, one nonetheless crosses it in his text. Because this religion is the foundation of  Hegelian philosophy; because Hegel proclaims his philosophy the fulfilment of  Christian religion,15 biblical echoes pervade the whole text. What Hegel passes over in his explicit discussions of  Christianity betrays itself in his other chapters. When, for example, the initiates of  Demeter and Dionysos consume their gods by consuming bread and wine, prefiguring the Eucharist, the gods are ‘verraten’ [‘betrayed’] as substances of  the human self who enjoys them – so that the unity of self and divine essence is ‘geof fenbart’ [‘revealed’]: ‘In diesem Genusse ist also jenes aufgehende Lichtwesen verraten, was es ist […]. Denn das Mystische ist nicht Verborgenheit eines Geheimnisses oder Unwissenheit, sondern besteht darin, daß das Selbst sich mit dem Wesen eins weiß und dieses also geof fenbart ist.’16 [‘Thus that dawning essence of  light is betrayed in this pleasure for what it is (…). For the mystical is not the concealing of

Because the verb that means betray literally means to hand over, the betrayal of  Christ continues to resonate in the moments at which he is, for example, handed over to Pontius Pilate [παρεδώκαμεν, παρέδωκάν John 18:30, 35]. 14 ‘Die of fenbare Religion’ is the title of  the final chapter in the penultimate section of  Hegel’s Phenomenology, ‘Die Religion’. As in English, the German verb for betrayal, verraten can refer to revealing when it is used ref lexively. 15 Statements to this ef fect recur throughout Hegel’s writings. The Christological fundament of  Hegelian philosophy is most thoroughly explicated in Werner Hamacher, ‘pleroma – zu Genesis und Struktur einer dialektischen Hermeneutik bei Hegel’, in Werner Hamacher, ed., ‘Der Geist des Christentums’: Schriften 1796 –1800 (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Vienna: Ullstein, 1978), 1–333. See also Michael Theunissen, Hegels Lehre vom absoluten Geist als theologisch-politischer Traktat (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970) and, more recently, Peter Trawny, Die Zeit der Dreieinigkeit: Untersuchungen zur Trinität bei Hegel und Schelling (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005). 16 Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 526. 13

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

53

a secret or of unknowingness; rather, it resides in the way the self  knows itself  to be one with essence and this (essence) is thus revealed.’] In this sentence, betrayal in the Greek mysteries precedes and conditions the certain knowledge that divine revelation and belief always constitute for Hegel.17 This is not to say, however, that betrayal and revelation are synonyms that Hegel varies. Already in the passage devoted to the mystery cults of  Greece, the moments of  betrayal and revelation he names dif fer according to the self-consciousness of  the self in his relation to divinity. Only when an initiate knows himself  to be one with the divine essence it consumes, does Hegel draw the conclusion that this essence is ‘geof fenbart’ [‘revealed’]. Only when the divine essence is itself a self-conscious spirit, can its incarnate sacrifice lead to the ‘Verlust der Substanz und ihres Gegenübertretens gegen das Bewußtsein’ [‘the loss of substance and its confrontation with consciousness’], which is, at the same time, ‘die reine Subjektivität der Substanz oder die reine Gewißheit seiner selbst, die ihr als dem Gegenstande oder dem Unmittelbaren oder dem reinen Wesen fehlte’ [‘the pure subjectivity of substance or the pure certainty of itself, which it had lacked as the object or as the immediate or as the pure essence’].18 Hegel will explicitly add that these mysteries fall short of  the Eucharist they presage, because the self does not (yet) consume the self-conscious self: ‘Noch hat sich […] der Geist als selbstbewußter Geist nicht geopfert, und das Mysterium des Brotes und Weins ist noch nicht Mysterium des Fleisches und Blutes.’19 [‘Spirit has not yet (…) sacrificed itself as self-conscious spirit, and the mystery of  bread and wine is not yet the mystery of  f lesh and blood.’] (Self-)consciousness

17

18 19

Belief, or ‘Glaube’, is not, for Hegel, a word that expresses one’s private conviction on an uncertain issue, which could be otherwise. Belief is never mere belief, as opposed to knowledge. To the contrary, ‘Glaube’ describes a structure in which one’s immediate self-certainty resides in one’s immediate certainty of another, and for this reason, it is one’s most certain knowledge. See Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 410. Philosophy is thus not opposed to the content of  belief, but to its immediacy – and indeed, by mediating that which constitutes immediate, religious belief, philosophy fulfills religion. Ibid., 572. Ibid., 527.

54

Kristina Mendicino

distinguishes divine betrayal and revelation, at once ref lecting their nearness and underscoring their dif ference. If  the Greek mysteries cults are a proto-Eucharist, Greek comedy, the fulfillment of ancient ‘Kunstreligion’ [‘art religion’], is recast as the night in which Christ was betrayed by Judas. Of comedy Hegel writes: ‘Diese Form ist die Nacht, worin die Substanz verraten ward und sich zum Subjekte machte; aus dieser Nacht der reinen Gewißheit seiner selbst ist es, daß der sittliche Geist als die von der Natur und seinem unmittelbaren Dasein befreite Gestalt aufersteht.’20 [‘This form is the night in which substance was betrayed and made itself a subject; it is from this night of pure selfcertainty that the ethical spirit resurrects as the form that is freed from nature and its immediate existence.’] Once again, the betrayal that Hegel distances from Christian revelation is displaced to pagan antiquity; Judas lives and falls centuries before the birth of  Christ – as Aristophanes. And as in the Greek mystery cults, the divinity that is betrayed on the Attic stage is no self-consciousness. Nature, the gods and the ideas of  the good and the beautiful are the elementary essences that comic theater displays and ‘sind, als allgemeine Momente, kein Selbst und nicht wirklich’ [‘are, as universal factors, no self and unreal’].21 But here, the betrayal – and the unconsciousness from which it is inseparable – far exceeds that of  Demeter and Dionysos. The self  that bears the comic masks, precisely in speaking as and through them, ironizes them, betraying all displayed universal essences as a self less and insubstantial display: ‘Es, das Subjekt, ist daher über ein solches Moment als über eine einzelne Eigenschaft erhoben, und angetan 20 Ibid., 514. The transition from substance, here associated with the ethical world of ancient Greece and immediate, natural existence, to the subject, is one of  the most important and complex strokes of  the entire Phenomenology. The full philosophical resonance of  the terms substance and subject would require a book-length discussion in its own right. For now, I only want to draw attention to the Biblical echoes of  the passage, which render Aristophanes – the author of  the comic form that culminates art and subjectifies substance – akin to Judas. The best commentary on the structure of comedy that Hegel evokes here is Werner Hamacher’s essay, ‘(Das Ende der Kunst mit der Maske)’, in Karl Heinz Bohrer, ed., Sprachen der Ironie – Sprachen des Ernstes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 121–55. 21 Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 541.

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

55

mit der Maske spricht es die Ironie derselben aus, die für sich etwas sein will. Das Aufspreizen der allgemeinen Wesenheit ist an das Selbst verraten’.22 [‘It, the subject, is thus elevated above such a factor as above a single quality, and donned with the mask it speaks its irony out, which would be something for itself. The display of universal essentiality is betrayed upon the self ’.] The masks are, as Hegel puts it, betrayed ‘an das Selbst’ in a double sense: by the self and on the self  that put them on in the first place.23 The mask ‘die für sich etwas sein will’, or ‘that would be something for itself ’, meanwhile, proves to be nothing for itself, not even for the self. To the contrary, the self  that speaks through the mask dissolves it, and with it, any particularities that could give the self a stable, positive content. As comic appearances, divine essences disappear; ‘sie sind Wolken, ein verschwindender Dunst’ [‘they are clouds, a disappearing vapour’], writes Hegel, alluding to Aristophanes’ Clouds.24 The comic self  that brings about this dissolution, moreover, also disappears. When it emerges ‘in seiner eigenen Nacktheit und Gewöhnlichkeit’ [‘in its proper nakedness and commonness’], Hegel writes that it is shown to be no dif ferent from the actor or the spectators – and without dif ference, there is nothing to show or to see.25 22 23

Ibid., 542. As Hamacher states in his essay, ‘und hier wie überall hat man die Hegelsche Präposition Ernst zu nehmen’ [‘and here as overall one has to take the Hegelian preposition seriously’]. Hamacher, ‘(Das Ende der Kunst mit der Maske)’, 123. 24 Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 543. 25 Hegel writes, ‘Das Selbst, hier in seiner Bedeutung als Wirkliches auftretend, spielt es mit der Maske, die es einmal anlegt, um seine Person zu sein; aber aus diesem Scheine tut es sich ebenso bald wieder in seiner eigenen Nacktheit und Gewöhnlichkeit hervor, die es von dem eigentlichen Selbst, dem Schauspieler, sowie von dem Zuschauer nicht unterschieden zu sein zeigt.’ [‘The Self, here entering in its significance as something real, plays it with the mask, which it puts on in order to be its person; but from this appearance it emerges just as soon once again in its proper nackedness and commonness, which shows it to be no dif ferent from the proper self, the actor, as well as the spectator.’] Ibid., 542. When he later writes that the spectator ‘sich selbst spielen sieht’ [‘sees itself play’], the accent must fall on the playing, and not any fixed or fixable self  that would dif fer from this activity. Here as before, the positive content of  ‘play’ is nothing other than its successive negations. What the playing self sees, meanwhile, ‘ist, daß in ihm, was die Form von Wesenheit gegen es annimmt, in seinem Denken,

56

Kristina Mendicino

Comic theatre is thus a form of representation that betrays and negates any and all presentations and presences – including those of  the actor and spectator. And indeed, when Hegel introduces this art as ‘diese Form’ [‘this form’], it is crucial to remember that form and the labour of negation are inseparable for Hegel.26 The radicality of  this negation is matched, meanwhile, by the radicality of  the unconsciousness of  the actors that characterize it. If, on the one hand, the comic self proves to be hyper-conscious in its ironization of all divine essences,27 its decimating irony unites it with the consciouslessness that Hegel had previously associated with tragic fate: ‘Hier ist also das vorher bewußtlose Schicksal, das in der leeren Ruhe und Vergessenheit besteht und von dem Selbstbewußtsein getrennt ist, mit diesem vereint.’28 [‘Here the previously unconscious fate, which consists of empty rest and forgetfulness and is severed from self-consciousness, is

Dasein und Tun sich vielmehr auf löst und preisgegeben ist’ [‘is that in it, whatever might take on the form of essentiality against it, is rather dissolved and abandoned in its thinking, existing and doing’]. Ibid., 544. 26 Hegel elaborates the essential relationship of  form, activity and negation most extensively in his Wissenschaft der Logik, where he will call form ‘die absolute Negativität selbst’ [‘absolute negativity itself ’]. Hegel, Werke, vol. 6, 87. The intertwinedness of  these concepts, however, pervades the Phenomenology as well, starting with Hegel’s association between the labour of  the negative and ‘the autokinesis of  form’ in the passage from his preface cited above. 27 Hegel underscores the consciousness involved in comic irony when, for example, he contrasts comic self-consciousness to initiates of  the mystery cults: ‘[I]n dem Mysterium des Brotes und Weines macht es [das Selbstbewußtsein] dieselbe zusammen mit der Bedeutung des inneren Wesens sich zu eigen, und in der Komödie ist es sich der Ironie dieser Bedeutung überhaupt bewußt.’ [‘In the mystery of  bread and wine, self-consciousness makes these, together with the sense of  their inner essence, its own, and in comedy it is absolutely conscious of  the irony of  this sense.’] Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 542. 28 Ibid., 544. As Hamacher remarks in his reading of  this section of  the Phenomenology, ‘Die Komödie is Komödie nur, wenn sie die Komödie der Tragödie auf führt. Komödie ist sie nur in der Weise, daß sie den Betrug, den in der Tragödie zwei konf ligierende Rechtsformen aneinander üben, exponiert und an die Selbstvergessenheit erinnert, aus der dieser Betrug resultiert und in der er gesühnt wird.’ Hamacher, ‘(Das Ende der Kunst mit der Maske)’, 139.

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

57

thus united with it.’] Unconscious fate, along with its empty calm and forgetfulness, are ‘vereint’ [‘united’ or ‘made one’] with self-consciousness. A hyper-conscious unconscious, then, is the paradoxical agent and result of comedy;29 a self-consciousness that is absolutely forgetful of everything, including itself; a display that ef fects above all disappearance. Most important, however, is that this specific form of negation, which marks the shift from antiquity to modernity and crosses Aristophanic comedy with Christ’s Passion, is a thoroughly treacherous one. Like the betrayal of  Judas, it brings about, not only the death of  God, but also the death of man – Christ, the Son of  Man – leaving a world temporarily bereft of all essence. Like Christ’s words of despair, which dissolve God, Christ, language and spirit, each sentence (Satz) is a counter-sentence (Gegen-satz) that would seem to empty out the substance of speaker and bespoken, as well as the ‘Sittensprüche’ and ‘Gesetze’, the sentences of morality and law, that lose all ‘Gültigkeit’ [‘validity’] in the mouths of comic actors.30 But whereas Christ’s language dissolves into a ‘great cry’ [φωνὴν μεγάλην Mark 15:37], comic language dissolves into laughter. Here, loss is the pinnacle of joy rather than grief: ‘ein Wohlsein und Sichwohlseinlassen des Bewußtseins […], wie sich außer dieser Komödie keines mehr findet’ [‘a well-being and letting-oneself-be-well of consciousness, as none other besides this comedy is to be found’].31 29 In his commentary on this chapter of  Hegel’s Phenomenology, Werner Hamacher writes, ‘Aber sie kann nur so spielen, weil die Struktur des Selbstbewußtseins keine andere ist als der “Leichtsinn”, in dem alles, was sich als Substanz des Subjekts sedimentiert hat, abgestreift, als ein Überf lüssiges liquidiert, als Betrug denunziert und genüßlich dem Vergessen anheimgegeben wird. Das Spiel des Selbstbewußtseins ist letal für das Bewußtsein wie für das substantielle Selbst. Was in ihm überlebt und genießt, ist allein das Spiel als die unendlich of fene Form, die sich eröf fnende Form, in der ein Selbst und sein Bewußtsein erst erscheinen und verschwinden können.’ Hamacher, ‘(Das Ende der Kunst mit der Maske)’, 140. When he writes ‘letal’, one must hear echoes of  the ‘Lethe’ of  tragic fate, the river of  forgetfulness and the dead, which Hegel evokes as the fateful, unconscious end of  tragedy. See Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 539–40. 30 Ibid., 543. 31 Ibid., 544.

58

Kristina Mendicino

In the ancient Greek pre-iterations of  Christianity, betrayal haunts the revelation of  Christian spirit in the Phenomenology. Its echoes throughout Hegel’s presentation of  Greek religion show that it is more essential to his Christological system than its exclusion from his chapter on the ‘revealed religion’ would otherwise suggest. It even resounds in the last sentence of  the Phenomenology, when Hegel compares his entire work to Golgotha, the ‘Schädelstätte’ [‘place of skulls’] where Christ was cruficied. Each stage of (un-)consciousness that spirit surpasses adds one more empty skull to the macabre pile that builds the ‘Thron’ [‘throne’] of  Hegel’s all-knowing, transparent spirit.32 Understood as the ‘begrif fene Organisation’ [‘grasped organization’] of  the movement of spirit, the cast-of f masks, the expired spirits of  history ‘bilden die Erinnerung und die Schädelstätte des absoluten Geistes, die Wirklichkeit, Wahrheit und Gewißheit seines Throns, ohne den er das leblose Einsame wäre’ [‘build the memory and the Golgotha of absolute spirit, the reality, truth and certainty of its throne, without which it would be the lifeless lone one’].33 This analogy also implies that betrayal is the modus of  the ‘Selbstbewegung der Form’ [‘autokinesis of  form’] that Hegel traces in the Phenomenology, as it was in Christ’s Passion and the divine comedy of  Ancient Greece. Betrayal cannot simply be one of  the many biblical moments Hegel leaves out of  his system, because they belong to what he calls the mere ‘historical’ side of  the Bible.34 But what 32 Ibid., 591. 33 Ibid. 34 In the Phenomenology, Hegel dismisses attentiveness to the historical details of  the Bible – including the speeches of  Christ himself – when he writes, ‘Was dieser sich of fenbarende Geist an und für sich ist, wird daher nicht dadurch herausgebracht, daß sein reiches Leben in der Gemeine gleichsam aufgedreht und auf seinen ersten Faden zurückgeführt wird, etwa auf die Vorstellungen der ersten unvollkommenen Gemeine oder gar auf das, was der wirkliche Mensch gesprochen hat. Dieser Zurückführung liegt der Instinkt zugrunde, auf den Begrif f zu gehen; aber sie verwechselt den Ursprung als das unmittelbare Dasein der ersten Erscheinung mit der Einfachheit des Begrif fes. Durch diese Verarmung des Lebens des Geistes […] entsteht daher statt des Begrif fes vielmehr die bloße Äußerlichkeit und Einzelheit, die geschichtliche Weise der unmittelbaren Erscheinung und die geistlose Erinnerung einer einzelnen gemeinten Gestalt und ihrer Vergangenheit.’ [‘What this self-revealing spirit is in and

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

59

properly belongs to Christian revelation only seems to be called betrayal, so long as the gods and their substance are unconscious, so long as spirit has not yet grasped itself. Betrayal would seem to be the improper modus of revelation, which persists only until spirit has overcome its own unconscious and become completely ‘of fen’ [‘open’] and ‘of fenbar’ [‘revealed’] to itself and recuperated in the ‘Begrif f ’ [‘concept’] that unites the absolute, positive being-in-itself of religion with the absolute, negative being-for-itself of self-consciousness. At the same time, betrayal is a necessary function in the movement of spirit that makes up Hegel’s Phenomenology, insofar as it marks the transition from ancient ethical substance to the modern subject, from the art-religion of ancient Greece to the revealed religion of  Christianity. If it is improper to call betrayal a non-function in the movements of spirit, as I did at the start of  this essay, then it is an unconscious function that must operate, just as much as it must be cancelled. Betrayal is no mere episode in the Phenomenology, but one of its most fundamental moments. But the one time that Hegel uses the noun ‘Verrat’ [‘betrayal’] in the Phenomenology, he radically dismisses it as an act that is not even worthy to be unworthy of ancient Greek righteousness. Hegel writes: Die Gerechtigkeit ist aber weder ein fremdes, jenseits sich befindendes Wesen noch die seiner unwürdige Wirklichkeit einer gegenseitigen Tücke, Verrats, Undanks usf., die in der Weise des gedankenlosen Zufalls als ein unbegrif fener Zusammenhang und ein bewußtloses Tun und Unterlassen das Gericht vollbrächte […].35

35

for itself   is not brought out through the unraveling of  his rich life in the congregation and the tracing [of  this life] back to its first thread, to, for example, the representations of  the first, imperfect congregation or even to what the real man said. Such backwards tracing has as its basis an instinct to pursue the concept, but it mistakes the origin as the immediate existence of  the first appearance for the simplicity of  the concept. Thus, through this impoverishment of  the life of  the spirit (…) arises instead of  the concept mere externality and singularity, the historical manner of  the immediate appearance and the spiritless remembrance of a singular, intended figure and its past.’] Ibid., 537. Ibid., 340.

60

Kristina Mendicino [Righteousness is, however, neither a foreign essence that finds itself in a beyond, nor is it the reality that is unworthy of it (the foreign essence), (the reality) of a mutual perniciousness, betrayal, thanklessness, etc., which in the manner of  thoughtless accident would carry out its judgement as an ungrasped complex and an unconscious doing or neglecting.]

In one stroke, he summons and dismisses a host of abuses – from ‘Tücke’ [‘perniciousness’] to ‘Verrat’ [‘betrayal’] and ‘Undank’ [‘thanklessness’]. Righteousness is neither a foreign essence, nor is it the reality of  these abuses, which would make up the ‘unwürdige’ [‘unworthy’] correlate of  foreign essence. In the Greek world of righteousness, where spirit first comes to itself after a long history of (self-)estrangement, foreignness and its abuses have been – at least temporarily – cancelled out.36 Here, right can only come into conf lict with itself – and indeed, within the Greek world of  ‘ethical substance’, or ‘sittliche Substanz’, the conf lict of right and right proceeds until both ‘sides’ perish –37 and until all substantial right, all substantial essences, dissolve into comic irony. Nonetheless, it is this passage, Hegel’s most complex denial and articulation of  betrayal, that sheds the most light on the structure of  betrayal in the Phenomenology. He introduces betrayal, alongside perniciousness and thanklessness, as the ‘Wirklichkeit’ [‘reality’] of a justice that is ‘jenseits’ [‘beyond’], ‘fremd’ [‘foreign’]. As such, it would be the reality of an 36 In his introduction to the chapter on ‘Spirit’, or ‘Geist’, which begins with ancient ethical substance, Hegel announces its necessary bifurcation into ‘die in das Diesseits und Jenseits zerrissene Welt’ [‘the world torn into a here and a beyond’] and a ‘moralische Weltanschauung’ [‘moral world-view’], which succeed one another and lead to the ‘wirkliche Selbstbewußtsein des absoluten Geistes’ [‘real self-consciousness of absolute spirit’]. Ibid., 327. The harmony of  Greece thus constitutes a moment that cannot last, nor can it serve as the telos of spirit – which its dissolution through comedy makes clear. 37 After tracing this conf lict, Hegel writes, ‘Erst in der gleichen Unterwerfung beider Seiten ist das absolute Recht vollbracht und die sittliche Substanz als die negative Macht, welche beide Seiten verschlingt, oder das allmächtige und gerechte Schicksal aufgetreten.’ [‘First in the equal subjection of  both sides is absolute right brought to fulfillment and ethical substance has made its entrance as the negative power, which consumes both sides, or as the all-powerful and righteous fate.’] Ibid., 349.

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

61

irreality – a point that is underscored, when Hegel names the ‘Gericht’ [‘judgement’] it would bring upon itself, and thus ‘vollbringen’ [‘bring to completion’], in the irrealis: ‘das Gericht vollbrächte’. Betrayal would seem to be hardly worth comment, and even the most extensive commentaries on Hegel do not pause to discuss this passage.38 But its correlate, ‘ein fremdes, jenseits sich befindendes Wesen’ [‘a foreign essence that finds itself in a beyond’], is the unreality that the entire Phenomenology, indeed the entire philosophical project of  Hegel, sets out to overcome. In this light, it is no passing matter, however quickly Hegel passes over it. Alone, the passage is startling: in his ‘weder … noch’ [‘neither … nor’] formulation, Hegel insinuates that righteousness could be, albeit falsely, conceived either as a ‘fremdes Wesen’ [‘foreign essence’] located in some beyond, or as the righteousness of  that essence’s ‘unwürdige Wirklichkeit’ [‘unworthy reality’] – a treacherous reality of mutual perniciousness, betrayal and thanklessness. In other words, righteousness could be, albeit falsely, conceived as treachery. In fact, according to the logic of  Hegel’s sentence, righteousness would have to be conceived as treachery, if it were delegated to a foreign essence. For the two alternatives of  Hegel’s ‘weder … noch’ are not symmetrical: the reality of  betrayal, perniciousness and thanklessness is the unworthy reality of  foreign essence, just as much as it is a reality unworthy of  this essence. The ambivalent genitive, ‘die seiner unwürdige Wirklichkeit’, says both at once – one of  the many times Hegel will speak with a forked tongue – so that a foreign essence and a treacherous reality are presented as two sides of  the same coin.39 With these words, Hegel

It is not discussed, for example, in Alexandre Kojève’s commentary, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), nor in Jean Hippolyte’s Genèse et structure de la phénomenologie de l’esprit de Hegel (Paris: Montaigne, 1946). To my knowledge, there is no extensive study of  betrayal in Hegel. Authors of monographs devoted to his theology, such as Hans Küng (Menschwerdung Gottes: Eine Einführung in Hegels theologisches Denken als Prolegomena zu einer künftigen Christologie [Freiburg, Basel and Vienna: Herder, 1970]), also do not discuss the conspicuously suppressed role of  Judas in Hegel’s system. 39 The ambivalence of  Hegel’s language has been repeatedly emphasized in Hegel scholarship; see, for example, Theodor Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel (Frankfurt 38

62

Kristina Mendicino

sets the unworthy reality of perniciousness, betrayal, thanklessness, etc., as the essential complement to any justice that would imply a beyond – from the judge of  the Jews to the judge of  the Christian Apocalypse. And soon, this complementarity of  foreign essence and pernicious reality collapses in Hegel’s sentence into an identity, into which the foreign essence, or any imaginable judge from beyond, disappears. After all, it is the unworthy reality – and not the foreign essence – that, in Hegel’s sentence, grammatically does precisely what a judge would do: namely, ‘das Gericht vollbr[ingen]’ [‘bring the judgement to completion’].40 But such an (irreal) act of judgement – another crucial turn in this passage – would be no act in the strict sense. Mutual perniciousness, betrayal and thanklessness operate ‘in der Weise des gedankenlosen Zufalls’ [‘in the manner of  thoughtless accident’]. They make up an ‘unbegrif fen[en] Zusammenhang’ [‘ungrasped complex’] which, because thoughtlessness and accidentality prevail, is also a complex with nothing in it to grasp. If, in this (irreal  ) reality, something is done or neglected, this doing and neglecting is a ‘bewußtloses Tun und Unterlassen’ [‘unconscious doing and neglecting’, my emphasis]. Indeed, one might even hear echoes in these words of  Christ’s absolution (of  his betrayer, of  his thankless executioners): ‘They know not what they do’.41 With the dif ference, however, that unconscious action here – that is, action deprived of its character as an act – does not justify pardon, but rather brings judgement to completion.

am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 105–65; Ernst Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt: Erläuterungen zu Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962, 2nd edn, 1971). 40 Such turns in and of speech are the motor of  the Hegelian dialectic. Already in his preface, Hegel warns readers against taking the elements of  his sentences for static. In a sentence such as ‘Gott ist Sein’ [‘God is being’], the subject ‘God’ disappears into its predicate ‘Being’ as one moves from subject to predicate, casting the reader back to the (now dif ferent) subject. Hegel, Werke 3, 59–60. The best discussion of  this language – the language of  the ‘speculative sentence’ – is Hamacher, pleroma – zu Genesis und Struktur einer dialektischen Hermeneutik bei Hegel, 11–28. 41 See Luke 23:34, ‘And Jesus said: Father, discharge them [of all charges], for they do not know what they do’ [ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς ἔλεγεν · πάτερ, ἄφες αὐτοῖς, οὐ γὰρ οἴδασιν τί ποιοῦσιν].

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

63

Judgement implies decision. But what could be decided or distinguished in a condition of ‘gegenseitige[r] Tücke, Verrats, Undanks’ [‘mutual perniciousness, betrayal and thanklessness’, my emphasis]? Hegel’s irrealis is the precise negative of  the Greek ‘Gerechtigkeit’ [‘righteousness’] that sets right against right, in that unright prevails all around. From the moment that reality consists only of mutual perniciousness, betrayal and thanklessness, there is no distinction between the mutually opposed sides. There is nothing but an ‘unwürdige Wirklichkeit’ [‘unworthy reality’], so that judgement – the Judgement – could only be the total, mutual cancellation of  the undif ferentiated terms, an unconscious dissolution. The little Hegel does say about betrayal in this passage makes it clear: there can be no theory, nor act, of  betrayal. Betrayal, for Hegel, would be a simultaneous event of crime and judgement that exceeds the intentionality of any individual. At the same time, any postulation of an essential ‘Jenseits’ [‘beyond’] has betrayal – among other abuses – as its real consequence, as its realization. This radically negative understanding of  betrayal has crucial structural implications for the entire Phenomenology, which rests on the theoretical (and theatrical) principle that consciousness progressively overcomes foreignness by testing and transcending itself, leaving ‘us’ the mere task of watching: ‘[I]ndem das Bewußtsein sich selbst prüft, [bleibt] uns […] nur das reine Zusehen’.42 [‘In that consciousness tests itself, there remains to us […] nothing but pure watching’.] Every moment in the history of consciousness that Hegel exposes – until the self  knows and grasps itself absolutely, leaving nothing foreign to it – would have the fundamental structure of unconscious betrayal and judgement. It is in this light that the pervasiveness of  ‘Täuschung’ [‘mistaking’] and ‘Betrug’ [‘deception’] throughout the Phenomenology can be understood.43 The mistakes and deceptions of consciousness, all of which involve a mistaken, ‘fremdes, jenseits sich befindendes Wesen’ [‘foreign essence that finds itself in a beyond’], are what 42 Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 77. 43 This pervasiveness is clear from Hegel’s chapter titles alone, e.g. ‘Die Wahrnehmung oder das Ding und die Täuschung’ [‘Perception, or the Thing and Deception’], ibid., 93; ‘Das geistige Tierreich und der Betrug oder die Sache Selbst’ [‘The Spiritual Realm of  Animals and Deception, or the Matter Itself ’], ibid., 294.

64

Kristina Mendicino

force it to dissolve and re-emerge, transfigured – without even knowing what happened to it.44 If  Hegel calls each transformation of consciousness ‘eine Umkehrung des Bewußtseins selbst’45 [‘a conversion of consciousness itself ’] – which German word echoes the imperative of  Christ to ‘convert the mind’ [μετανοεῖτε]46 – this conversion of consciousness depends upon its proper, unconscious moment of dissolution. It depends, that is, upon the automatic betrayal and judgement that cancels its unreal projection of a foreign object as well as its correspondingly unreal knowledge. In its automatism, each conversion of consciousness structurally resembles the moment of  ‘Verrat’ [‘betrayal’] that Hegel so disparages, setting in motion the self-propelled crucifixion – or suicide – that adds another skull to the ‘Schädelstätte’ of absolute spirit and allows spirit to turn, transformed, closer towards its throne. At the level of  language, meanwhile, every moment of consciousness would, like the treacherous comic self, speak its own irony and negation. And indeed, the Phenomenology begins with the false speech of sense-certainty: even as we believe ourselves to speak the most concrete and singular reality with our ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘this’ and ‘I’, we utter only the most universal and, consequently, abstract ‘here’ of all heres, ‘now’ of all nows, ‘this’ of all thises, ‘I’ of all I’s. We are the first actors and dupes in the Phenomenology, which begins with a ‘wir’ – a first-person plural that does not distinguish reader and writer – as the undif ferentiated, immediate reality of  the text. But as our words and observations just as immediately convert the specificity of all immediate spatial, temporal and pronominal coordinates to universals,

44 See, for example, Hegel’s remarks in the transition from the chapter on perception to the chapter on ‘Kraft und Verstand, Erscheinung und übersinnliche Welt’ [‘Force and Understanding, Appearance and Supersensual World’]. There, ‘das Wahre’ [‘the true’], which emerges after both the object of perception and the understanding cancel their mutual untruthfulness, ‘treibt sein Wesen für sich selbst, so daß das Bewußtsein keinen Anteil an seiner freien Realisierung hat, sondern ihr nur zusieht und sie rein auf faßt’ [‘drives its own essence for itself, so that consciousness has no part of its proper, free realization, but merely watches it and purely takes it up’]. Ibid., 107–8. 45 Ibid., 79. 46 See, for example, Matthew 4:17; Mark 1:15.

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

65

our immediate coordinates disappear, too. The scene of reading gives way to an other; Hegel’s use of  the first-person, plural pronoun gives way to the third-person subjects that we watch from a universal perspective. Readers and writer alike are the first to self-betray and self-destruct in the progress of spirit. From this point forward, a limited, historical consciousness operates parallel to our observing, universal consciousness. Any form it might assume, any others it might meet, can only be false ones that will betray and cancel themselves (like us) until it knows itself (like us) as absolute. But it is Hegel who writes, and insofar as he must speak the language of each consciousness that will dissolve and transcend itself, in order for us to watch, his voice must ironically cite and betray each essential stage of consciousness. His principle of  ‘reines Zusehen’ [‘pure watching’] depends upon the pure citationality that pervades the entirety of the Phenomenology, in order to expose the false speeches and self-betrayals of consciousness.47 Hegel, the ultimate Christian philosopher, is Judas. The many conversions of consciousness amount to just as many moments of  ‘giving-over’ [παραδιδόναι] in an economy where each giving-over and giving-up is a gain in Hegel’s monumental work of recollection, The Phenomenology of  Spirit. But betrayal is the blind-spot that accompanies all the representation and seeing of  the Phenomenology, the non-act in Hegel’s strategy of writing that makes its dialectic seem to operate on its own, that makes it speak and dissolve – like the comic actor – its self. At this point, it is time to return to the death of God, which, for Hegel, also operates on its own: ‘[d]er vom Selbst ergrif fene Tod’ [‘the death that is grasped by the self      ’].48 In light of all that has been said, it is questionable whether the Christian revelation could really be exempt from the ironic underpinnings and treacherous moments that drive the Phenomenology. To be sure, a death grasped by the divine, incarnate self implies an act deprived of  the foreignness that, for Hegel, produces a treacherous reality. Hegel’s formulation also excludes any unconscious or unclear moment in

47 Jacques Derrida describes the opening language of  Hegel’s Phenomenology as citational on the very first page of  Glas. 48 Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 571.

66

Kristina Mendicino

this death, like the intervention of  Judas. But precisely in reformulating the death of  Christ as a death violently grasped by the self – that is, a death without the Passion, without the betrayal of  Judas – Hegel ironically (and perhaps unconsciously) brings the death of  God closer to the suicide of  Judas than to the crucifixion of  Christ. Still, the death that is grasped by God Himself allows spirit to grasp itself  for the first time in history. This ultimate ‘Entäußerung’ [‘exteriorization’, or ‘relinquishment’] of spirit is the ultimate recuperation.49 If, on the one hand, God’s death is ‘der Ernst, der Schmerz, die Geduld und Arbeit des Negativen’ [‘the seriousness, pain, patience and labour of  the negative’] that Hegel had opposed in his preface to the ‘Leben Gottes’ [‘life of  God’], or ‘[das] Spielen der Liebe mit sich selbst’ [‘the play of  love with itself ’], God’s negative ‘Selbstbewegung der Form’ [‘autokinesis of  form’] is also what recasts matter, life and self-consciousness as moments in his eternally circulating movement.50 From the earth and the f lesh, which are His material exteriorizations; to the human self-consciousness that incarnates and knows Him; to the deaths that cancel these exteriorizations of  God once again, nothing should henceforth be foreign to Him, and He should no longer be foreign to the world. Therein lies their reconciliation and redemption. Therein lies, too, the movement of exteriorization and return to the self  that speaks in the logos of  the Gospel of  John and that culminates in the logic of  the Hegelian ‘Begrif f ’ [‘concept’] – which itself is ‘ein Anerkennen der Liebe’ [‘recognition of  love’].51 All foreignness, any beyond becomes unthinkable in the regime of absolute spirit that only Christianity, the religion in which God Himself dies, can deliver. All possibilities of perniciousness, betrayal and thanklessness – as well as the 49 Each moment of God’s movements, from the Creation of the world to the Incarnation, is described in Hegel’s chapter on ‘revealed religion’ as an ‘Entäußerung’. The incarnation is, for example, named an ‘Entäußerung des göttlichen Wesens’ [‘exteriorization and relinquishment of  the divine essence’]. Ibid., 570. Later he will reformulate the resurrection (as it is understood by the congregation) as an ‘Entäußerung der Substanz’ [‘exteriorization and relinquishment of substance’]. Ibid., 573. 50 Ibid., 24. 51 Ibid., 561.

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

67

judgement that annihilates them – are cancelled upon the articulation of each individual as a moment or form of universal spirit. And indeed, just as Hegelian philosophy claims to grasp, for the first time, the ‘Begrif f ’ of  Christian religion, so, too, are its political and ethical implications realized for the first time in Hegel’s historical present. It is no accident that Hegel articulates the end to the ultimate historical phase of mutual perniciousness and immediate, fatal judgement – the French Revolution – with the Christian ‘Selbstbewegung der Form’. The Reign of  Terror, in which ‘Verdächtigwerden tritt […] an die Stelle oder hat die Bedeutung und Wirkung des Schuldigseins’ [‘becoming suspicious takes the place or has the meaning and ef fect of  being guilty’],52 closes at the moment that each individual recognizes: ‘Es ferner als einzelnes Selbst ist nur die Form des Subjekts oder wirklichen Tuns, die von ihm als Form gewußt wird; ebenso ist für es die gegenständliche Wirklichkeit, das Sein, schlechthin selbstlose Form.’53 [‘Further, as singular self, it is only the form of  the subject or actual doing, which is known by it as form; similarly, objective reality or being is, for it, the absolutely self less form.’] Hegel’s answer to the Revolution, its world of representation and betrayal, is a Re-Form-ation in the literal sense. The death of  God thus converts the most negative moment of  Christianity into its greatest strength. It is at the crux, not only of  the absolute knowledge of  Hegelian philosophy, but also of  the political and ethical order of  the modern state as Hegel had envisioned it. However, the passage that registers this conversion in the Phenomenology betrays its own logic in ways that speak against any reconciliation. On the one hand, when Hegel elaborates ‘das schmerzliche Gefühl des unglücklichen Bewußtseins, daß Gott selbst gestorben ist’ [‘the painful feeling of unhappy consciousness

52 53

Ibid., 437. Ibid., 440. Hegel will go on to describe this new form of spirit and community in chapters devoted to moral consciousness – a consciousness indebted as much to Luther as to Kant, which is well-recognized in the vast scholarship devoted to Hegel’s reception of  the French Revolution. See, for example, Lewis White Beck, ‘The Reformation, the Revolution, and the Restoration in Hegel’s Political Philosophy’, Journal of  the History of  Philosophy 14/1 (1976), 51–61.

68

Kristina Mendicino

that God himself is dead  ’],54 the negativity of  God’s death immediately reverses into the positive identity of spirit that the world has won: Dieser harte Ausdruck ist der Ausdruck des innersten sich einfach Wissens, die Rückkehr des Bewußtseins in die Tiefe der Nacht des Ich = Ich, die nichts außer ihr mehr unterscheidet und weiß. Dies Gefühl ist also in der Tat der Verlust der Substanz und ihres Gegenübertretens gegen das Bewußtsein; aber zugleich ist es die reine Subjektivität der Substanz oder die reine Gewißheit seiner selbst, die ihr als dem Gegenstande oder dem Unmittelbaren oder dem reinen Wesen fehlte. Dies Wissen ist also die Begeistung, wodurch die Substanz Subjekt, ihre Abstraktion und Leblosigkeit gestorben, sie also wirklich und einfaches und allgemeines Selbstbewußtsein geworden ist.55 [This hard expression is the expression of  the most inward, simple self-knowing, the return of consciousness into the depth of  the night of  I = I, which distinguishes nothing outside itself and knows nothing else. This feeling is thus indeed the loss of substance and its opposition to consciousness; but at the same time, it is the pure subjectivity of substance or the pure certainty of itself, which it lacked as the object or as the immediate or as the pure essence. This knowing is thus the bespiriting (Begeistung), through which substance has become subject, its abstraction and lifelessness dead, (making it) real and a onefold and universal self-consciousness.]

The decisive moment that empties out the world, Christ, God and his believers, leaves a single I bereft of all objects outside itself – and, as a result, an I that is absolute. The totality of  this ‘Entäußerung’ – Luther’s translation of  Christ’s kenôsis, or ‘emptying-out’56 – is a ‘Verlust der Substanz’ [‘loss of substance’] that, at the same time, yields a subjectivity that fills

54 Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 572. 55 Ibid., 572. It is important to notice that, from the ‘depth of night’ to the transformation of substance to subject, the central terms of  Hegel’s discussion of comedy return here. 56 Specifically, Luther translates ἐκένωσεν (‘emptied’) with ‘eussert’ in ‘Die Epistel S. Pauli: an die Philipper’ 2:7. The relationship between Hegel’s ‘Entäußerung’ and the theological notion of  kenôsis is brief ly touched upon in Alfred Ferrarin’s monograph, Hegel and Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 98. Ferrarin does not, however, unfold the implications of  this translation at length. On the Pauline thrust of  Hegel’s theology, see below.

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

69

this substantial lack. ‘Begeistung’ [‘bespiriting’] in divine death ends the ‘Leblosigkeit der Substanz’ [‘lifelessness of substance’] that had heretofore characterized life and death alike. But, as in the Gospel of  Mark, this decisive moment is not the death of  God, but its ‘Ausdruck’ [‘expression’]. In this respect, although Hegel does not directly address Christ’s expression of god-forsakenness in the Phenomenology, his words return to the torn language of  the most extreme of all ‘Gegensätze’ – ‘oppositions’ or ‘counter-sentences’ – the anti-logos: ‘O God of mine, o God of mine, why have you left me utterly?’ [ὁ θεός μου ὁ θεός μου, εἰς τί ἐγκατέλιπές με; Mark 15:34]. And who but Christ was the first to articulate the abandonment of  God from the world and to feel this pain, to reduce himself (and God Himself ) to an empty, benighted me? With this, the immediate, physical death that should be grasped by God himself remains infinitely suspended.57 If  the death of  God and its

57

Hegel stresses the importance of  the actual, physical death of  God, ‘das Verschwinden des unmittelbaren Daseins des als Wesen Gewußten’ [‘the disappearance of  the immediate being of  that which is known as the absolute essence’]. Ibid., 556. The universal, spiritual knowledge that develops from Christian revelation – and that will also allow Hegel to later translate the Christian tradition as a mere historical representation of  the concept – depends upon its immediate natural and historical correlate. Both the historical Christ and the sublation of  this history into an eternal concept are crucial to Hegel’s arguments in the Phenomenology, which traces the historical unfolding of spirit from an absolute, universal perspective. This is why Hegel can stress the necessity that, at one point, divine essence concentrated in one singular man, whose conceptual truth could, at the same time, remain ungrasped by the earliest congregations. In this vein he writes, ‘Das Begreifen also ist ihm [dem Selbstbewußtsein] nicht ein Ergreifen dieses Begrif fes, der die aufgehobene Natürlichkeit als allgemeine, also als mit sich selbst versöhnte weiß, sondern ein Ergreifen jener Vorstellung, daß durch das Geschehen der eigenen Entäußerung des göttlichen Wesens, durch seine geschehene Menschwerdung und seinen Tod das göttliche Wesen mit seinem Dasein versöhnt ist.’ [‘Conceiving is thus for it (self-consciousness) not a grasping of  this concept, which knows the cancelled naturalness as a universal one, and thus as one that is reconciled with itself; rather, it is a grasping of  that representation, so that, through the historical event of  the proper exteriorization of divine essence, through its historical incarnation and its death, the divine essence is reconciled with its existence.’] Ibid., 570. As at every stage of  the Phenomenology, immediacy precedes the

70

Kristina Mendicino

attendant pain are an ‘Ausdruck’ [‘expression’]; if all moments of  the Passion and the Spirit are spoken in the sentence, ‘daß Gott gestorben ist’ [‘that God is dead’] – or, to return to the Biblical expression, ‘O God of mine, o God of mine, why have you left me utterly?’ – one must ask: was there ever an immediacy that could be cancelled? Was there ever an immediacy that was not already pre-empt(i)ed, mediated and thus endlessly deferred? The death that is thus expressed is a death that cannot, in its absolute and physical sense, happen. For in speaking his death and abandonment in a way that empties out the identity of  God and Christ, Christ at once fulfills and prevents the real death of  both. Nor can the words of  the first and ultimate ‘unhappy consciousness’, on the verge of expiration, be translated ‘Ich = Ich’ [‘I = I’]. The consequences of  Christ’s ‘Ausdruck’ [‘expression’] exceed the negativity that is so crucial to Hegel’s Christianity. It prevents any positive conversion and hinders any cyclical closure of  the ‘Selbstbewegung der Form’ [‘autokinesis of  form’] that Hegel speaks of, in order to refer to the (negative) life of  God. An irresolvable uncertainty insinuates itself into the self-certainty of  the one, universal godly man of  Hegel’s Christian spirit. What would He be, left to himself ? An I that is constantly losing itself, abandoning itself – and thus, an I that could never be sure whether it is speaking its own death, or suspending its own death infinitely, or speaking and suspending the death of another? Such an I – the Biblical I that speaks in Christ’s last words – remains radically foreign to a logic that would culminate in the law of identity; it remains radically foreign to the ‘vom Selbst ergrif fene[n] Tod’ [‘death seized by the self ’]; and it is incompatible with an ‘einfache[n] und allgemeine[n] Selbstbewußtsein’ [‘onefold and universal self-consciousness’]. Subreptitiously, Hegel’s translation of  the death of  Christ into conceptual terms betrays the foreignness of  the I that opens in the language of pain and abandonment. The concept, or ‘Begrif f ’ – which German word stems from ‘greifen’ [‘to grasp’] – is a violent seizure of universality that

mediation of  the concept: ‘dies erste Of fenbarsein ist selbst unmittelbar’ [‘this first existence of revelation is itself immediate’], ibid., 555. See also n. 34.

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

71

silently, perhaps unconsciously, breaks faith with the pain and expression it describes. Hegel’s exclusion of  betrayal from the Passion ironically culminates in a betrayal of  his own, which prepares the ground upon which absolute spirit will rest. In Hegel’s philosophy of spirit, where dif ference and opposition spring from a primary diremption, only to reconcile once again, no moment of  betrayal could disturb the self-disclosing and selfconcluding circuit, because betrayal – and its denial – are its unspoken foundation and driving force. However, the ultimate conversion that Hegel articulates is, like so much else, citational. The divine ‘Selbstbewegung der Form’ [‘autokinesis of  form’], which destabilizes all identities, only to secure an all the more unshakeable universalization of spirit, comes from an evangelizing persona that Hegel neither abandons nor surpasses. By evoking the passion of  the form and by inscribing the relationship of  the singular self  to the f lesh and the universal self as a form-relationship, Hegel speaks with the Apostle Paul, whose epistle to the Philippians begins with a hymn that articulates Christ’s relationship to God and his f lesh as form relations. There, however, the rupture to which the closed circuit of  Hegel’s Christology is indebted reveals itself more clearly than it does in the Phenomenology, so that a close attentiveness to the epistle makes its Hegelian echoes all the more audible. And as in Hegel’s Phenomenology, Paul’s hymn to Christ presents God as a ‘Selbstbewegung der Form’: Christ begins in the form of  the God and transforms into human f lesh. In two sentences, the hymn sings the entire life and death of  God (as Christ), then the order of  the Christian cosmos. The first part of  the hymn – a biography of  Christ – reads thus: τοῦτο φρονεῖτε ἐν ὑμῖν ὃ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, ὃς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ, ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών, ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων γενόμενος · καὶ σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτὸν γενόμενος ὑπήκοος μέχρι θανάτου, θανάτου δὲ σταυροῦ (Phil 2:5–8).58

58

Since the entire hymn is philologically and theologically contested, I hope to defend my translation in the course of  the interpretation, with references to the relevant secondary literature.

72

Kristina Mendicino [Think this with your hearts within yourselves, that which (was) also in Jesus Christ, who, present in the form of  God, did not consider being equal to God a thing to be seized, but emptied himself out, taking the form of a slave, coming to be in likeness to man: and, being found as a man in visible shape, he lowered himself, becoming subservient up to the point of death, and the death was the death of  the cross.]

The second part proceeds, after a full stop: διὸ καὶ ὁ θεὸς αὐτὸν ὑπερύψωσεν καὶ ἐχαρίσατο αὐτῷ τὸ ὄνομα τὸ ὑπὲρ πᾶν ὄνομα, ἵνα ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι Ἰησοῦ πᾶν γόνυ κάμψῃ ἐπουρανίων καὶ ἐπιγείων καὶ καταχθονίων, καὶ πᾶσα γλῶσσα ἐξομολογήσεται ὅτι κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς εἰς δόξαν θεοῦ πατρός (Phil 2:9–11). ‘ [For this, God raised him high and graced him with the name above all names, in order that in the name of  Jesus all bend their knees, those upon the heaven and upon the earth and below the earth, and each tongue speaks out in accord that the Lord is Jesus Christ in the glory of  God the Father.]

The Philippians should ‘think with their hearts’ [φρονεῖτε] that which was also in Christ.59 Above all, however, Paul calls upon them to think with their hearts the transformations of  Christ, God and man, all of whom – at least in the opening sentence of  the hymn – are forms of an anonymous, ever-changing ‘who’ [ὃς].60 There are no stable substantives in this sentence; 59

As Ralph P. Martin ref lects in his monograph on the hymn, ‘φρονεῖν is more than “to think”; it signifies a combination of intellectual and af fective activity which touches both head and heart, and leads to a positive course of action’. Martin, A Hymn of  Christ: Philippians 2:5–11 in Recent Interpretation & in the Setting of Early Christian Worship, 2nd edn (Downers Grove: Inter Varsity, 1983), xiv. The particular sense of ὃ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, which I translate ‘that which [was] also in Jesus Christ’, follows Charles F.D. Moule’s acceptance of  the much-contested Authorized Version, taken to mean ‘which (mind or attitude [φρόνημά]) was also found (in the case of ) Jesus Christ’. Moule ‘Further Ref lections on Philippians 2:5–11’, in W. Ward Gasque and Ralph P. Martin, eds, Apostolic History and the Gospel: Biblical and Historical Essays Presented to F.F. Bruce (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1970), 265–76. 60 This passage is, like every word of  the hymn, heavily disputed among New Testament scholars. The debate revolves around the ‘name’ [ὄνομα] that God confers Christ in the second part of  the hymn. Since Jesus is named in Paul’s introduction, some scholars have proposed that the name does not refer to Jesus, but to his traditional epithet, ‘Lord’ [κύριος], as Martin argues in A Hymn of  Christ, 250. Moule, on the

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

73

instead, each exists as a form that can be assumed and emptied out – to the point of death. Even God is, at first, none other than one of  the many forms of  this ‘who’: since we hear nothing else of  God or of  Christ at this point, but that a masculine subject existed ‘in the form of  God’ before assuming his other forms, this makes ‘God’, strictly speaking, a ‘form’ of  that masculine subject.61 So, too, do the categories of  ‘slave’ [δοῦλος] and ‘man’ [ἄνθρωπος] function, not as independent essences, but as forms that figure in a f luid process of  transformation. This f luidity is reinforced by the syntax of  the sentence, a series of  loosely linked participial clauses that are only anchored by the finite verbs ‘deem’ [ἡγήσατο] and ‘empty-out’ [ἐκένωσεν]. When the words ‘similitude’ [ὁμοίωμα] and ‘visible shape’ [σχῆμα] appear in conjunction with ‘man’ [ἄνθρωπος], they do not suggest that Christ merely adopted a human semblance, but was not really human. Here, to be human is to be a likeness or visible shape, which dif fers from Adam’s creation in the ‘likeness’ [εἰκῶν] of  God, insofar as human likeness is not like anything else in the hymn, nor is it an ‘image’ [εἰκῶν] of anything else. Rather, it is itself a likeness per se within a language that consists only of 

61

other hand, takes the ‘name’ at the end to indeed be ‘Jesus’ – an earthly name that, ‘because it accompanied that most God-like self-emptying, has come to be, in fact, the highest name’. Moule, ‘Further Ref lections on Philippians 2:5–11’, 270. What I am suggesting is a radicalized version of  this thesis; namely, that the earthly name exalted at the end is also first conferred at the end, whereas the ‘who’ that transforms in the first part of  the hymn is anonymous. Paul’s initial evocation of  ‘that which [was] also in Jesus Christ’ would then ref lect his perspective, which follows Christ’s exaltation. This perspective does not, however, necessarily govern the narrative, which traces the movements of a far less determinate, not-yet named (and perhaps unnameable) subject, who is both divine and earthly at once, and as a consequence, neither. This reading is more plausible and closer to the language of  the text than the prevailing assumption that God exists separately in and for himself, while Christ’s existence in the form of  God implies that ‘the form of  God were a sphere in which he existed or a garment in which he was clothed (cf. Lk. 7:25)’. For the latter interpretation, see Peter T. O’Brien, The Epistle to the Philippians (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991). 206. These additional images of separate spheres or clothing have no support in the text, which is highly abstract. O’Brien and other interpreters of  the passage seem to leave out the radical possibility that, at least in this half-sentence, ‘God’ could be read as one form of an indeterminate subject.

74

Kristina Mendicino

forms and likenesses. Specifically, it is associated with ‘the form of a slave’ or, to speak with Hegel, the ‘schlechthin selbstlose Form’ [‘the absolutely self less form’].62 And if, within the hymn, this re-formation of divinity and humanity alike might only seem true for Christ, Paul’s other usages of  ‘form’ [μορφή] and its derivatives also present each singular Christian as a form of  the ultimate (transforming) divine subject.63 62 Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 440. The word for ‘slave’ here cannot be read as a reference to Christ’s humiliation during the Passion, which follows his initial incarnation. Thus, I follow Moule’s interpretation of  the word as a further elaboration of  Christ’s incarnation as a moment of  kenôsis, or ‘emptying-out’. If a slave was denied ‘the right to anything – even to his own life and person’, then ‘the statement that Jesus so completely stripped himself of all rights and securities as to be comparable to a slave, constitutes a poignant description of  his absolute and extreme self-emptying’. Moule, ‘Further Ref lections on Philippians 2:5–11’, 268. As for the dif ference between Christ’s human formation and Adam, it is important to notice that Paul consistently speaks of  Adamic f lesh as a ‘visible likeness’ [εἰκῶν] of  God, as opposed to Christ’s existence in the form of  God, and then in the form of a slave (which amounts to being a likeness of man). See Rom 8:29; 1 Cor 11:7, 15:49; 2 Cor 3:18, 4:4. This distinction between Adam’s designation as an εἰκῶν and Christ’s as a μορφή is discussed at length in Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2003), 122 and in Edward Adams, ‘Paul, Jesus, and Christ’, in Delbert Burkett, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Jesus (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 94–110, 104. The fact that the phrase ‘the form of  God’ [μορφή θεοῦ] is, as Hurtado points out, ‘never used elsewhere in any allusion to Adam’, nor is it ever used in the Greek Old Testament or ‘any other pre-Pauline Greek writing’, precludes reading the opening of  the hymn as an allusion to Christ as a second Adam. See Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 122. 63 Towards the end of  his letter, Paul tells his Christian public: ‘For ours is the kingdom in heaven, from which we also receive the saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall transform our body of  humiliation to a form shared with his body of glory, in accordance with the work of  his power and the subjugation of all to himself ’ [ἡμῶν γὰρ τὸ πολίτευμα ἐν οὐρανοῖς ὑπάρχει, ἐξ οὗ καὶ σωτῆρα ἀπεκδεχόμεθα κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστόν, ὃς μετασχηματίσει τὸ σῶμα τῆς ταπεινώσεως ἡμῶν σύμμορφον τῷ σώματι τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ κατὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν τοῦ δύνασθαι αὐτὸν καὶ ὑποτάξαι αὑτῷ τὰ πάντα Phil 3:20–1]. I base my translation here on O’Brien, The Epistle to the Philippians, 458–67. The Christian ‘polity’ [τὸ πολίτευμα] is made up of  those who shall receive Christ, who changes the scheme of  the body to a ‘shared form’ [σύμμορφον]. Singular Christians are forms of  this ultimate self, this ultimate form to whom ‘all is subjugated’ [ὑποτάξαι

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

75

The divine subject of  Paul’s hymnic biography is truly the autokinesis of  form and negative labour that make up Hegel’s ‘Leben Gottes’ [‘life of  God’].64 One can even go so far to call the subject of  Paul’s first sentence ‘Form’, just as the ‘einzelne Selbst’ [‘singular self ’] was itself a ‘Form’ in Hegel’s Christological ontology.65 In fact, the looseness, if not amorphousness, of  Paul’s syntax supports such a reading. For in the clause, ‘but he emptied out himself, the form, taking the form of  the slave’ [ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών], the word ‘form’ [μορφὴν] can grammatically function as a zeugma; i.e. both as the object of  ‘emptied out’ [ἐκένωσεν], in apposition to ‘himself ’ [ἑαυτὸν], as well as the object of  ‘taking’ [λαβών]. Thus, one might translate: ‘But he emptied out himself, the form, taking the form of  the slave.’66 Form, in other words, courses through the sentence as the subject and object of  transformations. It is absolute, in that no subject or object has a more stable ontolological significance than that of a moment in this transforming form, this kenotic kinesis. But what is this self-emptying, unforming and reforming form? The significance of  the word ‘form’ [μορφή] in this passage remains one of  the most heatedly debated problems in theology and New Testament scholarship. However, the Greek Old Testament usage of  that word to denote a visible, outward appearance is not immediately implied in the text, where God is only present as a form in the first place.67 Nor can one assume that Christ’s ‘being in the form of  God’ means having the essence or essential αὑτῷ τὰ πάντα]. Elsewhere Paul will claim that he – in the name of  Christ – bears the congregation with birth-pangs ‘until Christ has assumed form in them’ [μέχρις οὗ μορφωθῇ Χριστὸς ἐν ὑμῖν Gal 4:19]. 64 Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 24. 65 Ibid., 440. For the full passage, see above, 67. 66 This interpretation has not been adopted by most commentators, though Paul Feinberg and Peter O’Brien both agree that the participial clauses that coordinate with the main verb ἐκένωσεν describe ‘the way in which Christ emptied himself out’. See O’Brien, The Epistle to the Philippians, 217 and Feinberg, ‘The Kenosis and Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Analysis of  Phil 2:6–11’, Trinity Journal 1/1 (1980), 21–46, 42. 67 For arguments that ‘form’ [μορφή] refers to a visible appearance by which one can ‘identify the concrete entity as such’, see Takeshi Nagata, ‘Philippans 2:5–11. A Case

76

Kristina Mendicino

attributes of  God, such as omnipotence, omniscience, etc., – of which there is also nothing said at the cryptic opening of  this hymn. To the contrary, Paul’s language unsettles, rather than af firms, any essentialist ontology.68 The word ‘form’ [μορφή] seems instead to hold Christ-the-God or Christthe-slave apart from any identification with a particular appearance or existence. It is not ‘essence’ [οὐσία] in the philosophical sense that scholars such as Lightfoot support, but it is also not the visible appearance that more recent scholars have made it out to be. It is rather the term that, in its nearness to each, suspends both – just as it suspends, liquefies and empties out the substantives ‘God’ and ‘man’. Form here is ‘emptying-out’ [κένωσις] or ‘Entäußerung’ [‘relinquishment’]. As such, the autokinetic form of  Paul’s hymn must relinquish the alternative to self-emptying that Christ, in the form of  God, had faced: namely, the rejected alternative of considering ‘being equal to God a thing to be seized’ [ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ]. Here as throughout, the sense of  the text, especially the word ἁρπαγμός – in the Latin Vulgate translation, raptus – is contested.69 One thing, however, is clear: he who is in the form of  God is not God; to the contrary, such a divine identity, a res rapienda, could only be won through an act of seizure. But if it is right to read God himself as a form, this would also mean that God is not God yet. It would mean that the one in the form of  God abandons the possibility of  being equal to himself and that ‘form’ cannot be equated with essence or being. The sentence of identity, so important to the resurrection of spirit for Hegel – the sentence ‘Ich = Ich’ [‘I = I’] – is what is at stake Study in the Shaping of  Early Christology’, PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1981, 204 and O’Brien, The Epistle to the Philippians, 209. 68 Gregory of  Nyssa writes ‘and the form of  God is the same in all respects to the essence’ [ἡ δέ μορφὴ τοῦ θεοῦ ταὐτὸν τῇ οὐσίᾳ πάντως ἐστίν], and the other early commentators, such as Chrysostom, agree. See J.B. Lightfoot’s survey in Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1953), 134. 69 Interpretations range from the verbal concept of  ‘stealing’ (Moule, ‘Further Ref lections on Philippians 2:5–11’, 266–8) to the notion of  ‘advantage to be clung to or exploited’ (Roy Hoover, ‘The Harpagmos Enigma: A Philological Solution’, The Harvard Theological Review 64/1 [1971], 95–119) and ‘a thing to be seized’ (Martin, A Hymn of  Christ, 134–53).

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

77

here, and it is explicitly characterized as the object of grasping, a raptus: ἁρπαγμός. The absolute ‘form’ we find in the first sentence of  the hymn is an amorphous subject that does not seize upon identity and does not coincide with being, but that suspends a violent gesture of grasping its own ontological substance. The first words of  Paul’s hymn are as unsettling to any onto-theology as Christ’s last words. But the author of  the hymn makes a leap – as abrupt and violent as an act of seizure – to the last sentence. Something happens surreptiously in the syntactic pause that separates the death of  Christ from the proclamation of  his glory. The second sentence is radically dif ferent in character and tone from the first, with its sharp articulation of actions and subjects. It comprises a series of separate, finite verbs, with clearly-defined subjects and objects, as opposed to the amorphous opening, which had consisted of  loosely linked participial clauses and was narrated in an aorist tense, leaving all specific temporal coordinates indeterminate. In the second sentence, one finds causal [διὸ] and purposive [ἵνα] relations, which culminate in the prescription for every tongue to ‘speak out in accord that the Lord is Jesus Christ in the glory of  God the Father’ [πᾶσα γλῶσσα ἐξομολογήσεται ὅτι κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς εἰς δόξαν θεοῦ πατρός]. The contrast to the declarative tenor of  the first sentence could not be greater, which was neutral in relation to its listeners, as well as categories such as causality and purpose. It is as if  the passion of  form that takes place in the first sentence violently converts to a cosmological hierarchy. Just after the bearer of  this passion is suspended on the cross, each member of  the movement, from God to Christ and man, can receive a separate designation. A fixed order of substantives – and imperative orders – can be articulated. In Paul’s hymn, the passion of  form describes the very movement that Hegel inscribes as the life of  God – and as the Christological conclusion to the French Revolution.70 It describes the many moments of ‘Entäußerung’, or ‘exteriorization’ and ‘relinquishment’, that pervade Hegel’s Phenomenology and resonate with Luther’s translation of the Pauline ἐκένωσεν. Above all, its (rapturous) rupture betrays the violent gesture that transforms Hegel’s and 70 Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, 440.

78

Kristina Mendicino

Christ’s labours of negation into an absolute system – a rupture that, in its subtlety, could otherwise pass unnoticed in Hegel’s presentation of absolute spirit. Paul’s presentation of  the exaltation of  Christ might even be called a ‘seizing’ (ἁρπαγμός, raptus) in the most active sense of  the word, such that it undoes and definitively transforms the kenôsis that had preceded it. But the emptiness in the text that gapes between the first and second sentences cannot be concealed with the sudden conjunction ‘for this’ [δίο καὶ] that introduces the glory of  Christ and God within a fixed world order. This phrase, precisely because it is a language of conjunction and causality, does not conjoin in tone or structure with the previous, amorpohous sentence of  form. The two sentences are absolutely foreign to each other. The f luidity of  form becomes for Hegel as for Paul a truth that is betrayed in arguments that render an established order of identities more unassailable and fixed than ever. But the conversion of an absolutely amorphous, transforming form into a circulation of spirit that can only come to itself, remains and must remain suspicious. It will always betray itself – unconsciously, against all intentions – with the foreignness it must suppress, in order to grasp itself.

Bibliography Adams, Edward, ‘Paul, Jesus, and Christ’, in Delbert Burkett, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Jesus (Malden: Blackwell, 2011), 94–110. Adorno, Theodor, Drei Studien zu Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969). Beck, Lewis White, ‘The Reformation, the Revolution, and the Restoration in Hegel’s Political Philosophy’, Journal of  the History of  Philosophy 14/1 (1976), 51–61. Bloch, Ernst, Subjekt-Objekt: Erläuterungen zu Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962, 2nd edn, 1971). Cane, Anthony, The Place of  Judas Iscariot in Christology (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005). Derett, J.D.M., ‘The Ischariot, MeSira and the Redemption’, Journal for the Study of  the New Testament 8 (1980), 2–23. Daub, Carl, Judas Ischariot, oder das Böse im Verhältniß zum Guten, 2 vols (Heidelberg: Mohr and Winter, 1816–18). Derrida, Jacques, Glas (Paris: Galiliée, 1974).

Grasping Spirit: Betrayal in Hegel’s Christology

79

Feinberg, Paul, ‘The Kenosis and Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Analysis of  Phil 2:6–11’, Trinity Journal 1/1 (1980), 21–46. Ferrarin, Alfredo, Hegel and Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Hamacher, Werner, ‘(Das Ende der Kunst mit der Maske)’, in Karl Heinz Bohrer, ed., Sprachen der Ironie – Sprachen des Ernstes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 121–55. ——, ‘pleroma – zu Genesis und Struktur einer dialektischen Hermeneutik bei Hegel’, in Werner Hamacher, ed., ‘Der Geist des Christentums’: Schriften 1796–1800 (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1978), 1–333. Hegel, G.W.F., Hegels theologische Jugendschriften, ed. Herman Nohl (Tübingen: Mohr, 1907). ——, Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–71). Hippolyte, Jean, Genèse et structure de la phénomenologie de l’esprit de Hegel (Paris: Montaigne, 1946). Hoover, Roy, ‘The Harpagmos Enigma: A Philological Solution’, The Harvard Theological Review 64/1 (1971), 95–119. Hurtado, Larry W., Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 2003). Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Küng, Hans, Menschwerdung Gottes: Eine Einführung in Hegels theologisches Denken als Prolegomena zu einer künftigen Christologie (Freiburg: Herder, 1970). Lightfoot, J.B., Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1953). Martin, Ralph P., A Hymn of  Christ: Philippians 2:5–11 in Recent Interpretation & in the Setting of  Early Christian Worship, 2nd edn (Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity, 1983). Moule, Charles F.D., ‘Further Ref lections on Philippians 2:5–11’, in W. Ward Gasque and Ralph P. Martin, eds, Apostolic History and the Gospel: Biblical and Historical Essays Presented to F.F. Bruce (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1970), 265–76. Nagata, Takeshi, Philippans 2:5–11. A Case Study in the Shaping of  Early Christology (Princeton University PhD thesis, 1981). Nestle, Eberhard, and Erwin Nestle, eds, Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1984). O’Brien, Peter T., The Epistle to the Philippians (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991). Theunissen, Michael Hegels Lehre vom absoluten Geist als theologisch-politischer Traktat (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970). Trawny, Peter, Die Zeit der Dreieinigkeit: Untersuchungen zur Trinität bei Hegel und Schelling (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005).

Eric Dodson-Robinson

‘By a Brother’s Hand’: Betrayal and Brotherhood in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Senecan Tragedy

Now therefore thou art cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. — Geneva Bible (1560), Genesis 4:11 ATREUS It is but right to doe to him, that wrong to brother were. — Jasper Heywood, The Seconde Tragedie of  Seneca Entituled Thyestes Faithfully Englished (1560)

‘It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, | A brother’s murder’, says Claudius in his famous soliloquy (Ham. III iii 37–8).1 Betrayal between real and metaphorical brothers is a leitmotif in Hamlet and in other Shakespearean works.2 Janet Adelman has recently suggested that Rome’s fratricidal foundation myth of  Romulus and Remus, as transmitted via Plutarch, Ovid and Virgil, implicitly informs Timon of  Athens and Shakespeare’s Roman plays.3 Adelman argues that in Cymbeline Shakespeare revisits this problematic 1 2 3

All citations of  Hamlet are from Stephen Greenblatt, ed., The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edn (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). For fratricide in tragedy, see Joseph T. McCullen Jr., ‘Brother Hate and Fratricide in Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey 3/4 (1952), 335–40. Janet Adelman, ‘Shakespeare’s Romulus and Remus: Who Does the Wolf  Love?’, in Maria Del Sapio Garbero, ed., Identity, Otherness and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 19–34. Also see Clif ford Ronan, Antike Roman (Athens, Georgia: Georgia University Press, 1995).

82

Eric Dodson-Robinson

foundation narrative in order to sanitize translatio imperii, the mythic relocation of  Rome to England.4 I find that the modes of  brotherly betrayal in Hamlet, though, resonate more with Senecan tragedy, particularly Thyestes, Agamemnon and Phoenissae, than with Plutarch or Ovid, and that the implications are both religious and political. I would argue here that Shakespeare’s reception of  the Senecan tradition of  betrayal between brothers programmatically challenges Seneca’s vision of a cosmos brought to universal ruin through fraus [‘betrayal’ or ‘deception’],5 nefas [‘atrocity’], and scelus [‘atrocity’ or ‘sin’], in that Shakespeare’s concluding scene of  forgiveness and true brotherhood annuls brotherly betrayal. Forgiveness in Hamlet of fers spiritual salvation in a materially corrupt universe. In allusive and often ironic ways, Christian virtues, juxtaposed with Senecan precedents, redeem ‘the primal eldest curse’ of  betrayal. The inf luence of Senecan tragedy on Shakespeare, and on early modern tragedy in general, has long been controversial. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, John Cunlif fe and others argued for its central function in Shakespearean drama.6 Howard Baker later challenged this

4 5

6

Adelman, ‘Shakespeare’s Romulus and Remus’, 19. See Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of  Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) for a detailed treatment of  Shakespearean translatio imperii. The semantic range of  fraus includes fraud, betrayal, deception and treason. The English word ‘treachery’, although slightly archaic, has a similar range of meanings. Fraus often indicates betrayal in political or military contexts. It may also describe erotic deception, the betrayal of marital vows or the violation of any pledge of  trust. John Cunlif fe, The Inf luence of  Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (New York: G.E. Stechert & Co., 1925), argues that Shakespeare partook of  Seneca through Kyd and Marlowe, but discusses the dif ficulty in determining direct as opposed to indirect inf luence (66). F.L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1922) largely agrees with Cunlif fe. T.W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greek, vol. 2 (Urbana: University of  Illinois Press, 1944) reexamines these questions more skeptically, and argues against Shakespeare’s direct knowledge of  Seneca: ‘We thus have no indication that Shakspere [sic] read Seneca’s plays in the original. Nor do I find any evidence worth repeating that Shakspere [sic] had read English Seneca’ (560). Baldwin believes it unlikely that Shakespeare encountered any more than Senecan sententiae in grammar school (ibid.). Also see

‘By a Brother’s Hand’

83

argument, and G.K. Hunter dismissed it in favour of  Ovidian imitation.7 More recent scholarship in Elizabethan and Jacobean reception of  the classics, while keeping a wary distance from earlier source studies, acknowledges Seneca’s heavy role in Shakespearean drama.8 Gordon Braden argues for a complex relation between Senecan and early modern subjectivity; Anthony Boyle traces the preeminence of Seneca in the European theatrical tradition from Italy to England; and Robert Miola analyses Shakespeare’s innovative metamorphoses of Seneca, Virgil, Ovid and indigenous drama.9 Rather than cataloguing Shakespeare’s supposed sources, such contemporary reception studies raise more engaging questions about the relations of  Shakespeare’s work to classical literature: if  the dramaturgy of  Shakespeare’s plays parallels that of  Seneca’s, what does it mean and what are the consequences? In what ways does Shakespeare transform or challenge Senecan exempla? These are the types of questions I would like to raise in this essay. Questions of  Senecan models and their transformation in Hamlet receive illuminating attention in recent reception studies.10 Boyle describes features such as the ghost, the rewriting of  Senecan speeches and scenes,

7 8

9 10

J. Jacquot, ed., Les Tragédies de Sénèque et le Théâtre de la Renaissance (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1964). G.K. Hunter, ‘Seneca and the Elizabethans: A Case-Study in Inf luence’, Shakespeare Survey 20 (1967), 17–26; Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978). For an accessible overview of  the ‘battle over the question of  Seneca’s inf luence’, see Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of  Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 29–34, 29. Also see M. Frank, ‘Did Shakespeare Owe Anything to Seneca? The Debate Outlined’, Akroterion 42/1 (1997), 36–42, who holds that Shakespearean rhetoric, style, structure and themes partake heavily of  Seneca, and Raimund Borgmeier, ‘Die Englische Literatur’, in Eckard Lefèvre, ed., Der Einf luss Senecas auf das Europäische Drama (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978), 276–323 for an earlier comprehensive summary of  the question. Hunter suggests that studies of  ‘inf luence’ should consider the multiplicity of intertexts with which a given author engages, rather than focusing on one source in isolation. Hunter, ‘Seneca and the Elizabethans’, 18. See Geof frey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of  Shakespeare, 8 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957–75) vol. 7, 155–65 for an earlier assessment and reprint of potential Senecan sources.

84

Eric Dodson-Robinson

the theatricalized world, Senecan metatheatre and autarchic self hood.11 Miola argues convincingly that Shakespeare rewrites Senecan dramatic forms and conventions, such as the revenge ghost and the choral meditation, in Hamlet and other plays.12 While I agree with Miola on several points, my interest here is more axiological than formal. In my own recent work, I have argued that Shakespeare, through substantial engagement with Senecan tragedy, ironizes and confronts Senecan values in ways that call into question identity: individual, national and religious.13 This essay furthers that broader project, with a view toward better understanding the reception and transformation of values in the European dramatic tradition. The modes of  brotherly betrayal in Hamlet resonate markedly with those of  Senecan drama, particularly Thyestes, in several significant respects. Betrayal and revenge, which typify Senecan brotherhood, manifest both in Claudius’s fratricide and in Laertes’s false playing of  the ‘brother’s wager’ (Ham. V ii 190) with Hamlet. Conf lated erotic and political ambitions motivate fraternal betrayal in Hamlet as they do in Seneca’s Thyestes, Agamemnon and Phoenissae, while Shakespeare complicates the double exile and return cycle portrayed in Thyestes by adding a double revenge plot: both Hamlet and Laertes return to Denmark to seek revenge. Above all, contaminated nature, which results from ‘rank’ primal crime,14 underlies betrayal between brothers in Hamlet as it does in Senecan drama. In Senecan tragedy, crime is hereditary and all-infecting. The crimes of  Atreus and Thyestes, for example, stem from the primal atrocity of  their grandfather, Tantalus.15 Yet, while primal crime and ineluctable causality Anthony J. Boyle, Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1997). 12 Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Inf luence of  Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 13 E.g., Eric Dodson-Robinson, ‘Introduction’, in Eric Dodson-Robinson, ed., The Scholarly, Literary, and Theatrical Reception of  Seneca’s Tragedies: A Brill Companion (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 14 E.g., Ham. I ii 136, III ii 235, III iii 36, III iv 139. 15 See Gottfried Mader, ‘Quis Queat Digne Eloqui? Speech, Gesture and the Grammar of  the Mundus Inversus in Seneca’s Thyestes’, Antike und Abendland 46 (2000), 153–72, 161. 11

‘By a Brother’s Hand’

85

ef fectively determine the identities of  Senecan avengers such as Tantalus, Shakespeare’s characters ‘rough-hew’ (Ham. V ii 11) their own. Tantalus’s primal and paradigmatic crime, a betrayal of  the gods, challenges the boundary between the human and immortal. As the Fury displaces and drives Tantalus from the underworld, Tantalus demands, ‘peius inventum est siti | arente in undis aliquid et peius fame | hiante semper?’16 [‘Have you devised something worse than dry thirst in the midst of water, worse than ever-gaping hunger?’] Tantalus refers to the perpetual thirst and hunger he suf fered in his subterranean prison, where he stood in a pool of cool water that receded from his lips before he could drink, beneath boughs of  fruit that remained just out of reach. The punishments fit the crimes committed by Tantalus, who butchered his son, Pelops, and attempted to serve his butchered body to the immortals. The emptiness of  ‘fame | hiante semper’ [‘ever-gaping hunger’] is Tantalus’ due for having betrayed the immortals in an attempt to taint them with a meal of  human meat, and thus to overthrow the distinction between gods and men. Tantalus’ boundless greed results in his everlasting punishment, in the banishment of  humankind from the presence of  the gods and in the infection of  his living progeny. At the beginning of  Thyestes, the Ghost of  Tantalus, returning to the upper world, becomes a punishment to poison the minds of  Thyestes and Atreus: ‘mittor ut dirus vapor | tellure rupta vel gravem populis luem | sparsura pestis?’17 [‘Am I sent forth like some dread vapour from the broken earth, or as a disease to scatter oppressive sickness among the nations?’] The language of communicable disease, paramount in this scene, pervades the Senecan tragic body. Tantalus, like other Senecan patriarchs, acts as a vector whose crimes infect his progeny. Such infections, which grow to permeate all of nature, lead inevitably to political and cosmic disaster in the Senecan plays. In Phoenissae, Eteocles’ betrayal of  Polynices, which results

16 Seneca, Thyestes, 4–6. All translations are mine unless noted otherwise. The Latin text used for all citations of  Seneca’s tragedies is that of  Otto Zwierlein, ed., L. Annaei Senecae Tragoediae (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 17 Seneca, Thyestes, 87–9.

86

Eric Dodson-Robinson

in a civil war of mutually assured and total destruction, originates in the incest and parricide committed by their father, Oedipus.18 Similarly, the atrocities of  Thyestes, Atreus and Tantalus spur Aegisthus’ dull revenge in Seneca’s Agamemnon:19 a triumph of  tyranny and cosmic confusion. To return to Thyestes, the primal atrocity of  Tantalus infects Atreus’ and Thyestes’ ethical agency through contagio, the physical contamination transmitted by Tantalus’ Ghost.20 Tantalus invades the agency of  his grandsons by stimulating an impression, or pre-emotion, that results in furor [‘rage’] and violence. For the Stoics, propatheiai [‘pre-emotions’] are twinges that result from powerful stimuli. Although they may be precursors to emotions, propatheiai are not emotions in themselves. Unlike true emotions, pre-emotions do not involve the agent’s evaluation or assent. Thomas G. Rosenmeyer argues that the world of  the Senecan plays is physically Stoic.21 In the Stoic cosmos, all that exists (with four exceptions) is corporeal.22 As bodies, all things intermesh such that the movement of one part of  the universe has inevitable consequences for the whole, and vice versa. Because the mind is corporeal, external movements af fect it, as Seneca, following his Hellenistic predecessors, describes in De Ira.23 When an external stimulus such as Tantalus’s furor moves the mind, unless one actively resists, the resulting passions assume

Elaine Fantham, ‘Nihil Iam Iura Naturae Valent: Incest and Fratricide in Seneca’s Phoenissae’, in Anthony J. Boyle, ed., Seneca Tragicus (Berwick, Victoria: Aureal, 1983), 61–76. 19 Although Aegisthus is ostensibly both Agamemnon’s cousin and nephew, Thyestes’ adultery with Agamemnon’s mother, Aerope, lends an uncannily fraternal quality to their familial bonds. 20 Eric Dodson-Robinson, ‘Rending Others: Ethical Contagio in Seneca’s Thyestes’, Mouseion 10 (2010), 45–68. 21 Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1989). 22 Rosenmeyer, Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology, 94–5; M.D. Boeri, ‘The Stoics on Bodies and Incorporeals’, The Review of  Metaphysics 54 (2001), 723–52, 737; DodsonRobinson, ‘Rending Others’, 47. 23 E.g., 1.8; 1.16.7; 2.5.8. Also see Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 2007), 16–26, 85–6, 98–9. 18

‘By a Brother’s Hand’

87

immediate and total control, as they do over Atreus. In Thyestes, Tantalus initiates a pre-emotion that Atreus fails to resist. Atreus’ consequent furor overwhelms his agency. The infection of  Tantalus’ furor drives Atreus’ revenge on Thyestes. The latter had betrayed Atreus by seducing his wife and stealing a golden ram that guaranteed kingship: motivations at once erotic and political.24 From the moment of  Tantalus’ acquiescence to the Fury’s command, event follows event in an inevitable chain. As the Fury drives Tantalus from the underworld,25 she orders him, ‘perturba domum’ [‘wreak havoc on the house’].26 When the Ghost attempts to resist, the Fury terrifies him and torments him with hunger and thirst,27 physical sensations that torture his body.28 At the Fury’s bidding, Tantalus then infects the entire house with his furor.29 When the Fury prescribes the betrayal, butchery and cooking of  Thyestes’ children, her language recalls Tantalus’ primal crime, and the Chorus recounts the history of  his nefas [‘atrocity’] in detail.30 While Tantalus is tortured in the underworld by insatiable hunger and thirst, his descendants Atreus and Thyestes are now also to be punished, their identities determined by their progenitor’s crime. The Chorus’s allusion to the primal crime of  Tantalus explicitly links it to the mutual betrayals and crimes that Atreus and Thyestes are destined to commit. The Ghost makes this link physical,31 such that the primal crime of  Tantalus determines Atreus’ nefas. The Fury commands the Ghost, ‘concute insano ferum pectus tumultu’ [‘shake the fierce breast with frantic turmoil’].32 We must understand that

24 Seneca, Thyestes, 220–35. 25 Ibid., 23. 26 Ibid., 83. 27 Ibid., 96–9. 28 The hunger has been ‘driven in’ (‘infixa’, ibid., 97) to the ghost’s marrow, and the thirst burns its heart and intestines (ibid., 98–9). 29 Ibid., 101. 30 Ibid., 144–51. 31 Ibid., 101–21. 32 Seneca, Thyestes, 84–5.

88

Eric Dodson-Robinson

this is the very same tumultus [‘turmoil’] that shakes Atreus: ‘tumultus pectora attonitus quatit | penitusque volvit’ [‘a turmoil shakes my breast and stirs it within’].33 Atreus’ chiastic repetition of  the Fury’s words is more than mere linguistic or poetic reverberation. The chilling echo, given the Stoic corporeality of  the play, emphasizes Tantalus’ ethical contagio, or ‘infection’, of  Atreus. The tumultus that shakes Atreus is a pre-emotion evoked by Tantalus’ ghost, and thus the Fury has compelled the Ghost to drive an impetus for retributive violence into Atreus. The dialogue between the Ghost and the Fury contaminates the agency of  Atreus, who, like Tantalus, knowingly assents to wrongdoing: ‘fiat hoc, fiat nefas | quod, di, timetis’ [‘let it be, let it be done, this sin that terrifies you, gods’],34 he proclaims, ‘ita sit. hoc, anime, | occupa’ [‘so be it. Seize it, spirit’].35 Atreus’ elaborate betrayal of  his brother’s trust, which traces its cause to Tantalus’ primal atrocity, culminates in a sacrilegious of fering of  Thyestes’ sons that Atreus consecrates ‘to himself ’ [‘sibi’].36 After accomplishing the sacrifice, Atreus boasts that he has become equal to the stars: ‘Aequalis astris gradior et cunctos super | altum superbo vertice attingens polum’ [‘Equal among the stars I tread, and lord over all, my head touching the lofty sky’].37 Atreus believes that his scelus has elevated him to divine status: ‘dimitto superos’ [‘I dismiss the gods’],38 he vaunts. He wishes that he could compel them to watch the grotesque spectacle of cannibalism he stages: ‘utinam quidem tenere fugientes deos | possem et coactos trahere, ut ultricem dapem | omnes viderent’ [‘oh, I wish I could detain the gods as they try to f lee and drag them all under constraint to watch this feast of vengeance’].39 Atreus’ grandiose vision exemplifies the impiously boundless cupiditas [‘ambition’] that characterizes him, his brother and the other Tantalids. Such cupiditas is the legacy of  Tantalus himself. Atreus betrays the pledge 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Ibid., 260–1. Ibid., 265–6. Ibid., 269–70. Ibid., 713. Ibid., 885–6. Ibid., 888. Ibid., 893–5.

‘By a Brother’s Hand’

89

of reconciliation he had given Thyestes along with the most fundamental family bonds. In this way, Atreus reenacts Tantalus’ exemplary crime. When Thyestes discovers that he has eaten a meal prepared from the f lesh of  his own sons, he demands, ‘Hoc foedus? Haec est gratia, haec fratris fides?’ [‘Is this your pledge? This your goodwill, this the promise of a brother?’]40 In his grief, Thyestes invokes the gods: ‘Piorum praesides testor deos’ [‘I call the gods that stand by the righteous to witness’].41 Yet, Atreus reminds Thyestes and the audience that Thyestes himself  transgressed against the gods when he betrayed Atreus and corrupted his wife, Aerope.42 Taunting Thyestes, Atreus answers, ‘Quid coniugales?’ [‘What about the marriage gods?’]43 Thyestes, through his own act of  betrayal, has of fended the gods, and he can therefore expect them to spurn his prayers. In Thyestes, fraternal betrayal is mutual and perverse. Not only do the gods shun both brothers, but the brothers’ reciprocal betrayals are consequence of and punishment for Tantalus’ primal crime. Atreus’ scelus results in apocalypse. After Atreus butchers Thyestes’ sons and serves them to their father at dinner, the sun itself  f lees from the sky, as the tragedy emphasizes repeatedly.44 The sun’s departure continues a chain reaction of ef fects leading to universal catastrophe. The reversal of  the sun disrupts the diurnal cycles of  the cosmos, and the Chorus foretells the downfall of  the Zodiac, which is a leitmotif in Seneca, as well as the fiery ekpyrosis [‘conf lagration’] to follow.45 In this way, Tantalus’ buried crime resurfaces, poisons the earth and precipitates total destruction. In Thyestes, the primal crime of  betrayal leads inexorably to cosmic disaster. Foul deeds infect and corrupt the material world in Hamlet, as they do in Thyestes, although in Shakespeare’s tragedy spiritual redemption mitigates the physical dissolution that is the inevitable consequence of  betrayal 40 Seneca, Thyestes, 1024. 41 Ibid., 1102. 42 See Atreus’ dialogue with the satelles at 220–44, especially 222–4 and 238–41. Thyestes himself confesses his crime to Atreus at 512–21. 43 Seneca, Thyestes, 1103. 44 E.g., ibid., 120–1, 637–8, 776–8, 789f. 45 Ibid., 813–74.

90

Eric Dodson-Robinson

and atrocity in Senecan tragedy. The foul deed in Hamlet is Claudius’s fratricide. Claudius betrays his king and his brother when he poisons Old Hamlet. While this betrayal leads to upheaval and disaster, it culminates with mutual forgiveness between the ‘brothers’ Laertes and Hamlet. The brotherly forgiveness exchanged between Hamlet and Laertes inverts the dual prayers for vengeance uttered by Atreus and his brother at the conclusion of  Thyestes. Hamlet challenges the Senecan vision, according to which betrayal and sacrilege contaminate and destroy all, through inversions that are linguistic and thematic as well as structural. For example, Hamlet juxtaposes Christian and Senecan values through the motif of poisoned and corrupted nature. This motif pervades Shakespeare’s tragedy, as it does the Senecan plays and the neo-Senecan revenge drama that Hamlet stages in his attempt to ‘catch the conscience of  the King’ (Ham. II ii 582). ‘Fie on’t, ah fie, fie!’ Hamlet says (Ham. I ii 135). ‘’Tis an unweeded garden | That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature | Possess it merely’ (Ham. I ii 135–7). The word ‘rank’ has special significance because of its multiple meanings and connotations: while it clearly denotes luxuriant and abundant vegetative growth, the pejorative tone of  Hamlet’s speech (‘Fie!’) also implies something stinking, festering, or diseased. This is the meaning it holds, for example, when Hamlet confronts Gertrude in her chamber: Lay not a f lattering unction to your soul That not your trespass but my madness speaks. It will but skin and film the ulcerous place Whilst rank corruption, mining all within, Infects unseen. (Ham. III iv 136–40)

Here, Hamlet suggests that the betrayal of  Old Hamlet corrupts like a ‘rank’ infection that runs rampant throughout the body. The description of  betrayal and its consequent crimes as disease or infection is one of  the prominent markers of  Senecan tragedy, and more generally, of  Stoic physics.46

46 See above. Also see Rosenmeyer, Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology, 90, 111, 117, 136–59, 175.

‘By a Brother’s Hand’

91

The resonances with Thyestes are particularly relevant. The language of cancerous growth pervades Seneca’s tragedy: scelus [‘atrocity’] grows, while ira [‘anger’] and tumultus [‘turmoil’] tument [‘swell’] to corrupt all. The word rank in Hamlet translates the disturbing conf lation of violence, lust, corporeal engorgement, festering infection and metastatic growth encompassed by words with the tum- [‘swell’] root in Thyestes.47 Significantly, the word ‘rank’ is also prominent in the sixteenth-century translations of  Seneca’s plays, which speak, for example, of  ‘poyson ranke’ and of  love ‘raging ranke’.48 Accordingly, the neo-Senecan tragedy performed before Claudius at Hamlet’s bidding refers to the Player Lucianus’s poison as a ‘mixture rank’ (Ham. III ii 235). Claudius’s rank primal crime, like that of  Tantalus, spreads uncontrollably to infect the state. As Marcellus says, ‘Something is rotten in the state of  Denmark’ (Ham. I iv 67). Christian and Senecan values intersect in Claudius’s use of  the word ‘rank’ in his confession soliloquy. Hamlet has just highlighted the Senecan connotations of  the word with a metatheatrical f lourish through the language of  The Mousetrap in the previous scene. The Player Lucianus’s ‘mixture rank’ (Ham. III ii 235) evokes the potion with which Claudius poisons Old Hamlet. Yet, although the neo-Senecan play-within-a-play suggests a connection between Claudius’s crime and the rank crimes of  Senecan revenge tragedy, Claudius’s use of  ‘rank’ and his subsequent confession situate his crime within a Christian cosmos. The ‘rank’ nature of  Claudius’s crime ‘smells to heaven’ (Ham. III iii 36), much like the infectious atrocities of  the Tantalids that contaminate the cosmos and disturb the very gods. ‘It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, | A brother’s murder’ (Ham. III iii 37–8), says Claudius. The ‘primal eldest curse’ alludes to the Lord’s curse upon Cain in Genesis: ‘Now therefore thou art cursed from the earth, which 47 For example, when Hamlet calls Claudius the ‘bloat King’, ‘lascivious’ and ‘lustful’ are the implied meanings. See Paul Hammond, The Strangeness of  Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 109–10 for a close reading of  the tum- roots in Thyestes. 48 Thomas Newton, ed., Seneca His Tenne Tragedies Translated into Englysh, 2 vols, Spenser Society, 43–4 (London, 1581; facs. edn, Manchester, 1887), vol. 2, 409; vol. 1, 135.

92

Eric Dodson-Robinson

hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand’ (Gen. 4:11). Claudius’s betrayal of  his brother reenacts ‘the primal eldest’ crime of  Genesis, Cain’s murder of  his brother Abel, and explicitly connects Claudius’s crime with its lapsarian roots.49 The Ghost of  Hamlet tells young Hamlet how the ‘leperous distilment’ (Ham. I v 64) that Claudius poured in his ears curded his blood: And a most instant tetter barked about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust, All my smooth body. Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand Of  life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched: Cut of f even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhouseled, dis-appointed, unaneled, No reck’ning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. (Ham. I v 71–9)

Set in the Eden-like ‘orchard’ (Ham. I v 59) where Claudius, the ‘serpent’ (Ham. I v 39), stings Old Hamlet’s physical and spiritual life, the scene approaches an allegory for original sin, for man’s primal betrayal of  the Lord. Thus the episode condenses the biblical narrative of  the Fall with that of  Cain and Abel, and it emphasizes the enormity and impiety of  Claudius’s crime.50 Such crimes, of course, including the imperfections on Old Hamlet’s head, ultimately begin with Eve’s and Adam’s betrayal of divine commandment: a betrayal that corrupts all f lesh. In his confessional soliloquy, Claudius acknowledges the blackness of  his sin, for which he despairs but does not repent or seek the forgiveness that might redeem him from this corruption: ‘Pray can I not’ (Ham. III iii 36–8).

49 See Gen. 4:3–12; Gen. 3. Donald V. Stump, ‘Hamlet, Cain and Abel, and the Pattern of  Divine Providence’, Renaissance Papers (1985), 27–38, argues that the engagement with the Cain and Abel narrative portrays a recognizable and consistent image of divine justice and providence. 50 See Sergio Bertelli, The King’s Body, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (University Park: Penn State Press, 2001), esp. 1–38. Claudius, with typical hypocrisy, refers to the sanctity the royal body at IV v 120–2.

‘By a Brother’s Hand’

93

‘Ambition’ and erotic interest motivate Claudius’s sins (Ham. III iii 55), as they do those of  the Tantalids. In Hamlet, though, a brother’s betrayal takes a tone very dif ferent from Senecan fraus, scelus and nefas, in that Shakespeare foregrounds the biblical resonances of  Claudius’s crime, which are, of course, absent in Thyestes. The inveterate, hereditary nature of sin in Hamlet and its resonances with a primal crime evoke both the biblical narrative and the Senecan tradition. Yet, in the Senecan tragedies, primal nefas determines crimes of violent retribution, while this is not so in Hamlet. Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost sets biblical and Senecan traditions in an intimate proximity that illuminates their incongruous values and the paradoxes to which their juxtaposition leads. As in Thyestes and Genesis, in Hamlet ‘Foul deeds will rise, | Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes’ (Ham. I ii 256–7). When the Ghost does rise in Hamlet, he not only appears before Hamlet’s eyes, but also professes to disabuse his ears: ’Tis given out that, sleeping in mine orchard, A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of  Denmark Is by a forged process of my death Rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth, The serpent that did sting thy father’s life Now wears his crown. (Ham. I v 35–40)

The adverbial use of  ‘rank’ in the speech is worth noting here. The meanings of disease, decay, poison and sin overlap here as they do in Claudius’s confession. As in Thyestes, a poisonous secret buried beneath the earth now ‘breathes out | Contagion to this world’ (Ham. III ii 359–60), in the protagonist’s words.51 The contagion of  Claudius’s buried crime will physically poison Claudius himself, Hamlet and other central characters. The Ghost of  Hamlet, however, is a hybrid between a corporeal, Senecan-derived ghost and a disembodied spirit. Shakespeare’s play dramatizes this dialogism as an encounter with and transformation of the Senecan dramatic tradition and of what Senecan drama has to say about violence and

51

Cf. Seneca, Thyestes, 87–9 and discussion above.

94

Eric Dodson-Robinson

identity. The Ghost of Hamlet is, as Barnardo, Horatio and Marcellus determine, ‘as the air invulnerable’ (Ham. I i 126). Unlike the world of  Thyestes, there is a dualism to the physical universe of  Hamlet that separates body and spirit. However, the Ghost alludes to the traditional corporeal torments suf fered in the prison-house where he must ‘fast in fires’ (Ham. I iv 11). The catalogue of such torments was a convention of  Senecan tragedies and of  Elizabethan revenge drama. Yet, the Ghost tells Hamlet, ‘this eternal blazon must not be | To ears of  f lesh and blood’ (Ham. I iv 21–2). This occultatio of  the Ghost’s subterranean prison defines an ontological distinction between the ‘spirit’ that is the Ghost and the ‘f lesh and blood’ of  the body he has lost (Ham. I iv 9, 22). The separation between the world of  f lesh and the world of spirit is essential to Hamlet’s challenge to Senecan values. All f lesh is ‘rank’ in Hamlet’s universe and not only subject to corruption, but inescapably contaminated by original sin. Yet, despite the rankness of nature, salvation is possible for the soul. Claudius’s betrayal is a spiritual crime as much as a physical crime. He has both destroyed Old Hamlet’s mortal body and compromised the place of  the Ghost’s soul in the afterlife because Old Hamlet had no time to confess and receive spiritual absolution for his bodily sins.52 Young Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost dramatizes a reassessment of  the Senecan interactions between the spirits of  the underworld and the human characters of revenge tragedy. In the Senecan plays, the chthonic agents, such as Tantalus, who are embodied patriarchs, act on and through their living descendants to usurp agency and determine the action of  the play. This happens without the awareness of  the human characters like Atreus, who assert their self-sovereignty in bombastic rhetoric that belies the predetermined and hereditary nature of  their crimes.53 Hamlet comes 52

The physical mechanism of  Claudius’s fratricide dif fers from Atreus’ betrayal of  his brother in that Claudius’s poison is bloodless, whereas Atreus dismembers Thyestes’ sons. Yet, Atreus, Tantalus and Claudius all attempt to infuse their targets with corruption. Claudius and Atreus succeed. Thyestes incurs the irremediable sin of eating his own children, while Old Hamlet receives no opportunity for absolution of  his sins. While Atreus dissects bodies, Claudius disembodies Old Hamlet entirely, separating body from soul. 53 E.g., Thyestes, 885 and following above.

‘By a Brother’s Hand’

95

face to face with the spirit that appears in the ‘questionable form’ of  Old Hamlet (Ham. I iii 24), unlike the Senecan avengers who never see the infernal spirits that direct their every essential action. Both Hamlet’s awareness of  the Ghost’s presence and the prince’s meta-theatrical self-consciousness are critical. The first words the Ghost speaks to Hamlet are, ‘I am thy father’s spirit’ (Hamlet, I iii 9). The Ghost enjoins Hamlet, ‘If  thou didst ever thy dear father love | […] | Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’ (Hamlet I iii 23, I iii 25). The Ghost’s command ties Hamlet’s identity as Old Hamlet’s son to the execution of revenge on Claudius. Here, Shakespeare refers to the hereditary mechanics of violence in the Senecan drama. In Agamemnon, for example, Thyestes’ Ghost urges Aegisthus to murder Agamemnon: ‘quid ipse temet consulis torques rogas | an deceat hoc te? Respice ad matrem: decet.’ [‘why do you consider, turn over, ask yourself whether this becomes you? Consider your mother: it does.’]54 Yet, although Hamlet does eventually kill Claudius in the last scene of act five, it is not clear that he does so to avenge his father, or that his actions have anything to do with the Ghost’s command or infernal or divine machinations. Hamlet stabs Claudius only after seeing his own mother murdered by poison and learning that Claudius is ‘to blame’ in the plot (Ham. V ii 263), which has also inf licted on Hamlet a mortal wound. While Hamlet’s Ghost does not physically determine his son’s violent action or identity in the tragedy, as the Senecan ghosts do, the Ghost’s appearance raises questions about the nexus between primal crime and betrayal, heredity, identity and violence: questions that challenge the Ghost’s Senecan heritage. Hamlet says of  the Ghost, The spirit that I have seen May be the devil: and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me. (Ham. II ii 600–5)

54 Seneca, Agamemnon, 51–2.

96

Eric Dodson-Robinson

For Hamlet, who takes both the Ghost and his own conscience seriously, his decision about whether to take revenge against Claudius will determine the destiny of  his soul: his identity as either saved or damned.55 Contrasting Hamlet with Laertes tells much about both characters in few words. Laertes tells Claudius, I dare damnation. To this point I stand That both the worlds I give to negligence Let come what comes; only I’ll be revenged Most thoroughly for my father. (Ham. IV v 131–4)

Laertes articulates much of what remains latent in Hamlet’s character, although from a choleric rather than a melancholic constitution, a determined conviction about his own paternity that contrasts with Hamlet’s marked lack of such avowals, and an ethos that prefers damnation to thinking too precisely on the event. Laertes speaks with the all-consuming rage of a Senecan agent of vengeance. Hamlet, however, reverses Laertes’s equation. He asks Horatio: Is’t not perfect conscience, To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damn’d, To let this canker of our nature come In further evil? (Ham. V ii 68–71)

The prince cannot kill Claudius until he persuades himself  that it is ‘perfect conscience’ (Ham. V ii 68–72), whereas Laertes consigns ‘conscience and grace to the profoundest pit’ (Ham. IV v 130). Laertes dares damnation to take revenge, but Hamlet describes the violence he intends toward Claudius, not in terms of revenge, but in terms of  forestalling ‘further evil’ (Ham. V ii 71).

55

R.A. Foakes proposes a shift from ‘Thyestean revenge’ to Christian conscience. R.A. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 123. I would argue that a dialogic tension remains between the two throughout the drama.

‘By a Brother’s Hand’

97

In Thyestes, nefas is hereditary, infectious and constitutive of  Atreus’ identity through his revenge,56 while Hamlet repeatedly makes reference to heredity only to complicate and challenge its prerogatives against individual conscience. This dialogue articulates a non-Senecan resistance to fate and to allowing the revenge tragedy tradition to saturate agency or determine identity. Although Senecan characters, such as Oedipus and Aegisthus, struggle against fate and their inherited identities, they remain unaware of  the agents who drive their actions. They never face heredity as a potential ethical paradox of  the dimensions of  Hamlet’s dilemma. The final scene of  Hamlet inverts the conclusion of  Thyestes. Whereas Seneca’s tragedy stages a false reconciliation between hostile brothers, which is actually a betrayal of  trust, and the play culminates in their mutual curses, Hamlet reverses this precedent. Laertes’s betrayal of  Hamlet’s trust concludes in spiritual reconciliation and prayers for reciprocal forgiveness. While Laertes is Hamlet’s bitter enemy, in that Hamlet has killed Polonius, Laertes’s father, the two are nonetheless metaphorically brothers. The text makes this metaphor explicit. When Hamlet asks Laertes’s pardon, he says, Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil Free me so far in your most generous thoughts That I have shot mine arrow o’er the house And hurt my brother. (Ham. V ii 178–81)

Hamlet’s comparison suggests that he considers his relationship to Laertes to be so close that the two share fraternal bonds. He claims that the injury he did to Laertes was unintentional. Hamlet then refers to the duel as a ‘brother’s wager’ (Ham. V ii 190). These ‘brothers’ are also doubles in some senses, despite the contrasts in their characters discussed above. Again, this uncanny doubling is explicit. Hamlet tells Horatio, ‘by the image of my cause I see | The portraiture of  his’ (Ham. V ii 77–9): each is a son seeking vengeance for the murder of  his father. There are many more examples. Both return from abroad to seek revenge, both profess their love for Ophelia in passionate terms and both rebel against Claudius. Both 56

Dodson-Robinson, ‘Rending Others’, esp. 55–8.

98

Eric Dodson-Robinson

also are accomplished swordsmen, although Laertes enjoys a reputation superior to Hamlet’s. Claudius confides to Laertes that Hamlet’s ‘envy’ of  Laertes’s fencing ‘[d]id Hamlet so envenom’ (Ham. IV vii 80), that he was eager to try Laertes’s skill with rapier and dagger. The word ‘envenom’ simultaneously foreshadows Laertes’s poisoning of  Hamlet and recalls both Claudius’s poisoning of  Hamlet’s father and Lucianus’s poisoning of  Gonzago. When Claudius and Laertes conspire to poison Hamlet, the stage is set for a neo-Senecan reenactment of  the ‘brother’s murder’ (Ham. III iii 38) – which carries the primal eldest curse. Yet, as so often happens in Hamlet, traditional plots do not turn out as planned. Although Hamlet succumbs to Laertes’s poison, Claudius, Gertrude and Laertes himself  fall. In the physical world of  the tragedy, betrayal and sin destroy the tyrant as well as his intended victims. This is a glaring dif ference from the Senecan plays. There is a further dif ference in the spiritual world of  the play, in that Hamlet and Laertes exchange forgiveness rather than cursing each other. It is forgiveness that allows Hamlet’s characters salvation from the rank corruption of  the material world of  the tragedy. In these ways, the final scene of  Hamlet overturns the conclusion of  Thyestes. In overturning the Thyestean model in the final scene, Shakespeare contests Senecan cosmological and political perspectives. For Seneca, the fraus of  the hereditary past determines present scelus, which will, in turn, lead to universal conf lagration and enmity between even those who should naturally have the closest af finity: ‘natura versa est retro’.57 In Hamlet, Claudius’s primal fraternal betrayal does lead to subsequent crimes, which come ‘not single spies | but in battalions’ (Ham. IV v 74–5). There is Hamlet’s killing of  Polonius; the executions of  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and the murders of  Hamlet, Laertes, Claudius and Gertrude in the final scene. Although heredity and the spectre of  the past embodied by the Ghost ‘shape’ the characters’ ends in Hamlet, Hamlet and Laertes ‘rough hew’ (Ham. V ii 11) their own destinies. Their exchange of  forgiveness challenges the ineluctable determinism of  Senecan drama, in that their reconciliation

57

‘Nature’s been subverted’. Seneca, Agamemnon, 34.

‘By a Brother’s Hand’

99

is a reversal of  the fraternal betrayal that, framed as reenactment of original sin, began the tragedy: Laertes Hamlet

Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet. Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee, Nor thine on me. Heaven make thee free of it! (Ham. V ii 272–4)

The language of  this exchange reveals something about the two characters: while Laertes wants to make a quid pro quo deal and assumes he has the right to pardon Hamlet, Hamlet seems at ease about his destiny, as he tells Horatio before the duel (Ham. V ii 157–61). When Laertes proposes that they exchange forgiveness, Hamlet prays, ‘heaven make thee free of it’ (Ham. V ii 274), serenely expressing both his own lack of malice against Laertes and his deference to divine judgement. Despite such ironies, the scene suggests that, in forgiving one’s enemy (who is one’s double or ‘brother’), there is both personal salvation and a broader redemption from the original betrayal: a general political redemption that comes through the overthrow of  the tyrant Claudius. Hamlet’s engagement with the Senecan tradition makes this message an emphatic polemic against Seneca’s portrayal of  fraus as the origin of continuously expanding and all-destroying nefas. How should we interpret the dif ference between Shakespeare’s and Seneca’s treatment of primal betrayal and sin? Contrasting Hamlet with the Senecan tradition reveals resilient hope in Shakespeare’s drama that springs from an otherwise emotionally crushing conclusion. Shakespeare envisions a redemption for primal fraus, or betrayal, that is lacking in Seneca. We might attribute this in part to the dif ferences between Christian soteriology, which promises such redemption, and the Stoic eschatology of ekpyrosis, or universal conf lagration resulting from causes and consequences. For Seneca, fraus irrevocably initiates civil war, cosmic upheaval and ekpyrosis. Through the mechanism of contagio [‘infection’], betrayal infects hereditary agents with a mad impetus to crime. Betrayal and atrocity consume individual agency and poison all, resulting in the total destruction of  the cosmos. This not only ref lects the Stoic cosmology Seneca outlines in Naturales Quaestiones, but also a cynical political philosophy resonant with years of 

100

Eric Dodson-Robinson

Julio-Claudian tyranny, and perhaps, depending upon when the tragedies were written, with Seneca’s experiences as co-regent to Nero. At any rate, the dif ferences have political relevance in both the English and the Roman contexts. Seneca’s avengers are betraying brothers. They are aristocrat tyrants. They, like Shakespeare’s Claudius, betray and crush their opponents to fortify their own rule. From the Stoic perspective, true power and agency inhere in the apatheia of  the post-political, autarchic self.58 Shakespeare challenges this perspective and its spiritual and political implications. While Laertes betrays Hamlet, his metaphorical brother (Ham. V ii 181, 190), he forgives him and receives forgiveness. Hamlet also brings down the tyrant Claudius to redeem the commonwealth from its betrayer. The politically oppressed avenger achieves a power to destroy his oppressor unprecedented in Senecan tragedy. For Seneca, there is no recovery from a brother’s betrayal, but for Shakespeare, forgiveness redeems primal betrayal. Although the physical world of  Hamlet is, like that of  Senecan tragedy, rank with corruption originating in primal betrayal, the spiritual realm of fers potential salvation absent in the Senecan universe. In Hamlet, it is through forgiveness and spiritual self-determination that the pattern of  betrayal and crime loses its power to define individual or political destiny. Without the original betrayal, there would be no forgiveness. In this sense, betrayal could be seen as part of a providential teleology that culminates in spiritual redemption and in the restoration of political order under the rule of  Fortinbras. In addition, Hamlet consciously tests and confronts the Senecan traditions that would script his part, and in doing so he reclaims agency. These crucial dif ferences reveal a striking contrast between Seneca’s and Shakespeare’s dramatic visions of  fraternal betrayal and its moral and civic consequences: a contrast that, as I have suggested, constitutes a programmatic challenge to the worldview and values of  Senecan tragedy.

58

See Gordon Braden, Anger’s Privilege: Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 9–27.

‘By a Brother’s Hand’

101

Bibliography Adelman, Janet, ‘Shakespeare’s Romulus and Remus: Who Does the Wolf  Love?’, in Maria Del Sapio Garbero, ed., Identity, Otherness, and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 19–34. Baker, Howard, Induction to Tragedy: A Study in a Development of  Form in Gorboduc (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965). Baldwin, T.W., On the Literary Genetics of  Shakespere’s Plays: 1592–1594 (Urbana: University of  Illinois Press, 1959). ——, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greek, 2 vols (Urbana: University of  Illinois Press, 1944). Battenhouse, Roy W., ‘Apocatastasis of  Hamlet’s Ghost’, American Notes and Queries 9 (1970), 57–8. Boeri, M.D., ‘The Stoics on Bodies and Incorporeals’, The Review of  Metaphysics 54 (2001), 723–52. Borgmeier, Raimund, ‘Die Englische Literatur’, in Eckard Lefèvre, ed., Der Einf luss Senecas auf das Europäische Drama (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978), 276–323. Boyle, Anthony J., Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1997). Braden, Gordon, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Bullough, Geof frey, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of  Shakespeare, 8 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957–75). Cunlif fe, John William, The Inf luence of  Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (New York: G.E. Stechert & Co., 1925). Dodson-Robinson, Eric, ‘Rending Others: Ethical Contagio in Seneca’s Thyestes’, Mouseion 10 (2010), 45–67. Fantham, Elaine, ‘Nihil Iam Iura Naturae Valent: Incest and Fratricide in Seneca’s Phoenissae’, in Anthony J. Boyle, ed., Seneca Tragicus (Berwick, Victoria: Aureal, 1983), 61–76. Foakes, R.A., Shakespeare and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Frank, M. ‘Did Shakespeare Owe Anything to Seneca? The Debate Outlined’, Akroterion 42/1 (1997), 36–42. Girard, René, A Theater of  Envy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Graver, Margaret, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 2007).

102

Eric Dodson-Robinson

Hammond, Paul, The Strangeness of  Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Hunter, G.K., Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978). ——, ‘Seneca and the Elizabethans: A Case-Study in Inf luence’, Shakespeare Survey 20 (1967), 17–26. Jacquot, J., ed., Les Tragédies de Sénèque et le Théâtre de la Renaissance (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1964). James, Heather, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of  Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Lucas, F.L., Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1922). McCullen, Joseph T. Jr., ‘Brother Hate and Fratricide in Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey 3/4 (1952), 335–40. Martindale, Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of  Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Miola, Robert S., Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Inf luence of  Senea (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Newton, Thomas, ed., Seneca His Tenne Tragedies Translated into Englysh, 2 vols, Spenser Society, 43–4 (London, 1581; facs. edn, Manchester, 1887). Ronan, Clif ford, Antike Roman (Athens, GA: Georgia University Press, 1995). Rosenmeyer, Thomas G., Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1989). Seneca, L. Annaei Senecae Tragoediae, ed. Otto Zwierlein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). ——, Seneca: Agamemnon, ed. R.J. Tarrant (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976). ——, Seneca’s Thyestes, ed. R.J. Tarrant (Athens, GA: Scholars Press, 1985). Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (2nd edn, New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). Stump, Donald V., ‘Hamlet, Cain and Abel, and the Pattern of  Divine Providence’, Renaissance Papers (1985), 27–38.

Horst-Jürgen Gerigk

Notes towards a Definition of  Betrayal:1 Koestler, Hamsun, Pound and the Doppelgänger in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Introduction Betrayal has many faces, but only two fields of action, which can be roughly described as the external and the internal world. As historical figures, Arthur Koestler, Knut Hamsun and Ezra Pound belong to the external world. The phenomenon of  the double, on the other hand, represents a reality of  the internal world, typically in the form of a daydream that fulfils the wish to act against one’s moral code; Stevenson’s Strange Case of  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is undoubtedly the most famous example. These two fields of  betrayal will be discussed in the following pages.

Koestler, Hamsun, Pound Three lives, three poets who were almost drowned in the maelstrom of political history: Arthur Koestler (1905–83),2 Knut Hamsun (1859– 1952), and Ezra Pound (1885–1972). To be sure, they were very dif ferent: 1 2

The title of  this chapter is borrowed from T.S. Eliot’s famous enquiry, Notes Towards the Definition of  Culture (1948). In 1983 Koestler committed suicide together with his young wife Cynthia because he suf fered from leukemia.

104

Horst-Jürgen Gerigk

a Hungarian who wrote his books in German and English, a Norwegian Nobel Prize winner and an American poet who chose to live in Italy. Nonetheless, they had a great deal in common, for all of  them had traumatic experiences in the first half of  the twentieth century. Furthermore, all of  them were accused of  treason: Arthur Koestler by the Communists he had supported, then critiqued (as represented in his novel Darkness at Noon, where his alter ego Rubashov figures as the hero), Knut Hamsun and Ezra Pound by their own countrymen. The latter writers had to defend themselves against the argument that they had betrayed their own nations, but both of  them thought they were wrongly punished for their political views (I will return to the details of  their punishment shortly). Arthur Koestler, however, was – at least in the long run – hailed by many for his betrayal. After all, he had betrayed the Communist Party, which was to lose the Cold War. In 1941 he published his novel Sonnenfinsternis or Darkness at Noon, which was translated from the German by Daphne Hardy. Since, however, the German manuscript is no longer extant, the German version we have today is a retranslation of  the English translation. This novel made him famous throughout the world and fixed his international reputation as an anti-Communist. First published by the Macmillan Company in 1941, a Modern Library edition was issued in 1946, which guaranteed the widest possible circulation. The novel has two quotations as an epigraph and a note by the author. The epigraphs are from Machiavelli’s Discorsi und from Dostoevsky’s novel Prestupleniye i nakazaniye, or Crime and Punishment. Machiavelli says: ‘He who establishes a dictatorship and does not kill Brutus, or he who founds a republic and does not kill the sons of  Brutus, will only reign a short time’.3 The Dostoevsky quote, on the other hand, reads as follows: ‘Man, man, one cannot live quite without pity’.4 The note of  the author summarizes the topic of  the novel extremely well:

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (New York: Bantam, 1979). I refer here to an unnumbered page that precedes the table of contents. 4 Ibid. 3

Notes towards a Definition of  Betrayal

105

The characters in this book are fictitious. The historical circumstances which determined their actions are real. The life of  the man N.S. Rubashov is a synthesis of a number of men who were victims of  the so-called Moscow Trials. Several of  them were personally known to the author; his book is dedicated to their memory (Paris, October 1938 – April 1940).5

The novel has four chapters; the first three are entitled: ‘The First Hearing’, ‘The Second Hearing’ and ‘The Third Hearing’. The monotony of  these titles has its own momentum. The last chapter, entitled ‘The Grammatical Fiction’, begins with the statement: ‘Asked whether he pleaded guilty, the accused Rubashov answered “Yes” in a clear voice. To a further question of  the Public Prosecutor as to whether the accused had acted as an agent of  the counter-revolution, he again answered “Yes” in a lower voice.’6 Then he is shot. But the first sentence of  the novel already says: ‘The cell door slammed behind Rubashov.’7 Here the entire theatre of violence takes place inside a prison: the dead house of  the Moscow Trials. Like his protagonist Rubashov, Koestler found himself in the role of  the accused when he left the Communist Party. The same was true of  Knut Hamsun and Ezra Pound when the Allied Forces had won the war in 1945 and Italy and Germany were defeated. Let us now turn to Knut Hamsun. A Nobel Prize winner in 1920 for his novel Markens Grøde [Growth of  the Soil], Hamsun wrote approximately twenty novels and many tales. As a journalist, Hamsun severely criticized the British with regard to the Second Boer War. After living in the United States as a young man for several years during the 1880s, he returned to Norway with an everlasting contempt for everything American. The USA was, for him, a nation without culture; he published three essays about three Americans, which ruthlessly satirized Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman.8 Hamsun’s polemical essays against Twain, Emerson

5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 196. 7 Ibid., 1. 8 Cf. Knut Hamsun, Drei Amerikaner. Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman. Essays, trans. Jutta and Theodor Knust (Munich: Langen/Müller, 1959).

106

Horst-Jürgen Gerigk

and Whitman are masterpieces of satirical scholarship. They complete his view of  Anglo-American civilization and culture. Hamsun preferred the Germans and hoped that Norway and Germany would unite. And when Adolf  Hitler invaded Norway in 1940, they did. Hamsun, of course, aligned himself with the collaborators – that is, Vidkun Quisling – though Hamsun always distanced himself  from specific political activities and decisions. Nevertheless, he commented on the German occupation in a thoroughly positive light – except for his dislike towards Josef  Terboven, who was appointed Hitler’s Reichskommissar to watch over Norway. Hamsun wanted Hitler to remove Terboven and tried to arrange a meeting with Hitler. It really happened in June 1943 at Obersalzberg. Hitler was then fifty-four years old, Hamsun eighty-three. Hamsun came from Vienna in Hitler’s private airplane, a very new Focke Wulf 200/ Condor C-4, f lown by Hitler’s private pilot Hans Baur. It was Hamsun’s intention to persuade Hitler to fire the Reichskommissar Josef  Terboven. But Hitler said that this would be done later, ‘when the war is over’.9 After this remark, Hitler did all the talking, an endless monologue. Hamsun wept and left Obersalzberg for Berlin – in the same private airplane of  the Führer. In Berlin, Norwegian journalists were waiting to spread the news of  his meeting with Hitler. Upon his return, Hamsun continued his admiration for the Great Dictator, and as a result the Norwegians did not like their Nobel Prize winner anymore. After the war, Hamsun, then eighty-five years old, was arrested as a traitor of  his country, brought to a home for the elderly and then, finally, committed to a lunatic asylum. On trial he did not plead guilty and was sentenced to pay a large sum of money.10 In 1947 he published his autobiographical report of  his arrest and his trial, Paa g jengrodde Stier [On Overgrown Paths], in which he defends himself without any repentance. The trial confirmed that he never had been a member of a Nazi organization. In 1952 he was buried with the Norwegian f lag on his cof fin.

9 10

Cf. Thorklid Hansen, Der Hamsun Prozess, trans. U. Leippe and M. Wesemann (Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus, 1979), 124. Ibid., 506.

Notes towards a Definition of  Betrayal

107

But Norway could not forgive him. And what do we think of  Knut Hamsun today, knowing what we know? Are his novels and tales stigmatized because he took sides with Adolf  Hitler? I do not think they are. For what has Growth of  the Soil to do with the Second World War? It is useful to have a look at a slim volume by Carl Schmitt from 1932, in which he defines the term political. According to Schmitt, ‘[e]very religious, moral, economic, ethnic or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is suf ficiently strong to group human beings ef fectively according to friend and enemy [Freund und Feind]’.11 In other words, a person who is attached to a non-political opposition that divides a group into friends and enemies, can – regardless of  her integrity and good will – become a political enemy to be attacked and destroyed. Political evaluation operates independently of all other levels at which a person’s deeds might be judged and has nothing in common with other levels of evaluation. If a person is guilty of  high treason, he has to be punished in accordance with the law, notwithstanding the aesthetically important novels he may have written. Thus, the State of  Norway was of course right to punish Hamsun for collaboration with the enemy. Hamsun, on the other hand, did not regard himself as a traitor, but stressed his good intentions for the sake of a noble future for Norway. Nevertheless, the evidence for being guilty by law was plain to everybody: his publications in favour of  the German occupation and Adolf  Hitler. Therefore, the question of guilt is not answered by morals, but exclusively by the political situation. The winning side of any war gains the right to define who is to be punished; those who question this right are, of course, hardly heard. Victory creates political facts. The same constellation of  facts defines the situation of  Ezra Pound at the end of  World War II. Now the setting is not Northern, but Southern Europe. Ezra Pound, an admirer of  Mussolini, took sides against his own country. Born in Hailey, Idaho, Pound died in Venice. In 1908 he left the United States to live in Europe: from 1909 to 1920 in London; from 1920

11

Carl Schmitt, The Concept of  the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1996) 37.

108

Horst-Jürgen Gerigk

to 1924 in Paris; and, from 1924 until his death, in Rapallo, Italy. He published a chapter of  his never-completed dissertation on Lope de Vega in his Spirit of  Romance (1910). Sylvia Beach writes the following of  Pound’s days in Paris in her memoir Shakespeare and Company: ‘His costume – the velvet jacket and his open-road shirt – was that of  the English aesthete of  the period. There was a touch of  Whistler about him; his language, on the other hand, was that of  Huckleberry Finn’.12 In 1945 after the invasion of  the American troops in Italy, Pound was arrested by the FBI and forced to live in a cage in Pisa. In July 1946 he was transferred to the United States and accused of  high treason. Because of  his disturbed mind (according to a psychiatric expert he was a ‘psychopathic personality that had developed paranoid psychoses of a manic color’13), he was saved from being executed. Instead, he was sentenced to spend thirteen years at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, DC, an institution where dangerous lunatic criminals were held. By 1956 he had been released from the hospital and went to Switzerland to be with his daughter Mary de Rachewiltz. He lived in South Tyrol and Venice until his death and was buried on the cemetery island San Michele. Why such a life? The answer may be sought in Ezra Pound’s change of roles from a poet to a politician. On the one hand, he was a poet in the strict sense, because he exclusively wrote poems – no novel, no short story, no play, but poems of every kind: short poems, very short poems (for example, ‘In a Station of  the Metro’), long poems, and a very lengthy poem called The Cantos, a work of 802 pages with over a hundred songs. He was intensely occupied with this work until his death. For Cantos 74–84, the so-called ‘Pisan Cantos’, he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1949 while still a patient in St. Elizabeth Hospital. It was acknowledged that Pound’s poetry belongs to the highest achievements of  American literature. In 1972 Hugh Kenner even published a book entitled The Pound

12 13

Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), 28. Margret Boveri, Der Verrat im 20. Jahrhundert. I: Für und gegen die Nation. Das sichtbare Geschehen, 4 vols (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956–60), vol. 1, 125.

Notes towards a Definition of  Betrayal

109

Era, which deals with Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis.14 Pound himself commented on the Cantos: ‘There is no mystery about the Cantos, they are the tale of  the tribe.’15 Nevertheless, many were of fended by Ezra Pound’s radio speeches during the Second World War. 110 recorded scripts were edited and published in 1978 by Leonard W. Doob.16 These radio speeches were delivered between 2 October 1941 and 25 July 1943. Held in English over Radio Rome, some were intended for an audience in the United States, some for an audience in the United Kingdom and some for both. In April 1942, the Department of  Justice began an investigation through the FBI. Leonard W. Doob confirms in his ‘Introduction’: ‘There is no way of estimating how many persons listened to him regularly or how large his audience ever was. Certainly his broadcasts never attained great popularity.’17 Pound always referred to himself as an American. After 29 January 1942, he was introduced by a statement he had drafted himself: Rome Radio, acting in accordance with the fascist policy of intellectual freedom and free expression of opinion by those who are qualified to hold it, has of fered Dr. Ezra Pound the use of  the microphone twice a week. It is understood that he will not be asked to say anything that goes against his conscience, or anything incompatible with his duties as a citizen of  the United States of  America.18

What, then, was the reason for the trial of  Ezra Pound? The answer is very simple: he aligned himself with the enemy in a foreign country and attacked both the American government and the Roosevelt administration over Radio Rome. Pound incessantly argues in favour of  Mussolini. Pound’s war-time speeches in favour of  Mussolini and Hamsun’s meeting with Adolf  Hitler, along with his articles in Norwegian newspapers, 14 See Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972). 15 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1968), 194. 16 Cf. ‘Ezra Pound Speaking.’ Radio Speeches of  World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978). Doob was Sterling Professor of  Psychology and Director of  the Division of  Social Sciences at Yale University. 17 Ibid., xi. 18 Ibid., xiii.

110

Horst-Jürgen Gerigk

make them both appear as traitors in the strict sense of  the law. The evidence cannot be denied. But was it really evidence? If we look, for example, at the ‘Introduction’ Julien Cornell wrote to his book, The Trial of  Ezra Pound. A Documented Account of  the Treason Case by the Defendant’s Lawyer, we come across the following passage: After having been confined by the United States for thirteen years on charges of  treason, Ezra Pound was released from St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington in April 1958, his indictment was dismissed, and he was allowed to return to Italy. The story of  his trial, confinement and eventual release is told here, including all the relevant documentary material from my files and public records. I was Pound’s lawyer. […] Some of  his broadcasts were highly critical, even contemptuous, of  the politics of  the United States and its allies. The indictment charged that Pound, an American citizen, in making these broadcasts committed treason by giving ‘aid and comfort’ to the enemy. This, Pound has always vigorously denied. ‘The treason, he said, ‘was in the White House, not in Rapallo.’19

However that may be, one fact clearly emerges. When he arrived in jail, Pound was an old man, tired and sick, unable to understand his predicament suf ficiently well to defend himself. For this reason, he was adjudged unfit to be tried and was eventually released. People will soon forget, if  they have not already forgotten, the war-born passions that brought Ezra Pound to the courtroom, but they will forever remember his verse and will want to know why and how he came to be imprisoned for his utterances. Hence this book by Julien Cornell, Pound’s lawyer. Hamsun and Pound obeyed their own consciences. They wanted to save their own country from a detrimental government. They are both famous traitors now, but not because of any extraordinary treacherous activities. They did not transfer secrets to the enemy, but focused their political protests on facts that everybody knew. This is why they will be mainly associated with and remembered for their achievements as poets, as artists, as hommes de lettres – distinguished as artists and mediocre as traitors.

19

Julien Cornell, The Trial of  Ezra Pound. A Documented Account of  the Treason Case by the Defendant’s Lawyer (New York: John Day, 1966), ix.

Notes towards a Definition of  Betrayal

111

In her classic, four-volume monograph, Der Verrat im 20. Jahrhundert [Treason in the Twentieth Century] (1956–60), Margret Boveri confronts us with the idea that ‘the matter of  treason changes because the wheel of  history is always going on and on. Today we worship as heroes and martyrs those who were hanged yesterday’.20 Hamsun and Pound, to be sure, are not worshipped as heroes and martyrs, but their life and work does seem to be representative of  the human condition. And besides, the ‘wheel of  history’ is not so arbitrary as Boveri’s words would suggest. For Italian Fascism and German National Socialism have proven inacceptable to a democratic world. If, on the one hand, the answer to the question, ‘Who is a political traitor?’ will always be inf lected by the political perspective of  those who are asking it, it is also important to notice that Arthur Koestler, as a traitor of  the Communist Party he had once supported, is af firmed by the ‘Vernunft in der Geschichte’ [‘reason in history’], in the sense of  Hegel. The traitor Rubashov is, from the beginning, a hero and a martyr. Politically, the case represented by Koestler is very dif ferent from the cases of  Hamsun and Pound. Born in Budapest, Koestler studied science and psychology at the University of  Vienna from 1922–6. A member of  the German Communist Party (DKP) since 1932, he left the Party in 1938 to dedicate his life to anti-communist propaganda; Darkness at Noon was his manifesto. The main argument he presents in this novel is that treason functions as a social fact that can be created arbitrarily to destroy any rival within one’s own party. The first enemy is not another nation or political regime, but the comrades within one’s own party. This was the principle of  Stalin’s purge. The title Darkness at Noon is a metaphor of  the plot: the hero Nikolas Rubashov, who had been a member of  the Central Committee of  the Communist Party, is arrested, imprisoned and treated in such a way 20 Boveri, Der Verrat im 20. Jahrhundert. I: Für und gegen die Nation. Das sichtbare Geschehen, vol. 1, 7; on Hamsun see ‘Der taube Dichter – Knut Hamsun’, ibid., 134–40); on Pound see ‘Klassiker und Revolutionär – Ezra Pound,’ ibid., 125–30; on Koestler see ‘Kalter Krieg mit kultureller Freiheit: Arthur Koestler’ in Margret Boveri, Der Verrat im 20. Jahrhundert. III: Zwischen den Ideologien. Zentrum Europa (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957), vol. 3, 133–49.

112

Horst-Jürgen Gerigk

that he could no longer know who he was, until he confesses to treasonous activities he has never done, pleads guilty and is shot. The political setting is the Soviet Union under Stalin in the second half of  the 1930s. This is Koestler’s fictional account of a totalitarian state dominated by the Communist Party. Koestler’s fictional response to Communism is followed by a real one after he left the party. During the first days of  the Korean War in the summer of 1950 Koestler held the inaugural lecture at the ‘Congress for Individual Freedom’ in Berlin and told the press in an interview: Ich kann Ihnen versichern, daß das keine Phrase ist, Sie werden es in den nächsten Monaten fühlen. Damit sind die in der Politik sooft verachteten Intellektuellen zum ersten Mal zur Of fensive übergegangen. Sie haben eine neue Weltbewegung eingefangen und denken nicht daran, sie jemals einschlafen zu lassen. Ich versichere Ihnen, daß wir keinen Diskutierladen aufmachen werden, sondern eine wirklich operative Weltbewegung schaf fen.21 [I assure you that (individual freedom) is not a phrase. You’ll feel that within the next months. This means that the intellectuals who were met so often with contempt in politics have taken the of fensive for the first time. They came to grips with a new global movement and will never let it fade away. I assure you, we will not open up a debating parlour for discussions, but will create a truly operative movement for the world.]

Thus Koestler became an icon in the organization of a mass movement against Communism. Margret Boveri even reports in 1960 that millions of people were inf luenced by ‘Koestlerism’.22 In a word, this traitor of  the Communist Party was hailed by the free world, even worshipped. In Darkness at Noon, he exposes the enemy. In his Berlin program of 1950, he organized a mass movement against Communism with the same manipulative rhetorical techniques that representatives of  Communism had used. But now it is the idea of individual freedom that inspires the masses.

21 Boveri, Der Verrat im 20. Jahrhundert. III: Zwischen den Ideologien. Zentrum Europa, vol. 3, 148. My translation. 22 Ibid., 147.

Notes towards a Definition of  Betrayal

113

That Koestler’s strategy worked and remains alive today is due to the course of  history. The defeat of  Fascism after World War II and the fall of  the Soviet Union in 1991 seem to confirm Hegel’s insight that there is reason in history. This is a teleological notion of world history that he develops in his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte [Lectures on the Philosophy of  World History, 1830/31]; he identifies the telos as ‘das Bewußtsein des Geistes von seiner Freiheit und eben damit die Wirklichkeit seiner Freiheit’ [‘the consciousness of spirit of its freedom and thereby the reality of its freedom’].23 Whereas the political position of  Arthur Koestler, as a traitor towards Communism, is in accord with reason in history, the positions of  Knut Hamsun and Ezra Pound are not. If we call Koestler a traitor beside Hamsun and Pound, the implications are not the same, though the definition of  treason is identical in all three cases: ‘a violation by a subject of allegiance to the sovereign or the State esp. by attempting or plotting to kill or overthrow the sovereign or overthrow the Government.’24 In all three case histories presented here, the ‘traitor’ wanted to be heard in public in order to win friends or collaborators who had the same intentions. Hamsun, Pound and Koestler needed an audience and got it. Their positions were in accordance with their conscience – an ambivalent and even dangerous standard for judgement, as the second part of  this paper will show. Hamsun wrote articles in Norwegian newspapers, Pound used Radio Rome as a mass medium for publicity. Koestler wrote a novel and organized the masses by his lectures.

23 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, in Johannes Hof fmeister, ed., Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, 4 vols (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1955), vol. 1, 63f. 24 The New Oxford Shorter English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. Lesley Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 3379.

114

Horst-Jürgen Gerigk

Robert Louis Stevenson and the ‘Doppelgänger’ An appeal to one’s conscience, to one’s internal mechanisms of judgement, can be as precarious a way to determine treason as victory in war. This precariousness is especially clear when one turns from the historical events of  the twentieth century to the earliest presentations of  the Doppelgänger in German and English Romanticism. The word ‘Doppeltgänger’ (with a ‘t’ in the middle) was coined by Jean Paul in 1795 in his novel Siebenkäs, where the definition is given in a footnote. Jean Paul says, ‘So heißen Leute, die sich selber sehen’ [‘People who see themselves are called Doppeltgänger’].25 In the course of  time the ‘t’ was lost. Today in German the word has become ‘Doppelgänger’. The New Oxford Shorter English Dictionary defines ‘doppelgänger’, which has also entered the standard English language, as follows: ‘a supposed spectral likeness or double of a living person’.26 Among the authors who presented and thematized the double in their fiction are (besides Jean Paul) E.T.A. Hof fmann, Heinrich Heine, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Robert Louis Stevenson, Luigi Pirandello and Vladimir Nabokov. Especially interesting for our context is Stevenson. In 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson presented the most popular of all stories that deal with a ‘double’. But this time, the so-called double does not look like the ‘original’ person – he cannot, in a literal way, ‘see himself ’. Here, the double is not a ref lective image that comes to life. To the contrary, The Strange Case of  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is based on the surprising coincidence that two dif ferent individuals are one person. Stevenson’s point is clear: Dr. Jekyll, a famous scholar, wants to be another person who can commit crimes in Soho without a guilty conscience and leave behind the straitjacket of a life he had hitherto adjusted to career and social status. Dr. Jekyll took three academic degrees (medicinae doctor, doctor of  Civil Law, legum doctor), and he is a Fellow of  the Royal Society. He is fifty years old

Jean Paul, Siebenkäs, in Norbert Miller, ed., Sämtliche Werke, 6 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1959–), vol. 1.2, 67. 26 The New Oxford Shorter English Dictionary, 730. 25

Notes towards a Definition of  Betrayal

115

and a bachelor, like his two friends Mr. Utterson, a lawyer, and Dr. Lanyon, a physician. Dr. Jekyll has denied his lust for life. Therefore he is now willing, trusting science, to use a ‘magic drug’ to escape his scholarly life and betray his moral principles. Like Mr. Hyde, he loses his conscience but never his consciousness. At the same time, the dual nature of  this person calls into question any unified ‘internal’ standard of judgement at all. While Dr. Jekyll is a good-looking, middle-aged gentleman, Mr. Hyde is quite a young man. As Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll feels like a ‘schoolboy’ on the ‘ocean of  freedom’. Nevertheless, Mr. Hyde ‘was small and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, […] and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice […]; the man seemed hardly human.’ ‘Something troglodytic’, Mr. Utterson, the lawyer, muses, ‘is it the mere radiance of a soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for […] if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of  Mr. Hyde’.27 Here Stevenson’s character evokes the impression of  Goethe’s Mephistopheles in Faust, the impression of an ‘unnameable’ malformation.28 The first name of  Faust, by the way, is Heinrich, so that Dr. Henry Jekyll could align with Faust, just as Edward Hyde seems to align with Mephistopheles. Henry Jekyll, however, is a Faust without Gretchen and without Helena. And unlike Mephistopheles, Mr. Hyde moves like an ‘ape’ or a ‘monkey’, presenting a regression to the level of a subhuman creature. The metamorphosis of  Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde results in lustful desires being fulfilled (but remaining untold) and eventually even murder. At the end, Dr. Jekyll’s plan to return from being Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll, the famous scholar, is thwarted by a chemical error. The magic drug proves too strong, and the proportions of  the mixture are unknown. Dr. Jekyll has to remain Mr. Hyde forever. He confronts the choice to be arrested

27 28

Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde & The Suicide Club (London and Glasgow: Blackie, 1979), 25. Cf. Goethe, Faust I, ‘Marthens Garten.’ Margarete is abhorred by ‘des Menschen widrig Gesicht’ (‘the disgusting face of  the human being’), referring to Mephistopheles.

116

Horst-Jürgen Gerigk

for murder or to commit suicide. Dr. Jekyll dies by committing suicide in the body of  Mr. Hyde. In his The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson dramatizes the disposition of civilized man to betray his own code of  honour in favour of a regression, forgetting all achievements of culture and civilization for the sake of doing what is forbidden. Edgar Allan Poe has called the force and spirit of such an action ‘The Imp of  the Perverse’ (1845) – the eponymous title of one of  his short stories. In his story ‘The Black Cat’ (1843), the narrator asks us, ‘Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law merely because we understand it to be such?’29 And in his earlier story with the programmatic title ‘The Imp of  the Perverse’, Poe confirmed, ‘Examine these and similar actions as we will, we shall find them resulting solely from the spirit of  the Perverse. We perpetrate them merely because we feel that we should not. Beyond or behind this, there is no intelligible principle.’30 In our context, Stevenson (and Edgar Allan Poe) of fered case histories of persons betraying themselves by acting against their own code of  honour, against their own principles of reasonable behaviour – which, in turn, demand a betrayal of  the less pleasant moments of aggression and desire that can split the self in two.

Conclusion The dialectics of  betrayal are very dif ficult to analyse, because we have to decide upon the adequate level for the argument. Is it Law? Or Sociology? Or Psychiatry? Or Philosophy? We should not forget that the cases of  29 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Black Cat’ in Edward H. Davidson, ed., Selected Writings of  Edgar Allan Poe (Boston: Houghton Mif f lin Company, 1956), 199–207, 201. 30 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Imp of  the Perverse,’ in Selected Writings of  Edgar Allan Poe, 225–30, 226.

Notes towards a Definition of  Betrayal

117

Knut Hamsun and Ezra Pound brought lawyers and psychiatrists to the fore. The lunatic asylum is always at hand for the so-called traitors. And it is not by chance that Stevenson tells the story of  his ‘Strange Case’, first from the point of view of a lawyer (Mr. Utterson), and then from a doctor’s perspective (Dr. Lanyon), before we get the report of  Dr. Jekyll himself  to appeal to the philosophical mind of  the reader.

Bibliography Beach, Sylvia, Shakespeare and Company (London: Faber and Faber, 1956). Boveri, Margret, Der Verrat im 20. Jahrhundert, 4 vols (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956–60). Cornell, Julien, The Trial of  Ezra Pound. A Documented Account of  the Treason Case by the Defendant’s Lawyer (New York: John Day, 1966). Doob, Leonard W., ed., ‘Ezra Pound Speaking.’ Radio Speeches of  World War II (Westport: Greenwood Press 1978). Eliot, T.S., Notes towards the Definition of  Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1979). Hamsun, Knut, Drei Amerikaner. Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman. Essays, trans. Jutta and Theodor Knust (Munich: Langen/Müller, 1959). Hansen, Thorklid, Der Hamsun Prozess, trans. U. Leippe and M. Wesemann (Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus, 1979). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, ed. Johannes Hof fmeister, 4 vols (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968). Jean Paul, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Norbert Miller, 6 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1959–). Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972). Koestler, Arthur, Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (New York: Bantam, 1979). Poe, Edgar Allan, Selected Writings of  Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Edward H. Davidson (Boston: Houghton Mif f lin Company, 1956). Pound, Ezra, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1968). Schmitt, Carl, The Concept of  the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1996). Stevenson, Robert Louis, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde & The Suicide Club (London: Blackie, 1979).

Part II

Enacting Betrayal – Ethical Stages

Ritchie Robertson

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

My subject is betrayal as a political instrument. I shall take most of my examples from Schiller, the greatest political dramatist writing in German and one of  the major figures in a body of dramatic, especially tragic literature that runs from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century and makes German literature unique, in contrast to the virtual absence of successful tragedy in English or French literature of  that period. In the dramas of  Schiller and his contemporaries, we have a series of sustained inquiries into the possibilities of political life in the age, first of princely absolutism, then of  the French Revolution, and the liberating but also terrifying possibilities it opened up. Political life, like social life in general, depends on trust. But where trust exists, so does the possibility of its betrayal. Betrayal must by definition be abnormal. If it were the norm, the bonds of society would be dissolved. I have a moral obligation to keep my promises, to tell the truth, to reward people’s expectations that I can be trusted. If  I disappoint these expectations, I not only harm the individual to whom I lie or break my word; I harm humanity as a whole by loosening the bonds on which social cohesion depends. And what is true of relations between individuals must also be true of relations between social and political bodies. Agreements between corporations and states are often broken. The temptation to break them is so strong that whenever possible they are reinforced by legal sanctions. Yet it is highly unlikely that two parties ever enter into an agreement that neither intends to keep. Although the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939 may be considered an extreme example of political cynicism, Stalin at least expected Hitler to keep his word, as is evident from the fact that the Soviet Union was so thoroughly unprepared for the German invasion in 1942.

122

Ritchie Robertson

But must I tell the truth and keep my word under all imaginable circumstances? Kant presents an extreme case in his notorious essay of 1797, ‘Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen’ [‘On the supposed right to tell a lie out of  love for humanity’].1 Kant takes the argument so far as to maintain that one must tell the strict truth even in the following scenario. A man comes to my house intending to murder a friend of mine who has taken refuge with me. He asks me whether his intended victim is in my house. Should I tell a lie in the hope of saving my friend’s life? No, says Kant; for I cannot be certain that my reply will cause harm to the intended victim, who may in the meantime have escaped by the back door; but if  I lie, and my friend (also unbeknown to me) has gone out and is encountered and killed by the murderer, I may justly be charged with responsibility for his death. A warning against lying that seems almost as far-fetched occurs in the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft [Critique of  Practical Reason, 1788]. Suppose that the master of a house has told his servant to say that he is not at home if a certain person calls; suppose further that the unwanted visitor then goes of f and commits a crime which would have been forestalled if  the servant had been on the look-out for him; the servant then shares the responsibility for the crime.2 Why does lying seem inadmissible to Kant, even in these cases? (The hypothetical consequences he deduces from his scenarios are even more puzzling, but I refrain from entering into them here.) From his ethical writings, several reasons can be adduced. In the case of  the untruthful though obedient servant, Kant points out that the man has failed in his duty towards himself [‘Pf licht gegen sich selbst’]. For the categorical imperative requires me to act in such a way that the maxim underlying my action can become a law for everybody.3 However, when we find in Kant’s lengthy account of one’s duty towards oneself  that it also prohibits suicide and masturbation, we may wonder whether it is not a dignified disguise for 1

Immanuel Kant, ‘Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen’, in Wilhelm Weischedel, ed., Werke, 6 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964), vol. 4, 637–43. 2 Kant, ‘Über ein vermeintes Recht’, in Werke, vol. 4, 565. 3 Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, in Werke, vol. 4, 28.

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

123

local and temporary prejudices.4 More persuasive is the argument that, in lying to somebody, I am using that person, not as a fellow-human being, as an end in himself, but as an object or instrument.5 Kant adduces this argument in ‘Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen’ in order to confute the claim that a would-be murderer has no right to be told the truth. The main reason Kant gives in that essay, however, is that, by telling an untruth, I weaken the reliability of statements in general: ‘ich mache, so viel an mir ist, daß Aussagen (Deklarationen) überhaupt keinen Glauben finden, mithin auch alle Rechte, die auf Verträgen gegründet werden, wegfallen und ihre Kraft einbüßen; welches ein Unrecht ist, das der Menschheit überhaupt zugefügt wird.’ [‘I do as much as I can to ensure that statements (declarations) in general are disbelieved, hence that all rights based on agreements become null and void; which is a wrong inf licted on humanity in general.’]6 Although I cannot be certain that my truthful answer will injure my friend, I can be certain that an untruthful reply will harm humanity as a whole by weakening the bonds of  trust on which society is built. Kant’s argument has often been found hard to accept. It can be put in a still more drastic form by taking a dif ferent example. Suppose we are in Nazi Germany in 1943. A Gestapo agent asks me: ‘Are you sheltering a Jewish child in your attic?’ If  I am sheltering a Jewish child, then I am, on Kant’s principles, obliged to answer yes. Or – since this admission would also have adverse consequences for me – suppose I am asked: ‘Is your neighbour sheltering a Jewish child?’ If  this is true, I am obliged to say so, thus betraying both the child and my neighbour. In practice, however, such an admission would be intolerable. See Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, in Werke, vol. 4, 554 and 557. On contemporary debates, see Lester G. Crocker, ‘The Discussion of  Suicide in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of  the History of  Ideas 13 (1952), 47–72; Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of  Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003), esp. 58–60. 5 Kant, Grundlegung, in Werke, vol. 4, 62, 71. 6 Kant, ‘Über ein vermeintes Recht’, in Werke, vol. 4, 638. Similar pragmatic arguments are made in Grundlegung, in Werke, vol. 4, 30, 53. Translations are mine unless otherwise stated. 4

124

Ritchie Robertson

There may be philosophical ways of saving Kant from the implausible extreme to which his argument appears to have led him. Christine Korsgaard, for example, argues that, if  I tell the truth to the murderer, I am violating Kant’s principle of self-respect – the principle that I must not let myself  be used as an object by another person, just as I must not use another person as an object. ‘The murderer’, Korsgaard explains, ‘wants to make you a tool of evil; he regards your integrity as a useful sort of predictability. He is trying to use you, and your good will, as a means to an evil end. You owe it to humanity in your own person not to allow your honesty to be used as a resource for evil.’7 No doubt. But isn’t something rather obvious being overlooked here? Between my duty to myself, and my duty to humanity, hasn’t the philosopher forgotten about my duty to my friend? After all (Kant isn’t the only one who can spin hypotheses) the friend may be someone I have known since childhood; I may be bound to him by the strongest emotional ties. Doesn’t our relationship form part of the scenario? Kant’s moral theory of course warns us emphatically not to overestimate emotions. Morality cannot command us to love other people; it can command us to do good to them, and our beneficence is more meritorious the less it results from inclination. It is easy to do good to our friends; the real challenge is to do good to people we dislike. This principle leads Kant to the conclusion that a cold-hearted person who is indif ferent to other people’s suf ferings but benefits them from a sense of duty is more admirable than a good-hearted person who helps others spontaneously.8 The logic is impeccable, yet the conclusion is unacceptable: Kant’s coldhearted philanthropist, as an exemplar of moral excellence, seems no better than the truthful person who risks exposing his friend to the murderer. In both cases, Kant is artificially separating morality from emotion, although many eighteenth-century thinkers, led by Adam Smith, had argued that some emotions have the specific purpose of promoting moral behaviour.

Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of  Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 145–6. See especially chapter 5, ‘The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil’, 133–58. 8 Kant, Grundlegung, in Werke, vol. 4, 24. 7

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

125

With this in mind, a psychologist has recently described Kant’s theory as ‘a bloodless view of morality fit only for Vulcans’.9 We may learn more about the relation between the demands of principle and the messy conditions of real life if we look at some situations in dramas by Shakespeare and, more especially, by Schiller. Instead of  Kant’s unsatisfactory little scenarios, which pose more problems than they answer, the playwrights of fer us fully worked-out dramatic actions in which truth and betrayal are at stake, in which the claims of  friendship are presented alongside those of abstract humanity, and in which the consequences of people’s choices can be explored in detail. These may help us to put more f lesh on the dry bones of  Kant’s arguments, and to think about his arguments dif ferently. And on the way we must give some attention to Machiavelli, the political philosopher of pragmatism, who can readily be seen as Kant’s antithesis, and whose ideas are often embodied in Schiller’s dramas. Whenever a promise or a treaty is broken, one tells oneself  that this is an exceptional action, justified by abnormally dif ficult circumstances. It is not surprising, therefore, that we find the betrayal of  trust – whether called treachery, treason or betrayal – stigmatized in the strongest terms. Traitors are punished in the very lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno. It consists of a frozen lake, and as Dante and his guide Virgil trek across it, they find the heads of  traitors projecting from the ice. At the centre of  this frozen plain rise the torso and head of  Satan, who has three faces. In each of  his three mouths he holds a traitor and is eternally chewing him. The archtraitor, Judas Iscariot, is worst of f, because his head is inside Satan’s mouth. An only slightly milder punishment is given to Brutus and Cassius, the betrayers of  Caesar, whose heads are hanging down out of  Satan’s mouths. Dante gives them this extreme punishment because they were traitors not only to an individual, but to the ideal of empire. The Roman Empire, founded by Julius Caesar’s great-nephew and adoptive son Octavius, known as Augustus, embodied Dante’s ideal monarchy. Dante maintains in De

9

Dylan Evans, Emotion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 44. Star Trek fans will remember that the Vulcans, represented by Spock, are supposed to be purely rational.

126

Ritchie Robertson

monarchia (written between 1309 and 1312) that humanity needs to be ruled by a single, universal monarch, an earthly analogue to God. In the peace that is then secured, it may develop its full potential and attain a perfection analogous to that of  the heavenly bodies, which are governed directly by God. The universal monarchy should be the Roman Empire, because the Romans are the noblest race, being descended from Aeneas; because they have a natural talent for ruling justly; and because Christ himself acknowledged the Roman Empire’s authority by being born under an Imperial decree.10 However severely one may condemn treachery, history is crammed with instances of  betrayal of  trust, in the form of conspiracies and rebellions. At the same time, it was taken for granted that the ideal king should keep his promises, since he was supposed to be a paragon of wisdom and justice. This was the image of  the ideal king presented in the ‘mirrors for princes’ or ‘Fürstenspiegel’, a genre going back to St. Augustine’s portrait of  the happy emperor in De civitae dei [The City of  God, 426] and developed in a whole series of manuals throughout the later Middle Ages.11 In the course of  time, however, the emphasis shifted from the king’s virtues to his task of making his country prosperous. Virtue had to be tested by success in worldly af fairs. And so princely virtues had to compromise with the ways of  the world. Advice books for Renaissance princes try to resist this insight by insisting that the moral course of action is also the one most likely to succeed. They assert, as Quentin Skinner puts it, that honesty is always the best policy.12 Erasmus does so in his Institutio principis Christiani [The Education of a Christian Prince] (1516), but he acknowledges the real state of af fairs by

10

11 12

Dante Alighieri, De monarchia, in A.G. Ferrers Howell and Philip H. Wickstead, eds, A Translation of  the Latin Works of  Dante Alighieri (London: Dent, 1904), 125–291; see also the summary of  Dante’s argument in William Anderson, Dante the Maker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 214–25. On ‘mirrors for princes’, see Bernard Guénée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe, trans. Juliet Vale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 69–74. Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 41.

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

127

lamenting that princes are continually breaking the treaties that they have solemnly sworn to uphold: The good faith of princes in fulfilling their agreements must be such that a simple promise from them will be more sacred than any oath sworn by other men. How shameful it is, then, to fail to fulfil the conditions of a solemn treaty, one sworn by those things which Christians hold most sacred! Yet every day we can see this becoming the custom.13

A century before Erasmus, it was already acknowledged by a few writers that, while the prince must at least seem virtuous, in practice he could not always follow the straight path of virtue.14 The stage was set for the arrival of  Machiavelli, whose Il principe [The Prince] (probably written in 1513–14 but published only in 1532) reversed this moralistic tradition by advocating an uncompromising and amoral pragmatism. Machiavelli saw that that was how successful rulers actually behaved: Everyone knows how praiseworthy it is for a ruler to keep his promises, and live uprightly and not by trickery. Nevertheless, experience shows that in our times the rulers who have done great things are those who have set little store by keeping their word, being skilful rather in cunningly deceiving men.15

Thus the future Pope Julius II formed an alliance with Machiavelli’s admired Cesare Borgia, and assured him that, as a man of good faith he, Julius, was absolutely bound to keep his word to him. After his election, however, the Pope broke his promise to Borgia, refused to give him the troops he had undertaken to supply, and even had him arrested and imprisoned.16 Yet, as Machiavelli noticed, nobody seemed to think any the worse of  the Pope or the Papacy. Machiavelli commends the treacherous conduct of  Borgia himself  towards one of  his subordinates. Having become ruler of  13 Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath, ed. Lisa Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 94. 14 E.g., John of  Viterbo (fifteenth century), qtd. in Guénée, States and Rulers, 73. 15 Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 61. 16 Ibid., 29; Skinner, Machiavelli, 48.

128

Ritchie Robertson

the territory of  Romagna, Borgia assigned it to his lieutenant, Remirro de Orco, who pacified it by a reign of  terror and was therefore hated by the inhabitants. Borgia dealt with this situation by seeming to punish de Orco for his excesses. As Machiavelli tells it: ‘availing himself of an appropriate opportunity, one morning the Duke had Remirro placed in two pieces in the square at Cesena, with a block of wood and a blood-stained sword at his side. This terrible spectacle left the people both satisfied and amazed.’17 When the occasion demands it, the prince must be willing to betray a subordinate or an ally. Machiavelli of course was much execrated. It is very easy to imagine that Machiavelli was known simply as the demonic embodiment of amoral power politics who appears, for example, in the prologue to Marlowe’s Jew of  Malta. But as a political thinker, Machiavelli was required reading for writers from Francis Bacon down to Kant and Fichte. As an analysis of princely rule and the machinations of power, his works appealed to those who were coming to terms with absolutist government and seeking to understand its workings and maintain a place for themselves within it. Machiavelli described what princes actually did. Edward Dacres, the first English translator of  The Prince (1640), says in his epistle to the reader: ‘thou shall find him much practised by those that condemn him’.18 Bacon commends him for describing how the world really works: ‘we are much beholden to Machiavelli and other writers of  that class, who openly and unfeignedly declare or describe what men do, and not what they ought to do’.19 Had Shakespeare read Machiavelli? Although The Prince had not yet been published in English, Shakespeare could have had access to one of  the numerous manuscript translations. His political plays, it has been argued, can be set alongside Machiavelli’s treatises as major, indeed 17 Machiavelli, The Prince, 26. 18 Qtd. in Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolution: The Politics of  Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 332. 19 ‘Of  the Dignity and Advancement of  Learning’, in James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, eds, Collected Works of  Francis Bacon, 12 vols (1879; repr. London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996), vol. 5, 17.

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

129

epoch-making rethinkings of  the nature of  Renaissance kingship.20 Occasionally Shakespeare uses ‘Machiavel’ in the conventional abusive sense, as when the Duke of  Gloucester, before ascending the throne as Richard III, vows that he will ‘set the murd’rous Machiavel to school’ (Henry VI, III ii 193). But he also shows his rulers behaving in the pragmatic manner advocated by Machiavelli. An example is Henry IV, an usurper, who confesses to his son ‘by what by-paths and indirect crook’d ways | I met this crown’ (2 Henry IV, IV v 185–6). The rebellion against his rule is finally quelled in the scene in Gaultree Forest when Prince John (younger brother of  the future Henry V) persuades the surviving rebel leaders to disband their troops by promising to redress their grievances, then takes them prisoner and sends them to execution, pointing out that he never explicitly undertook to spare their lives: Westmoreland I do arrest thee, traitor, of  high treason; And you, Lord Archbishop, and you, Lord Mowbray, Of capital treason I attach you both. Mowbray Is this proceeding just and honourable? Is your assembly so? West Archbishop Will you thus break your faith? Prince John I pawn’d thee none: I promis’d you redress of  these same grievances Whereof you did complain; which, by mine honour, I will perform with a most Christian care. But for you, rebels – look to taste the due Meet for rebellion and such acts as yours.    (2 Henry IV, IV ii 107–17)

Prince John of course claims that, because he did not explicitly say he would spare their lives, the rebels have only themselves to blame if  they mistakenly inferred that meaning from his promise to redress their grievances. He thus illustrates a fallacy that Bernard Williams calls ‘mak[ing] an assertion into a fetish’: the idea that only an explicit assertion can be

20 See Theodor Schieder, ‘Shakespeare und Machiavelli’, in Begegnungen mit der Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1962), 9–55, esp. 13.

130

Ritchie Robertson

truthful or untruthful.21 A moment’s ref lection shows that there are many ways in which I can mislead someone without uttering a full-blown lie, and that these indirect forms of deceit are often the most ef fective. Prince John betrays the rebels by suggesting a falsehood every bit as well, if not better, than if  he had told a barefaced lie. In Shakespeare’s exploration of statecraft, however, the crucial figure is Henry V, who in the play of  that name is presented as an admirable monarch, a bluf f  Englishman who gets to understand his soldiers’ and subjects’ lives by talking with them incognito, defeats the old enemy France at the battle of  Agincourt, and seals his victory by a political marriage in which, in true English fashion, he fails to speak French. Yet there is a negative side to his behaviour, and even if  Shakespeare intended a patriotic celebration, it emerges thanks to the involuntary honesty of great art: Henry’s claim to France is not clearly justified; he is following his father’s advice to distract his subjects from their own discontents by seeking out foreign quarrels; his arguments that he is not responsible for the deaths of soldiers whom he leads into war are unconvincing; he threatens the citizens of  Harf leur with massacre and rape; and he orders the slaughter of  French prisoners. The bluf f  Englishman conceals a ruthless Machiavellian.22 This Machiavellianism was already in evidence when the future Henry V was still Prince Hal in Parts I and II of  Henry IV. As a young man, he behaves like a wastrel, keeping company with Falstaf f and other rogues in the tavern at Eastcheap, taking part in their practical jokes (as well as playing jokes on them), and indulging their fancy that, when he comes to the throne, they will be allowed to abuse their position as his friends. Early in 1 Henry IV, however, Hal delivers a soliloquy that reveals that his wildness is simply a pose. He intends to drop it when he becomes king, so that his dignified behaviour will be admired all the more for its contrast with his debauched youth: Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 107. 22 See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 56–65, and for a judicious recent account of  Henry’s Machiavellianism, see Malcolm Pittock, ‘The Problem of  Henry V’, Neophilologus 93 (2009), 175–90.

21

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

131

So, when this loose behaviour I throw of f, And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am, By so much will I falsify men’s hopes; And, like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it of f. (1 Henry IV, I ii 201–8)

When he becomes king, Henry does repudiate Falstaf f with the words ‘I know thee not […]’ – and continues: Presume not that I am the thing I was; For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, That I have turn’d away my former self; So will I those that kept me company. (2 Henry IV, V v 57–60)

It is convenient for Henry that Falstaf f accosts him in public, for that enables Henry to reject Falstaf f  before the eyes of  the multitude and thus perform his reformation before the largest possible audience. Falstaf f is the victim who is publicly sacrificed to Henry’s reputation. We are told in Henry V that he dies of a broken heart. This behaviour by Henry is cold and inhuman; the calculation involved is repellent; but it is necessary that, as a responsible ruler, he should dissociate himself  from his former companions. Pragmatically, his conduct is justified. It is moreover Machiavellian in being a piece of role-play. As Machiavelli says, the prince must be a lion and a fox. He must be strong and ruthless enough to defeat and frighten his enemies, but cunning enough to conceal his actions. He must seem to have virtues, even if  he does not really have them: One could […] show how many peace treaties and promises have been rendered null and void by the faithlessness of rulers; and those best able to imitate the fox have succeeded best. But foxiness should be well concealed: one must be a great feigner and dissembler. And men are so naïve, and so much dominated by immediate needs, that a skilful deceiver always finds plenty of people who will let themselves be deceived.23

23 Machiavelli, The Prince, 62.

132

Ritchie Robertson

For an example of such a skilful dissembler, we need look no further than Queen Elizabeth I of  England as Schiller represents her in his tragedy Maria Stuart (1801). Elisabeth is having a private conversation with Mortimer, the nephew of  Sir Amias Paulet, who is, in turn, the jailer of  Mary Queen of  Scots. Having failed to suborn the staunch morality of  the uncle, Elisabeth turns to the nephew and indicates that she would like her prisoner to be secretly murdered. She laments that, if she orders Maria to be executed, all the odium of  the deed will fall on her. Mortimer asks why she need worry about a bad appearance when her cause is good; Elisabeth gives a reply that is taken almost verbatim from Machiavelli: ‘Ihr kennt die Welt nicht, Ritter. Was man scheint, | Hat jedermann zum Richter, was man ist, hat keinen.’24 Although Elisabeth thinks she is rebuking Mortimer’s naivety, she does not realize that, in this world of plot and counter-plot, intrigue and counter-intrigue, Mortimer is one step ahead of  her, for he is secretly a Catholic convert, sent to England by the Catholic nobility of  France on a mission to liberate Maria from captivity, no matter how much bloodshed it may cost. Before going further, I want to distinguish three types of political situation that occur in Schiller’s dramas and in which the ethics of  betrayal become an issue:

24 Friedrich Schiller, Maria Stuart, in Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Göpfert, eds, Sämtliche Werke, 5 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1958), vol. 2, 600. ‘You do not know the world. Appearance, sir, | Is judged by every man, and truth by none.’ Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlos and Mary Stuart, trans. Hilary Collier Sy-quia and Peter Oswald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 238. For the verbal similarity to Machiavelli, see W.F. Mainland, Schiller and the Changing Past (London: Heinemann, 1957), 69–70. Schiller’s knowledge of  Machiavelli, at least at second hand, is attested by his statement in the Geschichte des Abfalls der Niederlande that Charles V had practised the teachings of  Machiavelli’s Prince (Werke, vol. 4, 94) and by his letter to Schelling of 12 May 1801. See further Kurt Wölfel, ‘Machiavellische Spuren in Schillers Dramatik’, in Achim Aurnhammer, Klaus Manger and Friedrich Strack, eds, Schiller und die höfische Welt (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), 318–40; Peter-André Alt, Schiller: Leben – Werk – Zeit, 2 vols (Munich: Beck, 2000), vol. 1, 342–4; Walter Müller-Seidel, Friedrich Schiller und die Politik (Munich: Beck, 2009), 91.

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

133

1) In the first situation, the ruler is not simply trying to retain power, but to serve his or her people, to keep the nation peaceful, prosperous and secure from civil unrest or foreign attacks. 2) The second situation is like the first, only seen not from the bird’seye view of  the prince, but from the worm’s-eye view of  the prince’s loyal servant, who feels obliged to put aside personal morality and personal preferences in advancing the goals decided on by his ruler. 3) These two situations presuppose that absolute monarchy may be used for the good of  the people, not just the monarch, but that it is essentially stable and unchanging. The third situation implies a progressive politics in which government can be modified, undermined, even overthrown, for the sake of a more advanced and generous conception of  liberty, democracy and human rights. The first situation is that of  benevolent absolutism. Even in The Prince, where Machiavelli advises a ruler on how to maintain his state in security, it is clear that such a policy will be to the advantage not only of  the prince, but also of  his subjects. Enlightened absolutists like Frederick the Great of  Prussia and Joseph II of  Austria described themselves as the first servants of  their people, though it never entered their heads to give their subjects any degree of self-determination. The more a ruler is concerned for the public good, however, the more justification he or she can claim for deploying the technology of power known in early modern times as reason of state or ‘Staatsräson’.25 Although most writers are too mealy mouthed to admit it in theory, it is agreed in practice that bad means – means that are known to contravene strict morality – may be used to achieve desirable political ends. Machiavelli is unusually and characteristically forthright when he says in the Discourses on Livy (1532): ‘It is a sound maxim that reprehensible actions may be justified by their ef fects, and that when the ef fect is good, as it was in the case of  Romulus, it always justifies the

25

See Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte, ed. Walther Hofer (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1957).

134

Ritchie Robertson

action.’26 However, such a policy falls foul of  the distinction drawn by Kant between ‘Staatsklugheit’, or expediency, and ‘Staatsweisheit’, or prudence, in which political morality coincides with universal morality.27 Schiller, in his Geschichte des Abfalls der Niederlande [History of  the Revolt of  the Netherlands] (1788), distinguishes similarly between ‘sieche gekünstelte Politik’ and ‘wahre Staatskunst’ [‘sickly, artificial politics’ and the ‘true art of  the state’].28 In Elisabeth, one of  the two queens who dominate Maria Stuart, Schiller shows us a monarch who has actually tried to rule for her subjects’ good and who now finds herself  forced into an unpalatable decision. So long as Maria remains a prisoner in England, security cannot be guaranteed, for emissaries from the Catholic powers on the Continent will try to set her free. These are not idle fears: the play centres on the plot by Mortimer that has just this purpose and that almost leads to Elisabeth’s assassination. The brutally pragmatic arguments for having Maria executed, albeit with a semblance of judicial process that deceives nobody, cannot now be resisted. Hence Elisabeth laments in soliloquy: Warum hab ich Gerechtigkeit geübt, Willkür gehaßt mein Leben lang, daß ich Für diese erste unvermeidliche Gewalttat selbst die Hände mir gefesselt!29 [Why have I heeded all my life the voice Of justice, scorned the act of  tyranny, Only to find that when I can no longer Abstain from violence my hands are bound?]30

However, the calculations of  ‘Staatskunst’ [‘the art of state’] are not really decisive. Schiller’s politicians are not reasoning machines, but complex 26 Machiavelli, The Discourses of  Niccolò Machiavelli, trans. Leslie J. Walker, 2 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950), vol. 1, 234. 27 Kant, ‘Zum ewigen Frieden’, in Werke, vol. 6, 233 and 240. 28 Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, 75. 29 Schiller, Maria Stuart, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, 655. 30 Schiller, Don Carlos and Mary Stuart, 290.

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

135

and inconsistent human beings. What finally tips the balance is Elisabeth’s personal animosity towards Maria, who is her rival – this is Schiller’s addition to history – for the love of  Leicester, a slippery courtier who manages to betray them both. Political calculation is of fset in Schiller by the claims of  the heart. ‘Herz’ [‘heart’] is a loaded and ambivalent word in his dramas. Its importance is twofold. First, as in the case of  Elisabeth, it points to the motives that are actually of crucial importance in political as in private life. Second, it provides a standard by which political decisions can be judged. A decision such as the execution of  Maria may be justifiable on pragmatic grounds, but it is humanly intolerable. It outrages the heart. Because it can only be reached when emotional considerations are screened out, it is as unacceptable to the audience as is the message of  Kant’s little story about telling the truth to the would-be murderer. And it is appropriate that the play ends with Elisabeth, freed from her enemy as she had hoped, but also in a state of emotional isolation. She thought that Leicester, no longer seduced by the enchanting Maria, would now belong solely to her, Elisabeth; but the last words spoken in the play inform us that Leicester has taken ship for France. Elisabeth is left hiding her emotional desiccation with what the closing stage direction calls ‘ruhige[ ] Fassung’, [‘calm composure’]. The second situation focuses on a servant of  the absolutist state following the instructions of  his ruler for the good of  the public weal. The cardinal example in Schiller’s dramas is Octavio Piccolomini in Wallenstein (1799). Octavio is an of ficer on the Imperial side in the Thirty Years’ War. The Emperor and his court no longer trust their commander, Wallenstein, and suspect him of conducting secret negotiations with the Swedes, the leading force on the Protestant side, with a view to transferring his army of 60,000 men to the Protestants and using the resulting position of power perhaps to make himself  King of  Bohemia, perhaps to impose peace on war-torn Europe.31 These suspicions are, in fact, justified: although the his-

31

On the historical circumstances, see Geof frey Parker, The Thirty Years’ War (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 132–40; Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A History of  the Thirty Years War (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 52–79; Geof f  Mortimer,

136

Ritchie Robertson

torical record is clouded by uncertainty, Schiller constructs a clear dramatic plot by showing Wallenstein negotiating with his Swedish counterpart. At the same time, however, Wallenstein’s motives and intentions remain obscure, especially to himself: concern for the good of  Europe plays a very small part, compared to resentment at his previous shabby treatment by the Habsburg court, personal ambition and a confused belief in his own greatness – a confusion characteristic of  Schiller’s charismatic heroes.32 The pros and cons of  Wallenstein’s betrayal of  the Imperial cause, however, are not my main concern here: I want to focus rather on Octavio’s task of countering Wallenstein’s intentions. Octavio has been sent to Wallenstein’s military camp in northern Bohemia with Imperial orders to persuade Wallenstein’s generals, who have signed a declaration of personal loyalty to him, to desert him and return to their imperial allegiance, and to assume the command himself. One of  these commanders is Octavio’s son Max, a character invented by Schiller, who hero-worships Wallenstein and hopes to marry Wallenstein’s daughter Thekla. Max initially refuses to believe that Wallenstein can intend such treachery. When Octavio assures him that he heard it from Wallenstein’s own lips, Max asks why he did not tell Wallenstein what a shocking plan it was, and Octavio’s reply – that he expressed misgivings, but concealed his profound disapproval – sounds rather lame. Moreover, although Max does not mention this, we know that for several years Wallenstein has regarded Octavio as a special friend, though Octavio does not understand why and does not reciprocate the feeling. Wallenstein’s reasons have to do with his superstitious belief in dreams and portents, not with a personal liking for Octavio, so Octavio may be excused for his coolness. Nevertheless, this does make Octavio seem to be a more unfeeling character.33 Still, Octavio is not a villain. Schiller defended him:

32 33

Wallenstein: The Enigma of  the Thirty Years War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 182–98. See F.J. Lamport, ‘The Charismatic Hero: Goethe, Schiller, and the Tragedy of  Character’, Proceedings of  the English Goethe Society 58 (1988), 62–83. For a defence of Octavio on this point, see Dieter Borchmeyer, Macht und Melancholie: Schillers Wallenstein (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1988), 122–4.

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

137

[E]r ist sogar ein ziemlich rechtlicher Mann, nach dem Weltbegrif f, und die Schändlichkeit, die er begeht, sehen wir auf jedem Welttheater von Personen wiederholt, die, so wie er, von Recht und Pf licht strenge Begrif fe haben. Er wählt zwar ein schlechtes Mittel, aber er verfolgt einen guten Zweck.34 [He is even quite an upright man, by worldly standards, and the shameful act he commits can be seen repeated on every stage of  the world by people who, like him, have strict notions of justice and duty. He does choose a bad means, but he is pursuing a good purpose.]

The deeper objections to Octavio’s conduct are expressed involuntarily in his self-defence against Max’s reproaches. In real life, he explains, one cannot always follow the pure morality enjoined by the inner voice: Ich klügle nicht, ich tue meine Pf licht, Der Kaiser schreibt mir mein Betragen vor. Wohl wär es besser, überall dem Herzen Zu folgen, doch darüber würde man Sich manchen guten Zweck versagen müssen. Hier gilts, mein Sohn, dem Kaiser wohl zu dienen, Das Herz mag dazu sprechen, wie es will.35 [I split no hairs, I only do my duty, I carry out my Emperor’s commands. Better indeed if we could always follow The promptings of our heart, but we must then Give up all hope in many a worthy purpose. Our place, my son, is here to serve the Emperor, Our hearts may say about it what they will.]36

Friedrich Schiller, letter to Böttiger, 1 March 1799, in Julius Petersen et al, eds, Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe, 43 vols (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1943–2010), vol. 30, 33. On divergent views of  Octavio, see Stef fan Davies, The Wallenstein Figure in German Literature and Historiography 1790–1920 (London: Maney, 2010), 67–8. 35 Schiller, Wallenstein, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, 398. 36 Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers, Wallenstein, trans. F.J. Lamport (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 310. 34

138

Ritchie Robertson

First, Octavio refuses to take responsibility for his own actions, but transfers the responsibility to the Emperor, his employer and sovereign. He says, ‘I am only doing my duty’, an excuse which, however specious, has often been used in much more unsavoury circumstances. In denying his own moral autonomy, he is going against a principle formulated by Kant and upheld by Schiller as the most important in human life. Some years earlier he had written to his friend C.G. Körner: ‘Es ist gewiss von keinem Sterblichen Menschen kein größeres Wort noch gesprochen worden, als dieses Kantische, was zugleich der Innhalt seiner ganzen Philosophie ist: Bestimme dich aus dir selbst.’37 [‘No mortal man has ever uttered a greater saying than this of  Kant’s, which is also the core of  his entire philosophy: make your choice by your own decision.’] Second, his methods are unsavoury. He alienates Wallenstein’s followers by a mixture of  threats and promises. In one case, that of  the Irish soldier Buttler, Octavio shows him a letter in which Wallenstein advises against Buttler’s elevation to the nobility, and – since Wallenstein elsewhere says that he puts nothing in writing – it is highly likely that this letter has been forged by Octavio.38 Third, he denies responsibility for the consequences of  his actions. On learning of  Wallenstein’s putative double-dealing, Buttler is so furious that he hires murderers to assassinate Wallenstein; Octavio insists that he bears none of  the blame for this shocking deed, yet it would be dif ficult to answer Buttler’s assertion that their responsibility dif fers only in their proximity to the deed: ‘Ihr habt den Pfeil geschärft, | Ich hab ihn abgedrückt.’39 [‘The only dif ference between what you | And I have done is this: you forged the bolt, | I fired it.’]40 Fourth and finally, Octavio condemns his own conduct most

Friedrich Schiller, letter to Körner, 18 and 19 Feb. 1793, in Nationalausgabe, vol. 26, 191. 38 Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, 446–7; contrast vol. 2, 343: ‘Ich geb nichts Schriftliches von mir, du weißts.’ On the question of  forgery, see Mainland, Schiller and the Changing Past, 38–9, and Stef fan Davies, ‘“Du wagst es, meine Worte zu deuten?” Unreliable Evidence on Schiller’s Stage’, Modern Language Review 106 (2011), 779–96, esp. 786–7. 39 Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, 545. 40 Schiller, The Robbers, Wallenstein, 470. 37

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

139

damningly in telling his son emphatically that in the conduct of  business one must ignore the wishes of  the heart. By worldly standards, that is true. But suppressing one’s emotional misgivings leads one into more and more repellent actions, as Octavio’s career – highly successful in worldly terms, since it ends with his receiving the title of prince – amply demonstrates. Long before the course of  the French Revolution proved his point for him, Schiller distrusted the power of abstract ideals that ran counter to the natural emotions of  the heart called forth by attachment to a definite object. He had explored the dangers of abstract idealism most thoroughly in his pre-French Revolution drama Don Carlos. This play illustrates the third situation I outlined above, one that presupposes an absolutist government that is capable of change, not just by the king’s policy of ruling for the good of  his subjects, but by the introduction of  liberal, representative or even democratic institutions. Despite his upbringing under the wellintentioned tyranny of  the Duke of  Württemberg, Schiller was at no time a revolutionary.41 He sympathized with the American War of  Independence and with its goals of establishing humanity’s rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of  happiness.42 He even planned to emigrate to the United States himself if  the revolution there proved successful.43 But, from Schiller’s point of view, the American Revolution succeeded because the populace that carried it out was already politically mature. In this it dif fered from most revolutions, including the French Revolution, which, in Schiller’s view, degenerated into rule by terror because the people were not prepared for their historic opportunity – ‘der freigebige Augenblick findet

41 See Jef frey L. High, Schillers Rebellionskonzept und die Französische Revolution (Lewiston: Mellen, 2004). 42 See Jef frey L. High, ‘Introduction: Why is this Schiller [still] in the United States?’, in Jef frey L. High, Nicholas Martin and Norbert Oellers, eds, Who is this Schiller Now? Essays on his Reception and Significance (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), 1–21, esp. 4–5. 43 ‘Wenn Nordamerika frei wird, so ist es ausgemacht, daß ich hingehe’. [‘When America becomes free, then it is decided that I go there.’] Schiller, letter to Henriette von Wolzogen, 8 January 1783, in Nationalausgabe, vol. 23, 60.

140

Ritchie Robertson

ein unempfängliches Geschlecht’44 [‘a moment so prodigal of opportunity finds a generation unprepared to receive it’].45 It was Schiller’s consistent view that only a politically mature people could carry through a successful revolution, and that political maturity presupposed a harmonious balance within each individual. In Schiller’s early plays, we find attempts to resist or overthrow tyranny being frustrated by the confused motives or psychological disharmony of  the would-be revolutionaries. Karl Moor in Die Räuber avenges himself on society by punishing individual oppressors, yet realizes too late that the violence he employs is equally oppressive. Ferdinand in Kabale und Liebe disapproves of  the corruption of  the German court run by his father, but is too headstrong and self-centred to resist it ef fectively. Fiesco, in leading a conspiracy to overthrow the Doria dynasty that governs Genoa, is motivated not by principle, but by lust for power, and is murdered by a republican who, by contrast, places political principle above humanity. The conf lict between principle and humanity, between the reason and the heart, forms the tragic core of  Schiller’s fourth play, Don Carlos. While writing it, Schiller found his interest shifting from the title figure, the unruly son of  King Philip II of  Spain, to an invented character, the Marquis Posa. The two are supposed to have become close friends in their youth. When the play opens, Posa has just returned to Madrid after several years of  travel. Freed from the stif ling moral and intellectual repression of  Catholic Spain, which is underpinned by the Inquisition, he has acquired libertarian and republican convictions. He has also seen the brutal ef fects of  Spanish oppression in the Netherlands, where Protestantism is spreading despite the occupiers’ attempts to crush it. His initial plan is to recruit Carlos to support the cause of  the Netherlanders, but this scheme is frustrated when the King rejects Carlos’s request to be sent to pacify the Netherlands by lenient methods, for the King believes that only the

44 Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5, 580. 45 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of  Man in a Series of  Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 25.

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

141

harsh measures proposed by his designated viceroy, Alba, can forestall rebellion. To his own surprise, Posa finds himself summoned by the King, who distrusts his advisers, longs for an honest counsellor and confidant and is impressed by what he has heard of  Posa’s independence of mind. Posa speaks favourably of  the Reformation, which, to the horror of  the Catholics, is gaining ground in their northern possessions, and urges the King to grant liberty of  thought. His ideals are, by his own admission, anachronistic: ‘Das Jahrhundert | Ist meinem Ideal nicht reif. Ich lebe | Ein Bürger derer, welche kommen werden.’46 [‘This century | Is far from ripe for my designs. I live | Among the citizens that are to come.’]47 He is a kind of emissary from the future. Although the King is far from sharing his ideals, he is suf ficiently impressed by Posa’s forthrightness – highly unusual in a court that, even more than most absolutist courts, was marked by constant dissimulation – to take him into his service. This might seem to be Posa’s ideal opportunity. Under absolutism, it was assumed that a king needed an honest counsellor immune from court intrigues to guide his policies, though it was well known that such counsellors were rare and their inf luence usually short-lived.48 But he wastes his opportunity by engaging in an intrigue far too complicated to recount here, by which he intends to manipulate the King into letting Carlos escape to the Netherlands and start a rebellion there against Spanish rule. Not only does this intrigue fail, but both Carlos and the King are deeply hurt by the evidence of  Posa’s manipulations. Instead of confiding in them, he has treated them as instruments. Why has he outsmarted himself in this way? Schiller’s high-minded rebels tend to be led astray by their own vanity. Karl Moor was accused by his fellow-robbers of  ‘Großmannssucht’ [‘megalomania’]; Fiesco is carried away by his love of grand gestures; and here the Queen, who is in many ways the moral centre of  the play, may well be justified in

46 Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, 121. 47 Schiller, Don Carlos and Mary Stuart, 112. 48 See Wolfgang Martens, Der patriotische Minister: Fürstendiener in der Literatur der Aufklärungszeit (Weimar: Böhlau, 1996).

142

Ritchie Robertson

charging Posa with vanity – ‘Sie haben | Nur um Bewunderung gebuhlt’49 [‘Your one desire is to be wondered at!’]50 Posa has another f law, however, which Schiller identifies in his commentary on the play, the Briefe über ‘Don Carlos’ [Letters on ‘Don Carlos’]. He has allowed abstract principles to triumph over human sympathy. Having gained the King’s confidence, he should have worked to humanize him further, to soften absolutist rule, and thus to benefit the Netherlands and the wider cause of  liberty. Schiller declares: daß man sich in moralischen Dingen nicht ohne Gefahr von dem natürlichen praktischen Gefühl entfernt, um sich zu allgemeinen Abstraktionen zu erheben, daß sich der Mensch weit sicherer den Eingebungen seines Herzens oder dem schon gegenwärtigen und individuellen Gefühle von Recht und Unrecht vertraut als der gefährlichen Leitung universeller Vernunftideen, die er sich künstlich erschaf fen hat – denn nichts führt zum Guten, was nicht natürlich ist.51 [that in moral matters it is risky to distance oneself  from natural and practical feeling in order to elevate oneself  to abstract generalities; that it is much safer for a human being to trust in the impulses of  his heart, or the individual feeling of right and wrong that he already has, than the dangerous guidance of universal ideas of reason which he has artificially created – for nothing can lead to good except what is natural.]

This statement may help us to gain a critical distance from the challenging argument by Kant with which I began. General principle requires me always to tell the truth. That principle, according to Kant, consists in my duty towards myself; the need to treat every other person, including a would-be murderer, as an end in himself, not as an object or instrument; and to preserve the fabric of  human relations from the harm that would result from the smallest act of dishonesty. What gets lost in this argument – and in the skilful attempt by Christine Korsgaard to recuperate it – is my duty towards the friend whom I would like to protect from the hostility of  49 Schiller, Don Carlos, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, 176. For a defence of  Posa, see Lesley Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 94–5. 50 Schiller, Don Carlos, 164. 51 Schiller, Briefe über Don Carlos, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, 262.

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

143

the murderer. In Kant’s scenario, my formal duty towards the murderer, as a fellow human being, seems to screen out my actual obligations towards my friend. His scenario is limited and one-sided. The network of ethical obligations that Kant composes does not seem fine enough to prevent ordinary human emotions from slipping through its meshes. The advantage of drama is that it forms a counterweight to philosophy and an antidote to the ‘gefährliche Leitung universeller Vernunftideen’ [‘the dangerous guidance of fered by universal ideas of reason’] by staging a thick description of  human life. If  the philosopher underestimates the importance of emotions in human life, the dramatist restores them. As Schiller says of art in general in the prologue to Wallenstein: ‘Denn jedes Äußerste führt sie, die alles | Begrenzt und bindet, zur Natur zurück.’52 [‘For art, that shapes and limits all, will lead | All monstrous aberrations back to nature.’]53 A plausible chain of reasoning may lead us far away from the constant facts of  human nature; drama, by showing humanity in the round, can restore the balance.

Bibliography Alt, Peter-André, Schiller: Leben – Werk – Zeit, 2 vols (Munich: Beck, 2000). Anderson, William, Dante the Maker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). Bacon, Sir Francis. Collected Works of  Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols (1879; repr. London: Routledge/ Thoemmes, 1996). Borchmeyer, Dieter, Macht und Melancholie: Schillers Wallenstein (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1988). Crocker, Lester G., ‘The Discussion of  Suicide in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of  the History of  Ideas 13 (1952), 47–72. Dante, De monarchia, in A.G. Ferrers Howell and Philip H. Wickstead, eds, A Translation of  the Latin Works of  Dante Alighieri (London: Dent, 1904), 125–291.

52 Schiller, Wallenstein, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, 273. 53 Schiller, The Robbers, Wallenstein, 168.

144

Ritchie Robertson

Davies, Stef fan, The Wallenstein Figure in German Literature and Historiography 1790–1920 (London: Maney, 2010). ——, ‘“Du wagst es, meine Worte zu deuten?” Unreliable Evidence on Schiller’s Stage’, Modern Language Review 106 (2011), 779–96. Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath, ed. Lisa Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Evans, Dylan, Emotion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Guénée, Bernard, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe, trans. Juliet Vale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). High, Jef frey L., Schillers Rebellionskonzept und die Französische Revolution (Lewiston: Mellen, 2004). ——, ‘Introduction: Why is this Schiller [still] in the United States?’, in Jef frey L. High, Nicholas Martin and Norbert Oellers, eds, Who is this Schiller Now? Essays on his Reception and Significance (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), 1–21. Kant, Immanuel, Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 6 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964). Korsgaard, Christine M., ‘The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil’, in Creating the Kingdom of  Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133–58. Lamport, F.J., ‘The Charismatic Hero: Goethe, Schiller, and the Tragedy of Character’, Proceedings of  the English Goethe Society 58 (1988), 62–83. Laqueur, Thomas, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of  Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003). Machiavelli, The Discourses of  Niccolò Machiavelli, trans. Leslie J. Walker, 2 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950). ——, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Mainland, W.F., Schiller and the Changing Past (London: Heinemann, 1957). Martens, Wolfgang, Der patriotische Minister: Fürstendiener in der Literatur der Aufklärungszeit (Weimar: Böhlau, 1996). Meinecke, Friedrich, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte, ed. Walther Hofer (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1957). Mortimer, Geof f, Wallenstein: The Enigma of  the Thirty Years War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Müller-Seidel, Walter, Friedrich Schiller und die Politik (Munich: Beck, 2009). Parker, Geof frey, The Thirty Years’ War (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). Pittock, Malcolm, ‘The Problem of  Henry V’, Neophilologus 93 (2009), 175–90.

Schiller, Kant, Machiavelli and the Ethics of  Betrayal

145

Schieder, Theodor, ‘Shakespeare und Machiavelli’, in Begegnungen mit der Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1962), 9–55. Schiller, Friedrich, Maria Stuart, in Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Göpfert, eds, Sämtliche Werke, 5 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1958). ——, On the Aesthetic Education of  Man in a Series of  Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). ——, The Robbers, Wallenstein, trans. F.J. Lamport (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). ——, Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe, ed. Julius Petersen et al., 43 vols (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1943–2010). Sharpe, Kevin, Reading Revolution: The Politics of  Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Sharpe, Lesley, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Skinner, Quentin, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Williams, Bernard, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Wilson, Peter H., Europe’s Tragedy: A History of  the Thirty Years War (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 52–79. Wölfel, Kurt, ‘Machiavellische Spuren in Schillers Dramatik’, in Achim Aurnhammer, Klaus Manger and Friedrich Strack, eds, Schiller und die höfische Welt (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), 318–40.

Betiel Wasihun

Eth(n)ical Betrayal: Kleist’s ‘Die Verlobung in St. Domingo’ and Roth’s The Human Stain

An Unlikely Couple Heinrich von Kleist and Philip Roth certainly make up a rather unusual pair, as the dif ferences between their works seem to be more salient than the similarities. And yet, these appearances are deceptive; the question of  trust – and therefore mistrust and betrayal – are abiding topics in the fiction of  both writers. Betrayal immediately strikes the eye against the backdrop of racial oppositions in Kleist’s novella ‘Die Verlobung in St. Domingo’ [‘The Betrothal in St. Domingo’, 1811] and in Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000). In both narratives, the light-skinned black protagonists betray by committing themselves to one racially defined social group: they pass as whites. Passing is a literary trope that emerged in the literature of  the so-called Harlem Renaissance – a movement in African American culture from the first decades of  the twentieth-century.1 In a typical narrative of passing, mixed-race characters ‘cross to the white side of  the color line’,2 denying their ‘invisible blackness’3 for the social and economic benefits of an exclusively 1 2 3

Ella O. Williams, Harlem Renaissance – A Handbook (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2008), 1. Lori Harrison-Kahan, The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 84. Joel Williamson, New People. Miscegnation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980), 98.

148

Betiel Wasihun

white existence.4 Unlike The Human Stain, which is regarded as a contemporary passing novel,5 Kleist’s novella may at first seem out of place in the context of  this topos. But the mixed race of  Kleist’s main character, Toni Bertrand, who is the daughter of a mulatta and a Frenchman – a quadroon, called mestiza6 by Kleist’s narrator – is even more blatant than that of  Roth’s African American protagonist, Coleman Silk, who owes his light skin to the history of  his ancestry. And indeed, Kleist’s novella has been occasionally referred to as a black-to-white passing narrative.7 Nonetheless, studies of passing tend to concentrate upon American literature.8 To be sure, passing in Kleist’s novella takes place under dif ferent auspices. Toni’s light-skinned appearance is abused to gain the trust of refugeseeking white people in the uproar of  the Haitian slave revolution of 1803. Here, passing is not only a means of deception, but also a means of revenge for the white tyranny that the blacks had suf fered. At first, Kleist’s Toni is a rather passive passing figure, forced to perform countless passings by 4 5 6

7

8

Nella Larsen’s novel entitled Passing (1929) is prototypical. See Donavan L. Ramon, ‘“You’re Neither One Thing (N)or The Other”: Nella Larsen, Philip Roth, and the Passing Trope’, Philip Roth Studies 8/1 (2012), 45–61, 45f. Mestiza was a common name for mixed people during Kleist’s time and is (as is argued frequently) not necessarily a misapplication by Kleist. See Klaus Müller-Salget, ‘August und die Mestize. Zu einigen Kontroversen um Kleists “Verlobung in St. Domingo”’, Euphorion 92 (1988), 103–13, 105f f. However, as Anselm Havercamp has pointed out, whether Kleist used that word correctly or not is ultimately irrelevant in the context of  the ‘Verlobung’. Anselm Haverkamp, ‘Schwarz/Weiß. “Othello” und die “Verlobung in St. Domingo”’, Weimarer Beiträge 41/3 (1995), 397–409, 400. See, for example, Todd Kontje’s article ‘Passing for German: Politics and Patriarchy in Kleist, Körner, and Fischer’, German Studies Review 22/1 (1999), 67–84; and Monika Ehlers, ‘“Wer bist Du?” Performanz, Gewalt und Begehren in Kleists Erzählung Die Verlobung in St. Domingo’, in Eva Lezzi, Monika Ehlers and Sandra Schramm, eds, Fremdes Begehren: Transkulturelle Beziehungen in Literatur, Kunst und Medien (Köln: Böhlau, 2003), 132–45, 133. Juda Bennett, for example, argues that passing is ‘a uniquely “American” theme with its own literature, which […] verges on becoming a genre defined not only by the uniqueness of its subject but by its symbolic and structural strategies.’ Juda Bennett, The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature (New York: Lang, 1996), 36f.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

149

her stepfather, the recently freed African slave Congo Hoango, and her mother Babekan, a mulatta, in order to serve their plans of vengeance for their former enslavement. Toni’s role is to lure white fugitives to the house on her stepfather’s plantation (which he appropriated during the revolution’s turmoil), where they would then be killed. In performing all of  these involuntary passings, Toni is trained for her actual passing, which will involve the betrayal of  her family. But how do these passings – understood as racial betrayals – come about? And how sustainable is the whole notion of passing as racial betrayal after all, especially in light of  theories that pivot on the social construction of race? These are the questions I will be addressing in this paper, whilst examining the ethical and motivational framework of  the individual betrayals represented in both literary texts. To begin with, I would like to elucidate the parallels that Roth’s and Kleist’s works exhibit beyond the passing topic.

(N)either Black (n)or White In both The Human Stain and ‘Die Verlobung in St. Domingo’, the phenomenon of  betrayal unfolds in concentric circles, from betrayals in a larger historical context to individual betrayals where individual identity is challenged. In this respect, a close analysis of  both prose pieces discloses surprising textual analogies. Kleist embeds his novella in the turmoil of  the Haitian Revolution led by Dessalines after the betrayal and capture of  Toussaint Louverture in 1802: Zu Port au Prince, auf dem französischen Antheil der Insel St. Domingo, lebte, zu Anfange dieses Jahrhunderts, als die Schwarzen die Weißen ermordeten, auf der Pf lanzung des Hrn. Guillaume von Villeneuve, ein fürchterlicher alter Neger, namens Congo Hoango. Dieser von der Goldküste von Afrika herstammende Mensch, der in seiner Jugend von treuer und rechtschaf fener Gemütsart schien, war von seinem

150

Betiel Wasihun Herrn, weil er ihm einst auf einer Überfahrt nach Cuba das Leben gerettet hatte, mit unendlichen Wohlthaten überhäuft worden.9 [On Monsieur Guillaume de Villeneuve’s plantation at Port-au-Prince in the French sector of  the island of  Santo Domingo there lived at the beginning of  this century, at the time when the blacks were murdering the whites, a terrible old negro called Congo Hoango. This man, who came originally from the Gold Coast of  Africa, had seemed in his youth to be of a loyal and honest disposition, and having once saved his master’s life when they were sailing across to Cuba, he had been rewarded by the latter with innumerable favours and kindness.]10

The precise historical reference not only provides a setting for the story, but also creates a certain atmosphere. The novella takes the reader immediately into a violent world where the decisive, ex- and including constituents are black and white. A similar, but less brutal opposition between races is evoked towards the beginning of  The Human Stain, when Roth’s longstanding narrator Nathan Zuckerman depicts the summer of  his decisive encounter with the novel’s protagonist Coleman Silk:11 The summer that Coleman took me into his confidence about Faunia Farley and their secret was the summer, fittingly enough, that Bill Clinton’s secret emerged in every last mortifying detail – every last lifelike detail, the livingness, like the mortification, exuded by the pungency of  the specific data. […] Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine, in baseball a summer of mythical battle between a home-run god who was white and a home-run god who was brown, and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge,

9 10 11

Heinrich von Kleist, ‘Die Verlobung in St. Domingo’, in Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle, eds, Sämtliche Werke, 20 vols (Basel: Stromfeld/Roter Stern, 1988), vol. 2/4, 7. Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of  O – And Other Stories, trans. and introd. David Luke and Nigel Reeves (New York: Penguin, 1978), 231. Unless otherwise stated, translations are taken from this book. Nathan Zuckerman is not only the narrator of  The Human Stain, which, along with American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), forms Roth’s American Trilogy; he is also the narrator of another Roth trilogy, Zuckerman Bound, which includes The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983) – and an epilogue, The Prague Orgy (1985).

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

151

when terrorism – which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s security – was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middleaged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Of fice like two kids in a parking lot revived America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony.12

The septuagenarian Coleman Silk, a former dean and classics professor at Athena College (a fictional institution in Massachusetts) and father of four children, was accused of racism, dismissed from work and widowed a few years before his encounter with Nathan Zuckerman, whom he implores to write the story of  his wrong accusation and the whole tragedy it entailed. His secret love af fair with Faunia Farley, a 34-year-old woman who was a janitor at his previous college, does not remain undiscovered and is turned against him by his former colleagues, who reproach him for abusing the young janitor. The way Coleman Silk’s secret liaison with Faunia Farley is mentioned in the same breath as Bill Clinton’s notorious adultery and sex scandal in 1998 bespeaks the treacherous ambience, in which hypocritical and fanatic piety is directed towards both Clinton’s and Silk’s private af fairs, whilst no attention is paid to world-shaking political movements. These double standards of  American society also colour Roth’s depiction of  his protagonist, who turns out to be duplicitous: Coleman Silk lives a double life, in which he plays the black and white races against each other – much like the white and black home-run gods the narrator contrasts at the opening of  the novel. Unlike Kleist’s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman only gently alludes to the racial opposition, referring to the brown and white appearance of competing baseball players as a ‘mythical battle’ – which recalls the mythical overtones in Kleist’s description of  the struggle between blacks and whites. And yet, as I will show in this paper, both texts gradually subvert this black and white opposition with a tenacious pledge for the human. Alone, Roth’s title – The Human Stain – already casts light on humans and their fallibility. The aspect of  the human is also emphasized in the opening 12

Philip Roth, The Human Stain (London: Vintage, 2001), 2.

152

Betiel Wasihun

passage of  Kleist’s novella, when Congo Hoango is described as ‘dieser von der Goldküste von Afrika herstammende Mensch’ [‘the human, who came originally from the Gold Coast of  Africa’].13 Above all, the protagonists’ yellowish skin colour renders the categories of  black and white questionable. While Kleist’s narrator explains how asylum-seeking white people were ensnared during the Haitian revolt, Toni is described as someone who was especially suitable for that kind of  ‘gräßliche[n] List’ [‘hideous deception’] because of  her facial colour, which tends towards yellow.14 Roth’s traitor, on the other hand, is depicted as ‘one of  those crimped-haired Jews of a light yellowish skin pigmentation who possess something of  the ambiguous aura of  the pale blacks who are sometimes taken for white’.15 Yellow is not only ‘the chromatic intermediary between the polarized black and white races’;16 it is also, according to medieval symbolism, the colour of  the traitor. The negative meaning of yellow was associated with poison, avarice, envy, lie and betrayal.17 This symbolic meaning of yellow is certainly evoked in these narratives; after all, one of  their prominent topics is betrayal.18 In both texts racial categories are blurred in the ambiguity of yellow, which facilitates betrayals.

13 My translation and emphasis. 14 Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 10. Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 232. 15 Roth, The Human Stain, 16f. Later in the novel, Les Farley refers to him as a ‘highand-mighty Jew professor, his yellow Jew face contorted with pleasure’ (ibid., 71). 16 Hans Jakob Werlen, ‘Seduction and Betrayal: Race and Gender in Kleist’s “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo”’, Monatshefte 84/4 (1992), 459–71, 462. 17 See Udo Becker, Lexikon der Symbole (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder/Spektrum, 1998), 102. 18 Especially striking is the predominance of yellow in Kleist’s novella. The slave’s name Congo Hoango, for example, refers to the two rivers Congo and Huang He (the Yellow River) that f low in opposite directions, once again underpinning the text’s black and white structure. See Roland Reuß, ‘“Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” – eine Einführung in Kleists Erzählen’, in Berliner Kleist-Blätter 1 (Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1988), 18, n. 44. Even more blatant for the betrayal topic is Gustav’s narration of  the treacherous black woman who infects her former master with yellow fever as an act of revenge. Unlike Toni and Coleman, this traitress is not of yellowish skin

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

153

Spooks and Promises In Roth’s novel it is the ‘self-incriminating word’ spooks that marks the revelation of a deep-seated betrayal.19 ‘Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?’ – with this question the classics professor Coleman Silk begins his lecture in the sixth week of  the semester, after two student names were still failing ‘to elicit a response’.20 Disturbingly, the mere articulation of  this word destroys his life, since it happens that these two missing students are dark-skinned. Being accused of racism, he loses his job. Ironically, his lack of immediate awareness of  the multiple meanings of  that word brands this classical philologist as a racist. In the accusations of  Athena College against Silk, the dif ferent meanings of  the word spook are scrutinized against the backdrop of political correctness: Because if we look in the dictionary, what do we find as the first meaning of  ‘spook’? The primary meaning. ‘1. Informal. ghost; spectre.’ But Dean Silk, that is not the way it was taken. Let me read to you the second dictionary meaning. ‘2. Disparaging. A Negro.’ That’s the way it was taken – and you can see the logic of  that as well: Does anybody know them, or are they blacks whom you don’t know?21

There is, however, a third meaning of spook, which is not explicitly taken into account in the novel: namely, spy or undercover agent. And because The Human Stain narrates the story of a traitor, these dif ferent meanings relate to one another in an important way. Revealingly, Coleman’s father, an avid reader of  English literature (including    Julius Caesar, the ‘most educational study of  treason’),22 gave him the middle name Brutus. Coleman was branded a traitor upon birth. complexion, but will eventually become yellow as the yellow-making-disease she passes on progresses. Yellow comes across as both the medium and the skin colour of  traitors. 19 Roth, The Human Stain, 6. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 84f. 22 Roth, The Human Stain, 92f.

154

Betiel Wasihun

The spook incident provocatively hints towards Silk’s concealed African American identity. It is almost as if  the spooks of  his past were spying on him, waiting for this lapse to happen. In defending himself against the charge of racism, Coleman says: But how could I know they were black students if  I had never laid eyes on them and, other than their names, had no knowledge of  them? What I did know, indisputably, was that they were invisible students – and the word for invisible, for a ghost, for a spectre, is the word that I used in its primary meaning: spook.23

Ironically, the invisibility of  Coleman’s own blackness, too, becomes visible, when the two black students on his attendance list never turn up.24 The spook incident marks a caesura in Coleman’s life, turning his betrayal against himself: Spooks! To be undone by a word that no one even speaks anymore. To hang him on that was, for Coleman, to banalize everything – the elaborate clockwork of his lie, the beautiful calibration of  his deceit, everything. Spooks! The ridiculous trivialization of  this masterly performance that had been his seemingly conventional, singularly subtle life – a life of  little, if anything excessive on the surface because all the excess goes into the secret.25

Coleman’s secret is threatened, as the novel’s first chapter title ‘Everyone knows’ clearly implies. In the first place, this title refers to an anonymous letter that discloses his secret love af fair with Faunia Farley (the letter turns out to be written by his young female colleague, a fanatic French professor). The formulation, ‘Everyone knows’ – which is not only the title of  the first chapter, but also a repeatedly employed phrase – equally indicates Coleman’s fear of exposing his hidden racial identity. Furthermore, it 23 Ibid., 85. 24 As Tim Parrish points out, the term ‘spook’ as ‘the central plot device of  The Human Stain [is] an inversion and rewriting of  the famous opening lines of [Ralph Ellison’s] Invisible Man.’ (Tim Parrish, ‘Becoming Black: Zuckerman’s Bifurcating Self in The Human Stain’, in Derek Parker Royal, ed., Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author [Westport: Praeger, 2005], 209–24, 215). 25 Roth, The Human Stain, 334.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

155

suggests that a certain kind of  knowledge is taken for granted. In a surprisingly similar manner, Kleist’s narrator informs us: ‘Nun weiß jedermann, daß im Jahr 1803, als der General Dessalines mit 30,000 Negern gegen Port au Prince vorrückte, Alles, was die weiße Farbe trug, sich in diesen Platz warf, um ihn zu vertheidigen.’26 [‘Now in the year 1803, as the world (every man) knows, when General Dessalines was advancing against Portau-Prince at the head of  thirty thousand negroes, everyone whose skin was white retreated to this stronghold to defend it.’]27 The racial struggle between blacks and whites is represented as public knowledge. What rings through here is the Heideggerian ‘Man’, an anonymous collective that constitutes the public.28 As the chapter title ‘Everyone knows’ already suggested, the individual’s exposure to the public is at stake in The Human Stain. The longstanding conf lict between the private and the public is also a central issue in Kleist’s novella. However, in Kleist’s ‘Verlobung’ there are no secrets made about racial ascriptions, no spooks invoked. It is less the captiousness of an ambiguous word that propels the narrative, than the dif ficulty of complying with binding words. Here, not only a spoken promise, but also an apparently unspoken oath preconditions one of  the betrayals – and in this instance, the novella’s traitress herself  turns out to be the victim. Betrayal resonates already in the title, for Verlobung or Betrothal – which is based on an oath of  loyalty or alliance – is nothing but a social union or contract, and as such, it is constantly jeopardized by betrayal. Betrothing is bespeaking, promising. Shoshana Felman argues in her reading of  the Don Juan myth that a promise is something that cannot be fulfilled.29 This is certainly the case in Kleist’s ‘Verlobung’. The stranger – who seduces Toni, albeit not in the manner of  Don Juan – does not ask Toni’s mother for her daughter’s hand

26 Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 10f. (my emphasis). 27 Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 232. 28 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit 18th edn (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), 127. 29 Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of  the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), 32.

156

Betiel Wasihun

the next morning as he had promised.30 Instead, he is interested primarily in the promise Babekan had given him: food and refuge to his family.31 Gustav not only nonchalantly strays from the promise he gave Toni, but, in the end, he also breaks faith with her. Due to a tragic misunderstanding, the expectation of  betrothal that the novella’s title raises remains ultimately unfulfilled. In order to rescue Gustav from the furious Congo Hoango, who returns to the house earlier than expected, Toni ties the sleeping Gustav to the bed, pretending to still be supportive of  her family’s deceitful plot. Although she thereby risks being perceived as a traitress by Gustav, she does not let him in on her plan.32 Strikingly, in describing Toni’s fear to come across as a traitress to Gustav, the narrator plays with the German word for betrayal: Verrat – which literally refers to a miscarried piece of advice: Rat.33 Toni appears as both the willing adviser and the traitress; her act of  faith towards Gustav coincides with her act of  betrayal towards her family.

30

31

32 33

‘[…] [U]nd sagte ihr, indem er ihre Hand bald streichelte, bald küßte: daß er bei ihrer Mutter am Morgen des nächsten Tages um sie anhalten wolle.’ Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 44. [‘And told her, stroking and kissing her hand, that he would tomorrow morning seek her mother’s permission to marry her.’] Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 247. For the Don Juan reference, see also Werlen, ‘Seduction and Betrayal’, 463. ‘Er grüßte sehr heiter und freundlich die Mutter und die Tochter, und bat, indem er der Alten den Zettel übergab: daß man sogleich in die Waldung schicken und für die Gesellschaft, dem ihm gegebenen Versprechen gemäß, Sorge tragen möchte.’ Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 53. [‘Evidently in the best of spirits, he greeted the mother and daughter very af fably, and giving the note to the former, asked her to send someone to the woods with it immediately, at the same time providing for the needs of  the party as she had promised.’] Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 251. Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 67. ‘Ja, die entsetzlichste Rücksicht, die sie zu nehmen genöthigt war, war diese, daß der Unglückliche sie selbst, wenn er sie in dieser Stunde bei seinem Bette fände, für eine Verrätherinn halten, und, statt auf ihren Rath zu hören, in der Raserei eines so heillosen Wahns, dem Neger Hoango völlig besinnungslos in die Arme laufen würde.’ Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 67. [‘Indeed, the most terrible thought of all those that occurred to her was that the unfortunate man, finding her standing beside his bed at such a time, would assume that she had betrayed him and, driven to despair by so disastrous an illusion, would ignore her advice and senselessly rush into the negro Hoango’s arms.’] Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 258.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

157

The figure of  the betrayed traitress begs the question of  the true betrayer. The dif ficulty of identifying any traitor is in line with the often noted inconsistencies in Kleist’s text: at more than one point Gustav changes names and is referred to as ‘August’,34 at some stage Gustav/August randomly changes colour, while Toni remains a fifteen-year-old throughout the novella – although the events narrated in the introduction are roughly ten years apart from those that mark the beginning of  the main plot in 1803. These are inconsistencies that can hardly be understood as mere coincidences, but rather work as deliberate narrative devices. Therefore, the entire discourse on betrayal in Kleist’s ‘Verlobung’ must be perceived in the light of narrative inconsistencies that create a prismatic ef fect. Toni, who recognizably appears as the novella’s traitress, turns out to be one among many traitors. There is her biological father, a Frenchman who denounces his paternity and thus breaks bonds to both herself and her mother. There is also her stepfather, the former slave Congo Hoango, who breaks his bond to his well-intentioned and generous master, murdering him during the uproar of  the revolution. And finally, there is Gustav, who fails to understand Toni’s strategy and kills her furiously in the false belief of  having been betrayed by her. Kleist’s text clearly narrates the consequences of a misunderstanding, a misconception, a missed recognition.35 This is also the case in Roth’s novel, since the spook incident is, in fact, the result of a misunderstanding (which, on the other hand, ironically communicates truth). Speaking that has gone awry is at play in both narratives. Particularly, in Kleist’s novella

34 Or perhaps this change is deceptive? Perhaps it is not a proper change of names, for Gust-av and Au-gust may be the very same, bringing to mind the anagrammatic relation between Nicolo and Colino in another text by Kleist: ‘Der Findling’ (‘The Foundling’). See Reuß, ‘“Die Verlobung in St. Domingo”’, 39. For a close engagement with the deception involved in the logogryph of  Nicolo’s name, see Rebecca Haubrich’s contribution to this volume. 35 See ibid., 3 and 12f. These arising dif ficulties of communication have taken centre stage in Kleist-criticism. See, for example, Dieter Heimböckel, Emphatische Unaus­ sprechlichkeit: Sprachkritik im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 160.

158

Betiel Wasihun

promising (versprechen) always places speakers on the edge of misspeaking. After all, the ref lexive usage of  the German verb (sich versprechen) bears the meaning of making a slip of  the tongue, of misspeaking oneself. And where words are miscarried, trust goes astray. Shortly before Toni dies, she reproaches Gustav of mistrust: ‘Ach’, rief  Toni, und dies waren ihre letzten Worte: ‘du hättest mir nicht mißtrauen sollen!’ Und damit hauchte sie ihre schöne Seele aus. Gustav raufte sich die Haare. ‘Gewiß!’ sagte er, da ihn die Vettern von der Leiche wegrissen: ‘ich hätte dir nicht mißtrauen sollen; denn du warst mir durch einen Eidschwur verlobt, obschon wir keine Worte darüber gewechselt hatten!’36 [‘Oh’, cried Toni, and these were her last words, ‘you should not have mistrusted me!’ And so saying, the noble-hearted girl expired. Gustav tore his hair. ‘It’s true!’ he exclaimed, as his cousins dragged him away from the corpse, ‘I should not have mistrusted you, for you were betrothed to me by a vow, although we had not put it into words!’]37

Although he failed to fulfil the promise he had given Toni (that is, to ask her mother for her hand after the night of consummation), Gustav claims to have violated the unspoken oath that had marked their betrothal.38 But how can an unspoken oath or vow validate a betrothal? For Toni, the betrothal had taken place with God and her own heart as witnesses. The legitimacy of  this exclusively private betrothal – without the presence of  the betrothed – is also highly questionable. Betrothal, as a form of promising, usually requires a public audience, since it would otherwise lose its validity.39 And yet, there is the illocutionary

36 Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 87f. 37 Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 267. 38 The authenticity of  Gustav’s statement has been frequently questioned. See, for example, Gerhard Neumann, ‘Die Verlobung in St. Domingo – Zum Problem der literarischen Mimesis im Werk Heinrich von Kleists’, in Christine Lubkoll and Günter Oesterle, eds, Gewagte Experimente und kühne Konstellationen – Kleists Werk zwischen Klassizismus und Romantik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), 93–117, 111. 39 See Reuß, ‘“Die Verlobung in St. Domingo”’, 6.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

159

act of commitment in a promise that validates it – be it private or public.40 Apart from that, oaths or vows are solemn promises – ‘invoking God (or a god, or other object of reverence) as witness to the truth of a statement, or to the binding nature of a promise or undertaking’.41 Vows or oaths do not need to be public, but can take place secretly, silently. Gustav’s ‘Brautgeschenk’42 [‘bridal gift’]43 to Toni – the cross of  his deceased bride – may have been the silent gesture that had sealed an unspoken oath, marking their betrothal in secret. On the one hand, Toni and Gustav perform an exclusively private and secret exchange of (only partially fulfilled and articulated) promises and vows. On the other hand, however, their public betrothal in the novella only takes place post mortem, when the rings of  the dead couple are exchanged, representing betrothal, in turn, as a utopian bond beyond this world.44 The emerging gap between an exclusively private and a public betrothal is aligned in the text with the abyss that separates life and death, leaving the reader with the notion of a missed betrothal. And indeed, the recurring breaches of  bonds, together with the paradoxical presentation of  the faithful traitress, seem to call the idea of  troth (or perhaps even truth; these words have the same etymological derivation in English) into question.45 In L’amour et l’Occident, Denis de Rougemont argues that marital fidelity is ‘the least natural of virtues’.46 Kleist and Roth would probably not hesitate to subscribe to Rougemont’s claim that ‘fidelity is extremely

40 J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 10f. 41 Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press, 2012) accessed 25 February 2013. 42 Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 87f. 43 Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 247. 44 See Reuß, ‘“Die Verlobung in St. Domingo”’, 6. 45 OED accessed 25 February 2013. 46 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 306.

160

Betiel Wasihun

unconventional   ’.47 But their texts clearly demonstrate a certain discomfort towards the conventionality of  betrayals and the ethical problems that they entail. After all, promises are commonly understood to generate moral duties. The unsettling interplay between breaking and keeping promises, between betrayal and betrothal in Kleist’s novella, is framed by the very notion of  troth. Recalling the opening passage, it leaps to the eye how the depiction of  Congo Hoango immediately brings ethical terms to the fore: ‘treu’ [‘faithful’] and ‘rechtschaf fen’ [‘righteous’].48 And in the last sentence of  the novella, the narrator, albeit ironically, sympathizes with Toni, calling her ‘treu’ [‘faithful’].49 It lies in the nature of narratives of betrayal that a certain understanding of  troth and truth remains pivotal. In the pages that follow, however, I will argue that the epistemological framework of  these texts proves dif ficult, as they articulate a constant challenge of socially constructed colour lines, suggesting reference points that lie beyond social realities. Nonetheless, it has been long recognized that referents beyond social realities become elusive and slippery.50 I will hark back to this problem, while exploring how the reliability of appearance – that is, ethnic determination based on skin colour – is undermined by the whole topic of passing in the texts discussed.

47 Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 306. 48 See Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 7. 49 ‘Herr Strömli kaufte sich daselbst mit dem Rest seines kleinen Vermögens, in der Gegend des Rigi, an; und noch im Jahr 1807 war unter den Büschen seines Gartens das Denkmal zu sehen, das er Gustav, seinem Vetter, und der Verlobten desselben, der treuen Toni, hatte setzen lassen.’ Ibid., 91. [‘There Herr Strömli settled, using the rest of  his small fortune to buy a house near the Rigi; and in the year 1807, among the bushes of  his garden, one could still see the monument he had erected to the memory of  his cousin Gustav, and to the faithful Toni, Gustav’s bride.’] Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 269. 50 In reaction to the popularization of notions of social construction, John R. Searle defended ‘the idea that there is a reality that is totally independent of us’ to tackle the slipperiness of  this problem. See John R. Searle, The Construction of  Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995), 2.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

161

Racial Betrayal: Passing the Colour Line The term passing is believed to be derived from the written pass given to slaves so that they might travel without being taken for runaways.51 Over time, the ‘permission to cross a land’ turned into the possibility to cross the colour line.52 However, the theoretical foundation of passing is not as simple – not as black and white – as it may seem prima facie. Newer approaches to passing thematize the subtleties of  this rather dif ficult concept, which has long invaded the spheres of religion and gender.53 Despite the various forms of passing, the original notion of  this concept is inextricably linked to race.54 There are several famous cases of passing in African American history; one of  them is the New York Times book reviewer Anatole Broyard, who passed for white most of  his life and ‘who was “outed” as “black” by African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.’55 In fact, it is generally assumed that Broyard may have inspired The Human Stain. But Roth, who only recently took a stand on this, radically rejects this assumption.56 Be that as it may, his light-skinned African American

Sinéad Moynihan, Passing into the Present. Contemporary American Fiction of  Racial and Gender Passing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 5. 52 OED accessed 25 February 2013. 53 See, for example, Anna Camaiti Hostert, Passing – A Strategy to Dissolve Identities and Remap Dif ferences, trans. Christine Marciasini (Cranbury: Rosemont, 2007), 13; or Samira Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line. Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 126–7. Juda Bennett stresses that ‘the passing figure delights in elusiveness and secrecy.’ Bennett, The Passing Figure, 4. 54 See also ibid., 6. 55 Timothy Parrish, Ralph Ellison and the Genius of  America (Amherst: University of  Massachusetts Press, 2012), 46. 56 In an open letter to Wikipedia, Philip Roth criticizes the entry’s ‘serious misstatement’ and insists that The Human Stain was not inspired by Anatole Broyard but by his ‘late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years’ (Philip Roth: ‘An Open Letter to Wikipedia’, in The New Yorker, 7 September 51

162

Betiel Wasihun

protagonist who decides to pass as a white Jew at the age of  twenty calls to mind passing figures like Broyard – whether the parallel is confirmed by the author or not. Both historical and literary passing figures are commonly labelled as traitors to their races. Despite the fact that passing was widely condemned as a masquerade of cowards,57 it was quite a common way of escaping racial discrimination before and during the Civil Rights Movements in the United States. Those light-skinned blacks who passed as whites, were regarded by the black community ‘as people who had betrayed their origins and given up on the fight against racial oppression’.58 As a way of representing someone you are not, passing is certainly playing false – and every act of  false play (even on stage) involves deception and (possibly) betrayal.59 The very condition of  those who pass, namely that their bodies have ‘always a deceptive appearance’, indicates that racial passing can be also unintended. In other words, you can be perceived – and therefore pass – as someone you are not without having the slightest intention to pass.60 After all, passing is only possible on the basis of  the ‘perception of race that others have’.61 What is at stake here is the ‘ethics of recognition’ as Dean Franco puts it, drawing attention to the meaning of  ‘recognition’ as a noun, namely ‘“reknowing,” or the confirmation of what was already presumed to be true’.62 As I have emphasized earlier, in an ethics of  betrayal the question of  truth 2012). For a comparison between Anatole Broyard and Coleman Silk, see Elaine B. Safer, Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of  Philip Roth (Albany: State University of  New York Press, 2006), 131f f. 57 See Parrish, Ralph Ellison and the Genius of  America, 71. 58 Camaiti Hostert, Passing, 79. See also Randall Kennedy, Sellout: The Politics of  Racial Betrayal (New York: Random House, 2008), 145. 59 See Gillian Granville Bentley’s contribution to this volume, where the complex relationship between stage acting and playing false is discussed. 60 See also Walter Benn Michaels, ‘Autobiography of an Ex-White Man: Why Race is not a Social Construction’ Transition 73 (1998), 122–43, 130. 61 Parrish, Ralph Ellison and the Genius of  America, 65. 62 Dean Franco, ‘Race, Recognition, and Responsibility in The Human Stain’, in Debra Shostak, ed., Philip Roth – American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot against America (London: Continuum, 2011), 65–79, 66.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

163

and authenticity is fundamental. In his comparison between Ralph Ellison and Philip Roth, Timothy Parrish highlights the way these writers put the existence of cultural authenticity in doubt, concluding that for Roth ‘a novel about passing can never quite represent a sense of cultural betrayal’.63 What exactly is ‘cultural betrayal’ supposed to be, though? Perhaps social betrayal? Parrish’s wording is problematic. Notwithstanding this, the questioning of cultural authenticity in the context of  Roth’s novel alludes to the widespread understanding of race as a social construction. On the basis of  this assumption, one may argue that Coleman cannot be regarded as ‘a traitor to his race’,64 since his racial identity is ascribed to something that is socially invented and not a part of  his true being. Taking a dif ferent approach, Walter Benn Michaels contends: ‘Passing becomes impossible because, in the logic of social constructionism, it is impossible not to be what you are passing for.’65 Michaels repudiates both the idea of race as a social fact and as a biological fact;66 for him, race is simply a ‘mistake’.67 Questions revolving around the concept of social construction are, of course, highly disputed and precarious,68 especially since all terms involved often rest on unquestioned, presumed identifications that have not been proven or argued for. But there is no doubt that, as in ‘all “passing” stories’,69 race is questioned in both Kleist’s and Roth’s prose, where its socially constructed aspects receive strong emphasis. There is, for example, the implication that one wears race or skin colour like a costume at the beginning of  Kleist’s novella: ‘[…] Alles, was die weiße Farbe trug […]’70 [‘Everyone who was

63 Parrish, Ralph Ellison and the Genius of  America, 47. 64 Roth, The Human Stain, 342. 65 Michaels, ‘Autobiography of an Ex-White Man’, 133. 66 Ibid., 142. 67 Ibid., 131. 68 For a critical engagement with this concept see Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of  What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and see also Searle, The Construction of  Social Reality. 69 Cf. Bennett, The Passing Figure, 25. 70 Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 10f. (my emphasis).

164

Betiel Wasihun

wearing white’].71 Race is represented as a mere appearance that covers the human. And there is another remarkable passage, shortly before Gustav – who is suddenly referred to as ‘August’72 – shoots Toni: Die Jünglinge, die sich bei ihm niedergesetzt hatten, fragten: was ihm fehle? und schon, da er sie mit seinem Arm umschloß, und sich mit dem Kopf schweigend an die Schulter des Jüngern lehnte, wollte Adalbert sich erheben, um ihn im Wahn, daß ihn eine Ohnmacht anwandle, einen Trunk Wasser herbeiholen: als Toni, den Knaben Seppy auf dem Arm, an der Hand Herrn Strömli’s, in das Zimmer trat. August wechselte bei diesem Anblick die Farbe; er hielt sich, indem er aufstand, als ob er umsinken wollte, an den Leibern der Freunde fest; und ehe die Jünglinge noch wußten, was er mit dem Pistol, das er ihnen jetzt aus der Hand nahm, anfangen wollte: drückte er dasselbe schon, knirschend vor Wuth, gegen Toni ab.73 [The young men had sat down beside him and asked what was wrong; he put his arms round them and laid his head on the younger brother’s shoulder without saying a word; and just as Adelbert, thinking he was going to faint, was about to rise and fetch him a glass of water, the door opened and Toni entered carrying the boy Seppy and holding Herr Strömli by the hand. At this sight Gustav changed colour: he stood up, clinging to his friends for support as if  he were on the verge of collapsing, and before the two youths could tell what he intended to do with the pistol he now snatched from them, he had, gritting his teeth with rage, fired a shot straight at Toni.]74

Gustav/August’s abrupt change of colour evidently indicates a change of sides; and within the military context of  Kleist’s novella it can be even read as a switch of uniforms. More importantly for my discussion, however, these changes imply the arbitrariness of colours – that is, races.75 At the 71 My translation and emphasis. 72 Roland Reuß interprets the change of names as a ref lection of  Gustav’s lack of  trust towards Toni. Reuß, ‘“Die Verlobung in St. Domingo”’, 40. Similarly, Bianca Theisen states that ‘mistrust and sceptical doubt has turned him into an Othello.’ Bianca Theisen, ‘Strange News: Kleist’s Novellas’, in Bernd Fischer, ed., A Companion to the Works of  Heinrich von Kleist (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), 81–102, 92. 73 Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 83f. 74 Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 265. 75 See also Susanne Zantop, ‘Changing Color: Kleist’s “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” and the Discourse of  Miscegenation’, in Bernd Fischer, ed., A Companion to the Works of  Heinrich von Kleist (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), 191­–208, 203f.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

165

same time, it is suggested that colour goes beyond racial categories, for the change of colour is left indefinite, dissolving the stability of race altogether. In The Human Stain, the African American’s decision to live the life of a white Jew from one day to the other strikes the reader as equally arbitrary. But Coleman Silk could not care less about race. Above all, he is concerned with the freedom to reinvent himself  from scratch, namely beyond socially ascribed attributes: All he’d ever wanted, from earliest childhood on, was to be free: not black, not even white – just on his own and free. He meant to insult no one by his choice, nor was he trying to imitate anyone whom he took to be his superior, nor was he staging some sort of protest against his race or hers.76

Roth’s protagonist suf fers the conf lict between a socially constructed identity and individuality.77 In George Herbert Mead’s terms, this can be described as the polarity and dynamic interdependence between the ‘me’ (the social self ) and the ‘I’ (the novel and creative response to the ‘me’). Mead states that ‘the “I” gives the sense of  freedom, of initiative’.78 His account of  the ‘I’, which ultimately bolsters the idea of autonomy, is mutatis mutandis in line with Roth’s conception of  the self. For Coleman, race becomes a means to an end, a disguise or performance for the sake of self-invention.79 The eventual failure of  Coleman’s detached, autonomous ‘I’ confirms Mead’s theory on the inseparable interrelation between the ‘I’ and ‘me’. Coleman’s ideal of a ‘raw I’80 cannot be fulfilled, for it is bound to his social self – that is, his ‘me’ – which is part of a black and white society.

76 Roth, The Human Stain, 120. 77 ‘[…] [T]he point of saying social construct is to contrast it with individualist […] construction of  the self.’ (Hacking, The Social Construction of what?, 15); see also Franco, ‘Race, Recognition, and Responsibility’, 66. 78 George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Perspective of a Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1934), 177f. 79 See Michele Elam, ‘Passing in the Post-Race Era: Danzy Senna, Philip Roth, and Colson Whitehead’ African American Review 41/4 (2007), 749–68, 755f f. 80 Roth, The Human Stain, 108.

166

Betiel Wasihun

As I have stated already, these black and white oppositions are constantly counteracted in both narratives. What is more, in Kleist’s text the undermining of racial realities is linked to specific emotional fields. The resemblance – or rather, the interchangeability – between the furious states of  the killing protagonists, the black slave and the white betrothed, favour an anthropological premise where black and white merge. Just like the enraged slave who kills his master in Kleist’s story, Gustav – in the belief  that he has been betrayed – shoots Toni in a furious state of mind: ‘knirschend vor Wuth’ [‘gritting his teeth with rage’].81 And yet, although both narratives suggest primarily a social constructionist view on race, the ultimate insolubility of  black and white oppositions, the tragedy of  the racial conf licts, as well as the destruction of  the protagonists, convey at the same time that these racial oppositions and their ef fects are inevitable.82 In other words, on the one hand, black and white are elusive terms; on the other hand, these (highly artificial) categories lead to inevitable consequences. ‘Like most passing figures’, Toni Bertrand and Coleman Brutus Silk are ‘unsolvable’, because they belong to neither side of  the socially constructed colour line.83 And the fact that they do not fit to any category even shows these categories to be impossible. For they are purportedly founded on an evidential, physical mark – skin colour – which turns out to be anything but self-evident. Instead, skin colour takes on varieties of shades that exceed the black/white opposition – as exemplified by the protagonists’ yellowish skin colour. These narratives expose the artificial, arbitrary – and cruel – aspects of  these social categories, above all when they also become moral categories.

81 See above, n. 73. 82 However, I am rather hesitant to talk about the essentialism of race as Hacking does. Although Hacking makes it clear that he does not understand essence in the racist use of  the word, but rather as ‘the strongest version of inevitability’, the way he reformulates such a charged term as essence, which has belonged to traditional philosophical vocabulary since Aristotle, is not convincing. Cf. Hacking, The Social Construction of  What?, 16f. 83 Bennett, The Passing Figure, 25.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

167

The betrayals in Kleist’s ‘Verlobung’ and Roth’s The Human Stain must be read against the backdrop of  these elusive racial categories. The ethical problem exposed here does not primarily involve betraying one side or another of a political opposition, but the need to choose a side at all.

Processes of  Betrayals Where betrayal takes place, dissonance cannot be avoided. In 1957, the American social psychologist Leon Festinger formulated the theory of cognitive dissonance.84 As opposed to Festinger, who was mainly concerned with the dissonance that emerges after a decision has been taken,85 I am mostly interested in exploring what precedes the making of decisions; in other words, the motivation of  these betrayals. This investigation of motives is all the more important, because betrayal is not a mere watershed decision, but a process that presupposes identification with the other, while committing a breach of confidence towards someone else. In Kleist’s novella, the coloured protagonist identifies with Marianne Congreve (Gustav’s idealized image of a white woman), thwarting her family’s fight against the race of  their former suppressors. And in Roth’s novel, an African-American embraces the idea of  living a life as a white Jew, choosing the loss of  his family and knowing that his decision will destroy them. It is indispensable that Toni’s and Coleman’s identifications with idealized images trigger moral conf licts – that is, dissonance. Both dissonance and identification are equally constitutive of  the act of  betrayal; simultaneously, it seems. And in order to reduce the dissonance, the inconsistency within oneself, the betraying subject seeks to attain justification. 84 ‘Where an opinion must be formed or a decision taken, some dissonance is almost unavoidably created between the cognition of  the action taken and those opinions or knowledges which tend to point to a dif ferent action.’ Leon Festinger, A Theory of  Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 5. 85 Ibid.

168

Betiel Wasihun

I argue that in each of  the texts discussed betrayal unfolds in the following four phases: (1) Seduction, which triggers the betrayal process, motivating and initiating identification and dissonance; (2) Justification of  betrayals in order to facilitate them; (3) Decision-taking and the performance of  betrayal: accomplished identification with the other, which is accompanied by an increase in dissonance; (4) Reduction of dissonance, or reconciliation with the means of justification. In both narratives, the moment of seduction initiates the process of  betrayal and entails complex and intertwined processes of identification and dissonance that lead to the protagonists’ separation from their families. In Kleist’s novella, Gustav, the stranger, seduces Toni in the very literal sense of  the word: separating her from the mother and the black community she had been part of.86 The seduction scene in Kleist’s text can be divided into three parts. In the first part, Gustav seizes Toni’s hand after having learned that she was the daughter of a rich merchant from Marseilles and entices her with the hope of glamorous perspectives and social advancement.87 In the second part of  the seduction, Gustav converts Toni in the missionary style, with two exempla. In responding to Toni’s naïve question as to why the blacks hated the whites, he justifies the racial oppression in terms of its long-standing tradition.88 In his racist view, it was the blacks’ rebellion towards their former masters that was treacherous: Er erzählte, auf des Mädchens Bitte, mehrere Züge der in dieser Stadt ausgebrochenen Empörung; wie zur Zeit der Mitternacht, da alles geschlafen, auf ein verrätherisch gegebenes Zeichen, das Gemetzel der Schwarzen gegen die Weißen losgegangen wäre.89 [At the girl’s request he gave some details of  the outbreak of  the rebellion in Fort Dauphin. He told how at midnight, when everyone was asleep, a treacherous signal had been given for the blacks to start massacring the whites.]90 86 See Werlen, ‘Seduction and Betrayal’, 464; see also Felman, The Scandal of  the Speaking Body, 32. 87 Cf. Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 28. 88 Cf. ibid., 31. 89 Ibid., 29f. 90 Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 241.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

169

Gustav’s outrage about the blacks’ treacherous behaviour finds its climax in his narrative of  the black woman who suf fered from yellow fever at the beginning of  the Haitian revolution. Three years prior to this, the black woman was a slave of a white planter who had mistreated her because she did not obey his wishes; he sold her afterwards to a Creole planter. In the course of  the general upheaval, she learned where her former white master was hiding and lured him to her bed in order to take vengeance and infected him with yellow fever.91 Gustav’s cautionary tale of  the black traitress intimidates and confuses Toni, who, when subsequently asked whether she would be capable of committing such a betrayal, answers negatively and shies away. But Gustav’s burst of  temper has not ended yet: daß, nach dem Gefühl seiner Seele, keine Tyrannei, die die Weißen je verübt, einen Verrath, so niederträchtig und abscheulich, rechtfertigen könnte. Die Rache des Himmels, meinte er, indem er sich mit einem leidenschaftlichen Ausdruck erhob, würde dadurch entwaf fnet: die Engel selbst, dadurch empört, stellten sich auf  Seiten derer, die Unrecht hätten, und nähmen, zur Aufrechterhaltung menschlicher und göttlicher Ordnung, ihre Sache!92 [that it was his deep inner conviction that no tyranny the whites had ever practised could justify a treachery of such abominable vileness. ‘Heaven’s vengeance is disarmed by it,’ he exclaimed, rising passionately from his seat, ‘and the angels themselves, filled with revulsion by this overturning of all human divine order, will take sides with those who are in the wrong and will support their cause!’]93

91

‘[…] [D]och kaum hatte er eine halbe Stunde unter Liebkosungen und Zärtlichkeiten in ihrem Bette zugebracht, als sie sich plötzlich mit dem Ausdruck wilder und kalter Wuth, darin erhob und sprach: eine Pestkranke, die den Tod in der Brust trägt, hast du geküßt: geh und gieb das gelbe Fieber allen denen, die dir gleichen!’ Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 32f. [‘But he had scarcely been half an hour in her bed caressing her and fondling her when she suddenly sat up with an expression of cold, savage fury and said: “I whom you have been kissing am infected with pestilence and dying of it: go now and give the yellow fever to all your kind!”’] Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 242. 92 Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 33. 93 Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 242.

170

Betiel Wasihun

Gustav then retreats to his room, accompanied by discomfort and mistrust towards his hosts. His diametrically opposed stories about his former white bride, the Alsatian Marianne Congreve, whom he depicts as a noble martyr, and about the black slave woman,94 are crucial for Toni’s identity formation, since she starts to identify with Gustav’s depiction of  the ideal woman. It is also significant for the passing topic that Gustav presents Toni with the golden cross of  his deceased bride as a ‘Brautgeschenk, wie er es nannte’ [‘bridal gift as he called it’],95 metaphorically inviting her to cross the colour line that defines his world-view. Finally, she falls for Gustav’s sexual seduction. Seduction in Roth’s novel is also decisive, albeit less complicated. The crucial figure here is Doc Chizner, a Jewish dentist and Coleman’s boxing trainer. In preparation for an upcoming match, Doc Chizner makes the idea of passing palatable to Coleman: ‘All he did was to follow the instructions that Doc Chizner had given him the day they were driving up to West Point (and that already had gotten him through the navy): if nothing comes up, you don’t bring it up.’96 Significantly, the first time Coleman ‘performs a “pass”’ is onstage, years before he performs his actual passing, so that his passing strongly resonates with theories on performative identity.97 Coleman’s pronounced self-consciousness is striking, indeed; he is aware of  his betrayal, but his vision of a ‘raw I’ stands above his moral conscience:98 Then he went of f  to Washington and, in the first month, he was a nigger and nothing else and he was a Negro and nothing else. No. No. He saw the fate awaiting him, and he wasn’t having it. Grasped it intuitively and recoiled spontaneously. You can’t let the big they impose its bigotry on you any more than you can let the little they become a we and impose its ethics on you. Not the tyranny of  the we and its we-talk and everything that we wants to pile on your head. Never for him the tyranny of  the we that is dying to suck you in, the coercive, inclusive, historical, inescapable moral

94 See Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 31f. 95 Ibid., 43. See also Bianca Theisen, who draws attention to the exchange of  the cross as an implicit reference to Christ and St. Peter. Theisen, ‘Strange News’, 92. 96 Roth, The Human Stain, 118. 97 See Elam, ‘Passing in the Post-Race Era’, 755f. 98 Roth, The Human Stain, 108.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

171

we with its insidious E pluribus unum. Neither the they of  Woolworth’s nor the we of  Howard. Instead the raw I with all its agility. Self-discovery – that was the punch to the labonz. Singularity. The passionate struggle for singularity. The singular animal. The sliding relationship with everything. Not static but sliding. Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?99

Coleman represents the American individualist par excellence who is obsessed with the idea of slipping into racelessness and transcending race.100 For him, betraying is freeing oneself. But his play yourself anyway you like ultimately fails, for his social being catches up with him.101 However, the autonomy of  the I, individuality – which he seems to confuse with singularity – proves impossible, fictitious.102 Rethinking Coleman’s personality, one may also wonder about the sanity of  his state of mind. His obsession with false performances and addiction to the ‘elixir of  the secret’ stand above any moral doubts.103 He refuses to adopt moral disciplines like – as he says – ‘conventional people’ do, but rather has the ‘objective for his fate’ to ‘be determined’ ‘by his own resolve’.104 And yet, Coleman’s performances reveal that he actually does subscribe to an essential racial identity to some extent. He does not live ‘beyond social morality’,105 and he is by no means, even though he strives for it, ‘postracial in a world still bound by race perception’.106 Coleman’s deliberate self-invention at the expense of  family members, his idée fixe of an autonomous self, recognizably foreground his strong agonistic tendencies. Clearly, vanity and an exorbitant hubris are equally triggering his passing. But his superiority complex is the result of the inferiority

99 Ibid. 100 See Elam, ‘Passing in the Post-Race Era’, 758. 101 ‘“What am I? Play it any way you like,” Coleman says.’ (Roth, The Human Stain, 133); or: ‘He could play his skin however he wanted, color himself just as he chose.’ Ibid., 109. 102 See also Franco, ‘Race, Recognition, and Responsibility’, 69. 103 Roth, The Human Stain, 135; see also Elam, ‘Passing in the Post-Race Era’, 760. 104 Roth, The Human Stain, 121. 105 Franco, ‘Race, Recognition and Responsibility’, 69. 106 Parrish, Ralph Ellison and the Genius of  America, 65.

172

Betiel Wasihun

he had experienced in a racist society – first, rather moderately in his hometown, then aggressively when he began attending Howard University in order to fulfil his father’s dream. The direct and humiliating racial attacks in Washington unleash a tremendous rage in him:107 But ‘nigger’ – directed to him? That infuriated him. […] His fists were useless, his footwork was useless, so was his rage. […] He saw all his father’s defenselessness, too, where before he had been a naïve enough youngster to imagine, from the lordly, austere, sometimes insuf ferable way Mr. Silk conducted himself, that there was nothing vulnerable there.108

Rage against a racial society motivates his passing; and where rage is, hatred is not far: He hated Howard from the day he arrived, within the week hated Washington, and so in early October, when his father dropped dead serving dinner on the Pennsylvania Railroad dining car that was pulling out of 30th Street Station in Philadelphia for Wilmington, and Coleman went home for the funeral, he told his mother he was finished with that college.109

Coleman’s insistence on the right to live a life that is dif ferent from his father’s condemned life induces the second phase of  the outlined betrayal process: justification of  betrayal. Kant stated that the desire for justice [‘Rechtsbegierde’] is rooted in hatred.110 Along these lines, the desire for justice expressed in Silk’s hatred against society provides a justification for his betrayal, reducing his dissonance, making ‘his first great crime’ – as he refers to it at one stage – reconcilable within himself.111 Hatred, deriving

107 ‘[…] [A]s the accused in the spooks incident he had never once weakened in fighting the false accusation against him; even his resignation from the college had been an act not of capitulation but of outraged protest, a deliberate manifestation of  his unwavering contempt.’ Roth, The Human Stain, 59f. 108 Ibid., 105f. 109 Ibid., 106. 110 Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, ed. Reinhard Brandt (Hamburg: Meiner, 2000), 193f. 111 Roth, The Human Stain, 109.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

173

from rage, motivates Coleman’s betrayal, but the motive for his hatred is the desire for justice. Interestingly, this desire for justice is also what justifies the betrayal, reconciling the conf licting parties in him. His motivation and justification of betrayal belong to a process of circular reasoning. Justification fulfils a double function: the performance of  betrayal needs to be justified in order to take place, and afterwards it needs to be justified again to reduce the dissonance of  the traitor. Similarly, the passing away of  Coleman’s father both triggers and makes his passing as a white Jew possible, because, once the authority of  the father – ‘who had been making up Coleman’s story for him’ – is gone, he is free to re-invent himself  from scratch.112 Silk’s main motivation for betraying may be sought in his ambition to pursue an academic career and live a self-determined life, without having to direct himself according to a prescribed ethnicity. Toni’s betrayal, on the other hand, seems to be motivated by love. Yet this is merely an ostensible motive that serves to confirm or, even more importantly, to disconfirm identities. The depiction of  Toni as a self lessly sacrificing lover is misleading, for she is also driven by an individualism that is, however, very dif ferent from Coleman’s. Toni literally indulges in the idea of dying as a martyr. And by eventually becoming a martyr in the manner of  Marianne Congreve, she meets her own ideal, glorifying herself in the image that had seduced her. Her whole physical demeanour towards Gustav is characterized by subservient gestures that express her admiration: she looks up to him in a dreamy state, kneels in front of  him, washes his feet. Her actions are less motivated by love than by the prospects of social advancement, or the possibility of  finding confirmation of what she thinks she deserves or has the right to be. As opposed to Roth’s hero, Toni has obvious reasons to turn away from her family. After all, her family did prostitute her to a certain degree; she was forced to allow strangers to fondle her, even though sexual intercourse was strictly prohibited: ‘die ihr bei Todesstrafe verboten war’ [‘which was forbidden her on pain of death’].113 And after the turning point of  the novella, the seduction scene, Toni expresses the long-suppressed outrage that the murderous ploys had evoked in her: 112 Ibid., 107. 113 Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 10. Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 232.

174

Betiel Wasihun ‘Beim Licht der Sonne,’ sagte die Tochter, indem sie wild aufstand, ‘du hast sehr Unrecht, mich an diese Gräuelthaten zu erinnern! Die Unmenschlichkeiten, an denen ihr mich Theil zu nehmen zwingt, empörten längst mein innerstes Gefühl; und um mir Gottes Rache wegen Alles, was vorgefallen zu versöhnen, so schwöre ich dir, daß ich eher zehnfachen Todes sterben, als zugeben werde, daß diesem Jüngling, so lange er sich in unserm Hause befindet, auch nur ein Haar gekrümmt werde.’114 [‘By the heavens above us,’ replied her daughter, rising wildly to her feet, ‘you are very wrong to remind me of  these atrocities! The inhuman deeds in which you all forced me to take part have for a long time sickened me to the very soul; and in order to satisfy the vengeance of  God upon me for all that has happened, I swear to you that I would rather die ten times over than allow a hair of  that young man’s head to be touched as long as he is in our house.’]115

Congo Hoango’s inhuman vengefulness is diametrically opposed to Toni’s claim for humanity – positioning her, as Werlen rightly observes, within ‘the enlightenment paradigm of  humanity’.116 Toni’s outcry for humanity, on the other hand, belies her betrayal, or, to put it dif ferently: her demand for humanity justifies the betrayal of  her family. And yet, similarly to the black and white opposition, the antagonism between the human (whites) and the inhuman (blacks) cannot be sustained in the course of  the novella. The biased tone of  the narrator has often invited critics to see a racist in Kleist.117 However, it is more likely – as other readings have also suggested – that the blurring of  the black and white divide throughout Kleist’s novella undermines the racist tone of  the narrator, implying an image of  humanity beyond such categorizations.118

114 Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 49. 115 Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 249f. 116 Werlen, ‘Seduction and Betrayal’, 462. 117 See, for example, Peter Horn, ‘Hatte Kleist Rassenvorurteile? Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Literatur zur Verlobung in St. Domingo’, Monatshefte 67/2 (1975), 117–28. 118 See also James P. Martin, ‘Reading Race in Kleist’s “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo”’, Monatshefte 100/1 (2008), 48–66, 50; see also Ray Fleming, ‘Race and the Dif ference it Makes in Kleist’s “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo’” The German Quarterly 65/3–4 (1992), 306–17, esp. 308, 310 and 312.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

175

Toni proclaims her whiteness after her mother had accused her of  betrayal;119 the subdued rage that f lares up in her outburst is remarkable: ich habe euch nicht verrathen; ich bin eine Weiße, und dem Jüngling, den ihr gefangen haltet, verlobt; ich gehöre zu dem Geschlecht derer, mit denen ihr im of fenen Kriege liegt, und werde vor Gott, daß ich mich auf ihre Seite stellte, zu verantworten wissen.120 [I have not betrayed you; I am a white girl and betrothed to this young man whom you are holding prisoner; I belong to the race of  those with whom you are openly at war and I will be answerable before God for having taken their side.]121

The rhetoric of  this exclamation is salient; betrayal – the identification with the other, the whites – is negated (‘ich habe euch nicht verrathen’; ‘I have not betrayed you’) only to be followed by an af firmative identification with them (‘ich bin eine Weiße’; ‘I am a white girl’). This implicit paradox is significant, as it exposes Toni’s endeavour to justify her betrayal with the means of  betrayal. She is constantly contradicting herself. Why is she so desperate to cross to the other side if she belonged there anyway? Toni’s dissonance is most evident shortly before her public announcement of  her newly gained identity, when she approaches her mother in a moment of af fection, reaching out her hand as a sign of  farewell. Her mother, however, rejects her fiercely, calling her a ‘Niederträchtige und Verrätherinn’ [‘contemptible traitress’].122 Kleist’s Toni finds her justification for betrayal in a black and white world-view that is, at the same time, a good and evil world-view; she is indoctrinated by Gustav’s exempla of  the treacherous black slave woman and the loyal Alsatian bride. Toni’s ethical values are adjusted accordingly, making the betrayal reasonable for her. Above all, her passing is a way of redeeming herself after having been involved in those atrocities. Beyond that, she justifies her betrayal by laying claim to the right to be white. Her 119 Cf. Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 65. 120 Ibid., 81f. 121 Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 264. 122 Kleist, ‘Verlobung’, 81; Kleist, The Marquise of  O, 264.

176

Betiel Wasihun

long-subdued rage, which is the result of suf fered injustice, turns into hatred. As with Roth’s traitor, it is hatred that simultaneously motivates her betrayal and accommodates a desire for justice. Toni Bertrand and Coleman Silk are not only turning away from the people they betray, but also from themselves. By betraying their social beings, these protagonists commit both betrayals of others and self-betrayals, since every betrayal is ultimately a self-betrayal. What emerges is an insurmountable dissonance. As a consequence of  the inseparability of  betrayal and self-betrayal, they find themselves in a constant self-contradiction, albeit in an attempt to conceal and repress that very conf lict. Given Coleman Silk’s life as a white Jew, which included his success as an esteemed classics professor and the respectable Jewish family he founded, the reduction of dissonance through dif ferent justification processes of  both self-betrayal and the betrayal of others successfully lasted for several decades – at least on the surface. The articulation of a single word – spooks – however, calls into existence a deep-seated dissonance in Coleman, revealing that a reconciliation had actually never taken place. Strikingly, his entire past of  betrayal catches up with him, when he seemed to have – as he explains to the Dean in his defence – ‘forgotten that “spooks” [was] an invidious term sometimes applied to blacks’, something that he ‘had known perhaps fifty years ago’.123 After the so-called ‘spooks af fair’124 destructs his self-constructed world, Coleman’s reconciliation with his betrayal takes place only suggestively, namely through his young lover – to whom he might have, as the narrator Nathan Zuckerman conjectures towards the end of  the novel, revealed his racial identity shortly before they both die in a car accident. Like Coleman, Toni also strives to escape from her social being. Through her death, her self-betrayal (the identification with the white martyr) is accomplished. She dies with the illusion of  being someone she was not – unlike the overly self-conscious individualist Coleman Brutus Silk. What both have in common, again, is passing away without having

123 Roth, The Human Stain, 6. 124 Ibid., 80.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

177

reconciled with the others whom they had betrayed. Coleman Silk, who wishes nothing more than to transcend into racelessness, is ‘revealed or undone’ by a single word that stigmatizes him as racist.125 Toni Bertrand is not killed by the ones she betrayed (her family), but by the white stranger she had pledged her troth to. Kleist’s and Roth’s passing protagonists dissolve in the elusiveness of  black and white. By the same token, the opposition of  black and white, for all its elusiveness (and ungroundedness), is a distinction that leads to inevitable consequences. Its fictitiousness – indeed, one can translate social construction this way – makes the represented betrayals no less serious and real.

Bibliography Austin, J.L. How To Do Things With Words, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). Becker, Udo, Lexikon der Symbole (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder/Spektrum, 1998). Bennett, Juda, The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature (New York: Lang, 1996). Camaiti Hostert, Anna, Passing – A Strategy to Dissolve Identities and Remap Dif ferences, trans. Christine Marciasini (Cranbury: Rosemont, 2007). Ehlers, Monika, ‘“Wer bist Du?” Performanz, Gewalt und Begehren in Kleists Erzählung Die Verlobung in St. Domingo’, in Eva Lezzi, Monika Ehlers and Sandra Schramm, eds, Fremdes Begehren: Transkulturelle Beziehungen in Literatur, Kunst und Medien (Köln: Böhlau, 2003), 132–45. Elam, Michele, ‘Passing in the Post-Race Era: Danzy Senna, Philip Roth, and Colson Whitehead’ African American Review 41/4 (2007), 749–68. Felman, Shoshana, The Scandal of  the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Festinger, Leon, A Theory of  Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957).

125 Ibid., 84.

178

Betiel Wasihun

Fleming, Ray, ‘Race and the Dif ference it Makes in Kleist’s “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo”’, The German Quarterly 65/3–4 (1992), 306–17. Franco, Dean, ‘Race, Recognition, and Responsibility in The Human Stain’, in Philip Roth – American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot against America, ed. Debra Shostak (London: Continuum, 2011), 65–79. Hacking, Ian, The Social Construction of  What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Harrison-Kahan, Lori, The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011). Haverkamp, Anselm, ‘Schwarz/Weiß. “Othello” und die “Verlobung in St. Domingo”’ Weimarer Beiträge 41/3 (1995), 397–409. Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit 18th edn (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001). Heimböckel, Dieter, Emphatische Unaussprechlichkeit: Sprachkritik im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Ruprecht, 2003). Horn, Peter, ‘Hatte Kleist Rassenvorurteile? Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Literatur zur “Verlobung in St. Domingo”’, Monatshefte 67/2 (1975), 117–28. Kant, Immanuel, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, ed. Reinhard Brandt (Hamburg: Meiner, 2000). Kawash, Samira, Dislocating the Color Line. Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Kennedy, Randall, Sellout: The Politics of  Racial Betrayal (New York: Random House, 2008). Kleist, Heinrich von, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle, 20 vols (Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1988–2010). ——, The Marquise of  O – And Other Stories, trans. and introd. David Luke and Nigel Reeves (New York: Penguin Books, 1978). Kontje, Todd, ‘Passing for German: Politics and Patriarchy in Kleist, Körner, and Fischer’, German Studies Review 22/1 (1999), 67–84. Martin, James P., ‘Reading Race in Kleist’s “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo”’, Monatshefte 100/1 (2008), 48–66. Mead, George Herbert, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Perspective of a Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1934). Michaels, Walter Benn, ‘Autobiography of an Ex-White Man: Why Race is Not a Social Construction’, Transition 73 (1998), 122–43. Moynihan, Sinéad, Passing into the Present. Contemporary American Fiction of  Racial and Gender Passing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Müller-Salget, Klaus, ‘August und die Mestize. Zu einigen Kontroversen um Kleists “Verlobung in St. Domingo”’, Euphorion 92 (1988), 103–13.

Eth(n)ical Betrayal

179

Neumann, Gerhard, ‘Die Verlobung in St. Domingo – Zum Problem der literarischen Mimesis im Werk Heinrich von Kleists’, in Christine Lubkoll and Günter Oesterle, eds, Gewagte Experimente und kühne Konstellationen – Kleists Werk zwischen Klassizismus und Romantik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), 93–117. Parrish, Tim, ‘Becoming Black: Zuckerman’s Bifurcating Self in The Human Stain’, in Derek Parker Royal, ed., Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (Westport: Praeger, 2005), 209–24. Ramon, Donavan L., ‘“You’re Neither One Thing (N)or The Other”: Nella Larsen, Philip Roth, and the Passing Trope’, Philip Roth Studies 8/1 (2012), 45–61. Reuß, Roland, ‘“Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” – eine Einführung in Kleists Erzählen’, in Berliner Kleist-Blätter 1 (Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1988). Roth, Philip, The Human Stain (London: Vintage, 2001). Parrish, Timothy, Ralph Ellison and the Genius of  America (Amherst: University of  Massachusetts Press, 2012). Rougemont, Denis de, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). Safer, Elaine B., Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of  Philip Roth (Albany: State University of  New York Press, 2006). Searle, John R., The Construction of  Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995). Theisen, Bianca, ‘Strange News: Kleist’s Novellas’, in Bernd Fischer, ed., A Companion to the Works of  Heinrich von Kleist (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), 81–102. Werlen, Hans Jakob, ‘Seduction and Betrayal: Race and Gender in Kleist’s “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo”’, Monatshefte 84/4 (1992), 459–71. Williams, Ella O., Harlem Renaissance – A Handbook (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2008). Williamson, Joel, New People. Miscegnation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980). Zantop, Susanne, ‘Changing Color: Kleist’s “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” and the Discourse of  Miscegenation’, in Bernd Fischer, ed., A Companion to the Works of  Heinrich von Kleist (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), 191­–208.

Bernd Blaschke

Betrayals and Their Af fects in Wilkomirski’s Fake Holocaust Memoirs Bruchstücke

Few literary scandals in recent decades have aroused such strong emotions as the so-called Wilkomirski case in the late 1990s. The moral stakes were high during and after the disclosure that Wilkomirski’s memories about his childhood in concentration camps and in post-war Switzerland were false, after he had published an autobiography consisting of invented f lashbacks of  horrible experiences in and after the camps. Hardly any case study concerning the performance of autobiography of fers more complex layers of  betrayal than the life and writings of  Bruno Dössekker, who was born Bruno Grosjean and who inscribed himself as Binjamin Wilkomirski, an imaginary Jewish child from Riga. These layers are not confined, however, to the falsification. To the contrary, in his book Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 [Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood] the author/narrator asserts he committed treason, Verrat, when he betrayed his mother and his friends in the camps and thereafter. He also depicts further betrayals of  his own in Switzerland, a safe but (for him, the traumatized person) uncanny place, since this is where the real Dössekker was raised by his adoptive parents, where the real Bruno Grosjean was born. On another level, betrayal (or fraud) characterizes the faked memoirs; that is, the book itself and its author, who presented false memories to the public − and perhaps even to himself.1 1

It is not easy to say whether Dössekker/Wilkomirksi made up his memories with full consciousness and control (that is to say: that he was lying and had the intention to do so). Some critics who closely studied the af fair think that Dössekker really believes in his false memories, which serve him to cover und solve his factual identity problems. The historian Stefan Mächler took this position in diverse publications;

182

Bernd Blaschke

If we were to understand betrayal as the severance of a social contract and, more precisely, as the breach of emotional and epistemological bonds of  trust, a traitor commits an act of  betrayal towards a victim who could reasonably expect respect, solidarity or support. Following this definition, the bonds broken in the Wilkomirski case make for a long list. The author broke the autobiographical pact that characterizes the referential genre of memoirs as defined by Philippe Lejeune, who claims that a contract exists between the autobiographer and its readers.2 Dössekker broke the bond of identity between author, narrator, and protagonist when he, a Swiss-born foster-child, masqueraded as that most innocent and pitied of victims, a Jewish child who suf fered the horrors of  the concentration camps and their lifelong echoes. This intentional or pathological appropriation of  the identity of a Holocaust survivor deceived the public. And Dössekker may have even betrayed himself  by pretending to be someone he was not for over twenty-five years, from his initial uses of a Jewish name in 1972, to his worldwide appearances as a Holocaust survivor, his book of  false memories, and the final disclosure of  his false identity. The fake autobiographer severed his relationship to his foster family, the Dössekkers, and their milieu by denying them and embracing a new identity. At another level, the Dössekkers themselves might also have betrayed Bruno by frustrating some of  his emotional needs or desires. (His biological mother could also appear to have broken her bonds towards her child by giving him away, although she was herself a victim of poverty and violence). Another betrayal concerns the bad counselling (implied in the German word for betrayal, Ver-rat, in the sense of giving bad advice, or Rat) of fered by Dössekker’s psychotherapist Elitsur Bernstein, who developed a new and supposedly ef fective therapy of memory-recollection for childhood trauma victims with Wilkomirski. Our last level of  betrayal in this multi-level case regards the institutions that published and marketed Wilkomirski’s Fragments despite doubts as to their authenticity, and that bestowed awards upon

2

see esp. Stefan Mächler, The Wilkomirski Af fair. A Study in Autobiographical Truth (New York: Schocken, 2001). Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1975).

Betrayals and Their Af fects in Wilkomirski’s Fake Holocaust Memoirs

183

him and organized public presentations of  his book and life. They were most probably tricked by Dössekker’s betrayals, but they also partook in them (and profited from them, at least for a while), leading the public to believe in the false memories. This raises the following questions: why did these institutions and their staf f  believe the text and its author? And yet another stakeholder was involved in these acts and receptions of  betrayal: the readers. What role did public expectation, attention and accreditation play in Wilkomirski’s betrayal? In this essay, I will approach the multiple betrayals in the Wilkomirski case in four steps. I will first give a brief outline of  this fake Holocaust autobiography and its disclosure. Second, I will attempt to answer the following questions: how did Wilkomirski’s Bruchstücke and his performance deceive? What kind of rhetorical and af fective strategy is used in this text? The focus here will be on the function of  his self-incrimination as a shameful traitor, which immunes him against the doubt of  his readers by explicitly thematizing betrayal. In the third part of  this paper, I will discuss possible reasons and motivations for inventing and believing such a terrifying autobiography. Finally, I will of fer some ref lections on the ethical and epistemological consequences that could and should be drawn from these multi-layered acts of  betrayals.

The Scandalous Case: Binjamin Wilkomirski In 1995 the Jüdischer Verlag, a sub-division of  Germany’s most important publishing house, Suhrkamp, published Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Bruchstücke. This book assembles fragments of  f lashback memories, scenes full of violence, horror and post-war confusion that are meant to represent sequences of  his childhood. Allegedly born in 1939 in Riga, the narrator pretends that he witnessed the bloody murder of a man, possibly his father, run over by a Nazi. He narrates his deportation from Poland, where he was hiding with his brothers, to the concentration camps in Majdanek and

184

Bernd Blaschke

Auschwitz. The book ends with a report on the way in which he survived the camps without ever having been told that the war and the Third Reich were over. After the war, he spent some years in a Krakow orphanage. He was then brought to another children’s home in Zürich and finally adopted by a doctor and his wife, who resided on Lake Zürich. The plasticity of  Wilkomirski’s depiction of raw violence and frightening scenes in the camps, as well as the traumatic recollections and their ramifications for his post-war youth, surpassed all prior Holocaust memoirs. The text was immediately translated into nine languages.3 The book received much critical acclaim, foremost in Switzerland and in Englishspeaking countries. It was awarded the National Jewish Book Award in the United States, the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah in France and the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in Britain. This narration of  horrible memories was not exactly a bestseller, but it sold quite well.4 Some critics claimed Wilkomirski’s work of remembrance to be akin to the classics of witness literature by authors such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi and Anne Frank. What is more, Wilkomirski participated as a witness and expert in radio, television and archival programs in Europe, Israel and the United States. Already prior to the publication of  the book, rumours spread in Zürich that this autobiography might be a fake and that its author was a Swiss-born foster child without a Jewish background who had no authentic Holocaust experience. Hanno Helbling, a former editor of  the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, warned Suhrkamp director Siegfried Unseld not to be fooled. However, Wilkomirski promised to provide proof of  the authenticity of  his work and Unseld and his editor Thomas Sparr stood by their new author. They published the book with a short and f limsy afterword by Wilkomirski that blurred the dif ferences between real life identity (i.e. ‘legally accredited 3 4

The English translation was published 1996 by the prominent publishing house Schocken. A detailed report on the success and reception of  Wilkomirski’s Fragments is given by Stefan Mächler, ‘Aufregung um Wilkomirski. Genese eines Skandals und seine Bedeutung’, in Irene Diekmann and Julius H. Schoeps, eds, Das Wilkomirski-Syndrom. Eingebildete Erinnerungen oder Von der Sehnsucht, Opfer zu sein (Zürich: Pendo, 2001), 86–131, 101f.

Betrayals and Their Af fects in Wilkomirski’s Fake Holocaust Memoirs

185

truth’ and archival documents) and private memories and subjective identity.5 In his afterword, he mentioned the dif ficult problems of identity and memory that all child survivors of  the Holocaust suf fer. And he pretended that he had begun to take legal action against his ‘imposed’ identity.6 In 1998, the author and journalist Daniel Ganzfried, the son of a Swiss Holocaust survivor, questioned the veracity of Fragments in the Swiss newsweekly Weltwoche. He argued that Wilkomirski was actually born in Biel, Switzerland – instead of  Latvia – as Bruno Grosjean, the illegitimate child of an unmarried mother named Yvonne Grosjean. In 1999, Eva Zoralnik, Wilkomirski’s literary agent, commissioned the Zürich historian Stefan Mächler to investigate these accusations. Mächler’s report gave a thorough description of  how Dössekker-Wilkomirski developed his fictional biography piece by piece over almost thirty years. Dössekker started to adopt and perform a Jewish identity during stays in Vienna, far from Zürich, where he was well-known. In the early 1970s, he met a Jewish Holocaust survivor, Karola, who had spent some time in a Krakow orphanage. Dössekker appropriated this episode in his ‘autobiographical’ narration. He adopted the name Wilkomirski after somebody mentioned in 1972 that he seemed to physically resemble the famous violin player Wanda Wilkomirska. In opposition to Daniel Ganzfried’s harsh accusations against Dössekker-Wilkomirski of intentional fraud to earn attention, fame and money in the ‘Holocaust circus’,7 Stefan Mächler remained more reticent in his assessment of  Dössekker’s inventions and intentions. Mächler showed that the alleged experiences of  horror in occupied Poland closely

See Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, transl. Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Schocken, 1996), 154. 6 Ibid. 7 Ganzfried uses this notion to criticize the institutions and rites of remembering the Holocaust in his highly polemical essays. Norman Finkelstein published his then much-debated book on misguided practices in commemorating the Shoah at about the time when the Wilkomirski syndrome came to light. Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry. Ref lections on the Exploitation of  Jewish Suf fering (London: Verso, 2000). For the reception and discussion of  Finkelstein’s thesis see Petra Steinberger, ed., Die Finkelstein-Debatte (Munich: Piper, 2001). 5

186

Bernd Blaschke

corresponded to some real events that Dössekker-Wilkomirski had experienced during his childhood in Switzerland and that might have been traumatizing for the child. He considered it possible that Dössekker rewrote his early experiences of neglect and violence by turning the events and feelings of  his real life into those of a child who had survived the Shoah. Mächler refused to decide whether Grosjean-Dössekker-Wilkomirski changed his life history deliberately or whether he himself indeed believed what he had written. In brief, Mächler disagreed that Dössekker was a ‘cold, calculating crook’, as Daniel Ganzfried had concluded. Mächler’s solid reconstruction of  Dössekker’s biography and of  the production of  his (imaginary) autobiography also revealed that a central witness and supporter of  Wilkomirksi’s story, Laura Grabowski, who had claimed to have known Wilkomirski as a child in a camp, had herself already been disclosed as a fraud years before. She had used the name Lauren Stratford to write about alleged satanic ritual abuse and child murder. On the of ficial and juridical level, Wilkomirski’s case was closed when in 2002 Zürich’s public prosecutor announced that she had found no evidence of criminal fraud in the Wilkomirski case. She also declared that a DNA test confirmed that Bruno Dössekker and Bruno Grosjean were the same person. Obviously, the law could not judge and would not punish this sort of  false memory and imaginary biography; and obviously, the archival and biological questions of  Dössekker’s genealogy and identity were then resolved. Most critics argued that Wilkomirski’s book, after having proven to be fiction, no longer had value as an authentic work of witness literature. The status of  the book switched from masterpiece to kitsch after the interrelationship between the first-person narrator, the survivor story he narrates, and historical reality were proven factually false. Critics started to take issue with Wilkomirski’s pornographic perspective on the camp memories, which focuses on crude scenes of violence. And they began to question and even mock his strange public performances. For example, the author often cried during his public appearances as a witness, unlike most other known survivors of  the camps. But for a minority of scholars, the ‘merits’ and ‘power’ of  the text still remain despite the disclosure: ‘Those merits reside in a ferocious vision, a powerful narrative, an accumulation of

Betrayals and Their Af fects in Wilkomirski’s Fake Holocaust Memoirs

187

indelible images, and the unforgettable way in which a small child’s voice is deployed in an unfeeling adult world, during the war and thereafter.’8 Bruno Dössekker was certainly not the only author to fake a biography and appropriate a false historical identity. Wolfgang Heuer sampled a whole range of successful historical narratives by fake witnesses who publicly performed their imaginary identities, not only in dif ferent contexts, but also over long periods of  time.9 However, there are at least two dimensions of  betrayal that seem to be specific to the Wilkomirski case and on which I will focus in the next sections: first, his self-presentation as a traitor and a victim of  betrayal; and second, his background as an adopted child who was possibly the victim of a betrayal trauma himself. Betrayal trauma is medically defined as a trauma that can occur when the persons or the institutions we depend upon for survival violate and deceive us in some way. Examples of  betrayal trauma are physical, emotional, or sexual abuse in childhood.10 We can assume that, at least during his time as a foster child at a Swiss farm, Bruno Grosjean suf fered from physical and emotional abuse before being adopted by the Dössekkers.

8 9

10

Froma Zeitlin, ‘New Soundings in Holocaust Literature: A Surplus of  Memory’, in Moishe Postone and Eric Santner, eds, Catastrophe and Meaning. The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 2003), 173–208, 177. Cf. Wolfgang Heuer, ‘Das Wilkomirski-Syndrom: Gefälschte Geschichte. Ein Essay über das Erinnern, die Kultur der Selbstviktimisierung und gefälschte Holocaustbiografien’, accessed 25 June 2012. For an introduction, overview, and bibliography on the psychiatric concept of betrayal trauma, see Jennifer J. Freyd, ‘What is a Betrayal Trauma? What is Betrayal Trauma Theory?’, accessed 25 June 2012. Although betrayal trauma was not of ficially accepted as established diagnosis by the psychiatric handbooks DSM-IV and now DSM-V (which still only acknowledges PTSD and did not include C-PTSD, which covers a wider field of  Complex PostTraumatic Stress Disorders) the concept is defined and discussed in the circles of  trauma-studies.

188

Bernd Blaschke

Autobiographical Construction – Staging Acts of  Betrayal The text itself, Bruchstücke, repeatedly returns to the narrator’s confessions of  his betrayal, Verrat, of  his mother and friends. The text also laments betrayals committed against the narrator by adults in the camps and afterward in Switzerland. Through this double aspect of  betrayal that is explicitly, repeatedly, and intensely formulated in his book, Dössekker achieved two important aims: self-accreditation and immunization against doubts and criticisms. In the last chapter of  the book, ‘Die Geschichtsstunde’, or ‘The History Lesson’, the narrator assembles and repeats the self-incriminations that already pervade his text: Ich hatte den Neuen ausgeliefert, ich war verstrickt in das Geschehen um seinen Tod. Nur weil ich feige war, haben sie den Neuen getötet. Ich hätte ihn vielleicht doch retten können, und ich hatte es nicht getan! Ich hatte meine Mutter verraten und sagte jetzt zu einer fremden Frau ‘Mutter’. Ich hatte die Suche nach meinen Brüdern aufgegeben, aus Angst, die Wahrheit zu erfahren. Ich war ein Fahnenf lüchtiger und hatte meine Kameraden aus dem Waisenhaus in Krakow im Stich gelassen. […] Das schlechte Gewissen war mein täglicher Begleiter und die Angst, entdeckt zu werden. Der Geschichtsunterricht half mir zu klären, doch zugleich steigerte er meine Verwirrung.11 [I had handed over the new boy; I was inextricably caught up in the fact of  his death. It was only because I was a coward that they killed the new boy. I might perhaps have been able to save him, and I didn’t do anything. I had betrayed my mother and now called a stranger ‘mother’. I had given up the search for my brothers out of a fear of discovering the truth. I had deserted the colors, and abandoned my friends in the orphanage in Kraków to their fate. (…) A bad conscience and the fear of discovery were my daily companions. History lessons helped me to sort it out, and increased my confusion, all at the same time.]12 Binjamin Wilkomirski, Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995), 137. 12 Wilkomirski, Fragments, 147–8. For further confessions or performances of selfincriminations, cf. Wilkomirski, Bruchstücke, 16–17, 62–3, 69, 97–9. 11

Betrayals and Their Af fects in Wilkomirski’s Fake Holocaust Memoirs

189

By accusing and blaming himself  for having betrayed his mother and his fellow inmates, the narrator posits himself as a credible, self-critical and hyper-moral person. His emphatic remorse solicits the reader to absolve him and to regard him as a highly sensitive and moral subject who feels guilty for deeds that many would not even consider blameworthy. Dössekker uses the rhetoric of self-incrimination, which is a topos in the history of autobiography from Rousseau to André Gide and Michel Leiris. My colleague from the Freie Universität Berlin, Regine Strätling, has demonstrated in an essay on autobiographical writing the way in which confessions of shameful deeds (mostly sexual in nature) have been used by Rousseau and his followers to generate an impression of authenticity and to guarantee the veracity of  the autobiographer.13 Self-accusation serves as a means to present oneself as credible. Dössekker adopts this autobiographical rhetoric of self-incrimination while replacing the charges of sexual transgression with the egoistic betrayal of  his peers. The confession of shameful deeds strives to secure the reader’s acknowledgement of  him as an honest and respectable narrator. Dössekker’s second strategy of addressing experiences of  betrayal presents him as the innocent victim of adults who broke the bonds of  trust and civility. The trusting child is deceived by the Polish peasant who hides him before he is deported to a camp. She tells him that Majdanek will be a playground.14 His trust is then betrayed by the guards in the camps, who sometimes play with the children, only to abruptly begin mistreating them. An example of  this abuse occurs when little Binjamin’s head is smashed against the wall while dancing with a guard.15 He feels deceived and disoriented again in the Krakow orphanage, where he wonders whether he has been betrayed by all the adults there and whether his time in the camps was an unnecessary and incomprehensible contingency.

13

Regine Strätling, ‘Vom Wagnis zum Hasard-Spiel: Zur Relevanz des Risikobegrif fs für eine Geschichte der Autobiographie’, in Monika Schmitz-Emans, ed., Risiko und Wagnis in der Literatur (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, forthcoming). 14 Wilkomirksi, Bruchstücke, 36. See also ibid., 29. 15 Ibid., 20f.

190

Bernd Blaschke

His broken sense of  trust is shattered and shocked once again in postwar Switzerland when the adults surrounding him are unable to understand his traumas, his fears and his failures in everyday situations. For instance, in the dining room, where he devours all the bread that he can for fear of  hunger, or on a ski lift, where he grows terrified that it leads to an extermination camp, because none of  the children return downhill with the lift.16 By blaming the insensitive Swiss adults for not caring enough about his wounds and thus betraying his trust towards them, he implicitly warns his actual public against committing the same act of cruelty again. He thereby exerts a powerful claim upon the care and sympathy of  his public. Wilkomirski’s self-presentation on the first page of  the book as someone who is neither a poet nor writer – and who had nearly lost his language altogether – produces a similar ef fect: it fabricates credibility and immunizes him against any critique that may emerge.17 He says he has

16

Ibid., 135. For Wilkomirski’s narration of  further confusions, pains and shocks during his allegedly safe postwar life in Switzerland, see also ibid., 27, 113–15, 126, 137–41. When his Swiss adoptive mother asks him to forget his previous life and says that she will now be his mother, the narrator wants to run away. He even cries, screams and bites. He feels a strong sense of shame and regards himself as a traitor: ‘Ich schämte mich, wie ich mich noch nie zuvor geschämt hatte. Ich hatte das Gefühl, ein großer Verbrecher geworden zu sein, ein Verräter an meiner Mutter. Ich kam mir schmutzig und elend vor, und meine Haut begann wieder zu brennen und zu jucken. || Jetzt bin ich für immer ein schlechter Mensch, dachte ich. Niemand wird mich mehr wollen, keiner mich mögen. Was soll ich nur tun? Ich müßte Motti fragen oder Jankl, sie wüßten sicher Rat. Aber sie würden mich vielleicht wegjagen. Einen Verräter will man nicht zum Freund. Ich werde nie zurückkehren können zu meinen Leuten, sie hätten so viele Gründe, an mir Rache zu nehmen.’ Ibid., 115. ‘I felt more ashamed than I had ever felt in my life. I felt as if  I’d become a criminal, my mother’s betrayer. I felt filthy and wretched, and my skin began to crawl and itch again. || Now I’ve really turned into a bad person. || Nobody will want me anymore, nobody will like me. What should I do? I would need to ask Motti, or Jankl. They’d know what to do. But they’d maybe chase me away. Nobody wants to be friends with a traitor. I won’t even be able to go back to my people – they’d have so many reasons to take revenge on me.’ Wilkomirski, Fragments, 123. 17 Wilkomirski, Bruchstücke, 7–8. For further declarations of  this pseudo-hyperrealist anti-poetics of  traumatized witnessing, see also Bruchstücke, 82, where the narrator

Betrayals and Their Af fects in Wilkomirski’s Fake Holocaust Memoirs

191

never had a mother tongue and that his only capital, his only clue to his identity, lies in the insistent pictures and short sequences of memories, the Fragments that he now entrusts to the public. These three strategies of self-accreditation and self-protection did initially work quite well as an ef fective shield against suspicion. The active and passive betrayals that form central topics in the text itself work to defend this deceptive book. Self-accusations of actively betraying friends and family, as well as claims for pity as a passive victim of  betrayal in the concentration camps and in Switzerland, combine to produce a shield against questions or doubts regarding (un)truthfulness and factuality. Speaking of  betrayals thus became an essential part of  the betrayals that this book enacted.

Conf licts and Conjectures on the Wilkomirski Syndrome Why would somebody construct and stage such a life story full of  horror and pain? What makes this an attractive choice? A simple approach would consist in looking for the benefits gained by performing such a traumatized life. At least some trauma victims do receive attention, care, respect and pity. However, the media and various communities might provide this support unevenly, devoting more attention to Holocaust survivors than ‘ordinary’ adopted children. A first step towards understanding the Wilkomirski ‘syndrome’ could involve admitting that he is not at ease with his real role and his real life. However, Dössekker’s change of identity seems bizarre in this regard because, upon entering his foster family at the age of  four, he enjoyed wealth and many privileges. From a foster mother who was said to be very fond of  him, to private schools, his extensive studies of

remembers himself as a mindless eye that just registered what it saw without articulating it or sharing it with others. Wilkomirski’s text thus stages a montage of violent pictures in the mode of  f lashback-memories.

192

Bernd Blaschke

music and history, his marriage and his three children, he seemed to have achieved a well-respected standard of  life. His fortunate circumstances were marred, however, by family crises that eventually lead to a breakdown of  his marriage in the 1980s. Wilkomirski also suf fered several long-lasting, serious illnesses. The editors of  this book are certainly right in suggesting that ‘betrayal will rarely be a merely rational act. Even the most calculated act cannot be thought apart from emotion. […] The etymology of  the English word betrayal traces back to the emotion of grief.’18 Bruno Dössekker most probably did suf fer grief over not knowing his natural mother or father. It is indeed possible that Dössekker had suf fered all his life from his existence as an orphan and foster child. This pain and grief, together with his reported mistreatment at the Swiss farm (before he came to the Dössekker family), support the interpretation that the author might be a victim of what is known as betrayal trauma, who felt abandoned and betrayed by his biological mother. The mother figure in the Bruchstücke is idealized, and the child-narrator accuses himself of  having betrayed his mother by not resisting his transfer to Switzerland. As the philosopher Alexandra Bauer has rightly pointed out, the theme of adoption, together with the alternating feelings of  being welcomed and repulsed, is as much a leitmotif in Wilkomirski’s Fragments as is the loss of  his parents. While the mother figure repeatedly appears in Wilkomirski’s story, however, the fatherly instance of symbolic authority is not present in the book.19 Bauer also refers to Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian interpretation of  the horrible lack of a father, which leads to the production of imaginary monsters. Žižek traces the imaginary horrors back to a horror vacui, a lack of enjoyment itself:

18 Betiel Wasihun and Kristina Mendicino, ‘Call For Papers: “Playing False: Representations of  Betrayal”’, accessed 25 June 2012. 19 Cf. Alexandra Bauer, ‘My private holocaust. Der Fall Wilkomirski(s)’, Sic et Non. zeitschrift für philosophie und kultur. im netz 4/1 (2006), 1–37. accessed 25 June 2012.

Betrayals and Their Af fects in Wilkomirski’s Fake Holocaust Memoirs

193

Apart from the standard question of  literary manipulation, are we aware to what extent this ‘fake’ reveals the phantasmatic investment and jouissance operative in even the most painful and extreme conditions? The enigma is the following one: usually, we generate fantasies as a kind of shield to protect us from unbearable trauma; here, however, the very ultimate traumatic experience, that of  the Holocaust, is fantasized as a shield – from what? Such monstrous apparitions are ‘returns of  the Real’ of  the failed symbolic authority: the reverse of  the decline of paternal authority, of  the father as the embodiment of  the symbolic Law, is the emergence of  the rape-enjoying father of  the False Memory Syndrome. This figure of  the obscene rapist father, far from being the Real beneath the respectful appearance, is rather itself a fantasy formation, a protective shield – against what? Is the rapist father from the False Memory Syndrome not, in spite of  his horrifying features, the ultimate guarantee that there is somewhere unconstrained enjoyment? And, consequently, what if  the true horror is the lack of enjoyment itself ?20

A less speculative and less psychoanalytic interpretation of  Wilkomirski’s phantasmatic, lurid inventions would interpret his narrations of a persecuted Jewish existence as a shield against his horror vacui of not having known his parents and his ancestors.21 Posing as a traumatized Holocaust survivor – and perhaps even falsely believing himself to be one – might of fer relief  to some of  his most tormenting concerns; namely, to find respect as a survivor or as a hero. Wilkomirski can exculpate himself  for the failures and hardships of  his present life by locating their causes in his Shoah-biography. He can move or force others to show him respect, to listen and to satisfy his needs. He can externalize his own aggressions, since the ‘evil ones’ are, after all, the others. And he can hold a moral position or even claim ethical

20 Slavoj Žižek, The Art of  the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: University of  Washington Press, 2000), 30f. 21 For such a functional interpretation of  the inventions or appropriations of  horrors, see Stefan Mächler, ‘Das Opfer Wilkomirski. Individuelles Erinnern als soziale Praxis und öf fentliches Ereignis’, in Diekmann and Schoeps, eds, Das Wilkomirski-Syndrom (Zürich: Pendo, 2002), 28–85, 29: ‘Of fensichtlich konnten die Metaphern jüdischer Existenz auch einem Nichtjuden, der unter dem horror vacui seiner nicht zugänglichen Geschichte litt, als biographische Versatzstücke dienen.’ I translate: ‘Obviously these metaphors of  Jewish existence could also serve as biographical elements to a non-Jew suf fering from the horror vacui of  his inaccessible history.’

194

Bernd Blaschke

sovereignty. He might gain direction in a chaotic world.22 Dössekker might have been pathologically seduced or more or less consciously motivated by all of  these reasons to become the Jewish survivor that he never was. Stefan Mächler, who of fers these explanations in his cautious report, elaborates four important aspects of  Dössekker’s production and performance of  false memories. First, he shows the sources Dössekker drew upon in combination with trauma theory. As a student of  history, Dössekker had established a genuine archive of  Holocaust studies and borrowed central elements of  his Fragments, not only from films and books of child survivors (such as Jona Oberski’s Kinderjahre, published in Dutch 1978, in German 1999), but also from Jerzy Kosinsky’s The Painted Bird (1965), a work of  fiction. Mächler also lists those elements in the Bruchstücke that are characteristic of  false memories in general. These include visualizations, recurrences of  the invented story over decades, exaggerated reactions to suggestive questions from his interlocutors, f lashbacks consisting of af fectladen images, and the amnesia of  the sources of  these alleged memories.23 But Dössekker also knew and made use of  trauma theories, characterizing his experiences as traumatic by presenting them as discontinuous f lashbacks. His friends and partners played a very important role in his change of identity as well. Mächler analyses the ways in which central figures in Dössekker’s entourage had their own reasons and motives for believing Dössekker. They supported him in his quest and construction of  his new and supposedly true identity.24 Dössekker made the fateful acquaintance of  Elitsur Bernstein as early as 1979.25 This psychotherapist introduced him in Israel into a specific social setting where many had certain expectations and hopes for him, including Bernstein himself, who developed a therapy for the recollection of childhood memories with him. This inf luential

22

I take this list of possible functions of and motivations for the adoption and performance of  Wilkomirski’s false identity from Stefan Mächler, who elaborates them more extensively. See Mächler, ‘Das Opfer Wilkomirski’, 68–72. 23 Ibid., 41–3. 24 Ibid., 74. 25 Ibid., 48–51.

Betrayals and Their Af fects in Wilkomirski’s Fake Holocaust Memoirs

195

setting permanently confirmed Dössekker’s steps towards Wilkomirski.26 Clearly without an open and af firmative surrounding, such an identity switch, which led to a rupture with his former milieu, would hardly have been manageable. But why did some of  the most reputable institutions follow, support and promote Wilkomirski? How can we explain their betrayal? Why did the public welcome and praise these memories? There were indeed good and bad reasons for the publishers Thomas Sparr and Siegfried Unseld to trust and support Wilkomirski as a supposed child survivor who struggled with his trauma. And this was also the case for prize committees, readers and listeners. The publishers may have simply followed their lifelong professional strategy of  helping and supporting their authors – of standing by them, especially when they are publicly attacked. They probably regarded it as their moral duty to expose themselves and the public to the worst that is presented in the text, without shying away from the most explicit descriptions of  horrifying memories. After all, the Nazi persecution and extermination of  Jewish people was known to transgress many thresholds of  the imaginable. Mächler explains that literary scholars and psychotherapists were easily duped by Wilkomirski’s text because he knew and used some of  their favourite concepts concerning the logic of  trauma – although he also occasionally misused and misapplied trauma theory.27 In the public and the media mixed emotions might also have been the motive for heightened attention: feelings such as pleasure in (witnessing) pain, sadistic voyeurism, joy over the salvation and survival of  the innocent victim, the motherless child. This cocktail of mixed emotions guaranteed fascination and media coverage for the book of  faked memories.

26 Ibid., 51f. 27 Ibid., 63.

196

Bernd Blaschke

Moral Questions and Consequences If, as the word’s etymology implies, there is no betrayal without grief at its origin, without absence and pain, there are certainly also strong emotions provoked by acts of  betrayal. Betrayal is judged and repaid by its recipients – and, in cases of  fraud, by the legal system. The Swiss jurisdiction did not judge Dössekker as a fraud; the prosecutor did not even charge him after investigation. The fake autobiographer was not sentenced by any institution, but the readers and the public sphere condemned him as a betrayer. The spheres of  law and public morality operate here with dif ferent sets of criteria and with dif ferent forms of retribution. The public (especially the media, but also scholars) reacted as though they were victims of a betrayal, and they answered it with condemnation. Dössekker’s condemnation in the media sphere consisted in turning him into an anathema, reducing his coverage (and certainly withdrawing all positive, empathic coverage). Wilkomirski’s public career, as well as his public respect and pity, became a thing of  the past after the disclosure and documentation of  the hoax. Dössekker has left the public sphere to live in his country house with its extensive archive for Holocaust research. If every betrayal provokes anger and moral aversion in its recipients, Wilkomirski’s case struck an especially sensitive chord, given the implicit contracts involved in the discourse of  Holocaust memories. His fake identity spoke to the conditions of witnessing the concentration camps fifty years later. One of  the main causes of  the emotions surrounding the scandal concerns the reliability of witnesses and the institutions of memory – such as publishing houses, prize committees, literary critics and historians. Since acts of remembrance have become central to our modern establishment of moral identity and to the constitution of political and national identities, we are called upon to trust the acts, rites and institutions that construct and participate in remembrance. Wilkomirski’s travesty threatens to empty the role of  the witness in public memory and to destroy its value for historiography. If someone can perform the role of  the victim and witness as convincingly as the real victims of  the concentration camps – and, thanks to his elaborate rhetoric, win

Betrayals and Their Af fects in Wilkomirski’s Fake Holocaust Memoirs

197

even more public attention than the real victims – what does this mean for our culture of remembrance? How can we still trust the testimonies or the autobiographies of victims, once we realize that these essential practices can be faked and appropriated? Alexandra Bauer’s essay points to the ways in which Wilkomirksi’s false performance of memory destabilized important ethical and historiographic categories: Imitation dieser Rolle vermag in gewisser Hinsicht auch den Opferstatus als solchen in Frage zu stellen. Eine Travestie – und als solche lassen sich Wilkomirskis Selbststilisierung und -inszenierung durchaus und plausibel beschreiben – erregt zumeist deshalb Anstoß, weil sie durch das perfekte bis übertrieben-überambitionierte Kopieren eines vermeintlich essentiellen Originals dessen Originalität und Essentialität performativ angreift und herausfordert. Die ausgesprochen skandalträchtige Frage, die das Phänomen Wilkomirski in dieser Hinsicht aufwirft, wäre demnach: Ist Opfersein eine Essenz oder eine Performanz? Ist man Opfer oder wird man dazu, indem man sich als Opfer auf fasst und inszeniert? Was Opferschaft – vor allem diejenige im Kontext des Holocausts – betrif ft, so muss einem ansonsten prominenten und weitläufig propagierten postmodernen ‘Pantextualismus’ (‘Alles ist Text’) eine entschiedene Absage erteilt werden: Opfersein ist keine beliebig wählbare Rolle bzw. ‘Identität’, ihm inhäriert vielmehr ein wesentliches und irreduzibles Moment des Gezeichnetseins durch Ereignisse, die sich sowohl seelisch als auch körperlich niederschlagen und ‘einschreiben.’28 [An imitation of  this role may, in certain respects, challenge the status of  the victim as such. A travesty – and Wilkomirski’s self-stylization and self-stagings can plausibly be described as such – scandalizes, primarily because it performatively attacks and challenges the essentiality and originality of an allegedly essential original through perfect or exaggerated copying. The potentially scandalous question that the Wilkomirski phenomenon raises would then be: Is being a victim an essence or a performance? Is somebody a victim or does somebody become one by regarding and staging himself as a victim? Concerning victimhood – especially in the context of  the Holocaust – the ‘pan-textualism’ (‘everything is text’) that is propagated elsewhere must be resolutely rejected: being a victim is no role or identity which can be chosen freely; rather, inherent to it is an essential and irreducible moment of  being marked by events which impose and inscribe themselves in a bodily and psychic manner.]29

28 Bauer, ‘My private holocaust. Der Fall Wilkomirski(s)’, 34. 29 My translation.

198

Bernd Blaschke

Wilkomirski’s identity appropriation thus betrays the remembrance of  historical horror and of  the victims with whom he had supposedly felt solidarity. And the public reacts to this appropriation of identity with contempt and repugnance once the invention, projection or fantasy is revealed to be fiction. What are the lessons to be learnt from the Wilkomirski case? A general mistrust and scepticism towards the narrations and actions of victims would be a very problematic answer, because such mistrust would certainly aggravate the suf fering of  traumatized victims. Perhaps we must learn to exercise a certain scepticism towards the worship of witnessing and the cult of victimization? Wilkomirski’s betrayal forced the public to navigate between blind belief and hard-hearted distrust. Alexandra Bauer’s instructive essay on Wilkomirski’s ‘private holocaust’ posits some useful outcomes of  the Wilkomirski syndrome: Dennoch kann das Phänomen Wilkomirski gleichsam als Exempel dem Aufzeigen postmoderner Identitätsproblematiken dienen, der Art, wie gesellschaftliche und symbolische Mechanismen, Dispositive und Stereotypen auf  Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung Einf luss nehmen, wie durch Mitleidshierarchien und Leidensökonomien verschiedene ‘Opfertypen’ geschaf fen werden, und wie historische Identitäten durch permanente Reinszenierung zu Abziehbildern und Versatzstücken mythisiert werden, wodurch die Singularität der jeweiligen Opfergeschichte verloren zu gehen droht.30 [However, the Wilkomirski phenomenon may serve as a revealing example for the postmodern problematic of identity, for the ways in which social and symbolic mechanisms, dispositives and stereotypes of self-perception and the perception of others inf luence the ways in which hierarchies of pity and economies of suf fering produce dif ferent ‘types of victims’; it also exemplifies the ways in which historical identities become mythologized as decals and clichés through their permanent restaging, by which means the singularity of every victim’s story threatens to become lost.]31

Of course, the relationship between the iterability of words and sentences, elements and gestures, as well as the singularity of any utterance or act, is 30 Ibid. 31 My translation.

Betrayals and Their Af fects in Wilkomirski’s Fake Holocaust Memoirs

199

not a post-modern problem.32 General narrative and structural strategies are the preconditions for a singular voice to speak; without these, there is no way to speak truly – and no way to construct a fake story. Although it is important to consider the structural generality of  language, performance and individuality, I find that the judgement of  the appropriation or performance of dif ferent sorts of identities is conditioned by (moral) distinctions. Dif ferent classes of performances are commented upon in dif ferent tones and viewed with dif ferent af fects. Dressing as a person of a dif ferent gender would rarely be called a betrayal of one’s gender, nor should it provoke much moral scandal (at least not in liberal, permissive societies). However, the free play with stereotypes, roles and identities meets its limits, when it concerns the performance of victimhood. And I agree with Alexandra Bauer that the role of  the victim in general and a fortiori that of  the victim and witness of  the Holocaust are identities, which are (for good reasons) sacrosanct. The room that societies allow for the free play of chosen identities is defined by their belief in strong bonds. Without strong bonds towards husbands or wives, towards groups or nations, towards stable identities, the concept of  betrayal loses its strong sense and its moral implications. In a permissive society, fewer areas are left where strong bonds and reliable identities are demanded. The victim and witness belong to those towards whom society and its public discourse preserve strong bonds and strict claims. The Wilkomirski case, with its multiple dimensions of  betrayal, demonstrates these limits of performativity, as they are regulated by public discourse and morality (although not, as we have seen, by the law). As a literary scholar, I cannot possibly read the mind of  Dössekker. I cannot and will not decide whether the Wilkomirski syndrome was a calculated and intended fraud, as Ganzfried maintains, or a pathological deferral of  Dössekker’s own trauma and an expression of  his unresolved identity conf licts, as Mächler’s interpretation claims. To decide this central question of  betrayal in the Wilkomirski af fair would amount to a betrayal of  the limits of philology. However, we can observe that the notion of  32

My thanks to the editors of  this volume for their remarks on this.

200

Bernd Blaschke

betrayal – which, in everyday life, might grow less relevant in proportion to the number of relations for which strong bonds are claimed – still maintains its relevance in discourses that are marked by strong bonds and af fects. The Wilkomirski case shows that the role of  the victim and witness belongs to social spheres where such strong bonds do persist. While Wilkomirski’s book widely used the semantics of active and passive betrayal to immunize his performance from doubts and criticism, the scandalous case itself showed the persistence of  betrayal as a moral category. Betrayal is still considered as the breaking of strong bonds or basic social contracts. There are some sacrosanct roles and identities that should not be appropriated, that should not be freely chosen and performed.

Bibliography Bauer, Alexandra, ‘My private holocaust. Der Fall Wilkomirski(s)’, Sic et Non. zeitschrift für philosophie und kultur. im netz 4/1 (2006), 1–37. accessed 25 June 2012. Finkelstein, Norman, The Holocaust Industry. Ref lections on the Exploitation of  Jewish Suf fering (London: Verso, 2000). Freyd, Jennifer J., ‘What is a Betrayal Trauma? What is Betrayal Trauma Theory?’, accessed 25 June 2012. Heuer, Wolfgang, ‘Das Wilkomirski-Syndrom: Gefälschte Geschichte. Ein Essay über das Erinnern, die Kultur der Selbstviktimisierung und gefälschte Holocaust­ biografien’, accessed 25 June 2012. Lejeune, Philippe, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1975). Mächler, Stefan, ‘Aufregung um Wilkomirski. Genese eines Skandals und seine Bedeutung’, in Irene Diekmann and Julius H. Schoeps, eds, Das WilkomirskiSyndrom. Eingebildete Erinnerungen oder Von der Sehnsucht, Opfer zu sein (Zürich: Pendo, 2001), 86–131. ——, ‘Das Opfer Wilkomirski. Individuelles Erinnern als soziale Praxis und öf fentliches Ereignis’, in Irene Diekmann and Julius H. Schoeps, eds, Das WilkomirskiSyndrom (Zürich: Pendo, 2002), 28–85.

Betrayals and Their Af fects in Wilkomirski’s Fake Holocaust Memoirs

201

——, The Wilkomirski Af fair. A Study in Autobiographical Truth (New York: Schocken, 2001). Steinberger, Petra, ed., Die Finkelstein-Debatte (Munich: Piper, 2001). Strätling, Regine, ‘Vom Wagnis zum Hasard-Spiel: Zur Relevanz des Risikobegrif fs für eine Geschichte der Autobiographie’, in Monika Schmitz Emans, ed., Risiko und Wagnis in der Literatur (Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming). Wasihun, Betiel and Kristina Mendicino, ‘Call For Papers: “Playing False: Representations of  Betrayal”’, accessed 25 June 2012. Wilkomirski, Binjamin, Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948 (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995). ——, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, transl. Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Schocken, 1996). Zeitlin, Froma, ‘New Soundings in Holocaust Literature: A Surplus of  Memory’, in Moishe Postone and Eric Santner, eds, Catastrophe and Meaning. The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 2003), 173–208. Žižek, Slavoj, The Art of  the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: University of  Washington Press, 2000).

Anne Julia Fett

Aesthetic Manifestations of (Self-)Betrayal in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden

In an interview about his monumental adaptation of  Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, which he completed in 1980, Rainer Werner Fassbinder said: ‘Jeder vernünftige Regisseur hat nur ein Thema, macht eigentlich immer denselben Film. Bei mir geht es um die Ausbeutbarkeit von Gefühlen, von wem auch immer sie ausgebeutet werden. Das endet nie. Das ist ein Dauerthema.’1 [‘Every sensible director only has one theme, and actually always makes the same film. In my case it is the exploitability of  feelings, no matter by whom they are being exploited. That never ends. It is a permanent topic.’] By the ‘Ausbeutbarkeit von Gefühlen’ [‘exploitability of  feelings’], Fassbinder refers to something that indeed permeates the entire gamut of  his work: namely, the idea of sentimental relationships as economically grounded and typically asymmetrical, in which the superiority of one (often deceitful) partner leads the inferior partner to desperate calculations and undertakings in order to regain af fection. In Fassbinder’s In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden [In a Year with 13 Moons] (1978),2 these economic calculations lead the emotionally submissive protagonist Erwin to self-betrayal. Fassbinder focuses the film on the way Erwin deals with the consequences of a far-reaching decision taken several years earlier, when his beloved, the unscrupulous estate agent Anton Saitz, rejects him on the pretext that he is not a woman (‘Ich fänd’ es schön, dass 1 2

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Die Anarchie der Phantasie, ed. Michael Töteberg (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986), 179. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, DVD, 119 min. (Germany: Tango-Film/Pro-ject Filmproduktion im Filmverlag der Autoren, 1978).

204

Anne Julia Fett

er mich liebt. Wenn er ein Mädchen wär’; ‘I would like the fact that he loved me. If  he were a girl’):3 Erwin decides to travel to Casablanca in order to undergo a sex change operation and become Elvira. Having made this decision solely for love and in an attempt to satisfy his lover’s wishes, s/he finds him/herself  faced with the loss of  his/her own identity. Anton Saitz never returned his/her love, and although Erwin/Elvira has meanwhile become fully conscious of  the self-betrayal implicit in the sex change, its impact on his/her personal relationships is irreversible. In In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, Fassbinder shows Erwin/Elvira during the last five days of  his/her life, ref lecting on his/her past, as well as his/her love relationships before and after the sex change, and searching desperately for a way out of  the vicious circle of  betrayal and self-betrayal that his/her existence seems to have become. Finally, after catching his/her beloved Anton Saitz in the act, making love to another woman (the woman he thought he could become) Erwin/Elvira commits suicide. The most striking feature of  Erwin/Elvira’s story is the inevitability with which sentimental relationships and betrayal seem to be connected, almost as if  they were two sides of  the same coin. In Erwin/Elvira’s past, just as love has necessarily led to betrayal (and self-betrayal), one act of  betrayal has necessarily led to another: Anton Saitz, the capitalist estate agent, had been yearning for predominance and power over Erwin; Erwin, on the other hand, was the predestined victim of  this power game, since he had been desperately in love with Saitz. The first act of  betrayal (Saitz’s lie that, perhaps as a woman, he could love him) leads to Erwin’s sex change and self-betrayal. However, the fatal chain of mutual deception does not end here because his ex-wife Irene eventually feels betrayed by Erwin’s sex change. Fassbinder uses the extraordinary character of  Erwin/Elvira as an example of  the most extreme way of putting oneself at risk in this treacherous game of  love. On the one hand, s/he risks his/her own body and sexual identity on the conviction that the only way to gain love is to distort oneself in order to fit the ideal of someone else; in so doing, Erwin/ 3

Ibid., 1:34:46 h.

Aesthetic Manifestations of (Self-)Betrayal

205

Elvira is part of  the logic of  betrayal depicted in the film. Just like the other characters, s/he has recognized and accepted that love is a power game one must try to win by all available means, and that, consequently, deception is essential for survival. But at the same time, Erwin undermines this logic of  betrayal by sacrificing and abandoning himself  through the sex change. Erwin’s self-sacrifice threatens to go beyond the selfish economics of personal relationships in Fassbinder’s world, as Erwin does not pretend to be someone else in order to fulfil his yearning for love; he actually becomes someone else. The generally understood structure of  betrayal, in which one pretends to be someone else for one’s own gain, is thus reversed and turned against Erwin/Elvira him/herself. And it is in this sense that it becomes a self-betrayal. With this extreme case, Fassbinder demonstrates how the vicious dynamics of (self-)betrayal in sentimental relationships, in which pretence or transformation seems necessary, call into question the very notion of identity. Indeed, Erwin/Elvira’s case raises the question as to what extent one can meaningfully speak of identity at all. Thomas Elsaesser addresses this problem by speaking of  the protagonist’s ‘impossible sexual identity’,4 and a reconsideration of  this story under the premises of self-betrayal af firms Elsaesser’s suggestion that identity is impossible. Indeed, Erwin/Elvira’s decision to become someone else ultimately leaves him/her suspended between his former self and the self s/he wished to become in order to fulfil Saitz’s wishes. Erwin/Elvira’s suf fering is caused by his/her consciousness of a complete lack of sexual self-definition and by the arbitrariness of  his/her being; according to the situation in which s/he finds him/herself, Erwin/Elvira is ‘lover, husband, father, orphan, […] [or] female “hustler”/ prostitute’.5 It is precisely the unavoidable shifts from one mode of  being to another that are depicted as a process of self-betrayal throughout the film, not in the sense of an unconscious self-deception, but as a conscious being double. Erwin/Elvira is constantly betraying him/herself  by entering

4 5

Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany. History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997), 201. Ibid., 202.

206

Anne Julia Fett

a new state without giving up his/her former one, by being two people at once. Paradoxically, this process makes him/her simultaneously the traitor within one mode of  being and the betrayed in the other. If, as Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has suggested, ‘only our own opinion of  the thing or person betrayed can guide us in determining whether a particular action is or is not an act of  betrayal’,6 Erwin/Elvira represents the special case of a person who, while being betrayed by himself, simultaneously condemns himself as a traitor. There are several examples that illustrate Erwin/Elvira’s dual condition as betrayer/betrayed. Already in the very first scene of  the film, Elvira is shown hustling, dressed up as a man, ‘da sie es irgendwo entwürdigend fand, als Frau einen Mann zu bezahlen’ [‘as she somehow found it degrading, as a woman, to pay for a man’].7 Elvira’s shame to pay for sex as a woman reveals how conscious she is of her female body – which betrays her male mode of  being. But by dressing as a man, she does not solve the problem either, and is brutally punished by her clients when they discover her female sexual organs. Likewise, when Erwin cuts of f  his hair at the end of  the film, just to cry out some hours later, ‘Schauen Sie doch nur mal, meine Haare! Ich habe mir meine Haare abgeschnitten!’ [‘Just look at my hair! I cut of f my hair!’],8 he blames himself  for having betrayed his female mode of  being. Fassbinder finds impressively haunting aesthetic and dramaturgical means to express these complex, inescapable dynamics of conscious selfbetrayal and to show the treacherous ground on which Erwin/Elvira’s relationships with other characters in the film lie. Thus, already during the first minutes of  the film, Christoph, a lover who abandons Erwin/Elvira, drags him/her forcefully in front of a mirror, forcing him/her to look at him/herself, insulting him/her and asking what s/he sees in the mirror. Erwin/Elvira’s prompt answer, ‘Ich seh’ mich dich lieben’ [‘I see myself  Leszek Kolakowski, Freedom, Fame, Lying and Betrayal. Essays on Everyday Life (New York: Westview Press, 1999), 72. 7 Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ‘In einem Jahr mit dreizehn Monden’, in Michael Töteberg, ed., Filme befreien den Kopf. Essays und Arbeitsnotizen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984), 43–68, 64. 8 Fassbinder, In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, 1:48:30 h. 6

Aesthetic Manifestations of (Self-)Betrayal

207

loving you’],9 reveals that he has lost him/herself and further illustrates the heteronomy of  his precarious existence. After the sex change has inscribed new gender traits into his/her body, which are incongruent with his feeling male, Erwin/Elvira finds him/herself devastated and without the means to win the power game of  love that his/her new lover Christoph is playing. Christoph had formerly exploited him/her economically, living from the money s/he gained as a prostitute, but when he becomes economically independent, Erwin/Elvira’s only way to retain him is through love. Erwin/Elvira’s love puts him/her in the position of  the loser once more, not least because it leads him/her to misunderstand the economics of  human relationships: ‘Ich bemühe mich, ihm soviel davon zu geben, dass er im Übermaß davon hat, um mir davon zurückzugeben.’ [‘I try to give him as much [love] as I can, so that he has it in abundance and can give some back to me’].10 This assumption of mutual compensation contrasts sharply with both this relationship’s dynamics in the film and with the director’s own perspective on sentimental relationships. For Fassbinder, the only reliable rule of interpersonal relationships is that of dependency and disparity, and it is certain that the more you give, the more will be taken from you without any reward: Natürlich ist der, der liebt oder mehr liebt oder mehr an dieser Liebe hängt oder an einer Beziehung hängt, der Unterlegene. Das hat damit zu tun, dass der, der weniger liebt, mehr Macht hat, klar. Damit fertig zu werden, ein Gefühl, eine Liebe, ein Bedürfnis zu akzeptieren, dazu braucht es eine Größe, die die meisten Menschen halt nicht haben. Deswegen läuft das halt meistenteils sehr hässlich. Also ich kenne fast keine Beziehungen unter irgendwelchen Leuten, von denen ich sagen würde, dass sie schön sind.11 [Certainly, the one who loves or who loves more or who is more attached to this love or to a relationship is the inferior one. This has to do with the fact that the one who loves less has more power, obviously. To cope with this, to accept a feeling, a

9 10 11

Ibid., 00:06:08 h. Ibid., 1:53:19 h. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fassbinder über Fassbinder. Die ungekürzten Interviews, ed. Robert Fischer (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 2004), 428.

208

Anne Julia Fett love, a need, requires a greatness that most people just don’t have. That is why most of  the time it just runs its course in a very ugly way. Well, I hardly know relationships among people that I would call nice.]

Interestingly enough, Fassbinder’s filmic explorations of  the economics of sentimental relationships not only ref lect his perspective on all other types of  human relationships, they also constitute a microcosmic model and laboratory that allows him to comprehend the macrocosm he is ultimately interested in – that is, the general psychic constitution of  West German society in its capitalistic logic. The choice of  the boom-town Frankfurt, the city of  banks, the stock market and social inequalities, as the setting of  Erwin/Elvira’s story suggests the intersection of personal and societal economics. Fassbinder’s personal (negative) experience with the city might also have motivated this choice; it dates back to the repertory season of 1974/1975 during which he worked at Frankfurt’s TAT (Theater am Turm), causing a German theatre scandal with his play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (1974).12 His problematic relationship to Frankfurt, the supposed defamer of which he became through this play, finds its direct expression in Erwin/Elvira’s story: ‘Der Film spielt in Frankfurt, einer Stadt, deren spezifische Struktur Biographien wie die folgende fast herausfordert, zumindest aber nicht als besonders ungewöhnlich erscheinen lässt.’13 [‘The film is set in Frankfurt, a city whose specific structure almost provokes biographies like the following, but which at least does not let them appear particularly uncommon.’] However, In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden not only expresses the director’s attitude toward Frankfurt; it also marks Fassbinder’s attempt to work through his own sentimental relationships and their vicious circles. In several interviews, the director admits to finding himself, just like everyone else, entangled in the same fatal system of double-dealing interrelations, which he repeatedly dissects within his works, so that filmmaking often becomes a sort of self-healing act for him. He observes: ‘Ich weiß, daß meine 12 13

Cf. David Barnett, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. ‘The big time’, 175–217. Fassbinder, ‘In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden’, 43.

Aesthetic Manifestations of (Self-)Betrayal

209

Kritiker mich oft für einen Psychopathen halten – aber wie ich die Dinge sehe, haben die oft einen Therapeuten eher nötig als ich – denn ich kann schließlich all das im Film loswerden, was mich bedrückt oder belastet.’14 [‘I know that my critics often consider me a psychopath – but as I see things, they are often more in need of a therapist than I am – because I can get rid of everything that depresses or burdens me with a film.’] This healing function of  filmmaking becomes exceedingly important in In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, which doubtlessly has to be regarded as one of  Fassbinder’s most intimate films. By filming the dynamics of mutual betrayal encircling the protagonist Erwin/Elvira, Fassbinder tries to cope with the death of  his long-term partner Armin Meier, who committed suicide in May 1978, just after Fassbinder terminated their four-year relationship. However, the film In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden is far from strictly autobiographical or cathartic in the classical, Aristotelian sense – ‘Wichtig ist für mich, dass ich es geschaf ft habe, einen Film zu machen, der nicht simpel das überträgt, was meine Gefühle waren zu diesem Selbstmord’ [‘Important for me is the fact that I have succeeded in making a film which does not simply transfer what my feelings about this suicide have been’],15 Fassbinder says in an interview. Neither he nor the spectator is supposed to undergo any sort of emotional cleansing through the film. As I will show in the following pages, the film consistently evokes, then undermines, melodramatic aesthetic devices, thereby inhibiting the spectator’s catharsis. Fassbinder insists that he constructed the film as a rational exposition of interpersonal dynamics, rather than as an act of emotional cleansing. Instead of  telling Armin’s story and his feelings about it, the director displays dysfunctional interpersonal relationships within a society based on betrayal and exploitation. He does so in an exemplary and highly stylized way, drawing on the genre of melodrama, only to subvert it. It is his encounter with the genre of melodrama and its decisive consequences on his method of  filmmaking

14 Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werkschau 28.5.–19.7.1992. Dichter, Schauspieler, Filmemacher (Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1992), 197. 15 Fassbinder, Fassbinder über Fassbinder, 544.

210

Anne Julia Fett

that allow him to achieve ‘was [er] wahrscheinlich früher nicht gekonnt hätte’ [‘what (he) probably could not have achieved in the past’].16 At first glance it may be surprising that Fassbinder – perhaps the most famous exponent of  New German Cinema – turned in the 1970s to a genre that is famous for its af firmative sentimentality. After all, he defines himself as an avowed opponent to a film industry that exploits spectators by manipulating their feelings: ‘Gefühle sind sehr wichtig für mich, aber Gefühle werden heute von der Filmindustrie ausgebeutet, und das verabscheue ich. Ich bin dagegen, daß man mit Gefühlen Spekulationen betreibt oder daß man für sie bezahlen muss.’17 [‘Feelings are very important to me, but feelings are being exploited today by the film industry, and I detest that. I am against carrying out speculations with feelings, or being forced to pay for them.’] And yet, it was the Hollywood melodrama of  the 1950s, especially Douglas Sirk’s unconventional version of it, that inf luenced the development of  Fassbinder’s visual aesthetics ever since he first encountered it in 1971. By constantly alluding to the artificiality of the filmic setting, the characters’ behaviour and the cinematic apparatus as a whole, Sirk shows how extreme visual stylisation can undercut the spectator’s empathy and subvert the manipulation of  his feelings. In particular, it was the psychosomatic ef fects of  Sirk’s stylized visual aesthetics that profoundly attracted Fassbinder. When Fassbinder, in his usual lapidary and unpretentious tone, says that ‘Film hat auch etwas damit zu tun, daß der Regisseur weiß, für welche Emotion er welche Optik benutzen muß’ [‘Film also has to do with the director, who needs to know which optics to use for which emotion’],18 he expresses a concept that is not only crucial for melodrama in general, but especially for the melodramas of  his role model Sirk. In his films, the melodramatic characters, as members of an extremely repressive society, are trapped within their muteness.19 Their suppressed emotional energies, however, are ‘sublimated’ into the mise-en-scène of  the film. Their 16 Ibid. 17 Fassbinder, Die Anarchie der Phantasie, 39. 18 Fassbinder, Werkschau 28.5.–19.7.1992, 179. 19 See Fassbinder, ‘Imitation of  life. Über die Filme von Douglas Sirk’, in Töteberg, ed., Filme befreien den Kopf, 11–24.

Aesthetic Manifestations of (Self-)Betrayal

211

suppressed feelings surface like symptoms in the film’s visual aesthetics, which is characterized by excessive stylisation. Sirk himself  has described this process of sublimation, which is typical of all of  his melodramas, with reference to one of  his most famous films, Written on the Wind (1956). He explains his approach to the film’s optics as follows: Almost throughout the picture I used deep-focus lenses, which have the ef fect of giving a harshness to the objects and a kind of enamelled, hard surface to the colours. I wanted this to bring out the inner violence, the energy of  the characters, which is all inside them and can’t break through.20

The division suggested by Sirk between two spheres, between the tangible sphere of  the setting’s ‘surface’ on the one hand, and a subliminal sphere of suppressed ‘inner violence’ and ‘energy’ on the other, has been described as an invariable, genuinely melodramatic principle in the history of  the genre by literary scholars. In his book The Melodramatic Imagination (1976), Peter Brooks explores how Balzac’s and Henry James’s novels are ‘constantly tensed […] to go beyond the surface of  the real to the truer, hidden reality, to open up the world of spirit.’21 Situating the roots of melodrama within the social context of  the French Revolution and establishing it as an expression of  the yearning for a moral point of reference in a desacralized world, Brooks names the subliminal sphere of  the melodramatic principle the ‘moral occult’.22 As a ‘domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality’,23 the ‘moral occult’ determines the structure of melodrama, though it is only indirectly tangible, through appearances.

20 Douglas Sirk, qtd. in Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of  Sound and Fury. Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Bill Nichols, ed., 2 vols (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1985), vol. 2, 166. 21 Peter Brooks, ‘The Melodramatic Imagination’, in Marcia Landy, ed., Imitations of  Life. A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama (Detroit, IL: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 50–67, 51. 22 Ibid., 53. 23 Ibid.

212

Anne Julia Fett

Sirk adapts this melodramatic ambiguity to the claustrophobic cosmos of  American family life in the 1950s. His cinematic décor and settings point to a hidden, subliminal sphere of emotional energies that have been suppressed by the characters due to their repressive environment. In this sense, Sirk confers a critical social dimension on the melodramatic principle. Thomas Elsaesser and Geof frey Nowell-Smith of fer a psychoanalytical reading of  Sirk’s symptomatic film aesthetics. Whilst suggesting that ‘the connections of Freud with [the American family] melodrama are as complex as they are undeniable’,24 Elsaesser concludes in his famous essay ‘Tales of  Sound and Fury’ that the ‘emotional pattern [of  Sirk’s melodramas] is that of panic and latent hysteria, reinforced stylistically by a complex handling of space in interiors’.25 Similarly, Nowell-Smith argues that the mechanisms that determine the visual aesthetics of  Nicholas Ray’s, Vincente Minnelli’s and Douglas Sirk’s family melodramas of  the 1950s are analogous to the ef fects of  hysteria upon the body.26 Sirk constructs distinct tangible and subliminal spheres by upholding what Brooks calls the essential melodramatic principle of ambiguity and subverting it at the same time. Under the aesthetic surface of his films there no longer lingers a collective ‘moral occult’; instead, one finds a sphere of collective paranoia. This sphere, at once lightly veiled and suggested by Sirk’s mise-en-scène, subtly mirrors the psychic constitution of  his contemporary American society – which fascinated and inspired Fassbinder. The subtlety and ambiguity of  Sirk’s aesthetics are born out of a necessity to mask his social criticism. On the one hand, Sirk belonged to the repressive society 24 Elsaesser, ‘Tales of  Sound and Fury’, 179. 25 Ibid., 183. 26 ‘The mechanism here is strikingly similar to that of  the psychopathology of  hysteria. In hysteria (and specifically in what Freud has designated as “conversion hysteria”) the energy attached to an idea that has been repressed returns converted into a bodily symptom. The “return of  the repressed” takes place, not in conscious discourse, but displaced onto the body of  the patient. In the melodrama, where there is always material which cannot be expressed in discourse or in the actions of  the characters furthering the design of  the plot, a conversion can take place into the body of  the text.’ (Geof frey Nowell-Smith, ‘Minnelli and Melodrama’, in Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, vol. 2, 193–4).

Aesthetic Manifestations of (Self-)Betrayal

213

of 1950s America, which was marked by racial prejudices and a climate of restrictive sexual morality that centred on the heterosexual nuclear family. On the other hand, Sirk had to work within the rigid logic of  Hollywood’s studio system, which demanded highly ef ficient, profitable productions that catered to mass tastes. Faced with a double limitation on his individual creativity, Sirk developed his characteristically dual mise-en-scène, whose subliminal, paranoid layer can be understood as a silent protest. The dual mise-en-scène is certainly a way to circumvent complete self-censorship without losing institutional backing from the studios.27 Just as Fassbinder admiringly declares: ‘Er hatte das ganze System im Rücken. Deshalb ist es um so bewundernswerter, daß es jemand geschaf ft hat, trotz dieses festgefahrenen amerikanischen Studiosystems eine ganz persönliche Welt zu errichten.’28 [‘He had the whole system behind him. Therefore it is all the more admirable that someone has succeeded, in spite of  this deadlocked American studio system, to construct a completely personal world.’] What Sirk of fered was the model of a personal and socially critical cinema within the formal restrictions of a popular, sentimental genre – a genre which allowed him to artistically explore his personal trauma, while exposing the dysfunctional dynamics of contemporary society. Fassbinder never tried to hide Sirk’s impact on him; on the contrary, he repeatedly expressed his indebtedness to Sirk: ‘Ich hab jemanden gefunden, der in einer Art und Weise Kunst macht, daß ich gemerkt habe, was ich an mir verändern muß. Ich mache das, worin er vielleicht sieht: Was er machen wollte, geht weiter.’29 [‘I have found someone who makes art in a way that has made me notice what I have to change in myself. I am doing something that he may feel is a continuation of what he wanted to do.’] The process of finding a new, socially critical way of filmmaking reaches an impressive peak in 1978 with In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden. As we will see, Fassbinder adapts Sirk’s ambiguous aesthetics of  ‘excess’30 to a plot 27 Cf. in this regard Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning. History, Culture and the Films of  Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 28 Fassbinder, Die Anarchie der Phantasie, 143. 29 Ibid., 143–4. 30 Brooks, ‘The Melodramatic Imagination’, in Landy, ed., Imitations of  Life, 73.

214

Anne Julia Fett

that revolves around the mechanisms of  betrayal and their psychic dimensions. Like Sirk’s films, Fassbinder’s In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden conforms to certain basic genre conventions, while dif fering considerably from the af firmative stereotype of  the melodrama at the level of aesthetics and narrative. Thus, while the film’s vicious circles, emotional double binds and locked outlets align with conventional melodrama, there are several characteristics of  the genre that Fassbinder radically re-envisions and subverts. It is precisely the illusionism, emotional exuberance and deceit, which are all geared to evoke exalted emotional states in the spectator, that Fassbinder radically disapproves. Instead, he searches for aesthetic devices to undermine melodramatic af fect and employs distancing strategies and alienation ef fects at all cinematic levels. It is primarily through these (often Sirkian) strategies that Fassbinder succeeds in making the self-betrayal of  Erwin/ Elvira perceptible without simply portraying Erwin/Elvira as a victim. (This would have made him/her a typical melodramatic character.) With stylized, intentionally artificial film aesthetics that deliberately undercut sympathy and identification, Fassbinder succeeds in creating a film that is both melodrama and anti-melodrama at once. He plays with melodramatic elements (such as the dramaturgical framework; the story of Erwin/Elvira’s impossible love and his/her unfulfilled yearning), while at the same time unmasking these elements as a treacherous, sentimental and black-andwhite vision of society. The crucial distancing and alienating elements of  In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden are represented in the film by mirrors, visual elements (such as masks and veils) that cover Erwin/Elvira’s face and visual barriers that expose the protagonist’s imprisonment within a false self and his/her lostness within a double reality. Through the repeated use of  these elements, the director maintains a constant tension between appearance and concealment and between conf licting appearances, which, tangible at every moment of  the film, subverts the sympathy of  the spectator. The mirror, Fassbinder’s favourite stylistic device, distances the spectator from the film’s characters and renders the filmic reality unreliable and confusing. At the same time, it also indicates the ravaging dividedness of  the protagonist’s

Aesthetic Manifestations of (Self-)Betrayal

215

identity, thus functioning as a symptom on the ‘hysterical’31 surface of  the film’s aesthetics. Every time Erwin/Elvira looks into a mirror, s/he is confronted with the irreversible self-betrayal s/he is living, which the spectator is also invited to grasp. It is a self-betrayal s/he is not able to express in words and about which s/he never speaks with anybody, even though it causes him/her constant suf fering. Instead, it is visually depicted through a symptomatic cosmos of mirrors – a cosmos that encircles Erwin/Elvira throughout the film. Elsaesser has pointed out the incongruous relationship between Erwin’s/Elvira’s voice and body, and more generally, the frequent use of of f-screen voices in In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden. The way Fassbinder ‘disarticulates film image and voice in [several] key scenes’,32 Elsaesser argues, parallels the split of  Erwin/Elvira’s identity. However, Erwin/Elvira’s dissociated voice and the unspeakable character of  his/ her feelings of fer an important clue to the film’s logic of  betrayal. Erwin/ Elvira’s silence is explicitly addressed in a scene that shows Erwin/Elvira and his/her friend Zora in the monastery where Erwin, as an orphan, grew up. There Gudrun (performed by Fassbinder’s mother, Liselotte Pempeit) describes the ‘system of rewarded lies’ in which Erwin was raised by her and the other sisters. By quietly and subtly expressing false feelings and needs towards the sisters with false demonstrations of af fection, Erwin succeeds in making himself  loved and ultimately surviving: Das Kind wurde Erwin getauft, und alle Schwestern hatten es gern, da es ein leises Kind war. Das war ihnen angenehm, das nannten sie brav. Sie steckten dem Kind deshalb auch in den ganz schlimmen Tagen nach Kriegsende immer genug zu, dass es satt war, lieber zuviel als zu wenig. Dafür sollte das Kind sie lieben, die Schwestern, jede einzelne und jede am meisten. So wurde das Kind gezwungen, das Lügen zu lernen, denn bald schon hatte es natürlich herausgefunden, dass es ihm besser ging, je mehr er einer jeden das sagte, was diese zu hören sich wünschte. Er lernte dieses System der belohnten Lügen so perfekt beherrschen, dass niemand merkte, wie aus dem leisen Kind ein trauriges wurde.33

31 For a definition of  this term see note 26. 32 Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany. History, Identity, Subject, 202. 33 Fassbinder, In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, 00:43:47–00:44:52 h.

216

Anne Julia Fett [The child was christened Erwin, and all the sisters loved him. He was a quiet child, which they found agreeable, so they said he was a good boy. Even in the worst days after the war they made sure that the child always had enough to eat. Rather too much than too little. In return, the sisters expected him to love them. Each one individually and each one the most. The child was, therefore, forced to learn to lie, for he soon found out that, the more he told the nuns what they wanted to hear, the better he was treated. He mastered this system of rewarded lies so well that no one noticed how the quiet child turned into a sad one.]34

Erwin/Elvira’s inability to speak about his/her feelings not only appears directly connected to his/her entrapment within a vicious circle of  betrayal and self-betrayal in interpersonal relationships; both constitute a behavioural pattern that traces back to childhood experiences and causes him/her despair and suf fering right through his/her youth and adult life. Throughout the film, Fassbinder’s aesthetics constantly expose all the emotional energy that Erwin/Elvira’s silence represses, culminating in the inner violence to which the protagonist finally succumbs when he kills himself. One of  the most suggestive manifestations of  this inner violence can be found in a shot showing Erwin/Elvira in the women’s bathroom of a café. S/he is contemplating his/her broken self within the f lagstones on the wall, which function as a distorting mirror (see Figure 1). Since the f lagstones form a chessboard pattern, in which the white f lagstones are ref lective and the black ones are not, the ref lection of  Erwin/ Elvira’s face appears cut into alternating squares. These pieces, meanwhile, are disjointed: because Erwin/Elvira stands in a corner of  the room, where the frontal ref lection of  his/her face is multiplied by a lateral ref lection, the fragmentation of  his/her body acquires a highly confusing, unsettling aspect. This is how the unspeakable uncanniness that emanates from his/ her heterogeneous identity comes to the fore. The treacherous labyrinth of mirrors Fassbinder creates indicates not only the subliminal sphere of  Erwin’s/Elvira’s violently suppressed emotions, but also the ambivalence other characters feel towards him/her.

34 Translation taken from the English subtitles.

Aesthetic Manifestations of (Self-)Betrayal

217

Figure 1.  Source: In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978), director and producer Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Filmverlag der Autoren, 00:11:07 h.35

Similarly, both Erwin/Elvira’s self-betrayal and the treacherous psychic dimensions of other characters are expressed on the aesthetic surface of  In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden. This is the case with the duplicitous role the ‘rote Zora’ plays: she first supports Erwin/Elvira in his/her search for a reliable identity and then betrays him/her at the end of  the film by having sex with Anton Saitz – the love of  Erwin/Elvira’s life. Her telling look into the mirror,36 as well as the gloomy half-covering of  her face, foreshadow her betrayal, by making her appear literally double-faced (see Figure 2). However, the visual motif of  the covered (or half-covered) face not only functions as an expression of dishonesty and hypocrisy; in its semantic ambiguity it also expresses the will to hide oneself  from the gazes of other film characters – or even from the eyes of  the spectators. This is clearly the case with the protagonist, who is shown in a variety of sequences covering his/her own face with all available means – hands, white or black veils, and even a feather boa (see Figures 3 and 4).

35 36

The copyright permissions for this screenshot, as well as for all the following ones were granted by the Filmverlag der Autoren, Berlin/ Studiocanal, Berlin. Ibid., 00:53:13 h.

Figure 2.  Source: Fassbinder, In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, 00:54:58 h.

Figure 3.  Source: Fassbinder, In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, 00:05:07 h.

Figure 4.  Source: Fassbinder, In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, 1:12:36 h.

Aesthetic Manifestations of (Self-)Betrayal

219

Eyes are always treacherous and never honest or objective in the hysterical cosmos of  Fassbinder’s films. The exhibitionism of  the characters, their will to be seen, is usually almost as powerful as their fear of others’ attention – and their fear of  looking at themselves. Thus, instead of  being the proverbial window to the soul, eyes become unreliable instruments of power. As Elsaesser puts it, ‘most decisively Fassbinder brings into play such a powerful sense of what it means for men and women to be visible to each other across dif ferent kinds of  looks’.37 In In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, Fassbinder persistently explores the visual perception of people’s existence – their existence as images, false projections, vanishing points of yearning, or objects of envy and malevolence. Not only does he install the character of Erwin/Elvira as an ambiguous pole of attraction both for the spectators’ and the film characters’ glances; he also makes him/her overlap with a historical figure. As Alice A. Kuzniar has pointed out, in a key sequence of  the film (Erwin/Elvira’s momentous reencounter with Anton Saitz, the unfulfilled love of  his/her life) s/he ‘dresses as Zarah Leander, wearing the same widow’s outfit as Astrée does as she leaves Puerto Rico on a ship to her native Sweden, in La Habanera. Both women don a black tight-bodiced dress with black gloves and a wide-brimmed black hat with a veil. Elvira likewise comports herself with Leander’s erect pose and dark, soft-spoken voice.’38 By superimposing Erwin/Elvira over Zarah Leander’s character in the Ufa production La Habanera (1937), Fassbinder not only pays explicit tribute to the director Detlef  Sierck (who only later, after his emigration to the United States, changed his name to Douglas Sirk); he also confers certain attributes to Erwin/Elvira, which, for a German spectator of  Fassbinder’s time, were directly linked to Leander as ‘the greatest screen idol of  the Third Reich’.39 At first sight, aligning Erwin/Elvira with a melodramatic heroine of  the 1930s might have an ironic ef fect in the light of  his/her distance from

37 Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany. History, Identity, Subject, 11. 38 Alice A. Kuzniar, The Queer German Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 83. See image 4. 39 Ibid., 57.

220

Anne Julia Fett

Leander’s stereotypical role as ‘a woman unjustly cast out of society, true to her loves, and prepared, even determined to suf fer for them.’40 Erwin/ Elvira certainly dif fers considerably from the suf fering heroine, precisely because his/her oscillating sexual identity counters any stereotypical fixation. But beyond her seemingly stereotypical façade, the figure of  Leander, too, challenges such fixations. As a matter of  fact, Fassbinder’s role model Detlef  Sierck alias Sirk was perfectly conscious of  the dissonance between the person Zarah Leander and the heroine he created as a director during the 1930s: ‘she was very large, broad-shouldered, and f lat-chested. Detlef  Sierck had recourse to various staging tricks – directing the male lead to stand on boxes, dressing Leander in decorative hats, sparkling jewellery, and advantageously cut gowns – in order to distract from her heavy figure.’41 Not only did Sierck deliberately construct an object for the spectator’s projection by staging Leander according to the stereotypical imagination of a melodramatic heroine that the Nazi film industry could sell; Leander herself was also conscious of  her film character’s artificiality. By virtue of  this consciousness she made fun of  ‘herself as an Ufa star’ decades later, disguised as the stereotypical melodramatic heroine she used to embody: ‘the aging Zarah was an imitation of  her former self ’.42 This ‘imitation’ of  herself appears even more interesting and multifaceted in light of  the ‘transgender appeal’,43 which has been associated with Leander since the very beginning of  her career. This appeal arose from her uncommonly deep voice, which contrasted sharply with the femininity of  her screen image built up by, amongst others, Sierck. In fact, this voice made Leander a typically Sierckian character, a character distinguished by unresolved contradictions: ‘The type of character I always have been interested in, in the theatre as well as in the movies, and which I also tried to retain in melodrama, is the doubtful, the ambiguous, the uncertain.’44 This statement by Sierck/Sirk 40 41 42 43 44

Ibid., 58. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 63. Douglas Sirk and Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1997), 46.

Aesthetic Manifestations of (Self-)Betrayal

221

could just as well have been made by Fassbinder, whose screen characters cannot be reduced to common categories such as heroic/anti-heroic, good/ bad – and male/female. When Fassbinder makes Erwin/Elvira dress as Zarah Leander in the potentially melodramatic scene of  the reencounter, he plays with the notion of conscious self-imitation, which is linked to the famous Ufa actress. Erwin/Elvira, like Leander’s screen character, appears during the entire film to be an imitation of  him/herself, trying (and failing) to be male or female respectively. Dressed in the actress’s clothes, and speaking with a similarly deep voice, Erwin/Elvira slips into her multi-layered, seemingly transgendered role, which renders the multiplicity of his/her own identity still more unsettling. In the reencounter scene, the transsexual Erwin/Elvira almost appears as a male transvestite, which, in turn, aligns him/her with the seemingly transgendered woman, Zarah Leander. The gender trouble of  the film reaches an impressive peak here, suggesting the complete dissolution of reliable categories that might otherwise determine the protagonist’s sexual identity. At the same time, however, the superposition of  Erwin/ Elvira and Leander also adds a new aspect to the film’s logic and aesthetic of  betrayal. Just as Zarah Leander’s film character appears treacherous throughout, Erwin’s/Elvira’s imitation of  her calls into question the cinematic illusion. Leander, more than any other screen character, embodies a film industry, which is based on the conversion of characters into images and on the transformation of actors into false projections. By alluding to her, Fassbinder eventually casts doubt on the individuality and authenticity of  his own film characters. Drawing the spectators’ attention to the artificiality of  film characters as such, Fassbinder distances them from filmic illusion and subverts their sympathy toward the protagonist – a sympathy that usually lies at the heart of melodrama. This is how Fassbinder artistically interrogates what it means for men and women to exist for one another as images, ‘to be visible to each other across dif ferent kinds of  looks.’45 Driven by this concern, he has configured the inner filmic relationships of  the characters 45 Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject, 12.

222

Anne Julia Fett

in a way which critically ref lects upon the spectators’ relationship to the film characters as images or objects of projection. This strategy, which stimulates the spectator’s ref lection on the cinematic apparatus as such, finds its analogy at the level of  film aesthetics. Obsessive framing, a distinctive characteristic of  Fassbinder’s films,46 figures centrally in the logic of  betrayal that unfolds in In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden. Not only does it allow Erwin/Elvira to hide him/herself while exposing his/her imprisonment within a treacherous reality; it also constantly keeps something concealed from the spectator. Whole scenes are filmed through visual barriers such as doors, window frames – and even the letterbox slots of  Erwin/Elvira’s apartment –, so that important parts of  the filmic action remain unseen. Characters turn their backs on the spectator in order to enter a distant room, leaving the viewer to guess at their movements and actions. In short: the spectator is forced into the role of a voyeur who is excluded from the scene (see Figure 5).

Figure 5.  Source: Fassbinder, In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, 00:57:18 h.

46 See also Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany. History, Identity, Subject and Bae Sang-Joon, Rainer Werner Fassbinder und seine filmästhetische Stilisierung (Remscheid: Gardez, 2005).

Aesthetic Manifestations of (Self-)Betrayal

223

At the end of  the film, even the culminating act of  betrayal – sex between the ‘rote Zora’ and Anton Saitz in Erwin/Elvira’s bedroom – and Erwin/Elvira’s death are filmed through the doorframe of  Erwin/Elvira’s bedroom and are thus visually withheld from the spectator. Keeping in mind the primary functions of  Fassbinder’s favourite aesthetic devices, including his overtly aesthetic and systematic attention to framing, one could speak of an aesthetics of  betrayal in a double sense. On the one hand, Fassbinder uses mirrors, the covering of  the face and visual barriers in an ambiguous, Sirkian (and thus melodramatic) way in order to express the betrayal suf fered by Erwin/Elvira and his/her own selfbetrayal. On the other hand, the film, through consistent employment of  these aesthetic devices, systematically hides something from the spectator and opens several convoluted levels of reality in which the spectator risks getting lost. These convoluted levels become directly tangible in a shot that shows Erwin/Elvira in one of  the alienated apartments of  the skyscraper where he meets Saitz; there, s/he appears enclosed by a great number of doorframes. The spectator’s gaze is directed through these doorframes toward Erwin/Elvira, who appears as a small vanishing point in a dauntingly symmetrical and confusing universe of optical illusions (see Figure 6).

Figure 6.  Source: Fassbinder, In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, 1:20:10 h.

224

Anne Julia Fett

Deception and betrayal are thus part of  the aesthetic construction of  Fassbinder’s film. However, they are not understood in the sense of melodramatic illusionism, but rather as elements that make us perceive the cinematic apparatus itself as unreliable, as a treacherous system, a construction and a factory of illusions. Fassbinder’s cinematic critique is especially shown in the parallels between Erwin/Elvira and the incarnation of cinematic imitation: Zarah Leander. Moreover, for Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s habit of drawing ‘constant attention to the presence of  the camera’47 alerts the spectator to the fact that he is watching nothing but the artificial product of  the director’s imagination. Through the obstruction of  the visual field (e.g. visual barriers), we experience the presence of  the camera as a medium that constantly keeps us separate from the characters’ actions instead of involving us in them. From this perspective, Fassbinder’s characteristic stylisation appears to be the very opposite of  Hollywood’s aesthetics – which force identification and sympathy by enclosing and involving the spectator in the filmic action, by creating visual transparency and hiding the filmic material.48 Fassbinder’s film aesthetics allow him to subvert the spectator’s sympathy, so that one can watch Erwin/Elvira’s melodramatic story from a distanced point of view that is more analytical than emotional or sentimental. In this way, Fassbinder finds ‘eine Art, Filme zu machen, die so schön und so kraftvoll und so wunderbar sind wie Hollywoodfilme und die trotzdem nicht unbedingt Bestätigungen sind’ [‘a way of making films that are as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as Hollywood films but which, at the same time, are not necessarily af firmations’].49 For Fassbinder, visuality, sentimental relationships (which are at the heart of  Hollywood melodrama) and (self-)betrayals are inseparably linked. Fassbinder’s In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, on the other hand, is a balancing act: It is a socially critical film about betrayal that converts an illusionist

47 Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany. History, Identity, Subject, 270. 48 This is achieved, in turn, through the hiding of  the camera and continuity editing. 49 Qtd. in Peter W. Jansen and Wolfram Schütte, eds, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), 93.

Aesthetic Manifestations of (Self-)Betrayal

225

genre and in so doing dismantles its manipulative sentimental mechanisms. The film embodies the paradox of an authentic and subversive melodrama.

Bibliography Barnett, David, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Brooks, Peter, ‘The Melodramatic Imagination’, in Marcia Landy, ed., Imitations of  Life. A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama (Detroit, IL: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 50–67. Elsaesser, Thomas, Fassbinder’s Germany. History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997). ——, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury. Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1985), vol. 2, 165–89. Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, Die Anarchie der Phantasie, ed. Michael Töteberg (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986). ——, Fassbinder über Fassbinder. Die ungekürzten Interviews, ed. Robert Fischer (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 2004). ——, Filme befreien den Kopf. Essays und Arbeitsnotizen, ed. Michael Töteberg (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984). ——, In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, DVD, 119 min. (Germany: Tango-Film/Pro-ject Filmproduktion im Filmverlag der Autoren, 1978). ——, Werkschau 28.5.–19.7.1992. Dichter, Schauspieler, Filmemacher (Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1992). Jansen, Peter W. and Wolfram Schütte, eds, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992). Klinger, Barbara, Melodrama and Meaning. History, Culture and the Films of  Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Kolakowski, Leszek, Freedom, Fame, Lying and Betrayal. Essays on Everyday Life (New York: Westview Press, 1999). Kuzniar, Alice A., The Queer German Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Nowell-Smith, Geof frey, ‘Minnelli and Melodrama’, in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1976–85), vol. 2, 190–4.

226

Anne Julia Fett

Sang-Joon, Bae, Rainer Werner Fassbinder und seine filmästhetische Stilisierung (Remscheid: Gardez, 2005). Sirk, Douglas and Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1997).

Part III

Ambiguous Characters – Scripted Masks

Anna Henke

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

Sing me to bed and sing me through the morning. I’m so grateful to you because tonight it’s become clear to me, tonight the great mysteries have unraveled and I’ve penetrated to the very core of  things. And I have stumbled on the answer and I’m not the sort of chap that would keep this to himself. Do you want to hear the answer? Are you truly hungry for the answer? Then you’re just the people I want to tell it to because it’s a rare thing to come up on this. I’m going to let you in on it now. The answer to the mysteries:    Do da dum dum de du dum dum. – Leonard Cohen, Tower of  Song (Live)

There is an Italian commonplace that has long identified the translator as a traitor: Traduttore, traditore. The pun renders the translator guilty by association. The associative logic that binds translator and traitor here is entirely auricular: everything hangs on the repetition of a similar set of sounds. Yet as much as it is built on reiteration, the wordplay relies just as heavily on the single phonetic shift that occurs in the transition from traduttore to traditore. Said again, the pun introduces an imperfection into the repetition. One vowel sound is imperfectly reproduced and out of  this unsound reproduction of  the sound, meaning is produced. The translator is damned the moment the vowel sound in his name is perverted, and this is fitting because it is precisely the translator’s inability to repeat the work’s original arrangement of sounds that earns him this stain to his reputation. What the Italian pun plays out on the level of  the letter, the translator himself plays out in the interplay of  languages. This is, at least,

230

Anna Henke

the common interpretation of  the pun: it is the very nature of  the translator’s task to betray the original. No matter how faithfully he undertakes his work, something is always lost in translation. The limitations imposed by the foreign tongue, into which he renders the original, must render him, in turn, a traitor to the work. When Walter Benjamin writes Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers [Task of  the Translator] in 1921, however, he identifies the translator as traitorous on dif ferent grounds. In order to hold open the possibility of a ‘zulänglichen Übersetzer[s]’1 [‘adequate translator’], Benjamin rigorously redefines the scope of  the translator’s task. The translator, by his measure, does not seek to reproduce the original but to generate a supplementary text. Benjamin is unequivocal when he states that the text constructed by the translator is an inessential accessory to the text: ‘Dass eine Übersetzung niemals, so gut sie auch sei, etwas für das Original zu bedeuten vermag, leuchtet ein.’2 [‘No translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original.’]3 For Benjamin, translation fails to constitute a betrayal of  the original, because betraying, or indeed, remaining faithful to the work itself is utterly beyond the translator’s strictly circumscribed purview. No work of  translation could ever presume to have bearing on the original. The work of art is in no way dependent on its translation: it remains untouched by good and bad translators alike. What is left to the translator is to prove faithful not to the original, but to the translation that takes shape in his hands. Only thereby can he remain faithful to his task as a translator. Though the original lies beyond the translator’s reach, what remains within his grasp is something Benjamin calls the law of  formation, which is sealed, yet legible to the translator, in the original text. This law is the blueprint according to which a new text 1 2 3

Walter Benjamin, ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, in Rolf  Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, eds, Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), vol. 4/1, 9–21, 9. Ibid., 10. Benjamin, ‘The Task of  the Translator’, in Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, eds, Selected Writings, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), vol. 1, 253–63, 254.

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

231

may take shape: ‘Übersetzung ist eine Form. Sie als solche zu erfassen, gilt es zurückzugehen auf das Original. Denn in ihm liegt deren Gesetz als in dessen Übersetzbarkeit beschlossen.’4 [‘Translation is a form. To comprehend it as a form, one must go back to the original, for the laws (sic) governing the translation lie within the original, contained in the issue of its translatability.’]5 Though it emerges over the course of reading the work of art, the relative pronoun ‘deren’ renders the ‘Gesetz’ the law of  the form it generates: it is proper to the translation it produces rather than to the original. That the law and original possess no direct relationship is again underscored by the fact that, though the law the translator develops resides ‘in ihm’ [‘in it’], the dative preposition suggests that, far from belonging to the original, the translator’s law bears only an indirect relation to the work itself. What intervenes between the law and the original is a figure Benjamin names the text’s translatability. Unlike the law he derives from it, the ‘dessen’ [‘whose’] that precedes ‘Übersetzbarkeit’ [‘translatability’] renders it proper to the work: the text’s translatability acts as much as the translator’s bridge to the work as it does as a barrier dividing him from it. That the translator’s engagement with the original is mediated through its translatability speaks to the fact that his task af fects his gaze. His work imposes certain limits on his perception of  the original. While his task cuts him of f  from the original per se, it concomitantly opens up a vision of  the law of  the work for him. It of fers him a view of  the work that is denied the average reader. He is permitted to perceive the work as if it were a law. Locked in the text’s translatability, the ‘Gesetz’ reveals itself  to the translator’s eyes alone. Recognizing the law as the limit of  his ability to perceive the work means recognizing the all-too-strict limits imposed by his task, but it also serves to reopen the possibility of proving himself a faithful translator. His adequacy is measured according to the humility with which he accepts the narrow scope of  his intervention and confines

4 5

Benjamin, ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, 10. Benjamin, ‘The Task of  the Translator’, 254.

232

Anna Henke

himself  to calculating the law of a form, which, in the end, can have no ‘significance as regards the original’. Insofar as the translator follows the law of  formation to the letter, it is possible for him to faithfully construct something like the signature of  the work in another language. Yet Benjamin’s translator nevertheless proves himself a traitor. His secondary composition proves to be problematic by virtue of  the fact that the translator’s foreign tongue is ill-equipped for the task to which he has repurposed it. He is forced to contort the concrete rules of grammar that obtain in his own tongue in order to remain faithful to the law of a work that obeys an alien morphology. By this logic, the translator’s task is to betray his own language for the sake of  the law he finds in the original text. Benjamin’s translator is no traitor because he is incapable of reproducing the work; reproduction is beyond his scope. He proves himself a traitor because he, of necessity, betrays his mother tongue for the sake of a foreign law, laid down by a foreign text. He opens up unimagined linguistic possibilities – possibilities heretofore forestalled by the conventions governing the speech patterns of  his vernacular. His work betrays consolidated grammatical laws in order to describe anew the ambit of  his tongue. This treason becomes the price he must pay to remain faithful to his task, for it is in his hands that the limits of  his own language are redrawn. Benjamin’s literary critic, not his translator, will come under discussion in the pages to follow, but it should be noted that the figures bear a family resemblance: both readers are treasonous. Each decides to honour something that appears to him over the course of reading the work of art above the rules and conventions handed down to him by his community. Like his translator, Benjamin’s critic finds himself  forced to switch allegiances, becoming a critic of  his own community in an ef fort to represent his reading of  the work of art to a society whose history has not thus far prepared it for what the work of art has revealed to him. Only with his intervention does it become possible for his community to recognize that which it was heretofore too blind to see – or had forgotten it knew. Whereas the translator redefines the linguistic possibilities of  his mother tongue, the critic is faced with critiquing the consolidated ideas and assumptions that

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

233

underpin his society’s institutions in order to redefine them with reference to something he heard first in the work. That being said, the two figures should not be conf lated. The critic’s purview finds its most precise definition in contradistinction to the translator. While translator and critic alike defect from their community and ally themselves instead with an aspect of  the work of art that has previously gone unheeded, only the translator’s faithful fingertips can produce a form according to a law that bears a definite relation to the original, by way of  the text’s own translatability. The critic cannot. For Benjamin, a text may possess its own ‘Übersetzbarkeit’, yet he never speaks of critiquability being proper to the original. Benjamin’s critic, in contrast to his translator, is the consummate traitor. Not only is he denied access to the translator’s Gesetz, there is no equivalent determinate principle governing his intervention. There is nothing to which he is permitted to remain faithful; thus, there can be no such thing as an adequate critic. The translator’s Gesetz is a mechanism of  formation; it has little to do with content, but concerns itself simply with form. Benjamin’s translator is no interpreter of  the work in the common sense of  the word. He undertakes his work less with reference to the supposed referents than to the sounds or graphic presentation of  the words. It is by virtue of  his total commitment to the superficial details of  the work’s appearance that he is capable of constructing a form from a definite law he locates in the text. The critic, on the other hand, sets out to account for what Benjamin, in his 1924–5 essay on Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Af finities] calls the ‘Wahrheitsgehalt’ [‘truth content’] of  the text. This is to say, his reading is not confined to reproducing the mode of  the work’s signification but also extends to its capacity to signify. This added layer of complexity interferes with the integrity of  the critic’s gaze, preventing the work of critique from ever obtaining the degree of clarity of fered by the translator’s Gesetz. In the absence of a critiquability proper to the text, Benjamin tethers the potential to critique solely to the critic’s capacity for judgement. He writes, ‘Alle Schönheit hält wie die Of fenbarung geschichtsphilosophische Ordnungen in sich. Denn sie macht nicht die Idee sichtbar, sondern deren

234

Anna Henke

Geheimnis’.6 [‘All beauty holds in itself, like revelation, the orders of a history of philosophy. For beauty makes visible not the idea but rather the latter’s secret’.]7 The orders according to which critique unfolds over time belong not to the work proper, but to the perception of the work as beautiful in the eyes of its critics. Judgement is the hinge upon which the relationship between truth and beauty turns. That being said, the link between them is by no means straightforward. Benjamin hints at the complexity of  the relationship when he insists that what the recognition of  beauty opens up for the critic is not a clear and distinct idea; his judgement points the way instead to a secret or a puzzle. Benjamin’s insistence on the centrality of judgement for the critical enterprise can be elucidated when read in conjunction with his remarks at the essay’s outset, where he defines the critical moment of  legibility thus: Und mit einem Schlag entspringt ihm daraus ein unschätzbares Kriterium seines Urteils: nun erst kann er die kritische Grundfrage stellen, ob der Schein des Wahrheitsgehaltes dem Sachgehalt oder das Leben des Sachgehaltes dem Wahrheitsgehalt zu verdanken sei.8 [And with one stroke, an invaluable criterion of judgement springs out for him; only now can he raise the basic critical question of whether the semblance/lustre (Schein) of  the truth content of  the work is due to the material content or the life of  the material content is due to the truth content.]9

Though critique hinges on the critic’s capacity for judgement, Benjamin’s critic is no judge of  the work of art. Though the criterion of judgement springs out for him, he never completes the act. It is ‘unschätzbar’ [‘invaluable’], not simply because this inestimable realisation first makes critique possible, but because the critic cannot ‘schätzen’ [‘treasure’] it. He deserts

6 7 8 9

Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1/1, 123–201, 196. Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 297–361, 351. Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 125. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 298.

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

235

his judgement in order to complete the work of critique. For no absolute answers are revealed to him: instead, at the critical juncture he poses the undecidable question of whether the truth in the work was there to begin with or whether it became legible only with his intervention. Having given up the chance to render decisive judgement, he is of fered the opportunity to meditate instead on the mystery that shrouds the moment in which something becomes legible. Only once the opportunity to speak of  the work in definite terms has passed does another occasion present itself. Rather than elucidating an idea that supposedly underpins the work, he contemplates the problem – the ‘Grundfrage’ [‘basic question’] – that grounds the work of interpretation as such. The critic is traditionally understood as the judge of  the work of art: he is supposed to possess the judgement necessary to betray the bedrock of  truth beneath the work’s seemingly unintelligible material content. Benjamin’s literary critic, however, is obliged to renounce any desire to pierce the material veil. After all, the work of art is paper-thin. Rather than celebrating the power of  his judgement to unearth a clear and distinct idea from the depths of  the work, Benjamin’s critic is faced with repudiating its ef ficacy. After the moment of  legibility, he is left to marvel at the fact that no penetrating vision was ever required. What he reads was already inscribed on the surface of  the work, not hidden in fictional depths. Thus, he undertakes his reading in full view of  the conceivable needlessness of  his intervention. The fact that the work of art is wholly superficial circumscribes the purview of  the critic’s ‘judgement’ so strictly that it is never clear that he does anything when he speaks. Nevertheless, the critic at least appears to perform an original speech act when he sketches a new reading of  the work. For even as he, in a sense, rewrites the work, he alters the perception of it in the collective imagination. By raising his voice, he intercedes in the history of its interpretation. While ideally he says nothing new, the critic’s words are, at the same time, his and his alone. He decides that it is time for him to raise his voice and betray an aspect of  the work that hitherto remained hidden in plain sight. His intervention is not necessitated by the work; for no critiqueability proper to the text calls for its interpretation. The responsibility for his decision to write himself into the history of  the work’s legibility lies solely at his feet.

236

Anna Henke

As such, it falls to him to define the parameters of  his intervention. For he cannot simply regurgitate the work; the moment he begins to read, he has already said too much. However, insofar as he can never suf ficiently uncover the Geheimnis of  the work, he will never say enough. The only tool at the critic’s disposal – his judgement – is so unsuited to the job for which the critic has repurposed it that it renders him inadequate to the job he would undertake. Thus, although Benjamin attributes a definite ‘Aufgabe’ [‘task’] to his translator, he never speaks of  the critic’s task. The former’s task is set by the law he perceives over the course of reading the original, but because it is the critic’s lot to draw the limits of  his judgement in the very moment insight becomes possible, the only task to which the critic obtains is the task he sets for himself. While the translator’s task is objective, the critic’s is subjective. The same holds true of  their vision of  the work. The objectivity of  the translator’s gaze is legible in the fact that translatability – the ground of  the translator’s ‘Gesetz’ – is proper to the art object. Because ‘critiqueability’ is in no sense a reserved potential proper to the original, however, the same cannot be said of  the critic’s gaze. This dif ference is underscored when Benjamin, in his well-known image of  the shattered vase, describes the correspondence of  the work of  translation to the work of art as that of  two shards of a broken vessel, whose jagged edges match in every detail. The two fragments do not resemble one another, yet they fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, following each other ‘in den kleinsten Einzelheiten’10 [‘in the smallest details’11]. No subject determines the intimate retracing of  the contours of  the work of art that generates a translation: the two works bear an objective relationship to one another. By contrast, Benjamin’s introduction of  the palaeographer-critic into the scene of reading on the first pages of  his essay on Goethe’s novel serves to implicate the critic in his own intervention. Man darf ihn mit dem Paläographen vor einem Pergamente vergleichen, dessen verblichener Text überdeckt wird von den Zügen einer kräftigeren Schrift, die auf 10 11

Benjamin, ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, 18. Benjamin, ‘The Task of  the Translator’, 260.

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

237

ihn sich bezieht. Wie der Paläograph mit dem Lesen der letztern beginnen müsste, so der Kritiker mit dem Kommentieren.12 [One may compare him to a palaeographer in front of a parchment, whose faded text is covered by the lineaments of a more powerful script which refers to that text. As the palaeographer would have to begin by reading the latter script, the critic would have to begin with the commentary.]13

Whereas the eye of  Benjamin’s translator, directed simply toward the original, is able to isolate a clear and distinct law of  the text, the critic’s eye is distracted by a writing that is not proper to the work and impairs his ability to read it. A distinct lack of objectivity clouds the critic’s eyes – to the point where he is prevented from perceiving the object of  his gaze. His attention is arrested by the interpretations of  his predecessors, which possess a stronger hold on his attention than the Sachgehalt, or material content, of  the work. In contrast to the faithful, monogamous relationship between the work and its translator, Benjamin’s critic has a roving eye. His vision is unfaithful to the work: yet precisely this infidelity, which clouds the critic’s eyes from the outset, af fords him a dif ferent set of possibilities and responsibilities than those af forded the translator. That the work appears to each new critic clothed in the works of  the critics that preceded him speaks to the fact that, unlike the translator, the critic is implicated in the history of  the work on the historical stage. Though the text’s translatability holds open the possibility of numerous translations, no translator undertakes his work with reference to the laws others may have encountered there. No work of  translation points to any other, for the work of  translation has nothing to do with the history of a work’s translation. But what Benjamin’s image of  the parchment makes clear is that, unlike the translator, the critic seeks to account not simply for the artwork, but for the history of its interpretation to-date. The critic is faced with accounting for the fact that he stands at a particular juncture in history.

12 13

Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 126. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 298.

238

Anna Henke

Precisely as a result of  his wandering eye, the critic’s work functions as an archive of  the critiques that laid the groundwork for his own intervention. Benjamin begins his essay by advising his critic to start with the history of a work’s critique; when he first encounters it, the text itself is ‘verblichen’ [‘faded’]: it stands at the outermost limits of  the critic’s perception. Thus, at the beginning of  Benjamin’s essay, the critic assumes the role of  the chronicler of  the work’s reception: he traces the ‘Leben des Sachgehaltes’ [‘life of  the material content’] in order to betray this history for the sake of a ‘Wahrheitsgehalt’ [‘truth content’] that has yet to be recognized. But this is only one of  two scenarios Benjamin lays out for how the critic ought to approach a literary text, for the moment of  legibility does not, in fact, emerge in relief against history like an antithesis in relation to a thesis. Critique is not simple negation: it possesses the power to overthrow an idea only insofar as it takes aim not directly at the idea, but at its hidden – even secret – assumptions. For Benjamin, unveiling these assumptions means turning from the reception of  the work to the Sachgehalt. The moment of  legibility – the betrayal of a new ‘Schein des Wahrheitsgehaltes’ [‘appearance of  truth content’] – arises solely from the text. At the essay’s outset, the Sachgehalt is verblichen; by its conclusion, it is so illuminated, it’s blinding. The critic comes much closer to Benjamin’s translator as a result, yet he never extricates himself  from his involvement in the work’s history. The critic begins with the work’s past; by reading it anew, he gives it a future. Benjamin begins with the history. He defines his critic in relief against an idea of  the literary critic that attained cultural currency when Goethe attempted to ensure that Die Wahlverwandtschaften was well-received. In this investigation of  the stakes of  Benjamin’s redefinition of  the critic’s purview, I will thus take the reception that Goethe had orchestrated for his novel as my starting point. * * * Benjamin maintains that the author betrayed his readers, giving them bad advice – in German one could say schlechten Rat, or Ver-Rat – about how to read his work: ‘Das Verständnis der Wahlverwandtschaften aus des Dichters eigenen Worten darüber erschließen zu wollen, ist vergebene Mühe. Gerade

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

239

sie sind ja dazu bestimmt, der Kritik den Zugang zu verlegen.’14 [‘To wish to gain an understanding of  Elective Af finities from the author’s own words on the subject is wasted ef fort. For it is precisely their aim to forbid access to critique’.15] In addition to arguing that Goethe misled his critics when he revealed to them the idea behind his work, Benjamin accuses the author of promoting a false idea of art criticism. Namely, the author asked his critics to remain faithful to the original intent he betrayed in his commentary. He sought to foreclose the kind of  betrayal that is commonly attributed to the translator, who cannot repeat the work word-for-word. By revealing an idea to which his critics could pledge allegiance, Goethe seemed to of fer them the chance to prove themselves adequate critics. He f lattered them thereby, for by seducing them into believing they could perfectly receive his work, which he handed down to them as a beautiful, shining idea, Goethe believed he could ensure its immortality in the human imagination.16 Kurz nach ihrer Vollendung schreibt er [Goethe] an Zelter: ‘Wo Ihnen auch mein neuer Roman begegnet, nehmen Sie ihn freundlich auf. Ich bin überzeugt, daß Sie der durchsichtige und undurchsichtige Schleier nicht verhindern wird, bis auf die eigentlich intentionierte Gestalt hineinzusehen’. Dies Wort vom Schleier war ihm mehr als Bild – es ist die Hülle, welche immer wieder ihn bewegen mußte, wo er um Einsicht in die Schönheit rang.17 [Shortly after its completion, he writes to Zelter: ‘Wherever my new novel finds you, accept it in a friendly manner. I am convinced that the transparent and opaque veil will not prevent you from seeing inside to the form truly intended’. This mention of  the word ‘veil’ was more to him than an image – it is the veil that again and again had to af fect him where he was struggling for insight into beauty.]18

Benjamin paints the grand idea of  the chemical theory of  ‘Wahlverwandt­ schaften’ [‘elective af finities’], which Goethe espoused in his commentary on his Wahlverwandtschaften, as an elaborate feint. He writes, ‘Dem Streit 14 15 16 17 18

Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 145. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 313. Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 151. Ibid., 197. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 352.

240

Anna Henke

der Meinungen nicht schweigend zu folgen, hatte Goethe einen doppelten Anlaß. Er hatte sein Werk zu verteidigen – das war eine. Er hatte dessen Geheimnis zu wahren – das war das andere.’19 [‘Goethe had two reasons for not following the conf lict of opinion [regarding the critical reception of  his work] in silence. He had his work to defend – that was one. He had its secret to keep – that was the other’.]20 Goethe’s sleight of  hand, Benjamin argues, was designed to draw attention away from the material content of  his work, which would give the lie to the single, unifying idea he claimed underpinned it. He seduced his readers into aspiring for ‘Einsicht’ [‘insight’] into beauty, for the more they attempted to ‘look into’ – ‘hineinsehen’ – his work to see the intended form beneath its material veil, the more transparent that veil grew before their eyes. Far from elucidating the Sachgehalt, the idea rendered the ‘Schleier’ [‘veil’] transparent because it drew readers’ attention away from it. By naming the veil superf luous, Goethe seemed to of fer critics a loophole that would release them from the arduous work of criticism. He asked critics to allow his text to remain permanently verblichen and to rest their eyes instead on his commentary. With the gift of perfect judgement, he of fered his critics the fruit of  the tree of  knowledge. He stroked their egos in order to seduce them with his beautiful idea into silence, betraying them in the hope that his commentary could ensure the novel a place as a permanent fixture of  the canon. For, despite what Goethe suggested to Zelter, it is not as an idea that a work survives in the human imagination. What sparks the imagination, rather, are the secrets that defy articulation: it is the inexhaustibility of a work’s secret that moves us to read it again and again over the course of  history. By pointing his critics to a straw man, the author sought to preserve the work’s secret – its Sachgehalt, not its Wahrheitsgehalt – from critics who would attempt to betray it. Goethe’s mistake was this: he assumed that the Geheimnis belonged to the art object – as if  the author had locked it in the critiqueability of  the text – and he sought to throw away the key. For Benjamin, however,

19 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 143. 20 Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 311.

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

241

there is no such thing as the critiqueability of a text. The Geheimnis is not bestowed on the work by its author: he is a ‘Bildner’, or ‘image-maker’.21 The author writes the work; it is the reader who transforms the images he encounters there into a secret. The perception of  the work of art ‘als Geheimnis’ [‘as a secret’]22 belongs to him because his judgement is never adequate. As such, it is incumbent on the critic to transform the work into the Geheimnis – and it was from this responsibility that Goethe distracted his readers. The work’s immortality is not bestowed, it is proven. The failure of critic after critic to exhaust the ‘Geheimnis’ they confront in the work is what lends the work fame. Precisely because his judgement is ill-suited to the task, the critic is of fered the chance to participate in the history of  the work’s legibility. His lack of insight lends it a life on the historical stage. It falls to him not to receive the work, but to perceive it anew. This is what is at stake when Benjamin counter-poses the figure of  the Hülle to Goethe’s Schleier. Raising his perception and obtaining a ‘wahre Anschauung des Schönen’ [‘true view of  the beautiful’] demands,23 ironically, that the critic give up the vision of  the work as a beautiful, unified idea in order to recognize its material content ‘als Hülle’ [‘as a veil’].24 This ‘undurchsichtige Hülle’ [‘opaque veil’] confronts the critic with the limits of  his perception. Ironically, he begins to read the moment his vision runs up against a brick wall. Only then do his eyes encounter, as if  for the first time, the text that has hindered his ‘Einsicht’ [‘insight’]. He can be under no delusions that he sees through the matter to an unmediated truth; instead, he must train his eye to read the matter alone. In Benjamin’s hands, truth is transformed from a substantial idea hidden beneath the work of art’s veil (‘Wahrheit’ / ‘truth’) into an attribute of perception (‘die wahre Anschauung’ / ‘the true view’); the latter can be applied only to the perception that recognizes its imperfection.

21 22 23 24

Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 159. Ibid., 196. Ibid., 195. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 351. Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 195.

242

Anna Henke

The critic’s eye lands on stable ground only after he has curtailed his insight because, despite appearances, no stable truth anchors the work’s material veil. Precisely the opposite is true: the work is a (relatively) stable linguistic construct. The readings to which it gives rise are far more mutable. The work teaches Benjamin’s critic that he looks at the world with a lazy eye when he searches for insight. Ideas only pretend to timelessness; it is the material, which we generally dismiss because it decays through time, that brings secrets within the critic’s grasp. The material reproducibility of a work of art will become significant for Benjamin’s later work.25 In the Wahlverwandtschaften essay, however, what is at issue is the decay that the work’s relatively stable Sachgehalt appears to undergo over the course of  history. This deterioration stems not from the decay of its ‘Sache’ [‘material’], but from the work of its critics, who seem to transform its Wahrheitsgehalt over the course of  history. For the critic is not charged with the task of preserving the work in pristine condition. He acts as the af fineur, who oversees its apparent decay. He is charged with recognizing the marks that time and critique have left on the work and to add the traces of  his own hand to the tangle of  lines and sound that will greet the critics to come. * * * Goethe’s unsound advice to his critics did not have the desired ef fect of convincing his readers universally to sit back and judge his text beautiful, but his commentary successfully fuelled the idea that an objective critic could see through the dissimulating work to the idea beneath it. By baiting critics with a chance to strip the truth bare, Goethe stripped the critic of  his capacity to recognize the work as secret. The latter half of  Benjamin’s essay is a polemic against Georg Simmel and K.W.F. Solger, who, he argues, fell prey to the ‘banale Philosopheme’ they inherited from Goethe that equated ‘Schein’ [‘semblance’] and ‘Schönheit’ [‘beauty’] and dismissed these as the superf luous trappings of a substantial kernel of  truth. Goethe’s

25

See Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier­ barkeit’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1/2, 431–69, 438f.

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

243

commentary convinced both that they could possess the naked truth as an enduring idea if  they simply stripped away the dissembling semblance that lent the work its patina of  beauty: Nicht also ist, wie banale Philosopheme lehren, die Schönheit selbst Schein. Vielmehr enthält die berühmte Formel, wie sie zuletzt in äußerster Verf lachung Solger entwickelte, es sei Schönheit die sichtbar gewordene Wahrheit, die grundsätzlichste Entstellung dieses großen Gegenstandes. Auch hätte Simmel dies Theorem nicht so lässlich aus Goetheschen Sätzen, die sich dem Philosophen oft durch alles andere empfehlen als ihren Wortlaut, entnehmen dürfen.26 [Beauty, therefore, is not itself semblance, as banal philosophemes assert. On the contrary, the famous formula, in the extreme shallowness of  Solger’s final development of it – beauty is truth become visible – contains the most fundamental distortion of  this great theme. Simmel likewise should not have taken this theorem so venially out of  Goethe’s sentences, which often recommend themselves to the philosopher by virtue of everything except their literal wording.]27

Simmel and Solger alike swallowed Goethe’s insistence that the work of art was an idea and with it, the author’s idea of art criticism. Their desire for insight blinded them to their responsibility to critique; as such, Benjamin names Simmel’s reading ‘lässlich’ [‘venial’]. For Benjamin, it is incumbent on the critic to turn traitor. He must betray the idea of  the work that has obtained until now in order to reveal an aspect that was inconspicuous before. In his critique, the dregs of  the Sachgehalt strike the eye and ear with enough force that their significance becomes obvious. Benjamin underscores his judgement of  Simmel’s failure to demonstrate the necessary cunning with his use of  the subjunctive. The wordplay is subtle, but it indicates what is at stake when Benjamin insists that the critic must commit a mortal of fense against Goethe’s doctrine, which sought to blind critics to the power of  the material content of  the work. The subjunctive generally denotes an unreal or counterfactual situation, in contrast to the matter-of-fact indicative. But the reading Simmel

26 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 194–5. 27 Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 350.

244

Anna Henke

actually performed appears not in the indicative, but in the subjunctive, underscoring the degree to which his misguided assumptions are a fabrication devoid of a foothold in anything material. Meanwhile, the way Simmel ought to have read, but failed to, is set of f  by commas in a telling clause that appears in the indicative. This clause indicates clearly how Benjamin wishes his critics to read. It holds the secret that Goethe attempted to keep from them. Unlike Simmel, who found himself distracted by the intention of  Goethe’s sentences, Benjamin’s critic must read word for word. At first glance, there appears to be a certain contradiction in Benjamin’s accusation that Simmel read according to everything but the literal wording. In a sense, Simmel’s fault is that he took Goethe at his word: he read too literally. But to read literally for Benjamin does not mean to uncritically assume the meaning of words; quite the opposite. Simmel’s mistake was that he bound Goethe’s words into the service of  his sentences: he sought security in the ideas Goethe laid down in his commentary. Because he read according to the sense of  the word as dictated by these sentences, Simmel took Goethe not so much ‘beim Wort’ [‘at his word’] as ‘bei den Sätzen’ [‘at his sentences’]. He looked around the word – to ‘alles andere’ [‘everything else’] – in order to define it. Simmel sought the work’s ‘Gesetz’ [‘law’] in Goethe’s ‘Sätzen’. Yet the Gesetz falls only within the compass of  the translator, who, unlike the critic, is confined to reconstructing the Sachgehalt of  the work. To equate the Gesetz with the work’s Wahrheitsgehalt mistakes the text’s law for a comprehensible idea – but this was precisely the mistake Goethe encouraged. He promoted the idea that his commentary laid down the law of  his text. To read literally for Benjamin means to read the word à la lettre. The constitutive parts of  the word, the sounds that construct it – in German, ‘die Laute des Wortes’ – are critical for Benjamin. To read the ‘Wortlaut’ is to betray the sense given to the word by the authoritative sentence, in order to hear the nonsense that comprises it. To read it, one must take the word apart. Nonsensical ‘Laute’ are the substance of which words are made – not ideas. Uncoupled from its presumed signified, the disarticulate sounds of  the signifier give themselves to be heard. This is what it means to encounter the work as an impenetrable Hülle: to reach the limits of one’s perception – that point at which one encounters not the sense of 

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

245

the word, but its musicality. Precisely by staving of f  the moment when sounds turn into sense, the critic sets the stage for the emergence of a new valance of  the word. Not only does Benjamin demand that the critic tear his gaze away from the supposed signifieds of  the text and approach the text instead with an eye to the singular construction of its signifiers, he follows his own advice to the letter and makes the same demand of  his readers. Not only is his argument spelled out in his grammatical formulations, even his diacritics call for critical attention. This is how he trains his reader to read around the sounds of words: scattered throughout the essay, his umlauts lay a trail for the reader determined to read the Wortlaut. These diacritical marks teach critics how to read around (um) the sound (Laut) of  the word. Benjamin’s inconspicuous umlaut functions as the material mark of  the veil of semblance. Like a veil, the diacritic hangs over particular vowels, marking and remarking the trace of semblance. By representing ‘Schein’ [‘semblance’] in the material form of  the diacritical mark, Benjamin underscores its materiality. What is at stake here is that semblance dissembles only as long as it is ignored in the hope of unearthing some other grounding substance. Where Simmel and Solger attempted to uncover the naked truth behind a veil they dismissed as superf luous, Benjamin’s critic works to lay the veil itself  bare. His umlaut-cum-veil, like his substitution of  ‘Schleier’ [‘veil’] with its near-synonym ‘Hülle’,28 directs his reader’s attention onto the forms of semblance that are right before his eyes. Just as an umlaut alters the value of a sound in the ear, so do Benjamin’s umlauts, by calling attention to the Schein, work to alter the value of semblance in the reader’s estimation. Fittingly, the diacritical veil that hangs over Benjamin’s Hülle reminds the reader of its status as semblance. Goethe’s Schleier, which conceals its position as mediator, of fers no such reinforcement. But just as the veil may prove either transparent or opaque, the umlaut can mark the presence of  the Schleier or Hülle. Hanging over the Hülle, the umlaut places emphasis on the fact of mediation, but as an index of  Schein, it suggests dif ferent readings depending on its context. This is already apparent 28

See above, 239.

246

Anna Henke

in Benjamin’s critique of  Simmel, where the arrangement of umlauts in the sentence speaks to the degree to which he was deceived. That Simmel falls prey to Goethe’s unsound advice is inscribed in the fact that umlauts bookend his lässliche interpretation of  Goethe’s unsound Sätzen: ‘Auch hätte Simmel dies Theorem nicht so lässlich aus Goetheschen Sätzen, die sich dem Philosophen oft durch alles andere empfehlen als ihren Wortlaut, entnehmen dürfen.’29 [‘Simmel likewise should not have taken this theorem so venially out of  Goethe’s sentences, which often recommend themselves to the philosopher by virtue of everything except their literal wording.’]30 Semblance is deception insofar as it is misunderstood, as it was by Simmel, to be the unnecessary trimmings of a substantial truth. Believing an objective vision of  truth was within his grasp, Simmel attempted to escape the realm of  Schein. That his eyes thereby fell prey to the deception of  beauty is accented by the umlauts that enfold the sentence, imprisoning Simmel in the veil he refused to recognize. In contrast to this, no trace of an umlaut clouds the clause that indicates how Simmel ought to have read. Benjamin’s umlauts continue to make his case for him when he argues, contra Solger’s false equation of  beauty and ‘Schein’, that while all beauty is semblance, not all semblance is beauty. Solger assumed that ‘beauty is truth become visible’ because Goethe’s ‘Schleier’ generated the idea of  beauty as ‘scheinhafte Schönheit’ [‘beauty having the character of semblance’].31 This formulation mistakes beauty for the noun or ‘Substantiv’ and ‘Schein’ for the adjectival, nonessential attribute of a beautiful substance. The misconstruction of semblance as the merely ‘[S]cheinhafte’ [‘having the character of semblance’] promulgates the fiction that ‘Schein’ is the ‘überf lüssige Verhüllung der Dinge an sich’ [‘superf luous veiling of  things in themselves’].32 It tempts critics to strip away the frontloaded superf luity of umlauts in order to reveal the longed-for unmediated idea. But, having stripped away the adjectival modifier, what is left is ‘Schönheit’. The critic 29 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 194–5 (my emphasis). 30 Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 350. 31 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 197. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 353. 32 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 195.

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

247

in search of insight, like Simmel, is ensnared again by the umlaut, which hangs like a veil over beauty. Critics who fell prey to this delusion did not simply believe they could exchange their subjectivity for objectivity; they believed they could escape the realm of appearances and uncover the noumenon, or intelligible. This is the height of  folly; indeed, it amounts to idolatry. No eyes are more clouded than those belonging to the critic who believes he has witnessed the naked truth as a single, shining idea. As the play of  Benjamin’s umlauts makes clear: he who fails to appreciate the inescapability of mediation is left adoring the same veil he believes he has discarded. He traps himself in a false belief. The inescapability of  Schein ensures that we all adore the veil; the trick is to learn to read in recognition of  this fact. In contrast to Goethe’s Schleier, which generates the fiction of  ‘scheinhafte[n] Schönheit’, the Hülle renders beauty the attribute of  Schein: ‘der schöne Schein ist die Hülle vor dem notwendig Verhülltesten.’33 [‘The beautiful semblance is the veil thrown over that which is necessarily most veiled’.]34 Properly conceived, beauty appears as an adjective describing the appearance assumed by ‘Schein’. While it is a fallacy to believe that beauty may be stripped of its status as semblance and appear transformed into the noumenon, it is possible to unveil the semblance of its value as beautiful. That being said, though semblance finds its accurate depiction as a noun or ‘Substantiv’, stripped of  the beauty that veils it with an umlaut, Schein does not appear substantial. Benjamin writes: ‘Denn weder die Hülle noch der verhüllte Gegenstand ist das Schöne, sondern dies ist der Gegenstand in seiner Hülle. Enthüllt aber wurde er unendlich unscheinbar sich erweisen.’35 [‘For the beautiful is neither the veil nor the veiled object but rather the object in its veil. Unveiled, however, it would prove to be infinitely inconspicuous.’36] The apparent object beneath the veil disappears when Schein is divested of its

33 Ibid. 34 Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 351. 35 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 195. 36 Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 351.

248

Anna Henke

beauty. Stripped of  the adjective that gave it value, Schein appears to the critic as ‘unscheinbar’ [‘inconspicuous’]. By suspending his judgement, the critic does not escape the realm of  Schein and betray an unmediated kernel of  truth; rather, what appears is unapparent. The encounter with Schein is a moment where nothing betrays itself as conspicuous. Semblance, denuded of its beauty, leaves the critic not with the naked truth, but with the seemingly insignificant veil in hand. Though he is at last confronted with something material in the ‘Sachgehalt’ of  the text, rather than the apparition of substance beneath the veil, he finds himself at a loss. Having truncated his judgement in the very moment it became possible, the critic is left bereft of any means of evaluating the worth of  the veil that still remains to him. He finds himself, like Faust, holding a robe and veil in his arms after the Goddess they once clothed vanishes. The challenge the critic faces is to overcome the idea that these vestments are merely superf luous accessories and to recognize the veil, as Mephistopheles reminds Faust [‘den Faust mahnen (läßt)’], as ‘göttlich­’ [‘divine’], though it no longer clothes the ‘Göttin’ [‘Goddess’] herself: Halte fest, was dir von allem übrig blieb. Das Kleid, laß es nicht los. Da zupfen schon Dämonen an den Zipfeln, möchten gern Zur Unterwelt es reißen. Halte fest! Die Göttin ist’s nicht mehr, die du verlorst Doch göttlich ist’s.37 [Hold fast what of it remains to you. The robe, do not let go of it. Demons are already tugging at the corners, would like To snatch it down into the underworld. Hold fast! It is no longer the goddess whom you lost, Yet it is divine.]38

37 38

Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 197. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 353.

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

249

Despite the fact that it comes from a devil – or perhaps because it comes from one – this advice, unlike Goethe’s misleading commentary, is sound.39

39 Benjamin cites the above passage from Faust II alongside a passage from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in which Mignon, like Helena, in passing from the world, leaves ‘Den Gürtel und den Kranz zurück’ in order to dif ferentiate these two figures from Ottilie, the heroine of  Die Wahlverwandtschaften. The three figures together, Benjamin argues, possessed particular importance for Goethe: ‘Drei Gestalten seines Lebenswerks sind diesem Ringen, das wie kein anderes ihn erschütterte, entwachsen: Mignon, Ottilie, Helena’ (197). [‘Three figures from his lifework have grown out of  this struggle, which shook him like no other’ (352).] For Benjamin, these are the three figures that speak most clearly of  his struggle for ‘Einsicht in die Schönheit’ (197) [‘insight into beauty’ (352)] and reveal something of  the nature of  Schein and its relation to beauty. Unveiled, Helena and Mignon disappear, but these disappearing beauties leave seemingly superf luous vestments in their wake. Such is not the case with Ottilie. ‘Unterschieden von diesen aber bleibt die Hülle von Ottilie als ihr lebendiger Leib’ (197). [‘In contrast to these, however, the veil of  Ottilie remains as her living body.’ (153)] Ottilie is inseparable from her veil – the beauty, disappearing, leaves behind nothing on which the hand might fix its grasp. Such too was the idea Goethe had for his novel writ large. He intended to deny critics purchase on the Sachgehalt, the veil of  the work, leaving them no choice but to cling onto the beauty that fades away before their eyes over the course of  the novel, i.e. no choice but to judge his work beautiful if  they sought to capture it at all. This is to say, he sought to enmesh the critics in his own project of attempting to commemorate in his novel a loved one now lost to him. Benjamin writes, ‘Denn was ist in alledem klar, wenn nicht eins: daß die Gestalt, ja der Name der Ottilie es ist, der Goethe an diese Welt bannte, um wahrhaft eine Vergehende zu erretten, eine Geliebte in ihr zu erlösen’ (199). [‘For what is clear in all of  this, if not one thing: that it is the figure – indeed the name – of  Ottilie which spellbound Goethe to this world, so that he could truly rescue someone perishing, could redeem in her a loved one?’ (353)] Mephistopheles does not advise Faust to hold fast to Helena’s garments in order to rescue the perishing Goddess, however. Instead, he advises Faust to turn to the veil that still remains to him, which is no longer the goddess but göttlich in its own right. This is the advice Benjamin passes onto his critics, who must forego judging the work beautiful in order to read its Sachgehalt. In the figure of  Ottilie, Goethe believed he had constructed a beauty that could never be unveiled, that is to say, an enduring beauty. In her, as in his novel, he sought to reconcile Schein and Schönheit. Benjamin’s project is to dif ferentiate the two. Rather than sending his critics in search of a beauty that could not be unveiled, Benjamin points them not to the appearance of  beauty, but to the

250

Anna Henke

Just as ‘Wahrheit’ [‘truth’] becomes an attribute of perception, ‘wahre Anschauung’ [‘true perception’], and ‘Schönheit’ becomes an adjective appended to ‘Schein’, ‘Göttin’ undergoes a corresponding metamorphosis into ‘göttlich’. It becomes the mark of  Helen’s material vestments. Like truth and beauty, the divine loses its status as a substantial noun in order to become a descriptor of  the seemingly insubstantial veil of semblance. Just as any veil can prove to be either Hülle or Schleier, the word göttlich retains the double-veilance of  being simultaneously divine and merely god-like: ‘gottähnlich’. Robe and veil earn the moniker göttlich, in part because they remind Faust of  the goddess – i.e. since they are gottähnlich – but also, ironically, because they function as the trace of  her absence. Mephistopheles advises Faust to hold fast to her garments, not out of some idolatrous attachment to the beauty they once clothed, but because, as the figure of  Schein, this material possesses the power to transport him into the next act: ‘Helenens Gewande lösen sich in Wolken auf, umgeben Faust, heben ihn in die Höhe und ziehen mit ihm vorüber.’40 [‘Helena’s garments dissolve into clouds, surround Faust, life him up, and drift past with him.’]41 Mediation is göttlich, not because it seems – but only seems inconspicuous appearance of  the veil itself: Schein. He cites the figure of  Helena in order to sketch out the significance of  the veil, which, separated from its wearer, appears at first to be insignificant. As we shall see later in this paper, Benjamin will turn to the to the figure of  the Beloved in the novella-within-the-novel in order to construct an alternative ‘Unenthüllbarkeit’ (197) [‘inability to be unveiled’ (352)] which takes apart the Unenthüllbarkeit Geothe sought to grant Ottilie. Unlike the heroine of  the novel, the Beloved of  the novella is no enduring beauty; for Benjamin, no beauty cannot be unveiled. It is Schein not Schönheit that is unenthüllbar. Only the veil cannot be unveiled. The Beloved of  the novella does not strike her lover as beautiful. The lover of  the novel grasps the naked body of  his beloved instead in a moment when his eyes are veiled and do not perceive its nakedness. Instead, he is struck by the Hoheit of what appears before his veiled eyes: he experiences the veil as divine. 40 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, ed. Albrecht Schöne, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe Sämtliche Werke, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer et al, 40 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), vol. 7/1, 385. 41 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. Cyrus Hamlin (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 282.

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

251

– to recall what is lost to the past, but because the veil drives the narrative onwards: it sets the stage for the future. The veil holds the inef fable secret of  transformation through time, a secret Benjamin names ‘das Lebendige’ [‘the appearance of  life’].42 Emancipating the work from its historical interpretation is the precondition of calling its future into being. Thus, Benjamin’s critic is charged with recognising the work’s Sachgehalt, which, at first, he could only judge to be the trappings of a beautiful idea, as the precondition of  the work’s future. This is no straightforward task, however, since, divested of its beauty, the work dissolves, becoming ‘unscheinbar’ [‘inconspicuous’]. The Sachgehalt is finally within his grasp, but, divested of  his insight, what he encounters first and foremost is his inability to perceive it. Like Helen’s veil, it disappears in a cloud of smoke – the critic must allow himself  be carried away by it. If  the critic were instead a translator, divorcing the signifier from the signified would reveal to him the law of  the text. But even once he gives up reading the words according to the sentences that build their sense and turns instead to the nonsensical sounds that construct the word, he does not grasp the text as a law, but ‘als Geheimnis’ [‘as secret’].43 Because his eyes are not objective, before the text can speak to the critic, he is doomed to encounter it as something that defies his ability to build an image of it. Legibility begins when the critic grasps the work’s Sachgehalt as ‘das Ausdruckslose’ [‘the expressionless’].44 The sublime potential of  the Sachgehalt becomes evident only once the reader realizes that he is not underwhelmed by the veil, but overwhelmed by it. Confronting an expressionless Hülle, he confronts the limits of  his perception – the object of  the exercise is to redraw those limits. The precondition of reading the work anew is the recognition that the work resides beyond his reach. Thus, Benjamin shifts the site of unveiling from the object to the critic’s eyes. The work unveils the fact that the

42 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 126. My translation. 43 See above, 240f. 44 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 194. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 350.

252

Anna Henke

Geheimnis does not belong to it, but is a product of  the critic’s subjective judgement. The revelation draws a veil over his eyes. To work towards a ‘reinere Betrachtung’ [‘purer observation’] of  the veil of semblance does not result immediately in a more precise knowledge of  the contours of  the work; rather, this ‘purer contemplation’ betrays the ‘Anschauung des Schönen als Geheimnis’ [‘view of  the beautiful as that which is secret’].45 Ironically, the ‘reinere Betrachtung’ is the perception that ‘betrachtet nicht’ [‘does not look’].46 The critic is faced with working towards a purer perception not of  the work, but of  the barrier against which his eyes have run – allowing the knowledge of mediation to overwhelm him – until mediation overwhelms his desire for knowledge. Because his encounter with the Hülle is predicated on his judgement, or rather, on his decision to suspend it, the work, which first appeared beautiful, points him to the inextricability of mediation: ‘der schöne Schein ist die Hülle vor dem notwendigen Verhülltesten’ [‘the beautiful semblance is the veil thrown over that which is necessarily most veiled’.]47 Just as they did in Simmel’s case, diacritical marks bracket the exercise. Though it installs the critic firmly in the realm of phenomena, the umlaut at the end of  the sentence does not pass judgement on the critic as it did with Simmel. It speaks rather to the fact that there is no resolution to the problem posed by mediation. Simmel and Solger attempted to look through the veil in pursuit of  lasting insight into the (presumably enduring) nature of  the work. No enduring truth-as-content is available to Benjamin’s critic: the appearances that strike him will belong to a particular moment in history. Unlike the lasting form the translator constructs, the new path the critic charts through the as-yet unfamiliar topography of  the work is revealed

45 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 195. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 351. 46 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 196. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 352. 47 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 195. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 351.

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

253

to him ‘zur Unzeit’ [‘at the wrong time’].48 The intractability of mediation ensures that the history of  the work’s legibility will tell the story of  the failure of each critic to exhaust the Geheimnis they read there. Thus, Benjamin’s metaphor of  the work of art as a piece of parchment bearing the graf fiti of its critics becomes an image of  the ruination time brings to all philosophical endeavours. However, insofar as he allows the Hülle to arrest his gaze, an enduring truth is within the grasp of  the critic’s understanding: that of mediation. His desire for knowledge of enduring truth is simultaneously arrested and exhausted by the veil of semblance. He can know he does not know. ‘So ist denn der Schein in ihr eben dies: nicht die überf lüssige Verhüllung der Dinge an sich, sondern die notwendige von Dingen für uns’ [‘so then the semblance in it is just this: not the superf luous veiling of  things in themselves but rather the necessary veiling of  things for us’], writes Benjamin.49 To the misapprehension of  beauty of  the critic who understands semblance to be unnecessary deception, Benjamin opposes the appreciation of  ‘Schein’ as ‘die notwendige von Dingen für uns’ [‘the necessary (veiling) of  things for us’]. Because ‘Verhüllung’ [‘veiling’] is implied, but does not actually take its place before ‘things’, the diacritical veil descends only over the preposition that determines our relationship to things in the world: ‘für’ [‘for’]. The umlaut thus takes its place as the veil that divides us from objects even as it grants them to us. Said again, things are the ‘Forderungen’ [‘exactions’] that semblance demands,50 and though it divides us from them as long as we are in this world, the veil is also what makes it possible for subjects to have a relationship to objects. Insofar as they give themselves to us as phenomenal appearances, the veil is there for our eyes – or rather, our eyes are themselves a veil.

48 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 195. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 351. 49 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 195. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 351. 50 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 159. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 323.

254

Anna Henke

Mediation is not the translator’s law because it is simultaneously prescriptive law and proscriptive taboo.51 The critic comes closest to comprehending it as the former by attempting to encounter it first as the latter. Only by confining himself  to the realm of mere appearances, to what lies within the reach of  his sense perception, can he stretch his senses to new – perhaps even heroic – heights. In this condition, he might perceive something he did not know he knew. The critic sets the parameters of  his self-imposed task, for the work of art acts as a parchment on which he experiments with the limits of  his perception at a given moment in time. Over the course of reading, he trains himself  to better perceive the ‘shocks that f lesh is heir to’ (Ham. III i 62–3), for in these sudden shocks lie the keys to recognising what has been overlooked until now. In so doing, the critic potentially shifts that horizon for his community as well. The critic is charged with betraying and redefining our scope as ‘Empfindungssysteme’ [‘systems of  feeling’] in a world that we are still and always only now getting to know.52 It is in this sense that the work, in the hands of its critics, holds ‘geschichtsphilosophische Ordnungen in sich’ [‘orders of  the history of philosophy’].53 * * * In a sense, Benjamin redefines the work of reading as a suspended judgement of  the beautiful followed by the sublime moment of  legibility – except the critic does not transcend the veil in order to read the work. By attempting to faithfully observe the law of mediation as an absolute proscription on graven images, the critic is confronted by the Sachgehalt, which appears to him as ‘die Hülle vor dem notwendigen Verhülltesten’ [‘the veil thrown over that which is necessarily most veiled’]. Das Ausdruckslose, or the expressionless, overwhelms him. His ref lective judgement comes to his aid only 51 52 53

After all, the translator does not mediate between the ‘Sachgehalt’ and ‘Wahrheits­ gehalt’, but confines himself solely to the former. I borrow this term from Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Anmerkungen zum Ödipus’, in D.E. Sattler et al, eds, Sämtliche Werke, 20 vols (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1988), vol. 16, 250. Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 159. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 351.

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

255

to fail spectacularly: the super-sensible faculties are powerless to extricate him from his dif ficulty. He cannot transcend the veil. His ref lective judgement can point him only to the unresolvable antinomy of  legibility: ‘Und mit einem Schlag entspringt ihm daraus ein unschätzbares Kriterium seines Urteils: nun erst kann er die kritische Grundfrage stellen, ob der Schein des Wahrheitsgehaltes dem Sachgehalt oder das Leben des Sachgehaltes dem Wahrheitsgehalt zu verdanken sei.’54 [‘And with one stroke an invaluable criterion of judgement springs out for him; only now can he raise the basic critical question of whether the semblance/lustre (Schein) of  the truth content of  the work is due to the material content or the life of  the material content is due to the truth content’. ]55 Having encountered the limits of  his subjective vision, the critic is struck blind, but ref lecting on the problem does not bring enlightenment. The ref lective judgement cannot transcend its own subjectivity. The critic finds himself again enmeshed in the veil, a fact illustrated by the ‘sei’ [‘is’] that ends the sentence in the subjunctive. Unlike Simmel’s venial (lässliche) reading, however, the definition of  the critic’s purview is composed in ‘Konjunktiv I’ [‘subjunctive I’], which does not designate f lights of  fancy but is the form of indirect speech. The critic cannot get the distance from the problem of mediation necessary to achieve an unmediated view of it. Precisely because the Geheimnis belongs to the critic’s eyes, he cannot purely perceive it. And yet, though a faithful perception of  the Geheimnis is not within the critic’s scope, insofar as he is able to project the secret onto it, the work allows the critic to get limited distance from it. The work brings a purer perception of  the Geheimnis within his purview. This mediation is critical, for the contemplation of mediation threatens to end the critical enterprise in despair. Ref lection does not permit the critic to transcend the overwhelming encounter with dem Ausdruckslosen: it only redoubles it, confronting the critic with an irresolvable question. The critic’s understanding can refract the law it encounters in the Hülle into two irreconcilable options. It thereby of fers the critic the chance to

54 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 125. 55 Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 298.

256

Anna Henke

recognize that there is no resolution to the problem legibility poses, but his understanding can take him no further. He cannot faithfully know mediation as a law. His desire to know is exhausted by the veil. From this point on, another desire must carry him forward if  he is to read the work of art. He turns from this last, most powerful, manifestation of  the Wahrheitsgehalt to a disarticulate Sachgehalt. It allows him to betray his desire to know ‘jenes Unscheinbare’ [‘what is inconspicuous’] as an unobtainable, substantial law.56 The price of  this betrayal is high; it demands that the critic break faith with the philosophical desire for enduring truth in order to participate in history. Though the encounter with profound silence is the precondition of  his work, he must turn from the contemplation of  the inef fability of mediation in order to read to his community. His desire to breathe new life into the work drives him beyond the moment in which nothing strikes him as apparent, in the hope of grasping something that had remained unscheinbar about the work until now. Philology – the adoration of  the veil – rescues him from despair. The problem of  the mystery of  legibility does not point the way to the sense of psychological superiority to the veil that has overwhelmed it:57 that was Simmel’s and Solger’s mistake. What recuses him is the work of art, which, still a dark shroud, presents itself  to his all-too-human senses, awakening his imagination. Stripped of  the understanding, his imagination, co-ordinated with the sounds that hit his ear, renders legible what was illegible a moment ago.58 Like Faust, whose wonderment at the toll of  bells interrupts his contemplation of suicide and brings him back into the

56

Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 195. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 351. 57 Ibid. 58 The imagination, stripped of  the understanding, calls for the philosophy-to-come not because it prophesies what will be, but because the imagination is capable of achieving a purer perception of what already is: ‘as a de-forming agent, [the imagination] must refer to something formed beyond itself.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘Imagination’, in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 280–2, 281. The imagination is what makes ‘Dinge[n] für uns’ [‘things for us’]: it tethers us to the world. Its forms are not ‘Gestalten’ [‘formed shapes’], but ‘Erscheinungen’ [‘appearances’].

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

257

world, the critic is rescued from despair at the absolute limit of  his judgement by the free play of sounds. The moment he turns to the Sachgehalt of  the work, ‘[verf lüchtigt sich] in nichts jenes Unscheinbare […], womit Of fenbarung die Geheimnisse ablöst’ [‘the inconspicuous evaporates into nothing, whereupon revelation takes over from secrets’].59 But when it comes – because it is not the return of  his judgement – this revelation, too, is blinding. Though the event of  legibility will permit him to read to his community after he has ref lected on it, the event itself – in which an appearance becomes apparent – is a moment in which the critic is hit by another blinding Schein. The placement of  the line from Klopstock with which Benjamin introduces the essay is fitting; for, though it hits the critic only belatedly, the ground for this second shock to the critic’s system was already prepared by the work of art: ‘Wer blind wählet, dem schlägt Opferdampf | In die Augen.’60 [‘Whoever chooses blindly is struck in the eye with the smoke of sacrifice.’]61 The first ‘Schlag’ [‘strike’] to the critic’s system was a substantial noun that extinguished his intellect’s capacity to see substantial truth, incapacitating his insight. Here, the disarticulate sounds of a disintegrated text are set in motion: they begin to speak to the imagination. The Wortlaut, or sound of  the word, hits a critic blinded to all intents and purposes as he gropes his way over the surface of  the work, driven only by his love of words. If  he has a purpose it is only to read: to rescue the life of  the work for his community, who cannot hear it for the din of  the ideas past critics have brought to bear on it. Stretching the physical limitations of  his senses to new heights, he seeks only to catch in the free play of sounds that sound in his ear something he never realized he was hearing. It is in this condition that the decomposed material of  the work finds his eyes – forcing him to turn and blink. Though he will never measure up to him, the critic finds his ideal in the figure of  the young man from the novella-within-the-novel, whom

59

Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 195. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 351. 60 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 125. 61 Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 297.

258

Anna Henke

Benjamin claims takes the idea of  the novel apart and displays its secret: ‘Er betrachtet nicht ihren nackten Körper und gerade darum nimmt er seine Hoheit wahr.’62 [‘He does not look (betrachtet) at her naked body. And just for that reason, he perceives its majesty.’63] Driven only by the desire to save the life of  his beloved and bring her back to the world, the youth does not look down on her body and judge it naked – but takes her ‘Körper’ [‘body’] true, so to speak. (With ‘take […] true’, I refer to the German verb for ‘perception’, ‘wahrnehmen’, which literally means ‘to take true’.) Driven by a completely dif ferent desire, blind to what he does, he strips his eyes of  the desire to see nakedness. And in this moment when he does not look, the veiled body is unveiled in its (umlaut-less) ‘Hoheit’ [‘highness’]. He does not know it, but for a moment he is transported back to the Garden of  Eden. Goethe famously defined the genre of  the novella as the portrayal of an ‘unerhörte Begebenheit’ [‘unheard of event’]. In the event of  legibility, what is at stake is also an ‘ungehörte Begebenheit’ [‘unheard event’], though, at the same time, it is possible that the event of  legibility may be the only thing we ever hear – we just do not know it. What the youth does is beyond the purview of either the translator or the twice-blinded critic: he rescues the body of  his beloved in tact. The critic, meanwhile, rescues the body of  the text only piecemeal from obscurity. Resuscitating the complete work is beyond his purview – but his citation gives it new life on the historical stage. The critic is charged with striving towards a merely ‘reinere Betrachtung des Naiven’ [‘a purer contemplation of  the naïve’].64 But this is what is at stake when Benjamin demands that his critic suspend his judgement. Before his blinded eyes, stripped of  their desire to see it stripped down, the Sachgehalt, which he at first dismissed as superf luous clothing, ‘unvolkommen … sich eröf fnet’ [‘imperfectly opens itself ’].65 Like the youth, the critic is deaf  to the better part of what he hears. He 62 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 196. 63 Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 352. 64 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 195. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 351. 65 Ibid.

Sound and Unsound Advice: Unveiling Walter Benjamin’s Umlaut

259

will betray it in order to articulate it, but inscribed in his reading are the inconspicuous traces of an event that defies articulation. For in the end, despite all his best ef forts, the critic cannot betray the Geheimnis. The secret is not exhaustible: every attempt to betray the Geheimnis betrays only the Geheimnis. Ironically, this is what makes the ‘reinere Betrachtung’ possible for the critic in the first place: the work of art cannot be unveiled. Benjamin calls it a construction in which ‘die Zweiheit von Nacktheit und Verhüllung noch nicht besteht’ [‘the duality of nakedness and veiling does not yet obtain’].66 Precisely because he cannot perceive the work in its nakedness, the critic experiences something like the youth’s blindness to nakedness. When the words strike him blind, they strike him blind to their nakedness. But the critic cannot bear this blindness. Instead, he ref lects on the mode of perception that has suddenly become possible for him. Benjamin writes: ‘In der hüllenlosen Nacktheit ist das wesentlich Schöne gewichen und im nackten Körper des Menschen ist ein Sein über aller Schönheit erreicht – das Erhabene, und ein Werk über allen Gebilden – das des Schöpfers.’67 [‘In veilless nakedness the essentially beautiful has withdrawn, and in the naked body of  the human being are (sic) attained a being beyond all beauty – the sublime – and a work beyond all creations (sic) – that of  the creator.’]68 The naked body that betrays itself anew to the critic in the event of  legibility is not that of  the work, but his own. The words on the page seem to have transcended themselves – but they have not changed. Instead, his perception has transcended the limits that confined it until now. The work as Hülle reminds him of what one calls in German the ‘sterbliche Hülle’ [‘mortal shell’]: the veil belonged to his eyes all along. Thus, the event of  legibility reveals itself  to be sublime after all, not because it permits the critic to unveil the work, but because the critic’s inability to 66 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 196. Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 351. 67 Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’, 196. 68 Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Af finities’, 351. Please note: ‘Gebilden’ would be better translated as ‘constructions’, in light of  Benjamin’s definition of  the artist as a ‘Bildner’ rather than a ‘Schöpfer’.

260

Anna Henke

perceive the work’s nakedness allows him to slough of f  the limits that had confined his own perception. In the blink of an eye, he is brought back to a new world; he walks away from the work wearing new skin.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf  Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppen­häuser, 7 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–89). ——, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Fenves, Peter, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of  Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Johann Wolfgang Goethe Sämtliche Werke, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer et al, 40 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994). ——, Faust, trans. Cyrus Hamlin (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000). Jacobs, Carol, The Dissimulating Harmony (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Nägele, Rainer, ed., Benjamin’s Ground: New Readings of  Walter Benjamin (Detroit, IL: Wayne State University Press, 1988).

Rebecca Haubrich

Deceptive Letters: The Structure of  Substitution and Exchange in Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘Der Findling’

Prelude: Possibly the Deception How is it possible for a Prelude to be deceiving? What are the options to facilitate linguistic concealment within a text? How could any readers trust a written response to these questions without distrusting their own reading? They should not. If  the structure of  language envelops possibilities to deceive beyond the realm of semantics, no attempted response can be doubtlessly trusted. Like any text, it could always, intentionally or not, play into a deception – taking part in a linguistic play of  formal variations and dissimulations among letters, syllables or words. Considering this, a second reading of the heading ‘PRElude: POSSIbly The DeCepTion’ reveals that it, logogryphically, already enfolds its opposite – the Postscript. Thus, the antonyms play with and respond to each other, intrinsically belong together, while structurally veiling their relation under a deceiving impression of  their respective, independent singularity. The logogryph is thus a linguistic coincidence capable of structurally veiling a dif ferent or even diametrically opposed meaning. Its sheer possibility within language is a testimony to the ubiquitous deceptive potential of any linguistic structure, such as words or letters. This dangerous potential is one of  the most intricate biblical motifs, as it is essential for the distinction between Christ’s Second Coming and the preceding advent of  his impostor: Paul, Silvanus and Timothy caution: εἰς τὸ μὴ ταχέως σαλευθῆναι ὑμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ νοὸς μηδὲ θροεῖσθαι, μήτε διὰ πνεύματος

262

Rebecca Haubrich

μήτε διὰ λόγου μήτε δι᾽ ἐπιστολῆς. [‘That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter’, 2. Thess 2:2.] This warning of  the erratic, deceptive potential within spirit, word and letter accompanies the evangelists’ prediction of  the impostor’s impending coming in his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians. Their list enfolds the three means of  this ἄνομος, this one beyond any law,1 who, by his coming, will imitate God in order to claim His throne as his own: ὁ ἀντικείμενος καὶ ὑπεραιρόμενος ἐπὶ πάντα λεγόμενον θεὸν ἢ σέβασμα, ὥστε αὐτὸν εἰς τὸν ναὸν τοῦ θεοῦ καθίσαι ἀποδεικνύντα ἑαυτὸν ὅτι ἐστὶν θεός. [‘Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of  God, showing himself  that he is God’, 2. Thess 2:4.]. According to Paul, the ἀντικείμενος – God’s ‘essential opponent’ – will show himself as God, an imitation Him in order to take His place by virtue of  the three recounted means of deception. As one of  these means, the λόγος [‘word’] is depicted as susceptible to a linguistic imitation elaborate enough to grant a deceptive substitution and thereby facilitates the opponent’s transcending motion. The adverbial phrase ἐπὶ πάντα λεγόμενον θεὸν ἢ σέβασμα [‘over all that is said by God and worshipped’ – and therefore over all] illustrates this motion first as transgressive – a quality enabled and shared, as I will argue, by the λόγος. Notable is Paul’s distinction between λόγος [‘word’] and ἐπιστολή [‘letter’], which points towards a crucial, yet far from self-explanatory dif ference between these linguistic units. As the quoted triad refers to distinct means of deception, the dif ference between λόγος and ἐπιστολή must be bound up with their respective deceptive potentials. As Paul uses the term ἐπιστολή in the context of  his message, an Epistle, it is justified to translate it as letter in the sense of an addressed message. Hence, its deceptive potential lies either semantically in the message itself or in the directed motion of addressing. Contrary to this, the single word, which is not a message in itself, structur-

1

Usually translated as ‘Wicked’ in the biblical framework, this derivative from the Greek νόμος (law) is literally translatable as ‘lawless’ and here, ‘above law’ – a translation more suitable for the proposed context, since what is in question here are form and structure – the laws of  language (2. Thess 2:8).

Deceptive Letters

263

ally enfolds this potential in its essential variability, enabling duplications as well as simulations and substitutions. The diverse means of  linguistic deception are crucial strategies applied in Heinrich von Kleist’s narrative ‘Der Findling’ [‘The Foundling’] (1811), a narrative that unfolds as an intertwined fabric of substitution and exchange as well as desire, deceit and detection. After his son’s death, the tradesman Antonio Piachi takes in the orphaned boy Nicolo, whom he dresses exactly like the deceased and loves just the same. Ultimately, he signs his estate over to the young man, unaware of  how vicious, lecherous and peccable his stepson is turning out to be. Unnoticed by anyone, Nicolo bears an uncanny resemblance to a former love-interest of  his stepmother Elvire, a chevalier by the name of  Colino, who died due to an injury he received while saving her. Becoming aware of  this semblance through a series of coincidences, Nicolo believes himself  to be the object of  her desire – a belief  that is reinforced by his discovery of  the logogryphic relation between his and Colino’s name. Furious upon the revelation that he is, in fact, not desired by Elvire, Nicolo dresses up as his antagonist in order to rape her. Antonio Piachi interrupts the deed, yet is banned from his home – as the estate already belongs to Nicolo. When Elvire dies from the aftermath of  the incident, Piachi vengefully kills his stepson by crushing his skull against a wall and stuf fing the property deed down his throat – a brutal murder for which he is sentenced to death. Yet, instead of confessing and repenting, he swears to follow the false son into hell, haunting him forever: ‘[E]r würde noch dem ersten, besten Priester an den Hals kommen, um des Nicolo in der Hölle wieder habhaft zu werden.’2 [‘He would even go after the throat of  the first priest that comes along in order to once again take hold of  Nicolo in hell.’] His last threat expresses the desire to take hold of  Nicolo once again and thus completes the narrative’s structure of substitution and exchange.

2

All translations of  Kleist’s narrative are mine. Heinrich von Kleist, ‘Der Findling’, in Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle, eds, Sämtliche Werke. 20 vols (Basel: Stroemfeld/ Roter Stern, 1997), vol. 2/5, 19–58, 58.

264

Rebecca Haubrich

Similes Professionally taking part in an economy of exchange as a ‘Güterhändler’ [‘tradesman’],3 Antonio Piachi travels the country with his son Paolo for business at the beginning. They reach Ragusa, a city concurrently ravaged by a contagious epidemic described as a ‘pestartige Krankheit’ [‘plague-like disease’] and ‘Übel’ [‘evil’] – rendered, that is, as something similar yet not identical with the plague.4 Due to this abstract description, already the initial situation of  the narrative is not an original, but a simile – a simile that is itself an Übel, endowed with the fatal characteristics of a viral infection. Sympathetically, Piachi rescues the already infected orphan Nicolo from incarceration. The connection between infection and simulation is reinforced by the boy’s first gestures upon encountering the tradesman, as he raises his hands ‘nach Art der Flehenden’ [‘in the way of  the pleadingones’] and seems ‘in großer Gemüthsbewegung zu sein’ [‘to be in great emotional turmoil’].5 This particular phrasing implies, analogously to ‘pestartige Krankheit’, more than an imitation on the boy’s part: the substantivization of  the verb f lehen turns the act into a character, a character whose self is, in essence, acting, simulation. In this way, Nicolo is ab initio a figure of substitution.6 By taking him in, Piachi unknowingly propels the chaining of infection and simulation, sacrificing his own son, who dies in quarantine, having been ‘angesteckt’ [‘infected’] by the recovering Nicolo – who is, in turn, adopted by Piachi in lieu of  the deceased.7 The son’s death occurs within three days, a time frame over-determined biblically as the interim between Christ’s death and resurrection (Mk 8:31). Regarding this analogy, in which Paolo is Christ’s simile, it is necessary to 3 Ibid., 19. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Cf. Richard Block’s reading of Nicolo as a substitute in ‘The Bloody Price of Adoption: Betrayal and Absolution in Kleist’s “The Foundling”’, The New Centennial Review 12/3 (2012), 27–52. 7 Ibid., 21.

Deceptive Letters

265

inquire into Nicolo’s newly gained position as the son’s substitute. Instead of  the resurrection, a substitution takes place that is itself a substitute, which analogously replaces as such Christ’s Second Coming. The son’s substitution is granted by the hospital’s provosts, who claim, ‘daß [Nicolo] Gottes Sohn wäre und niemand ihn vermissen würde’ [‘that Nicolo was God’s son, wherefore he would not be missed by anyone’].8 The allusion to the boy’s orphanhood enfolds an ambiguous contradiction in terms: whereas God’s Son, the Messiah, is by definition the one whose inexecutable coming is always awaited and therefore missed, Nicolo is essentially neither awaited nor missed, yet only therefore able to actually come as the son via imitation. An analogy between Nicolo and the biblical ἄνομος is suggested and made explicit by Kleist through the adjectives ‘satanisch[…]’ [‘satanic’] and ‘höllisch’ [‘infernal’].9 The concurrence of  Paolo’s omitted resurrection and substitution is marked by the temporal conjunction ‘nun’ [‘just now’],10 which also pinpoints the coincidence of  Paolo’s death with the reopening of  the city gates as quarantine is lifted. In this precise instant, Nicolo steps into the son’s place – a son with whom he already shares the diminutive suf fix – olo – as Piachi adopts him ‘an seines Sohnes statt’ [‘in place of  his son’].11 For Nicolo to live, Paolo had to die, while he only had to die in order for Nicolo to live. At this moment, the substitutor comes to life as the son, where all similarities to the Gospel prepare the coming of  the son: he who returns from the grave, in Kleist’s text, is an impostor. The explicit transfer of  Paolo’s ‘sämmtliche Kleider’12 [‘complete clothing’] to Nicolo is an indication of  the importance that cloth and fabric rhetorically hold in the text as means of deceit as wells as linguistic disguise, as when a misdeed is ‘bemäntel[t]’ [‘cloaked’].13 This exemplary metaphor indicates that cloth and fabric are structurally related to the deceptive power of  language – a relation captured by the Latin term textum, 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 50, 54. 10 Ibid., 22. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 24. 13 Ibid., 53.

266

Rebecca Haubrich

which designates both cloth and text and thereby hints towards the veiling and revealing potential of  language. Disguising clothes coincidentally constitute, moreover, Nicolo’s second substitution in the narrative: being ‘zufällig’14 [‘by chance’] dressed up as a young chevalier for carnival, he unknowingly resembles his stepmother Elvire’s former love-interest Colino. Also by chance, Nicolo encounters Elvire in this disguise, causing her to become ‘starr vor Entsetzen, wie ihre Zunge’ [‘struck by terror, just like her tongue’].15 In the instant of deception, when Elvire wants to believe Nicolo to be Colino, her speech is interrupted and remains incapable of grasping the seemingly mysterious duplicity, which persists in being ‘in ein ewiges Geheimnis gehüllt’ [‘veiled in an everlasting secret’].16 In analogy to the disguising clothes, an analogy established through the verb ‘gehüllt’ [‘veiled’], silence becomes the bearer of secrets, putting in question that which is not said. In the aftermath of  this sighting, Elvire is described as having to overcome not the encounter itself, but its contingency: ‘durch die natürliche Kraft ihrer Gesundheit [überwand sie] den Zufall’ [‘by the natural power of  her health she overcame the contingency’].17 A description which, by contrasting contingency and health, links the former to the initial plague-like illness and thereby also to contagion and simulation, coining it as connected to the text’s fabric of desire, deceit and detection. Already prior to this incident, Elvire is characterized by a ‘stille[r] Zug von Traurigkeit’ [‘quiet trace of sadness’],18 which is rooted in yet another coincidence that made the mix-up of  the disguised Nicolo possible in the first place. As a child, this daughter of a cloth dyer – she is originally connected to fabric, fabrication – had been caught in a fire that ‘zu gleicher Zeit in allen Gemächern […] emporknitterte’ [‘simultaneously increased in all chambers’].19 The sudden combustion of  the entire house transformed it into an enclosed infernal realm. Its burning is described by the 14 Ibid., 30. 15 Ibid., 32. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 32–3. 18 Ibid. 26. 19 Ibid. 27.

Deceptive Letters

267

metaphorical verb ‘emporknitter[n]’, which alludes more to cloth than fire. This realm corresponds, in combination with the ignition’s temporal contingency, to the biblical rhetoric of  the passage: while the house is burning as if  built from ‘Pech und Schwefel’ [‘fire and brimstone’] Elvire soars ‘zwischen Himmel und Erde’ [‘between heaven and earth’].20 This rhetoric alludes to a passage of  the Book of  Revelation, which answers to Paul’s proclamation of  the ἄνομος: καὶ ἐπιάσθη τὸ θηρίον καὶ μετ᾽ αὐτοῦ ὁ ψευδοπροφήτης ὁ ποιήσας τὰ σημεῖα ἐνώπιον αὐτοῦ, ἐν οἷς ἐπλάνησεν τοὺς λαβόντας τὸ χάραγμα τοῦ θηρίου καὶ τοὺς προσκυνοῦντας τῇ εἰκόνι αὐτοῦ· ζῶντες ἐβλήθησαν οἱ δύο εἰς τὴν λίμνην τοῦ πυρὸς τῆς καιομένης ἐν θείῳ. [‘And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had received the mark of  the beast, and them that worshipped his image. These both were cast alive into a lake of  fire burning with brimstone’, Rev 19:20.] The ψευδοπροφήτης [‘false prophet’], the ἄνομος [‘one beyond law’], whose end the verse depicts and whose σημεῖα [‘signs’] are those of deceit, will burn in a lake of  brimstone – a phrase which Luther translates as a ‘feurige[r] Pfuhl […], der mit Schwefel brannte’ [‘fiery pool burning with brimstone’], a translation echoed by Kleist in his description of  the fire. This lake is evoked two more times in the Book of  Revelation, first as the devil’s final destination (Rev 20:10) and second as a scene of eternal suf fering called θάνατος ὁ δεύτερος [‘second death’ Rev 21:8]. The designation δεύτερος marks this death as an Other, depicting it as something distinct from itself – precisely as the plague is distinct from the plague-like illness, the Übel at the beginning of  the narrative. Correspondingly, the only phrasing for Elvire’s possible death in the fire is also ‘Übel’21 – a phrasing that reinforces, combined with the biblical rhetoric, Kleist’s representation of an infernal scene, framing the combusted house as a realm of  hell. Into this hellfire ‘plötzlich’ [‘suddenly’] Colino invades and is able to rescue Elvire;22 he dies himself subsequently. By giving his life for Elvire’s, his death is both a sacrifice and a substitution.

20 Ibid. 21 Kleist, ‘Der Findling’, 27. 22 Ibid., 29.

268

Rebecca Haubrich

Its description as an ‘unbegreif liche Schickung des Himmels’ [‘inconceivable act of providence’] frames this substitution as essentially messianic and coins Colino as Nicolo’s counterpart.23 After witnessing through a keyhole a peculiar scene between Elvire and an unrecognizable love-interest, Nicolo desires to disclose the identity of  the one whom he believes to be his stepmother’s lover. Yet, upon sneaking into her chamber, he discovers ‘nichts, das einem Menschen auch nur ähnlich war […]: außer dem Bild eines jungen Ritters in Lebensgröße, das in einer Nische der Wand, hinter einem rothseidenen Vorhang, von einem besondren Lichte bestrahlt, aufgestellt war’ [‘nothing even similar to a human being (…): except the portrait of a young chevalier in life size, positioned in a niche of  the wall, behind a red silken veil, irradiated by a peculiar light’].24 Instead of  finding Elvire’s suspected lover, as he had hoped, Nicolo discovers a portrait of  the young chevalier Colino inside her chamber. As an image – a simulacrum – the discovery is decisively distinct from a human being: not the slightest ‘Ähnlichkeit’ [‘similarity’] can be found between model and image. Yet Nicolo – unknowingly – resembles the portrait and thus representation itself. Therefore, the incisive phrasing, ‘nichts, das einem Menschen auch nur ähnlich war’, is a remark that also dif ferentiates Nicolo from a human being, alluding to his essential substitutionality. This allusion is complemented by the portrait’s display, which simulates a clerical reliquary in its particular framing and lighting, a simulation augmented by Elvire’s ‘Vergötterung’ [‘idolisation’] of  the image.25 Contrary to a reliquary, however, the image preserves no physical remnants, but Colino’s semblance – semblance itself  being the object of preservation and idolization, granting the possibility of physical resurrection, which is, as with Paolo, once again omitted by the substitute. The semblance between Nicolo and the portrait is not discovered by himself, but by the child Klara, a telltale name alluding to the child’s

23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 39. 25 Cf. ibid., 44.

Deceptive Letters

269

clear insight.26 She points it out through a peculiar exclamation: ‘Gott, mein Vater! Signor Nicolo, wer ist das anders, als Sie?’27 [‘God, my Father! Signor Nicolo, who is this, but you?’] Astonished, Nicolo replies jokingly: ‘[W]ahrhaftig, liebste Klara, das Bild gleicht mir, wie du demjenigen, der sich deinen Vater glaubt!’28 [‘Truly, dearest Klara, the image resembles me just like you resemble him, who believes himself  to be your father!’] The ambiguity of  the exchange is grounded on the relation between Klara’s interjection and Nicolo’s punchline – specifically, on their mutual reference to the father. By disputing his semblance to the portrait, Nicolo also implies that Klara is not, as stated earlier,29 the Cardinal’s daughter and thereby creates a vacancy in the father’s place. This vacancy is then filled by Klara’s expletive, ‘Gott, mein Vater!’, which assigns – as Nicolo does resemble the portrait – fatherhood to him, putting him, the son, once more into the position of  God the Father’s substitute. In this structure, the possessive pronoun ‘mein’, which refers equally to God and the image, is situated as a double bind that places Nicolo peculiarly in-between, vacillating incessantly between father and son. Still puzzling over the portrayed chevalier’s identity, Nicolo finds himself playing with six ivory dice, keepsakes from his childhood, which carry the letters required to spell out his name. Once belonging to a whole alphabet of dice, the six remaining letters are said to be preserved because of  their close relation to their namebearer:30 Da nun Nicolo die Lettern […] in die Hand nahm und […] damit spielte, fand er – zufällig, in der That, selbst, denn er erstaunte darüber, wie er noch in seinem Leben nicht getan – die Verbindung heraus, welche den Namen C o l i n o bildet. Nicolo, dem diese logogriphische Eigenschaft seines Namens fremd war, ward, von rasenden

26 Klara’s potential ‘voice of clarity’ is further discussed by Carol Jacobs in her volume Uncontainable Romanticism as a voice that should after all be doubted by the reader. Cf. Carol Jacobs, Uncontainable Romanticism. Shelley, Brontë, Kleist (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 177. 27 Kleist, ‘Der Findling’, 41. 28 Ibid., 42. 29 Cf. ibid., 41. 30 Cf. ibid., 45.

270

Rebecca Haubrich Hof fnungen von neuem getrof fen […]. Die Übereinstimmung, die sich zwischen beiden Wörtern angeordnet fand, schien ihm mehr als ein bloßer Zufall […].31 [As Nicolo picked up the dice (…) by hand and (…) played with them, he discovered – by chance, in fact, himself, as he was astonished by it like never before in his life – the conjunction which creates the name C o l i n o. Nicolo, to whom this logogryphic trait of  his name was foreign, was once more struck by fervent hopes (…). The concordance, which was found to be arranged between both words, seemed to him like more than chance (…).]

Nicolo’s semblance with Colino’s portrait is repeated by the logogryphic relation between their names. ‘[Z]ufällig’ [‘by chance’], he discovers this relation through play – with chance. Structurally, this play is restricted by the limited number of  letters shown on the ivory dice, determining the possible outcome of words. Due to this restriction, the discovery of  the names’ logogryphic relation is grounded on ‘mehr als’ [‘more than’] chance – a surplus of coincidence – causing not an arbitrary, but a distinct turn of  letters. Kleist renders their distinct disposition as a ‘Verbindung’ [‘conjunction’], a junction characterized by the prefix ver-, which indicates a reverse twist, a linguistic perversion that exposes Nicolo’s foreign- or otherness in relation to his own name. Observing Elvire’s strong reaction to the letters, he becomes convinced that the logogryph is not a dif ferent designation, but a construed linguistic hiding-place for his own name, where ‘unter dieser Versetzung der Buchstaben [sich] nur sein eigne[r] Name[…] verberge’ [‘beneath the letters’ conversion only his own name is covered’].32 By reading the name Colino as a linguistic ‘Ver-Setzung’ [‘conversion’], Nicolo perceives the letters as a perverted script aiming towards the ‘VerBergung’ [‘covering’] of an Other, and thus towards a deception analogous to his own disguise. In this analogy, the potential of  the logogryph to be a deceiving substitute is exposed, whereby the name Nicolo is, in turn, shown as a perverted substitution within language – an Er-Satz [‘substitute’] or Ver-Satz [‘the converted’] hiding the substitute in its structure. Yet the one who is hiding within Nicolo’s name is not Colino, but the essential Other, 31 32

Ibid., 45–6. Ibid., 47.

Deceptive Letters

271

the substitutor himself. In the syllable Nic, the English epithet Old Nick resounds, thereby alluding to Satan – whether Kleist intended it or not. Hence, the logogryphic potential of  language is essentially connected to its power of deceit via substitution. The biblical allusions of  the narrative and rhetoric fortify the initially proposed comparison between Kleist’s ‘Findling’ and Paul’s warning against the ἄνομος in his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians: Μή τις ὑμᾶς ἐξαπατήσῃ κατὰ μηδένα τρόπον. ὅτι ἐὰν μὴ ἔλθῃ ἡ ἀποστασία πρῶτον καὶ ἀποκαλυφθῇ ὁ ἄνθρωπος τῆς ἀνομίας, ὁ υἱὸς τῆς ἀπωλείας, ὁ ἀντικείμενος καὶ ὑπεραιρόμενος ἐπὶ πάντα λεγόμενον θεὸν ἢ σέβασμα, ὥστε αὐτὸν εἰς τὸν ναὸν τοῦ θεοῦ καθίσαι ἀποδεικνύντα ἑαυτὸν ὅτι ἐστὶν θεός. […] τὸ γὰρ μυστήριον ἤδη ἐνεργεῖται τῆς ἀνομίας· μόνον ὁ κατέχων ἄρτι ἕως ἐκ μέσου γένηται. καὶ τότε ἀποκαλυφθήσεται ὁ ἄνομος, ὃν ὁ κύριος [Ἰησοῦς] ἀνελεῖ τῷ πνεύματι τοῦ στόματος αὐτοῦ καὶ καταργήσει τῇ ἐπιφανείᾳ τῆς παρουσίας αὐτοῦ, οὗ ἐστιν ἡ παρουσία κατ᾽ ἐνέργειαν τοῦ σατανᾶ ἐν πάσῃ δυνάμει καὶ σημείοις καὶ τέρασιν ψεύδους […]. (2. Thess 2:3–9) [Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; / Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of  God, shewing himself  that he is God. (…) For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of  the way. And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord ( Jesus) shall consume with the spirit of  his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of  his coming: Even him, whose coming is after the working of  Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders (lit. wonders of  lie) (…)]

Paul’s warning regards the coming of a false son, the υἱὸς τῆς ἀπωλείας [‘son of perdition’], who originates in destruction and is thus diametrically opposed to the Son of  God – just as Nicolo is opposed to Paolo. His coming is an imitation of  his opponent, who aims to show himself as God. Thus, he causes a μυστήριον [‘mystery’] to arise regarding the substitutor’s identity beyond his imitation, a mystery that requires ἀποκάλυ[ψις] [‘revelation’]. He will be sustained by Satan’s δυνάμει [‘power’], σημείοις [‘signs’] and τέρασιν ψεύδους [‘lying wonders’], an infernal triad that is itself a mirror-image of  God’s powers, as they are described in similar terms in the Epistle to the Hebrews: συνεπιμαρτυροῦντος τοῦ θεοῦ σημείοις τε καὶ τέρασιν καὶ ποικίλαις

272

Rebecca Haubrich

δυνάμεσιν καὶ πνεύματος ἁγίου μερισμοῖς κατὰ τὴν αὐτοῦ θέλησιν [‘God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of  the Holy Ghost, according to his own will’, Heb 2:4]. God’s power, the δυνάμις, is omnipotent insofar as He Himself is this power,33 which over-archingly includes all the others: the signs and the wonders of  lie. The descriptive adjective ποικίλ[ος] [‘many-coloured’] connects these powers a priori with representation, turns it into a power of representation and shows it therefore as nothing other than the very power of  the signs. The ἀντικείμενος [‘essential opponent’] replaces this power with substitutes that are nothing but substitutes and is thus himself a figure of pure substitution. In this way, Nicolo’s ‘starre[…] Schönheit’ [‘rigid beauty’], his statuesque features which are accentuated by a face, ‘das, ernst und klug, seine Mienen niemals veränderte’ [‘which, somber and smart, never changes its expressions’], as well as his being ‘ungesprächig und in sich gekehrt’ [‘silent and withdrawn’],34 indicate a lack of individuality – a lack to be filled by the characteristics of  his predecessor, his clothes and position in Piachi’s home. Belonging equally to the powers of  God as well as the substitutor, the σημεία [‘signs’] hint towards a linguistic quality within the specific imitation of  the son of perdition. As the powers themselves are being imitated, these signs must carry a potential of deception; thus, as substitutes, they are instantaneously deceiving. Whereas Paul calls the coming substitutor in his Epistle either υἱὸς τῆς ἀπωλείας [‘son of perdition’] or ἄνομος [‘one beyond law’], in the Gospel of  John the name ἀντίχριστος [‘Antichrist’, John 2:18] is coined. Here, suitable translations of  the Greek prefix ἀντί- are, contrary to the common ‘against’, ‘instead’ or ‘alternate’. Thus it becomes clear that Nicolo is, by substituting for the son and resembling the image of  the saviour, a deceiving representation of  the essential substitutor or a substitute for the substitute – which appears as a blank page that can only be filled with signs that resemble, yet can never resurrect, his predecessor.

33

καὶ ὄψεσθε τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐκ δεξιῶν καθήμενον τῆς δυνάμεως. [‘and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power’] (Mk 14:62). 34 Kleist, ‘Der Findling’, 23.

Deceptive Letters

273

Mimesis A ‘pestartige Krankheit’35 [‘plague-like disease’] ravishing the city of  Ragusa leaves the boy Nicolo orphaned and alone at the beginning of  Heinrich von Kleist’s narrative ‘Der Findling’. He encounters the travelling ‘Güterhändler’36 [‘tradesman’] Antonio Piachi, who sympathetically takes him in. Soon after, Piachi’s son Paolo, who accompanied his father on his travels, dies after being infected with the contagious epidemic, the ‘Übel’37 [‘evil’], by Nicolo, who promptly replaces him in Piachi’s home, wears the clothes of  his predecessor and sleeps in his bed. Throughout the following years, Nicolo lives as Piachi’s son and grows up to be a young man with an excessive ‘Hang für das weibliche Geschlecht’ [‘inclination towards womankind’].38 Kleist describes this inordinate desire as an ‘Übel’,39 repeating the earlier periphrasis for the plague-like illness. Both maladies, disease and desire, are thereby interlocked and their similarities exposed, so that the latter is marked as potentially contagious and destructive; that is to say, potentially other than it appears to be, something distinct from itself. In the framework of  this analogy, Nicolo’s short marriage with Elvire’s niece, Constanza, must be understood as a temporary quarantine that plugs ‘das letzte Übel […] an der Quelle’ [‘the last evil’s […] well’] and thus hinders contagion from spreading.40 The metaphorical well reinforces this analogy by alluding to a poisoned well that dispenses the plague. The initial quarantine’s end at the beginning of  the narrative is signaled by the reopening of  the city gates,41 a motion that is repeated metaphorically after

35 Ibid., 19. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 25. 39 Ibid., 26. 40 Ibid. 41 Cf. ibid., 22.

274

Rebecca Haubrich

Constanza’s death, which opens Nicolo’s desire once more ‘Thor und Tür’ [‘all f lood gates’].42 The ending of marital quarantine marks the beginning of  Nicolo’s second simulative substitution – his imitation of  Elvire’s love-interest Colino – a concurrence that conjoins infection and simulation even more closely. In f lagranti, Elvire discovers Nicolo going back to his promiscuous ways after his wife’s death.43 Fearfully, Nicolo suspects she will give his transgression away to Piachi and thereby endanger his standing. This ill-founded suspicion turns out to be the root of a desire for Elvire that thrives while vacillating between devotion and despite: Zugleich war ihm Elvire niemals schöner vorgekommen, als in dem Augenblick, da sie, zu seiner Vernichtung, das Zimmer, in welchem sich das Mädchen befand, öf fnete und wieder schloß. Der Unwille, der sich sanfter Glut auf ihren Wangen entzündete, goß einen unendlichen Reiz über ihr mildes, von Af fecten nur selten bewegtes Antlitz; es schien ihm unglaublich, daß sie, bei so viel Lockungen dazu, nicht selber zuweilen den Wege wandeln sollte, dessen Blumen zu brechen er eben so schmählich von ihr gestraft worden war. Er glühte vor Begierde, ihr, falls dies der Fall sein sollte, bei dem Alten den selben Dienst zu erweisen, als sie ihm, und bedurfte und suchte nichts, als die Gelegenheit, diesen Vorsatz ins Werk zu setzen. 44 [Simultaneously, Elvire had never appeared more beautiful to him than in the very instance she opened and closed, for his destruction, the room in which the girl was located. The indignation, which ignited itself with gentle ember on her cheeks, poured an illimitable allure over her mild features, which were rarely moved by af fect; it seemed unbelievable to him that she, especially with so many temptations, would not herself on occasion wander the path whose f lowers he had just been shamefully chastized for breaking. He was burning with desire to do her, should that not be the case, the same turn with the old man that she had done him; and he required and searched for nothing but for the opportunity to fulfill this resolution.]

Nicolo’s desire for Elvire is sparked by her discovery of  his mischief, when she gains knowledge of  his secret by opening the door. This knowledge

42 Ibid., 33. 43 Cf. ibid., 34. 44 Ibid., 37.

Deceptive Letters

275

entails the potential of  harming Nicolo’s standing and is thus in itself dangerous. For her stepson, Elvire’s beauty arises out of  this danger, which attracts him in the very ‘Augenblick’ [‘instant’] she gains the power to destroy him via knowledge. The metaphor ‘Glut […] entzündete[n]’ [‘ignited […] with ember’] that describes her indignation alludes to the narrative’s important fire-motif, which is established in the description of  Colino as he saves the young Elvire’s life. This metaphor is augmented by the formulation, ‘[e]r glühte vor Begierde’ [‘he was burning with desire’], which burning is caused by Nicolo’s desire for revenge and later by a ‘peinliche […] und brennende […] Neugierde […], zu wissen’ [‘indignant (…) and burning curiosity […] to know’].45 Thus, the metaphoric fire indicates a relation between desire and knowledge, as it describes Nicolo’s burning longing for each. The term Begierde is connoted sexually by Kleist via the metaphor of a path entwined by f lowers to be broken. This metaphor is coined in Goethe’s ballad Heidenröslein,46 where the breaking of a f lower stands for the taking of virginity or, more generally, sexual intercourse. Kleist’s similar usage of  the metaphor is indicated by the terms ‘Lockungen’ [‘temptations’] and ‘schmählich’ [‘shamefully’], which point to licentiousness. The secret in question, the secret Nicolo desires to penetrate, is Elvire’s sexuality – her desires – cautiously guarded by a set of  keys around her waist.47 Metaphorically read, these keys are concealing devices for Elvire’s desires, while they literally lock and unlock her bedchamber, granting access to Colino’s portrait – the object of  her desire. What is near the body uncloses a shrine of satisfaction that is dislocated from the body. As a metaphor, these keys disclose the narrative’s linguistic strategy of concealment, simultaneously enclosing the key and lock of meaning without granting disclosure or understanding. This structure harbours an irreducible possibility of deceit caused by a permeable barrier between the (sexual) desire for disclosure and the disclosed, which is represented in Kleist’s

45 Ibid., 39. 46 Cf. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, ‘Heidenröslein’, in Erich Trunz, ed. Gedichte (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1981), 78. 47 Cf. Kleist, ‘Der Findling’, 32, 37–8.

276

Rebecca Haubrich

narrative by the keyhole. Once more by chance, Nicolo finds himself in front of  Elvire’s bedchamber, ‘da gerade’ [‘just as’] Piachi is travelling.48 Although he believes her to be alone, her voice sounds through the door, causing Nicolo to curiously bend himself  ‘mit Augen und Ohren gegen das Schloß nieder’ [‘with eyes and ears down against the lock’].49 Thus, the lock – the keyhole – is shown as a constricted device for discovery, as it only grants a view of puzzling clippings. Seeing and hearing, on the other hand, are depicted as the senses capable of detection, yet simultaneously receptive to deceit. As Nicolo sees his stepmother on her knees ‘in der Stellung der Verzückung, zu Jemandes Füßen’ [‘to someone’s feet in the position of ecstasy’] and hears her whisper the name Colino, he is unable to deduce that she is kneeling in front of a portrait and thus assumes that a lover is present in the chamber.50 Subsequent to this misinterpretation, there is a distinction of  ‘erblick[en]’ [‘seeing’] and ‘erkennen’51 [‘recognizing’]: Although Nicolo sees, he is unable to analyze the scene unfolding before him in its contiguity. Erkenntnis, recognition or discovery, is crucially dif ferent from seeing, as it requires an intentional act of analytic deciphering that transforms the seen into knowledge. Unable to perceive, Nicolo subsequently strives to expose Elvire’s infidelity. Kleist describes the attempted exposure with the verb ‘entlarven’ [‘eclose’] – a metaphor that describes the structure of enclosing a secret like a larva as well as its uncovering.52 Yet this eclosure is, like perception, always in danger to be – due to deception or misinterpretation – misleading and false: what is eclosed may well be a deceiving substitute, a false son and impostor. Such is Nicolo’s discovery of  the image, which exposes to him not Colino, but (mistakenly) himself. This supposition is based on an encounter he had with Elvire while wearing a chevalier’s uniform for carnival – which chances to be the exact clothing Colino wears in the portrait. This encounter causes

48 Ibid., 37. 49 Ibid., 38. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 37.

Deceptive Letters

277

Elvire to fall into shock – a peculiarly strong reaction, which Nicolo takes into account as he deduces himself  to be the portrait’s model: Er erinnerte sich, mit vieler Freude, der sonderbaren und lebhaften Erschütterung, in welche er, durch die phantastische Erscheinung jener Nacht, Elviren versetzt hatte. Der Gedanke, die Leidenschaft dieser, als ein Muster der Tugend umwandelnden Frau erweckt zu haben, schmeichelte ihm fast ebenso sehr, als die Begierde, sich an ihr zu rächen; und da sich ihm die Aussicht eröf fnete, mit einem und demselben Schlage beide, das eine Gelüst, wie das andere, zu befriedigen, so erwartete er mit vieler Ungeduld Elvirens Wiederkunft […]. Nichts störte ihn in dem Taumel, der ihn ergrif fen hatte, als die bestimmte Erinnerung, daß Elvire das Bild, vor dem sie auf den Knieen lag, damals, als er sie durch das Schlüsselloch belauschte: Colino, genannt hatte; doch auch in dem Klang dieses, im Lande nicht eben gebräuchlichen Namens, lag mancherlei, das sein Herz, er wußte nicht warum, in süße Träume wiegte, und in der Alternative, einem von beiden Sinnen, seinem Auge oder seinem Ohr zu mißtrauen, neigte er sich, wie natürlich, zu demjenigen hinüber, der seiner Begierde am lebhaftesten schmeichelte.53 [Gleefully, he remembered the peculiar and vivid shock in which he set Elvire through the fantastic appearance that night. The thought of  having awakened passion in this woman, who wanders as an ideal of virtue, f lattered him almost as much as the desire to take revenge on her; and as the prospect opened to satisfy both, in one and the same stroke, the one lustful longing as the other, he awaited Elvire’s return with much impatience (…). Nothing disturbed him in the frenzy that had taken hold of  him, but the specific recollection of  Elvire calling the image that she had kneeled before, when he was overhearing her through the keyhole, Colino; yet much lay in the sound of  this name, which was uncommon in the land, that cradled his heart in sweet dreams, yet he did not know why; and, confronted by the alternative of mistrusting one of  two senses, his eyes or his ears, he was, as is natural, inclined towards that which f lattered his desire most vividly.]

Nicolo’s ‘phantastische Erscheinung’ [‘fantastic appearance’], his disguised appearance, causes Elvire’s shock and ignites her passion. Etymologically, this phrasing is pleonastic, insofar as the ‘Erscheinung’ is doubled by its description as phantastisch, an adjective derived from the Greek φάντασμα, which can be translated ‘appearance’ as well as ‘phantasma’. In this way, the

53

Ibid., 42–3.

278

Rebecca Haubrich

description doubles the double it describes and linguistically performs Nicolo’s appearance as his antagonist in the very moment he appears to Elvire as a phantasma – the object of  her ‘Leidenschaft’ [‘passion’]. Her passion is decisively distinct from Nicolo’s ‘Begierde’ [‘desire’], although both are equally depicted as ‘Gelüste’ [‘lustful longing’]. While the motion of passion is directed towards a phantasma, an unattainable object created by the passionate subject, desire is, as a striving motion, directed towards an external object and aims as Gier [‘voracity’] towards possession. Nicolo’s desire is linguistically disrupted by the name Colino – a rupture that, analogously to Elvire’s phantasma, causes sweet dreams. This linguistic phantasma – the word as appearance – is thus another agent of deceit, created through the respective reader’s (mis)interpretation. From the discovery that he is, in fact, not the ‘Original des Bildes’ [‘original of  the image’],54 a discovery that exposes to Nicolo his status of a simulacrum, results Nicolo’s desire for revenge and a plan for the ‘abscheulichste That, die je verübt worden ist’ [‘the most heinous deed that has ever been executed’].55 This heinous deed, further depicted as ‘satanische[r] Plan’ [‘satanic plan’] – a depiction that connects Nicolo explicitly with the ἀντικείμενος and parallelizes their substitutive motions – includes the rape of  his stepmother:56 once again, dressing up as a chevalier and thus resembling Colino’s portrait, Nicolo sneaks into Elvire’s chamber and covers the image with a black sheet in order to stand in its place and imitate the subject’s posture – he imitates, that is, not Colino but the image and therefore substitutes for the substitute. His object of desire, at this point, is Elvire’s ‘Vergötterung’ [‘idolisation’], which he awaits ‘im Scharfsinn seiner schändlichen Leidenschaft’ [‘in the ingenuity of  his ignominious passion’].57 The exchange of desire and passion is caused by the change of  the desired object into idolisation – a phantasma, whereby Nicolo himself aims to be perceived as Colino.

54 Ibid., 49. 55 Ibid., 50. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 51.

Deceptive Letters

279

Elvire, upon seeing the disguised Nicolo and believing him to be Colino’s reincarnation, faints due to ‘seiner phantastischen, dem Ansehen nach überirdischen Erscheinung’ [‘his fantastic, transcendent appearance regarding the disguise’].58 Hence, the substitute is ab initio a phantasma, created by the deceived who believes him to be someone else. While the attribute fantastic is directly linked to Nicolo’s appearance, or ‘Erscheinung’, the adjective ‘überirdisch[…]’ [‘transcendent’] relates to his ‘Ansehen’ [‘disguise’].59 As Elvire believes him to be Colino, she believes the disguise to be a guise, wherefore the adjective überirdisch relates to Colino as transcendentally resurrected. Yet he is only distortedly resurrected as a disguise, which is phantasmatically misread due to desire. In this way, the disguise itself is a readable extension of  the logogryph and, as such, to be understood as linguistic. The logogryph, on the other hand, is a disguise in language. In Kleist’s narrative, these intertwined structures succeed as disguises only through their respective reader’s desire: this creates phantasms based on appearances, which are, themselves, turned into a disguise. Thus, desire comes in the way; it is itself  the text’s – or reader’s – stumbling block, fortified by deception. Thus, deception can be read as the text’s plague-like disease, a linguistic Übel that belongs, as an essential Other, to the structure of  language itself.

Postscript: Errability Uncovered How can the deception of a text be uncovered? What are the options for revealing its structural and semantic stumbling blocks? How can any readers be sure not to unknowingly repeat and fortify these blocks? They cannot.

58 59

Ibid., 52. In contrast to the more common translation appearance, this word should be understood as ‘disguise’, as he dresses in order to alter his outer appearance according to Colino’s guise, which allows him to be seen as his antagonist.

280

Rebecca Haubrich

If read as a designation for Kleist’s narrative itself instead of a metonymic description of  Nicolo, the title ‘Der Findling’ already alludes to deception as part of  the text’s rhetoric. As a Findling [‘foundling’], the text shares certain characteristics with its homonym Findling [‘erratic boulder’], which, in German, is also called Erratiker:60 While first appearing to be solid and coherent, a second look exposes its erratic – that is, its irregular and unpredictable – movement. As this movement is already set up in the title, stumbles over this block – like Nicolo’s misinterpretation of  the dice – are structurally intended. Regarding language, the reader is substitutively put into Nicolo’s position, who errs as a reader. Thus, erring itself essentially belongs to the text – just as erratic derives from the Latin verb errare, meaning to err or to misinterpret –, which provokes it by repeatedly appearing as something that it is not, something other than itself. The reader inevitably stumbles over this textual block, left – like Kleist’s characters – incapable of surmounting its deception. The recurrent consequence of  this error in the narrative is a necessity for revenge, which subsequently prolongs the motion of deception. Just when Nicolo is about to rape Elvire, Piachi returns ‘unvermuthet’ [‘unexpectedly’].61 His coincidental return is said to be motivated by Nemesis,62 the Greek goddess of retribution63 – that is, retribution itself as a goddess – who is crucially bound up with the structure of deception and desire.64 Although furious about the events in front of  him, Piachi is unable to juridically act against Nicolo, who is, through 60 The title’s homonymic quality has been repeatedly mentioned and analyzed by Kleist’s commentators. Cf. Irmgard Wagner, ‘Der Findling: Erratic Signifier in Kleist and Geology’, The German Quarterly, 64/3 (1991), 281–95. 61 Ibid., 52. 62 Cf. ibid. 63 Cf. Stenger, Jan, ‘Nemesis’, in Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider, eds, Der Neue Pauly, 16 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler 2000), vol. 8, 818–19. 64 Nemesis’ connection to a desire for revenge, which itself results from desire, is shown in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, particularly in the myth of  Narcissus and Echo, where the goddess is called upon by one of  Narcissus’ suitors who desires revenge for his unanswered desire (Met. 3.401–6). I have used the following edition: Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. G.P. Goold, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

Deceptive Letters

281

his stepfather’s signing over of all necessary documents, the legal owner of  his property.65 Against these valid documents, all of  Piachi’s legal appeals remain ‘machtlose […] Hebel’ [‘powerless (…) levers’]:66 The written law, although unjust – as it rewards malice [‘es siegte die Bosheit’] – remains in power.67 Elvire dies after Nicolo’s attack because of a fever caused by the shock. Driven by revenge, Piachi withdraws from legal action and kills his stepson by crushing his skull against a wall and, finally, stuf fing his mouth with the very documents that had made him the owner of  Piachi’s estate.68 First, this gruesome death mirrors Colino’s, as both men’s skulls are fatally crushed by stone. But what distinguishes these deaths is the stuf fing of  Nicolo’s mouth, an act comparable to the eating of  the book described in the Revelation: καὶ ἔλαβον τὸ βιβλαρίδιον ἐκ τῆς χειρὸς τοῦ ἀγγέλου καὶ κατέφαγον αὐτό, καὶ ἦν ἐν τῷ στόματί μου ὡς μέλι γλυκὺ καὶ ὅτε ἔφαγον αὐτό, ἐπικράνθη ἡ κοιλία μου’ [‘And I took the little book out of  the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter’, Rev 10:10]. Here, John tastes the bitterness of  God’s word, the λόγος, which is brought upon those suf fering in hell for their sins. As the father, Piachi condemns his son to damnation through his own word – while simultaneously giving up his own life by taking another at the moment of murder. Taking into account that the documents were initially signed by Piachi himself and are, as a result, a speech-act performed by him, their use as against Nicolo can be read biblically as the antichrist’s final expulsion, as it is alluded to in Paul’s Epistle to the Thessalonians and, previously, the Book of  Isaiah: ἀλλὰ κρινεῖ ταπεινῷ κρίσιν καὶ ἐλέγξει τοὺς ταπεινοὺς τῆς γῆς· καὶ πατάξει γῆν τῷ λόγῳ τοῦ στόματος αὐτοῦ καὶ ἐν πνεύματι διὰ χειλέων ἀνελεῖ ἀσεβῆ [‘But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of  the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of  his mouth, and with the breath of  his lips shall he slay the wicked’, Is. 11:4]. The ἀσεβῆς

65 66 67 68

Kleist, ‘Der Findling’, 53. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 55. Cf. ibid.

282

Rebecca Haubrich

[‘wicked’], who in the New Testament becomes the ἄνομος, is expulsed by the powers of  the λόγος, that is, of  God the Father himself. Piachi, who, against the law of  the ‘Kirchenstaat’ [‘Papal State’],69 does not repent this deed, is later executed for murdering Nicolo. Thus, he gives his life in order to take another and performs the final substitutive exchange of  the text by participating in the play of deceit and revenge. For a reading not to stumble over the text and thus overlook it completely, it is equally possible and possibly necessary to engage with its strategies and structurally participate in its play. Regarding Kleist’s ‘Findling’, the two essential modes of deception operate within the intentional or coincidental confusions of substitutes and the linguistic possibility of a logogryphic relation between words. The latter possibility is constituted by the variable yet limited structure of a language that is composed of a determinate number of signs. These make up a variety of semantic units, which depend on a certain order. A confusion of  this order does not, as is emphatically proven in Kleist’s narrative, necessarily result in semiotic chaos, but carries the potential to deceive by coincidentally creating a dif ferent semantic union instead. Thus, it shows that the motion of designation does not depend on the letters alone, but upon their order – just as their mere composition does not guarantee a successful designation or exclude a possible deceit, neither does the written word. This is exemplarily shown by Kleist through a linguistic masquerade, a ‘List’ [‘trick’] applied by Piachi, who writes a letter in order to deceive with ‘verstellter Schrift, im Namen Xavieras’ [‘disguised writing in the name of  Xaviera’] and who ‘siegelt[…] diesen Zettel mit einem fremden Wappen zu’ [‘seals this note with a foreign coat of arms’].70 A reading of  the ‘verstellte[…] Schrift’ as a textile disguise in language confirms the essential connection between fabric and letters in Kleist’s text: their similar potential to deceive implies corresponding structures that merge into each other and thereby fortify the respective other. The disguised writing and the foreign coat of arms serve Piachi’s writing as a disguise, hiding the writer’s identity and

69 Kleist, ‘Der Findling’, 56. 70 Ibid., 34, 35.

Deceptive Letters

283

thereby showing an essential quality of writing that is discussed by Plato in his Phaedrus, where he describes the writer as a text’s father: ὅταν δὲ ἅπαξ γραφῇ, κυλινδεῖται μὲν πανταχοῦ πᾶς λόγος ὁμοίως παρὰ τοῖς ἐπαΐουσιν, ὡς δ᾽ αὕτως παρ᾽ οἷς οὐδὲν προσήκει, καὶ οὐκ ἐπίσταται λέγειν οἷς δεῖ γε καὶ μή. Πλημμελούμενος δὲ καὶ οὐκ ἐν δίκῃ λοιδορηθεὶς τοῦ πατρὸς ἀεὶ δεῖται βοηθοῦ: αὐτὸς γὰρ οὔτ᾽ ἀμύνασθαι οὔτε βοηθῆσαι δυνατὸς αὑτῷ [‘Yet each word, once written down, meanders around everywhere, equally amongst those who understand and those for whom it does not apply, and it knows not to whom it should speak or not. Repelled and unjustly disparaged, it always stands in need of its father’s help, because it is incapable to defend or help itself ’].71 Plato describes the motion of writing as a universal meandering or rolling around ‘all over the place’ [πανταχοῦ] during which it does not know whom to address – which is why it addresses everyone and thereby no one. The Greek lexeme παντα-, which can be translated as all or every, describes this motion as transgressive, as uncivilized and (running) wild. Yet against accusations it is unable to defend itself, apart from repeating what it has already said over and over again. Therefore, writing needs its father’s [πατρὸς] defence and protection. Plato’s familial rhetoric adds to a reading of  Piachi as the father of a deceitful λόγος, whose motion distances it from the father. As quoted above, Paul applies πάντα in an adverbial construction in his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians to describe the motion of  the ἀντικείμενος, for it is equally transgressive. Hence, the essential antagonist shares crucial qualities with writing, exposing the λόγος itself as the ἀντίλογος par excellence. As Kleist’s Nicolo is depicted as the antichrist, as a ‘höllische[r] Bösewicht […]’ [‘infernal miscreant […]’] in relation to the son and the saviour,72 the narrative itself evolves around an ἀντίλογος and is thus constantly confronted with its own other, with a formal foreignness in its own form – just as Nicolo is upon first discovering the logogryphic relation of  his own name to Colino.73 It is in this way

71 Plato, Phaedrus, ed. Harvey Yunis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011), 275 d–e. My translation. 72 Kleist, Findling, 54. 73 Cf. ibid., 45–6.

284

Rebecca Haubrich

that the σημεία [‘signs’] can be equally applied by God and his antagonist; they are capable of revealing and deceiving, representing key and lock simultaneously. The other within language, the substitute of  the form within the form, the ἀντί within the λόγος, is thus exposed as irreducible, and the linguistic potential of deceit is thus eclosed ab initio as an essential quality of  language itself.

Bibliography Block, Richard, ‘The Bloody Price of  Adoption: Betrayal and Absolution in Kleist’s “The Foundling”’, The New Centennial Review 12/3 (2012), 27–52. Cancik, Hubert and Helmuth Schneider, eds, Der Neue Pauly, 16 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler 2000). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Gedichte, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1981). Jacobs, Carol, Uncontainable Romanticism. Shelley, Brontë, Kleist (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Kleist, Heinrich von, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle, 20 vols (Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1988–2010). Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. G.P. Goold, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Plato, Phaedrus, ed. Harvey Yunis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Wagner, Irmgard, ‘Der Findling: Erratic Signifier in Kleist and Geology’, The German Quarterly, 64/3 (1991), 281–95.

Gillian Granville Bentley

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

One of  the key facets of  betrayal is deception. In order to betray another person, the betrayer presents himself as something that he is not. An enemy takes on the role of  friend, and his behaviour becomes a performance that masks his true intent. This act of obfuscating true intentions, of presenting the self as something other than it is, involves the two most essential elements of  theatrical performance: something to act as and something to act for. In this chapter, I will discuss two texts – one ancient, one early modern – that engage with the relationship between theatricality and betrayal, addressing the performance mechanics of deceiving and being deceived. The second text, Shakespeare’s Othello (ca. 1603), will be familiar to most readers. The first, the Ancient Greek novel Callirhoe, is lesser known but equally as demonstrative of  the complexities of  this relationship. Callirhoe is an extended prose narrative, divided into eight books. It was likely written by Chariton of  Aphrodisias, the self-proclaimed author of  the work, in the mid-first century AD.1 Callirhoe is one of  the five so-called ideal Ancient Greek novels that have survived up to the present day in more or less complete form. All were written in first few centuries AD, though the specific dates of each are uncertain. These five novels share similarities in plot and are ideal in the sense that a young man and maiden meet, fall in love, are separated, face peril and adventure and are eventually reunited in time for a happy ending.2

1 2

For the most recent argument for a mid-first century dating, see Stefan Tilg, Chariton of  Aphrodisias and the Invention of  the Greek Love Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). For general information on the Greek novel, see Bryan P. Reardon, ed., Collected Ancient Greek Novels (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1990); Simon Swain,

286

Gillian Granville Bentley

Callirhoe is set in fourth-century BC Syracuse. Chariton, writing centuries later, sets his story in Classical Greece. His choice of time period ref lects a preoccupation of  his time – an interest in and emphasis on Greece’s glorious past, perhaps in contrast to its subjugation under the Roman Empire in his day.3 The main characters include the eponymous, supernaturally beautiful Callirhoe and her father, whom Chariton borrows from Syracusan history: the general Hermocrates, famous for his part in the Syracusan naval victory over the Athenians in 413 BC. Callirhoe has numerous suitors vying for her hand in marriage – in particular an unnamed suitor from the city of  Acragas, whom I will refer to as the Acragan. But Callirhoe loves another, a young man named Chaereas, who is the son of  Hermocrates’ (fictional) political rival, Ariston.4 For Chaereas and Callirhoe, it is love at first sight, after a chance encounter arranged by Ἔρως [‘Love’] himself.5 Chaereas, believing there is no hope in trying for the daughter of  his father’s rival, begins to waste away. The citizens of  Syracuse, who love the youth, pressure Hermocrates to allow the match. He consents, and the pair is married. The wedding angers Callirhoe’s jilted suitors. They protest that is an ‘insult’ [ὕβρις] that Chaereas should be chosen over one of  them, who had expended so much ef fort and showered Callirhoe with gifts, while Chaereas had done nothing at all.6 Led by the Acragan, the suitors plot revenge, intending to separate the couple by preying on Chaereas’ jealousy and making him doubt the ed., Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Gareth Schmeling, ed., The Novel in the Ancient World (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996). 3 See David Konstan and Suzanne Said, eds, Greek and Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past Under the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 2006). 4 The star-crossed lovers of rival parents have a superficial similarity to the protagonists of  Romeo and Juliet. 5 ‘By chance, the two walked straight into each other at the corner of a narrow intersection – a meeting manipulated by the god to make sure that each saw the other’ [ἐν τύχης οὖν περί τινα καμπὴν στενοτἐραν συναντῶντες περιέπεσον ἀλλήλοις, τοῦ θεοῦ πολιτευσαμένου τήνδε τὴν συνοδίαν ἵνα ἑκάτερος τῷ ἑτέρῳ ὀφθῇ]. Chariton, Callirhoe, 1.1.5–6. For Callirhoe, I use the Greek text from G.P. Goold’s 1995 Loeb edition, citing book, chapter and line. All translations are my own. 6 Chariton, Callirhoe, 1.2.2.

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

287

fidelity of  his wife. The Acragan’s plan, which involves bringing out the worst in Chaereas in order to separate the young couple, brings to mind Iago’s actions in Shakespeare’s Othello. For multiple reasons, Othello serves as a useful text to contrast with the suitor’s plot in Callirhoe. While the two share plot similarities, it is important to note their dif ferences before turning to their parallels.7 Callirhoe dates from the first century CE and belongs to the Greek novel genre, which only began to receive serious scholarly attention in the 1970s. The language is relatively uncomplicated ancient Greek and the brief episode in question is a peripatetic plot device to start the protagonists of f on the adventures that will take up seven books of  the novel’s eight. Shakespeare’s Othello, on the other hand, is an early seventeenth-century play written and performed in England, based on a story in the Italian writer Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (1565) and focused on a single revenge plot that spans the length of  the play. Despite these dif ferences of  time and form, the plots of  both works do share striking similarities in the methods and objectives of  betrayal. First, Iago and the Acragan (as well as the other suitors) plot revenge after being rejected in favour of another: Iago does not receive the promotion he had hoped for, and the suitors are not chosen as marriage partners. Both Iago and the Acragan explain their plans to an audience: Iago to the theatrical 7

Shakespeare may have had some familiarity with certain scenarios found in ancient Greek novels. For example, the line in Twelfth Night, ‘Why should I not, had I the heart to do it | Like to the Egyptian thief at the point of death | Kill what I love?’ (V i 114–15) appears to be a reference to a scene from an ancient novel that was a Renaissance favourite – Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Tale. However, it is highly unlikely that he could have had access to any text of  Chariton. See Gerald Sandy, ‘Ancient Prose Fiction and Minor Early English Novels’, Antike und Abendland 25 (1979), 41–55. It is possible that aspects of  Greek novels filtered down to Shakespeare through intermediary sources. Despite the early contributions of  Stuart Wolf f and Carol Gesner, as Stuart Gillespie has noted, ‘the Greek novels must be counted among the challenges to which students of  the English Renaissance in general, and Shakespeare in particular, have yet to rise.’ Stuart Gillespie, ‘Shakespeare and Greek Romance: “Like an old tale still”’, in Charles Martindale and Albert Booth Taylor, eds, Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 223–38, 228.

288

Gillian Granville Bentley

audience and, occasionally, to Roderigo; the Acragan to the reader and to the other suitors. Both use skills required of  theatrical productions to deceive and manipulate their victims, recruiting others to play roles (and in Iago’s case, playing a role himself ) and staging scenes to provide ‘ocular proof ’ (Oth. III iii 363). As such, they provide fodder for a discussion of  the theatricality of  betrayal, or even of  the theatre itself as treacherous – a concern of antiquity that was not alien to Shakespeare’s England, where the playhouses were legally required to reside outside of  the city limits. On a second level, the victims of  Iago and the Acragan betray themselves. Chaereas and Othello are passionately in love with their wives, who in turn love them faithfully and give their husbands no reason to distrust them.8 And yet, Chaereas and Othello, with their ‘free and open’ (Oth. I iii 397) natures, take slanderous words at face value. Their trust in others, even strangers, leads them to distrust people nearer and dearer to them. It is not necessarily rational for one to believe a stranger more than one’s wife, but the news they receive provokes an emotional response that clouds their judgement. There is a certain irony in the fact that their inability to see falseness leads them both to trust a false friend and to distrust a true one. The pain in the possibility of  falseness in their wives keeps them from realizing that the falsehoods may lie elsewhere. For both, the overwhelming fear of  betrayal overcomes rational thought when they see proof of adultery in the staged scenes set before them. In Othello’s case, his sense of self-worth and his status in society are unstable because of  his race. He is a Moor who has achieved wealth and status through ability, but, perhaps, he doubts his own worthiness. Chaereas has not yet established himself in adult society, and he achieves his greatest wish – marriage to Callirhoe – through no ef fort of  his own. Perhaps he, too, finds it hard to believe in his good fortune. Both fall into the roles created by their enemies (that of  the jealous husband) and ultimately perform the violent assault of  their

8

Stephen Greenblatt suggests that Othello may ref lect the anxieties of  loving one’s wife too well, in reference to Christian tradition found in Jerome that ‘an adulterer is he who is too ardent a lover of  his wife.’ Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 2005), 247–9.

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

289

wives. Not only do Chaereas and Othello betray the women who loved and trusted them, they betray their own reason in seeing incontrovertible proof in smoke and mirrors. The causes of  their final jealous rages are the ocular proofs provided by their deceivers – proofs that in reality prove nothing, but in their imaginations mean everything. These proofs bring us back to the danger embodied in Iago’s and the Acragan’s plots. As the term playing false suggests, betrayal is often bound up in performance – in presenting a certain image or quality, such as trustworthiness. In Callirhoe and Othello, this aspect of playing false is particularly emphasized. Iago explains his plan to a theatrical audience, while the suitor’s plot is ef fected through deception, couched in theatrical terms and presented as a performance. Elizabeth Burns writes, ‘the idea of the world as a stage, of men as actors assuming and discarding dif ferent roles, and of  the world of social reality becoming a play contrived by hidden, superhuman or impersonal forces, has been familiar in literature as long as it and drama have existed.’9 While Burns highlights the ubiquity of  theatre as a metaphor for life, in Chariton the theatrical metaphor takes on a literal and dangerous dimension. The Acragan is characterized as a director who coaches actors. Chaereas, all too naïve, believes that the performances he sees represent real life, and, convinced by false appearances, commits genuine violence. Play-acting as a mode and method of betrayal may reveal as much about contemporary thought about theatre and theatricality as it does about the nature of  treachery. Couched within Chariton’s particular characterization of  life as a stage is Plato’s fear that imitation, mimêsis [μίμησις], can be perceived as reality or inf luence reality.10 An anecdote related in Plutarch’s Life of  Solon provides some background into ancient Greek views on the relationship between acting and playing false. Solon, the legendary elder statesman of ancient Athens, goes to watch Thespis, the legendary creator of  Attic tragedy, perform:

9 Elizabeth Burns, Theatricality (New York: Longman, 1972), 1. 10 Plato, Republic 3.395d. Unless otherwise noted, all citations of classical works are based on the Oxford Classical Text editions.

290

Gillian Granville Bentley ἀρχομένων δὲ τῶν περὶ Θέσπιν ἤδη τὴν τραγῳδίαν κινεῖν, καὶ διὰ τὴν καινότητα τοὺς πολλοὺς ἄγοντος τοῦ πράγματος, οὔπω δ᾽ εἰς ἅμιλλαν ἐναγώνιον ἐξηγμένου, φύσει φιλήκοος ὢν καὶ φιλομαθὴς ὁ Σόλων, ἔτι μᾶλλον ἐν γήρᾳ, σχολῇ καὶ παιδιᾷ καὶ, νὴ Δία, πότοις καὶ μουσικῇ παραπέμπων ἑαυτόν, ἐθεᾶτο τὸν Θέσπιν αὐτὸν ὑποκρινόμενον, ὥσπερ ἔθος ἦν τοῖς παλαιοῖς. μετὰ δὲ τὴν θέαν προσαγορεύσας αὐτὸν ἠρώτησεν εἰ τοσούτων ἐναντίον οὐκ αἰσχύνεται τηλικαῦτα ψευδόμενος. φήσαντος δὲ τοῦ Θέσπιδος μὴ δεινὸν εἶναι τὸ μετὰ παιδιᾶς λέγειν τὰ τοιαῦτα καὶ πράσσειν, σφόδρα τῇ βακτηρίᾳ τὴν γῆν ὁ Σόλων πατάξας· ‘ταχὺ μέντοι τὴν παιδιάν,’ ἔφη, ‘ταύτην ἐπαινοῦντες οὕτω καὶ τιμῶντες εὑρήσομεν ἐν τοῖς συμβολαίοις.’11 [When Thespis was beginning to act tragedies, which, because of  their newness, were very attractive to the multitude, although not yet a competitive contest, Solon, who by nature loved to hear and learn something new, and now in his old age and having leisure and enjoyment, indeed, in music and wine, went to see Thespis himself act, as was the ancient custom. After the play concluded, he asked him if  he were not ashamed to tell so many lies before so many people. Thespis replied that it was no danger to say or do such things in play. Solon violently struck his staf f against the ground and said ‘If we praise and honour such play, we soon will find it in our daily business.’]

The anecdote suggests that playing false is the natural extension of playacting: acting is like lying, and promoting acting on the stage will bring acting into everyday life; thus, acting will bring falseness into daily life, training ordinary people how to present lies as truth. Plato voices similar objections to theatre in his discussion of mimêsis in the Republic. Mimêsis stands for representation or imitation, and it also stands in for the idea of acting. Plato writes: ἢ οὐκ ᾔσθησαι ὅτι αἱ μιμήσεις, ἐὰν ἐκ νέων πόρρω διατελέσωσιν, εἰς ἔθη τε καὶ φύσιν καθίστανται καὶ κατὰ σῶμα καὶ φωνὰς καὶ κατὰ τὴν διάνοιαν.12 [‘Have you not seen that imitations, if drawn out from youth into later life, settle into custom and (second) nature in the body, the speech and the understanding?’] Where Plutarch’s Solon fears that acting trains one to behave untruthfully in life, Plato’s fear of mimêsis stems from something more insidious. For Plato, the danger lies

11 Plutarch, Life of  Solon, in Robert Flacelière, Emile Chambry, and Marcel Juneaux, eds, Vies, 4 vols (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1961), vol. 2, 29.6. 12 Plato, Republic 3.395d.

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

291

in the way imitation could become reality, as he claims the traits imitated eventually become the traits of  the imitator. It is not only the acting, but also the creation of the material to be read or acted, that poses a threat. The interlocutors in the Republic conclude that: ἄνδρα δή, ὡς ἔοικε, δυνάμενον ὑπὸ σοφίας παντοδαπὸν γίγνεσθαι καὶ μιμεῖσθαι πάντα χρήματα, εἰ ἡμῖν ἀφίκοιτο εἰς τὴν πόλιν, αὐτός τε καὶ τὰ ποιήματα βουλόμενος ἐπιδείξασθαι, προσκυνοῖμεν ἂν αὐτὸν ὡς ἱερὸν καὶ θαυμαστὸν καὶ ἡδύν, εἴποιμεν δ᾽ ἂν ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν τοιοῦτος ἀνὴρ ἐν τῇ πόλει παρ᾽ ἡμῖν οὔτε θέμις ἐγγενέσθαι, ἀποπέμποιμέν τε εἰς ἄλλην πόλιν μύρον κατὰ τῆς κεφαλῆς καταχέαντες καὶ ἐρίῳ στέψαντες.13 [If a man, capable by his wisdom of assuming all shapes and imitating all things, were to arrive in our city, bringing with himself  the poems which he wished to display, we should show obeisance to him as holy and wondrous and delightful, but would say that there is no such man among us in our city, nor is it lawful for such a one to come into being among us, and we would send him away to another city, having poured myrrh over his head and crowned him with fillets of wool.]

Both of  these examples reveal a latent anxiety about the concept of mimêsis in general – although it requires skill and provides pleasure, it can be a danger, a first step down a slippery slope of deception. That slope is in evidence in the suitors’ plot, where craft and cunning, skills required for good acting and composing, become synonymous with deceit. However, it is important to keep in mind that for Plato mimêsis is most dangerous if  the imitated traits are negative ones. Characters in tragedy who commit fratricide, filicide and suicide are not, in Plato’s opinion, appropriate for imitation, while those who are just and good are excellent models. In his Laws, Plato claims: ἡμεῖς ἐσμὲν τραγῳδίας αὐτοὶ ποιηταὶ κατὰ δύναμιν ὅτι καλλίστης ἅμα καὶ ἀρίστης· πᾶσα οὖν ἡμῖν ἡ πολιτεία συνέστηκε μίμησις τοῦ καλλίστου καὶ ἀρίστου βίου, ὃ δή φαμεν ἡμεῖς γε ὄντως εἶναι τραγῳδίαν τὴν ἀληθεστάτην. ποιηταὶ μὲν οὖν ὑμεῖς, ποιηταὶ δὲ καὶ ἡμεῖς

13 Ibid., 3.398a.

292

Gillian Granville Bentley ἐσμὲν τῶν αὐτῶν, ὑμῖν ἀντίτεχνοί τε καὶ ἀνταγωνισταὶ τοῦ καλλίστου δράματος, ὃ δὴ νόμος ἀληθὴς μόνος ἀποτελεῖν πέφυκεν.14 [We ourselves, to the best of our ability, are the poets of a tragedy that is both the most beautiful and good; at least, for our whole polis is a representation of  the fairest and best life, which we say is the truest tragedy, in real life. And so we are poets, poets of  the same things as you are, rivals and competitors for the production of  the fairest drama, which, as we hope, true law alone can perfect.]

Here, Plato frames the functioning of  the state as a mimêsis of virtue, the ‘fairest/most beautiful drama’ [κάλλιστον δρᾶμα] that puts tragedy in the shade. While the passages cited above reveal misgivings about the potential of acting, they also reveal a reverence for the art. Plato, though he would turn the actor out of  his city, would do so only after honouring him.15 The anecdote in Plutarch is written with the hindsight that, despite Solon’s supposed concerns, Attic tragedy played a significant role in Classical Athenian civic and religious life. Theatrical performance remained a vibrant and popular source of entertainment through the Hellenistic and Imperial periods, continuing through Late Antiquity, where a combination of antitheatrical rhetoric from the Church Fathers and defences of  the art provide much of our evidence for the theatre of  the period. It is a paradox found in Western theatre, as Jonas Barish writes, that ‘outbursts of antitheatrical sentiment tend to coincide with the f lourishing of  theatre itself.’16 Such is certainly the case in Shakespeare’s time, with its institutionalized anti-theatricality. In Classical Athens, however, theatrical 14 Plato, Laws, 817b. My thanks to the editors of  this volume for reminding me of  this passage. 15 Eric S. Rabkin, ‘Imagination and Survival’, in Brett Cooke, George E. Slusser and Jaume Marti-Olivella, eds, The Fantastic Other: An Interface of  Perspectives (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 1998), 1–20, 3; Hazard Adams, The Of fense of  Poetry (Seattle: University of  Washington Press, 2007), 32. Others have seen the ‘worship’ of  the poet as sarcastic; see Rafey Habib, A History of  Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 31. 16 Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1981), 66.

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

293

performances were themselves institutionalized. Ismene Lada-Richards has attempted to locate signs of anti-theatricality on the Classical Greek stage through meta-theatrical examples, and her work suggests a similar anxiety regarding ‘the deceitful nature of representation frames and the ambiguous status of  the actor, continuously engaged in the business of pretending to be somebody other than himself.’17 As Lada-Richards explains, Greek culture is ‘keenly aware’ of  the two ways in which theatrical representation can be understood.18 Representation can be the (false) appearance of  truth with which a character deceives another, or it can be the whole of  the theatrical illusion, without which a play cannot be enjoyed. Gregory Nagy has argued that the term mimêsis had a primary meaning of re-enact or reproduce, with the secondary meaning of imitate, which would become the dominant definition towards the end of  the fifth century BC. Plato appears to employ the secondary usage, but the concept of mimêsis as reproduction could have had a place in the thought of  Classical Greek theatregoers.19 Nagy explains his formula for mimêsis as follows: If you re-enact an archetypal action in ritual, it only stands to reason that you have to imitate those who re-enacted before you and who served as your immediate models. But the ultimate model is still the archetypal action or figure you are re-enacting in ritual, which is coextensive with the whole line of imitators who re-enact the way in which their ultimate model acted, each imitating each one’s predecessor.20

According to Nagy, mimêsis is both imitative and authoritative, in that the imitated process can be understood as the process itself, rather than as a false projection of  the process, as could be assumed from the definition imitation. 17

Ismene Lada-Richards, ‘“Within the Compasse of a Lye …”: signs of antitheatricality on the Greek stage?’, in Elena Theodorakopoulos, ed., Attitudes to Theatre from Plato to Milton (Bari: Levante, 1998), 56. 18 Lada-Richards, ‘“Within the Compasse of a Lye …”: signs of antitheatricality on the Greek stage?’, 36–7. 19 Gregory Nagy, ‘Genre and Occasion’, Métis 9 (1994), 11–25, 14–15. 20 Gregory Nagy, Poetry as Performance. Homer and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 56.

294

Gillian Granville Bentley

On the opposite end of  the spectrum, there is a fragment from the fourth/fifth-century BC sophist Gorgias in which he claims, in reference to performance: ὅ τ᾽ ἀπατήσας δικαιότερος τοῦ μὴ ἀπατήσαντος καὶ ὁ ἀπατηθεὶς σοφώτερος τοῦ μὴ ἀπατηθέντος.21 [‘The one who deceives is more just than the one who does not deceive, and the one who is deceived is wiser than the one who is not deceived.’] Rather than mimêsis as an authoritative version of what it re-enacts, here mimêsis appears to take on the power of deception and to present what it is not. To be a successful actor, one must deceive the audience. The audience in turn, must be, or must allow themselves to be, deceived in order to enjoy the spectacle before them. Without this kind of compact a performance cannot succeed. Deception is essential to stage performance and, it is important to note, that is not a bad thing. Gorgias calls the deceiver ‘more just’ [δικαιότερος] and the deceived ‘wiser’ [σοφώτερος] – it is better to deceive or be deceived than to act poorly or not comprehend the theatre.

The Suitors’ Debate and Iago’s Monologue As the brief survey above begins to show, ancient opinion regarding acting was a fraught combination of suspicion and admiration, which continues to spur academic discussion. In Plato’s discussion of mimêsis, he does not take into account the possibility of a semblance of virtue for an evil purpose. Perhaps the anxiety voiced by Plutarch’s Solon better portrays the betrayal plots in Callirhoe and Othello: performance provides the tools for deception of f  the stage. The suitors’ plot begins with a short debate on how to exact revenge on Chaereas. One suitor, the prince of  Rhegium, declares the he cannot bear the insult of  Chaereas’ success in face of  their failure. He encourages 21

Gorgias, in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, eds, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidman, 1952), B23.

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

295

his fellows: ἀλλὰ ἀνόνητον αὐτῷ γενέσθω τὸ ἆθλον καὶ τὸν γάμον θάνατον τῷ νυμφίῳ ποιήσωμεν.22 [‘Let his prize be unprofitable, let us make the wedding equal death for the groom.’] The prince intimates that they should kill Chaereas outright, but this straightforward form of revenge is refuted by the Acragan’s speech: μέμνησθε γὰρ ὅτι Ἑρμοκράτης οὐκ ἔστιν εὐκαταφρόνητος· ὥστε ἀδύνατος ἡμῖν πρὸς αὐτὸν ἡ ἐκ τοῦ φανεροῦ μάχη, κρείττων δὲ ἡ μετὰ τέχνης· καὶ γὰρ τὰς τυραννίδας πανουργίᾳ μᾶλλον ἢ Βίᾳ κτώμεθα. χειροτονήσατε ἐμὲ τοῦ πρὸς Χαιρέαν πολέμου στρατηγόν· ἐπαγγέλλομαι διαλύσειν τὸν γάμον· ἐφοπλιῶ γὰρ αὐτῷ Ζηλοτυπίαν, ἥτις σύμμαχον λαβοῦσα τὸν Ἔρωτα μέγα τι κακὸν διαπράξεται· Καλλιρόη μὲν οὖν εὐσταθὴς καὶ ἄπειρος κακοήθους ὑποψίας, ὁ δὲ Χαιρέας, οἷα δὴ γυμνασίοις ἐντραφεὶς καὶ νεωτερικῶν ἁμαρτημάτων οὐκ ἄπειρος, δύναται ῥᾳδίως ὑποπτεύσας ἐμπεσεῖν εἰς νεωτερικὴν ζηλοτυπίαν.23 [For keep in mind that Hermocrates is no small fry, so an open fight isn’t possible with him. An attack with craftiness is better, for it is by cunning rather than force that we can prevail. Vote me general of  the campaign against Chaereas. I will promise to dissolve their marriage. I shall arm Jealousy against him, and she, choosing Love as her ally, will create some serious trouble. Callirhoe may be even-tempered and incapable of  terrible suspicion, but Chaereas, raised in the gymnasium and not incapable of youthful follies, can easily be made suspicious and fall into youthful jealousy.]

The Acragan recognizes that open battle will place the suitors against an opponent stronger than themselves. Pitting Chaereas against Callirhoe, however, keeps them protected while they achieve their goals. To this we might compare Iago’s soliloquy at the end of  Act 1, where he decides to frame Cassio as an adulterer. He muses: Cassio’s a proper man: let me see now, To get his place, and to plume up my will In double knavery. How? How? let’s see: After some time to abuse Othello’s ear That he is too familiar with his wife. He hath a person and a smooth dispose To be suspected, framed to make women false.

22 Chariton, Callirhoe, 1.2.4. 23 Ibid., 1.2.4–6.

296

Gillian Granville Bentley The Moor is of a free and open nature That thinks men honest that but seem to be so, And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose As asses are. I ha’t, it is engender’d; Hell and night Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light. (Oth. I iii 390–402)

Iago also chooses treachery to def lect any animosity towards himself onto those he wishes to harm. His method, to raise suspicion about Cassio and Desdemona, also resembles the Acragan’s declaration to make Chaereas suspicious. They also call on the supernatural, the Acragan on the personifications of  Jealousy and Love, and Iago on Hell. Both count on the naïveté of  their enemies to ease their task, as Othello will ‘tenderly be led’ and Chaereas will ῥᾳδίως [‘easily’] be made jealous. The Acragan twice makes reference to Chaereas’ youth through the use of  the adjective νεωτερικός [‘youthful’], which he uses to describe both ἁμαρτήματα [‘follies’] and ζηλοτυπία [‘jealousy’]. In calling attention to the ‘youthfulness’ of  these faults in conjunction with noting Chaereas’ cloistered, gymnasium upbringing, the Acragan suggests that they are due to Chaereas’ lack of experience with the rest of  the world and his susceptibility to the errors of youth. Both Iago and the Acragan choose to work on predispositions already found in their victims. Libanius, in his Oration 64, a defence of pantomime dancers, suggests that, if a performer is morally upright, then he can remain virtuous as a dancer. However, if it is in his nature to be corrupt, then he will be, and it is not his profession that makes him so.24 An earlier incarnation of  this sentiment can perhaps be found onstage in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, where the forthright nature of  Neoptolemus ultimately keeps him from successfully embodying the role Odysseus creates for him in order to deceive Philoctetes.25 As positive as a quality like openness may seem, it could suggest character f laws. The concept of a free and open nature 24 Margaret Molloy, Libanius and the Dancers (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1996) 93, 122, 153. 25 For a discussion of  the relationship between the actor and his role in Philoctetes, see Ismene Lada-Richards, ‘“The players will tell all”: the dramatists, the actors and the art of acting in Sophocles’ Philoctetes’, in Simon Goldhill and Edith Hall, eds,

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

297

contains within it the hint of a lack of general control over one’s feelings. Just as a closed-natured person controls his or her emotions to the point of concealing them, someone with an open nature does not and perhaps cannot. One might even consider that openness in its most radical form can be an outburst or an unrestrained action. If  Chaereas and Othello did not have violence or jealousy in their characters, or at least the capacity for such urges, theatrical prompting could not lead them to violent, jealous rages. The similarity in content between Callirhoe and Othello is perhaps not as important as the similarity in structure. Shakespeare and Chariton both reveal the inner working of  their characters’ revenge plots, allowing the reader or audience to follow the conspirators’ every step. Iago asks ‘How? How?’ and immediately answers his own question. The dramatic tension rises, not from what will happen, but from whether the plan will succeed. This places the emphasis on the machinations of  the revenge and betrayal. The authors place a second author (or director) within the text who sets scenes for characters within the works. The reader or audience then experiences, not only the performance of  the text, but also the performance within the text. The awareness of  the internal performances as performances invites the reader/audience to think about the nature of performance itself. The delineation of  betrayal plots also gives the audience or reader knowledge withheld from the plotters’ targets. In Othello, the audience watches Iago discredit Cassio and bait Othello with the additional knowledge of  Iago’s motives and goals, and therefore cannot be fooled by his words or his demeanour. Both Iago and the Acragan prey on their victims’ jealousy, but in Chariton’s novel, the very vocabulary of jealousness has theatrical connotations. When the Acragan mentions jealousy, he uses the word ‘zelotypia’ [ζηλοτυπία]. The term is specifically associated with violence and sexual jealousy, especially in terms of unfaithfulness and adultery. It also has a particular comic, theatrical context, related to ancient comic performances

Sophocles in the Greek Tragic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 48–68.

298

Gillian Granville Bentley

such as mime.26 One of  the stock themes of mime is an adultery plotline in which a wife deceives her husband with a lover.27 The connotation gives special significance to Chariton’s choice of a word that brings to mind not only the specific kind of jealousy the Acragan wished to provoke, but also its theatrical connections. The means through which the Acragan evokes Chaereas’ zelotypia is performance. He constructs several dif ferent scenes to arouse his jealousy, which culminate in a performance of  Chaereas’ own.

The Suitors’ Plot Both plots are predicated on the two victims thinking ‘men honest that but seem to be so’ (Oth. I iii 398). Playing false, like acting, relies on appearances: on seeming. The Acragan knows he does not even need to be present to ef fect betrayal – he need only set a scene. He convinces his fellow suitors to make it seem as though Callirhoe has thrown a party while Chaereas was out of  town, arousing the young man’s suspicions. In the night, while Callirhoe sleeps, the suitors dress the front of  her house, as if it were a stage-set, with garlands, perfumes, spilled wine and half-burnt torches.28 Upon his return, Chaereas is fooled by the scenery, but mere stage-setting alone is not enough. When he confronts Callirhoe, τὴν ὀργὴν μετέβαλεν εἰς λύπην καὶ περιρρηξάμενος ἔκλαιε. πυνθανομένης δὲ τί γέγονεν, ἄφωνος ἦν, οὔτε ἀπιστεῖν οἷς εἶδεν οὔτε πιστεύειν οἷς οὐκ ἤθελε δυνάμενος.29 [‘His anger changed to grief and he wept, tearing at his clothes. When she asked him 26 In her article ‘ΖΗΛΟΤΥΠΙΑ: Sex, Violence and Literary History’, Phoenix 40/1 (1980), 45–57, Elaine Fantham more fully explores the connotations of  the term. 27 For a more complete treatment of  the adultery mime, see Patrick Kehoe, ‘The adultery mime reconsidered’, in David F. Bright and Edwin S. Ramage, eds, Classical Texts and their Traditions: Studies in Honor of  C.R. Trahman (Chico: Scholars Press, 1984), 89–106. 28 Chariton, Callirhoe, 1.2.2. 29 Ibid., 1.3.4.

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

299

what had happened, he was speechless, unable to disbelieve what he had seen, nor able to believe what he didn’t want to know.’] However, when he reproaches Callirhoe for forgetting him, he is swayed by her protestation of innocence. The pair swiftly reconciles. The Acragan did not count on Callirhoe’s ability to defend herself verbally and to of f-set his stage setting. Appearances, in this instance, were almost, but not quite enough. Manipulation such as the Acragan’s can only extend to a certain level of predictability, and he has not yet managed to enrage Chaereas to the point where Callirhoe’s protests are as useless as Desdemona’s. Chaereas’ confusion shows his dif ficulty in discerning appearance and reality. He is unable to disbelieve his eyes and yet unwilling to believe them. Chaereas’ internal battle between what he has seen and what he believes, as well as his inability to consider any mitigating circumstances to explain the scene before him, resemble what Kenneth Gross calls ‘Othello’s naively oppositional, inf lexible, but wholly non-dialectical manner of  framing reality, framing limiting pictures of  love and doubt’.30 Othello’s confusion is found in lines such as, ‘to be once in doubt, | Is once to be resolved’ (Oth. III iii 183–4). Perhaps the most fitting and chilling is, ‘perdition catch my soul, | But I do love thee, and when I love thee not, | Chaos is come again’ (Oth. III iii 91–3). Through their inability to resolve appearances with reality, both Chaereas and Othello begin to betray themselves. The multiple facets of  the betrayal plots do not fall within their oppositional frameworks. Chaereas and Othello judge the scenes set before them as more authentic than the (real) appearance of  fidelity by their spouses. When Chaereas sees a party scene outside of  his house, he believes it must be related to goings-on inside. Although in this first instance Callirhoe manages to defend herself, it is not through reason, but emotion, that she succeeds. Chaereas does love her, but he will continue to employ the same form of  logic, and chaos comes again. The scenes set before Chaereas and Othello make them both doubt the fidelity of  the ones closest to them, through

30 Kenneth Gross, ‘Slander and Skepticism in Othello’, English Literary History 56/4 (Winter 1989), 819–52, 827.

300

Gillian Granville Bentley

no fault of  their dear ones. It is the individual decisions to place their trust elsewhere and to give in to the pain of jealousy that lead to their downfalls. After this first failed attempt, the Acragan contrives a more elaborate plan to make mimêsis a convincing reality. Chariton deliberately uses the language of  the theatre in this episode. He calls the Acragan ‘the director of  the drama’ [ὁ δημιουργὸς τοῦ δράματος],31 and sure enough, he does employ actors to play roles in something that, at first, resembles ancient dramatic performance, particularly New Comedy. This genre comprised Hellenistic Greek comic plays that ref lected city life, usually centring around a household with a young man in love.32 Often a clever slave is on hand to coach his master on how to act in order to achieve his romantic goals. The Acragan’s plan also resembles Roman comedy, which often involved similar coaching and acting, as well as Aristophanic, or Old Comedy. Furthermore, this kind of play within a play, complete with internalized directors and actors, is not only a comic device, but also a staple of self-ref lexive, sophisticated tragedy. Episodes of plays within plays share a common characteristic with the suitors’ plot: They are often sites of deception and intrigue – as in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, where Neoptolemus pretends to befriend Philoctetes in order to gain possession of  the soldier’s magic bow. Intentional role-playing is usually used to deceive another character to further the role-player’s agenda. Unintentional role-playing, on the other hand, has a more unstable quality. When a character does not know that he or she is playing a role, he or she does not know the script and is unaware of  the intended outcome of  the role. In the suitors’ first plot, Chaereas became jealous as they intended, but they could not vouch for his reaction to Callirhoe’s defence, and the plot failed. The second plot, with its apparent ocular proof, provokes a stronger emotional response from Chaereas, something that he cannot control. The suitors wish to destroy the couple’s marriage, but they cannot know that Chaereas will respond so violently, nor can Iago know for certain what Othello will do to Desdemona.

31 Chariton, Callirhoe, 1.4.2. 32 Stefan Tilg, Chariton of  Aphrodisias and the Invention of  the Greek Love Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 138.

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

301

The Acragan enlists an acquaintance to seduce Callirhoe’s maid. The acquaintance is described in Greek as a ‘parasitos’ [παράσιτος], a word often used to describe a comic character type called the parasite, a hungry hanger-on whose main goals are to curry favour and fill his belly. Chariton’s language clearly recalls the stage through the description of  the suitor’s instructions. He ‘ordered him to take on the role of a lover’ [τοῦτον ἐκέλευσεν ὑποκριτὴν ἔρωτος γενέσθαι].33 Chariton uses the word ‘hypokrites’ [ὑποκριτὴς], meaning ‘actor’, which is found in Aristophanes and Plato, among others.34 The term appears a second time when ‘the producer of  the drama recruited another actor’ [ὁ δημιουργὸς τοῦ δράματος ὑποκριτὴν ἕτερον ἐξηῦρεν].35 The theatrical language is taken beyond metaphor, as the Acragan truly serves as a director and his cohorts, as actors. They put on a performance that is rehearsed and stage-managed. The second actor is charged with approaching Chaereas and, in the guise of a concerned onlooker, informing him that his wife has taken a lover. The director of  the drama ‘coached him on what to do and say’ [τοῦτον προδιδάξας ἃ χρὴ πράττειν καὶ λέγειν].36 Not only does the Acragan recruit actors, he also gives them words and actions to perform. In Othello, Iago uses the boorish Roderigo for similar purposes, but he himself plays the concerned friend. In this way, Iago finds Othello ‘easier to play on than a pipe’ (Ham. III ii 370). The Acragan takes a more detached approach, shaping the actions of  his cohorts by telling them what roles to play. These cohorts, as actors, manipulate Chaereas by deceiving him with their performances. Chariton describes the key scenes performed by both actors in detail. The second actor, after approaching Chaereas in public, ‘pretended’

33 Chariton, Callirhoe, 1.4.1. 34 Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, Ninth Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889), s.v. ὑποκριτὴς, (Ar.V.1279, Pl.R.373b). The transliteration hypocrites reveals the etymology of  the modern word ‘hypocrite’, which perhaps serves as a example of a subtle way in which suspicion of actors and acting lives on. 35 Chariton, Callirhoe, 1.4.2. 36 Ibid., 1.4.3.

302

Gillian Granville Bentley

[προεφασίζετο] that the area was too public for their conversation.37 The word underlines the actor’s artificiality, even as the action of searching for privacy convinces Chaereas that it is genuine. The actor’s skills in af fecting emotion are displayed in the description of  his following actions: εἶτα συναγαγὼν τὰς ὀφρῦς καὶ ὅμοιος γενόμενος λυπουμένῳ, μικρὸν δέ τι καὶ δακρύσας, ‘ἀηδῶς μὲν’ εἶπεν, ‘ὦ Χαιρέα, σκυθρωπόν σοι πρᾶγμα μηνύω καὶ πάλαι βουλόμενος εἰπεῖν ὤκνουν· ἐπεὶ δὲ ἤδη φανερῶς ὑβρίζῃ καὶ θρυλλεῖται πανταχοῦ τὸ δεινόν, οὐχ ὑπομένω σιωπᾶν· φύσει τε γὰρ μισοπόνηρός εἰμι καὶ σοὶ μάλιστα εὔνους. γίνωσκε τοίνυν μοιχευομένην σου τὴν γυναῖκα, καὶ ἵνα τοὺτῳ πιστεύσῃς, ἕτοιμος ἐπ᾽ αὐτοφώρῳ τὸν μοιχὸν δεικνύειν.’38 [Then, drawing his brows together, and putting on a sad expression, and crying a bit, he said, ‘Chaereas, unfortunately I have to inform you of a terrible matter. I have long desired to speak, but have hesitated. But now that you are being publicly wronged and the awful issue is being discussed everywhere, I cannot keep silent. By my nature I hate wrong, and I feel particularly well-disposed towards you. Know that your wife is being unfaithful and in order to convince you, I am prepared to show you the adulterer in the act.’]

The actor’s emoting is the most specifically described facial expression in the novel. Other characters suf fer emotional distress, but none show it by ‘knitting their brows’ [συναγαγὼν τὰς ὀφρῦς]. The actor’s grief is false, as is Helen’s in Euripides’ Helen, or again in Othello, where Othello notes, ‘Honest Iago, thou look’st dead with grieving’ (Oth. II iii 169). A show of emotional vulnerability appears to be a way in which to gain the confidence of  the one being deceived. Another tactic used in Callirhoe and Othello is a claim to hold af fection for the victim. The second actor claims to have a special sympathy for Chaereas that urges him to speak. Iago tells Othello: Look to your wife, observe her well with Cassio. Wear out your eyes thus, not jealous nor secure; I would not have your free and noble nature Out of self-bounty be abused: look to’t. (Oth. III iii 200–3) 37 38

Ibid., 1.4.4. Ibid., 1.4.5.

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

303

Iago professes attachment to Othello, and claims to tell his tale, not because he wants to, but rather on account of  his feelings for the Moor: I do not like the of fice. But sith I am entered in this cause so far, Pricked to’t by foolish honesty and love, I will go on. I lay with Cassio lately And being troubled with a raging tooth I could not sleep. There are a kind of men So loose of soul that in their sleeps will mutter Their af fairs – one of  this kind is Cassio. In sleep I heard him say ‘Sweet Desdemona, Let us be wary, let us hide our loves,’ And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand, Cry ‘O sweet creature!’ and then kiss me hard As if  he plucked up kisses by the roots. (Oth. III iii 413–28)

While the Acragan’s actor is unknown to Chaereas and is presented as an almost impartial observer, he can make a straightforward claim about Callirhoe’s fidelity without raising any questions of motive. Iago’s accusations are subtler. He distances himself  from his own implied accusations by noting that these were the words of a dreaming man. However, both share some similar tactics. Both feign emotional distress over their roles as the bearers of slanderous news, falsely professing af fection for their victims, and both appear concerned for their victims’ reputations. In addition, in both cases the actors proclaim the goodness of  their victims. Othello is ‘free and noble’, while Chariton’s interlocutor feels ‘well-disposed’ [εὔνους] towards Chaereas because his late son had loved and admired the youth.39 The victims are willing to listen because of such praise. In Othello’s case, the freeness of  his nature becomes a tool with which to rein him in, not simply in his possession of  the trait, but in his willingness to listen to someone who describes him as such. Iago and the Acragan’s actor hide their betrayals behind false expressions of concern and admiration while they aim to destroy their victims’ well-being. All the while, the victims think they

39 Ibid., 1.4.3.

304

Gillian Granville Bentley

care for his welfare. They also fail to realize Plato’s fears regarding mimêsis, as their feigned concern leads to no increase in their actual af fection for their victims. Plato’s observation concerned primarily lengthy and repeated mimêsis, which is not quite the case in either of  these circumstances. Chaereas is convinced by the actor’s words and looks and asks to be shown the proof. He follows the actor’s instructions, unwittingly joining the cast of  this farce. The young man sends a note to Callirhoe saying that he will be away for the night, then spies on his own house. Chariton chooses this moment to highlight that this scene has been manufactured by the suitor from Acragas, writing, ὁ δὲ κακοήθης ἐκεῖνος καὶ διάβολος συνέταττε τὴν σκηνήν [‘then the wretched schemer set the scene’].40 Again, he uses a term from the theatre: ‘stage’ [σκηνή]. Chaereas’ house and its surroundings have become a stage on which the Acragan can set a drama. Chaereas himself  becomes an actor in the farce, allowing his actions to be dictated by his new ‘friend’. The Acragan, who has orchestrated the scene from afar, uses his cohorts as masks, ventriloquizing his treachery. Iago also sets a scene through his disposal of  Desdemona’s handkerchief. Othello leaves the stage and he announces, I will in Cassio’s lodging lose this napkin And let him find it. Trif les light as air Are to jealous confirmations strong As proofs of  holy writ. (Oth. III iii 324)

Stephen Greenblatt recognizes Iago’s ‘role-player’s ability’, noting, ‘Iago is fully aware of  himself as an improviser and revels in his ability to manipulate his victims’.41 Whereas in Chariton’s novel it is the author who casts the Acragan as a director, in Othello Iago voices his plans and shows himself  to be acting, without the same explicit references to theatre – which are, in fact, unnecessary. He is already on a stage. The connection between performance and deceiving the eye is highlighted in Othello’s demand for proof: 40 Ibid., 1.4.8. 41 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 235 and 233.

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

305

Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore, Be sure of it, give me ocular proof, Or by the worth of man’s eternal soul Thou hadst been better born a dog Than answer my wak’d wrath! (Oth. III iii 362–6)

Maurianne Adams, in discussing the discourse regarding sight and blindness in Othello, notes that Iago ‘seals up Othello’s eyes with a visual mousetrap’.42 His call for ocular proof, as judicial as it sounds, is hardly useful if  Othello misinterprets what he sees. Chaereas also falls into misinterpretation, when he watches the final performance in the suitors’ plot. As evening falls, the first actor, designated to play the lover, approaches Chaereas’ home, ὑποκρινόμενος μὲν τὸν λαθραίοις ἔργοις ἐπιχειρεῖν προαιρούμενον, πάντα δὲ μηχανώμενος ἵνα μὴ λάθοι [‘acting as if  he was trying to do something in secret, but in everything not making himself  hidden’].43 The actor reads like a character in comedy, overacting his role in a drama within a drama. Chariton describes the lover’s costume in great detail: κόμην εἶχε λιπαρὰν καὶ βοστρύχους μύρων ἀποπνέοντας, ὀφθαλμοὺς ὑπογεγραμμένους, ἱμάτιον μαλακόν, ὑπόδημα λεπτόν· δακτύλιοι βαρεῖς ὑπέστιλβον.44 [‘He had oiled hair, f lowing perfumed locks, his eyes were made up, his cloak soft, his slippers fine; his fingers sparkled with rings.’] It is possibly the most detailed description of any character’s hair, make-up and dress in the entire novel, including those of  Callirhoe and Chaereas. It is significant that it comes during the most self-consciously theatrical episode in the work. The costume and acting reinforce the impression that performance is at the heart of  the Acragan’s plot, and that the costumes and make-up of drama can be turned to more sinister uses. The Acragan produces a drama with three acts: the party scene outside of  Chaereas’ house, the warning from a concerned individual and the

42 Maurianne S. Adams, ‘“Ocular Proof ” in Othello and Its Source’, PMLA, 79/3 (1964), 234–41, 239. 43 Chariton, Callirhoe, 1.4.9. 44 Ibid., 1.4.9.

306

Gillian Granville Bentley

clandestine lovers’ meeting. He contrives the words and actions, and his actors wear costumes and convincingly play their scripted roles. The deception succeeds. Chaereas is prompted by the drama constructed around him to play the role of  the cuckolded husband in earnest. He rushes into his house, intending to apprehend the lover, but encounters the innocent Callirhoe instead. In his anger, he assaults his wife, kicking her in the womb. Callirhoe appears to be dead, Chaereas a murderer. He has fallen for the suitors’ scheme.

‘And what’s he then says I play the villain?’ The suitors’ plot is neither the first nor the last of  the stage-managed performances and pre-arranged spectacles in the novel, not all of which are necessarily nefarious.45 Chariton appears to have a preoccupation with making his protagonists the objects of spectacle.46 He also makes them the audience for performances by others.47 Chariton of fers a Hellenistic worldview – a world intent on viewing and being viewed.48 At times the author appears to compare himself  to a dramatist, particularly in book 5, when, after a brilliant courtroom spectacle, the narrator asks; τίς ἂν φράσῃ κατ᾽ ἀξίαν ἐκεῖνο τὸ σχῆμα τοῦ δικαστηρίου; ποῖος ποιητὴς ἐπὶ σκηνῆς παράδοξον

45 For instance, Fortune’s arrangement of  Callirhoe and Chaereas’ first meeting; see above, n. 4. 46 Froma Zeitlin, ‘Living Portraits and Sculpted Bodies in Chariton’s Theater of  Romance’, in Stelios Panayotakis, Maaike Zimmerman, and Wytse Keulen, eds, The Ancient Novel and Beyond (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003), 79. 47 Besides the suitors’ plot that is arranged for Chaereas, Callirhoe is the audience of (false) assurances of  her safety by the pirate Theron (1.13.8–10) and of  the (also false) lamentations of  her servant Plangon (2.6.2–6). 48 Perhaps such a world is analogous to that of  Shakespeare’s audience, when the best audience seats were those located on the stage itself.

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

307

μῦθον οὕτως εἰσήγαγεν; ἔδοξας ἂν ἐν θεάτρῳ παρεῖναι μυρίων παθῶν πλήρει.49 [‘Who could worthily report the scene in the courtroom? What dramatist ever set such a unique scene on the stage? One would have himself in a theatre, filled with countless emotions.’] Chariton’s self-congratulation at devising a theatrical setting would suggest that crafting theatrical ef fect is not in itself a negative or dangerous activity. If  theatricality is not in essence the evil to be found in the suitors’ plot, then perhaps the real danger that it highlights is the danger of oversimplicity, of not recognizing performance in the real world. The episode displays the naïveté of  Chaereas in comparison to the adult males around him. He is easily fooled and easily guided, even by strangers. Chariton specifically states that the second actor is someone whom Chaereas had never met before. Yet he is willing to take his word that his wife is an adulterer. Chaereas trusts in appearances. He saw the trappings of a party outside of  his home – he thought there had been a party. A man tells him his wife is unfaithful – he trusts that man to guide him. He sees a lothario approach his home – he does not question why a man who should be stealthy is in fact conspicuous. Chaereas is betrayed, not only by the Acragan’s actors, but also by his own instincts. The very qualities that can be admired in Chaereas and Othello become the ones that lead to their most terrible crimes. Othello’s free and open nature becomes the very thing that traps him, when the freeness of  his emotions allows an explosion of murderous violence that leads to an equally unbridled suicidal remorse. Chaereas is open and trustful, unaccustomed to the subtleties of  the adult world of which he has only recently become a part. The ‘youthful follies’ [νεωτερικὰ ἁμαρτήματα] he could indulge in at the gymnasium become a much more dangerous activity in the polis at large,50 and his zelotypia is all the more violent and irrepressible due to his inexperience at playing adult games. While Chaereas does not recognize performances as performances, the Acragan, on the other hand, takes every opportunity to create appearances that belie reality. The Acragan masks the suitors’ revenge behind

49 Chariton, Callirhoe, 5.8.1–2. 50 Ibid., 1.2.6.

308

Gillian Granville Bentley

actors unknown to Chaereas, thus avoiding the necessity of  befriending his rival. The first actor, the concerned friend, reveals that even imitating a good man can be done for evil. Plato’s fear that feigned traits will inf luence real ones is realized in Chaereas’ gullibility, but the actors themselves do no physical harm. The theatrical cast to the suitors’ plot does reveal the dangers of mimêsis made real – to an audience. Although the Acragan uses theatrical tricks, his actors’ playing false is mere performance – mere appearance. The act of mimêsis does not yield any evidence of increased regard for the victim, nor do the Acragan or Iago ever express remorse for the events they set into motion. Plutarch recounts that Solon feared that acting would find its way into daily business, and the way the Acragan hires an actor to take a role that is meant to ref lect real life is a very literal example of such danger. Instead of  the act of mimêsis being a danger to its agent, in both Othello and Chariton the greatest danger lies in how the mimêsis is received – as reality or as fiction. In Callirhoe, the Acragan is never caught and never punished. He achieves his aims and then disappears from the narrative. The remainder of  the novel can be read as the story of  Chaereas’ recognition of  his error and his redemption, achieved through a character-building journey that culminates in his reunion with Callirhoe (who is not dead after all).51 Othello, on the other hand, chooses redemption via suicide, and the play is brought to a close with the incarceration of  Iago, who is betrayed, in turn, by the deus ex machina found in a posthumous letter from Roderigo. Despite their dif fering fates, the Acragan and Iago both play engaging villains. Throughout Othello, Iago is most often onstage and most often directly in communication with the audience via soliloquy. He is witty and amusing, if diabolical. He is a seductive embodiment of  theatricality, both cleverer and funnier than his victims. The Acragan, though not presented as a showman like Iago, is clever speaker and a devious planner. He is also

51

As Carol Gesner notes in Shakespeare & the Greek Romance: A Study of  Origins (Lexington: University Press of  Kentucky, 1970), 122–3, the story is similar to the slandered ladies/Scheintode (apparent-death) scenarios found in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and A Winter’s Tale.

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

309

introduced during the very first shift of  focus from the protagonists, and he fills his short portion of  the narrative with a devious, layered plot over which he has complete control. Chaereas, on the other hand, fails even at getting himself convicted of a murder everyone knows he has committed – his court speech in self-condemnation wins him the pity of  the jury and they vote to acquit him. Iago asks, ‘And what’s he then says I play the villain?’ (Oth. II iii 336). He suggests that the dispositions of  the people around him are the true culprits, which resonates with Libanius’ above-mentioned argument. Othello sees ocular proof in a handkerchief; Chaereas is completely deceived by fake parties, false words and imitation adulterers, but it is he who makes the story real by embodying the zelotypia the performances were meant to invoke. Just as Othello does, Chaereas turns his anger on the one he loves, betrayed by his own emotions.

Bibliography Adams, Hazard, The Of fense of  Poetry (Seattle: University of  Washington Press, 2007). Adams, Maurianne S., ‘“Ocular Proof ” in Othello and Its Source’, PMLA, 79/3 (1964), 234–41. Barish, Jonas, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 1981). Burke, Kenneth, ‘Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method’, Hudson Review, 4/2 (1951), 165–203. Burns, Elizabeth, Theatricality (New York: Longman, 1972). Chariton, Chariton: Callirhoe, ed. and tr. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). De Temmerman, Koen, ‘Chaereas Revisited. Rhetorical Control in Chariton’s “Ideal” Novel Callirhoe’, Classical Quarterly 59/1 (2009), 247–62. Diels, Hermann and Walther Kranz, eds, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidman, 1952). Fantham, Elaine, ‘ΖΗΛΟΤΥΠΙΑ: Sex, Violence and Literary History’, Phoenix 40/1 (1980), 45–57.

310

Gillian Granville Bentley

Gesner, Carol, Shakespeare & the Greek Romance: A Study of  Origins (Lexington: University Press of  Kentucky, 1970). Gillespie, Stuart, ‘Shakespeare and Greek Romance: “Like an old tale still”’, in Charles Martindale and Albert Booth Taylor, eds, Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 225–40. Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 2005). Gross, Kenneth, ‘Slander and Skepticism in Othello’, English Literary History 56/4 (Winter 1989), 819–52. Habib, Rafey, A History of  Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). Kehoe, Patrick, ‘The adultery mime reconsidered’, in David F. Bright and Edwin S. Ramage, eds, Classical Texts and their Traditions: Studies in Honor of  C.R. Trahman (Chico: Scholars Press, 1984), 89–106. Konstan, David, and Suzanne Said, eds, Greek and Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past Under the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 2006). Lada-Richards, Ismene, ‘“Within the Compasse of a Lye …”: signs of antitheatricality on the Greek stage?’, in Elena Theodorakopoulos, ed., Attitudes to Theatre from Plato to Milton (Bari: Levante, 1998), 21–56. ——, ‘“The players will tell all”: the dramatists, the actors and the art of acting in Sophocles’ Philoctetes’, in Simon Goldhill and Edith Hall, eds, Sophocles in the Greek Tragic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 48–68. Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, Ninth Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889). Malloy, Margaret E. Libanius and the Dancers (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1996). Nagy, Gregory, ‘Genre and Occasion’, Métis 9 (1994), 11–25. ——, Poetry as Performance. Homer and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Nehamas, Alexander, ‘Plato on Imitation and Poetry in Republic 10’, in Julius Moravcsik and Philip Temko, eds, Plato on Beauty, Wisdom and the Arts (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), 47–78. Plato, Opera, ed. John Burnet, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1900–7). Plutarch, Vies, ed. Robert Flacelière, Emile Chambry, and Marcel Juneaux, 4 vols (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1961). Rabkin, Eric S. 1998. ‘Imagination and Survival’, in Brett Cooke, George E. Slusser and Jaume Marti-Olivella, eds, The Fantastic Other: An Interface of  Perspectives (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 1998), 1–20. Reardon, Bryan P., ed., Collected Ancient Greek Novels (Berkeley: University of  California Press 1990).

An Ancient Othello in Chariton’s Callirhoe

311

Sandy, Gerald, ‘Ancient Prose Fiction and Minor Early English Novels’, Antike und Abendland 25 (1979), 41–55. Schmeling, Gareth, ed., The Novel in the Ancient World (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996). Shakespeare, William, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1998). Smith, Steven D., Greek Identity and the Athenian Past in Chariton: The Romance of  Empire (Groningen: Barkhuis, 2007). Swain, Simon, ed., Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Tilg, Stefan, Chariton of  Aphrodisias and the Invention of  the Greek Love Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Wolf f, Samuel, The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New York: New Era Printing Company, 1912). Zeitlin, Froma, ‘Living Portraits and Sculpted Bodies in Chariton’s Theater of  Romance’, in Stelios Panayotakis, Maaike Zimmerman, and Wytse Keulen, eds, The Ancient Novel and Beyond (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003), 71–83.

Felisa Baynes-Ross

Ambages and Double Visages: Betrayal in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde1

At the beginning of  Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385), the narrator forewarns that the poem is concerned with the ‘double sorwe of  Troilus’.2 Already, the situation of  the poem is one of  f lux, as Troilus moves from ‘wo to wele and after out of joie’.3 In these few opening lines, the poem of fers us an image of  Troilus’ world, caught in phases of ascent and decline and moving from the unfortunate position of  lack to possession, and then to loss. At the opening, the narrator sums up the dramatic action of  the poem: Troilus desires the widow Criseyde, temporarily fulfills that desire and loses Criseyde’s love to Diomede, the Greek prince. It would seem that this is a world ruled by Fortune, the figure Chaucer borrows from Boethius’ Consolation of  Philosophy.4 As the narrator prompts us to look beyond the more immediate events of  the poem, Fortune appears here ‘as an implacable destiny’, a controlling force whose very essence is change.5 However, as David Benson has argued, the figure of  Fortune is but one of  the ‘central elements’ of  Troilus and it alone does not exhaust the poem.6 1

I am grateful to the editors of  this volume for their thoughtful suggestions, which have greatly improved the essay. I must also thank Steve Larocco, Patrick McBrine and Michael Ross for their comments and continued support. 2 Geof frey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed., Stephen A. Barney (New York: Norton, 2006), I.1. Subsequent references to the text will appear with book and line number. 3 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, I. 4. 4 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906). 5 David C. Benson, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (London: Unwin Hyman Inc., 1990), 150. 6 Ibid., 149.

314

Felisa Baynes-Ross

Furthermore, to read the poem as ‘a mechanical restatement of  Boethius’ orthodox and other-worldly message underestimate[s] the literary and thematic complexity of  Chaucer’s poem’.7 Fortune is not the only agent of change here, nor does its presence foreclose a reading of  the poem that admits the role of other forces in eliciting Troilus’ sorrow. If we take Fortune as the only agent of change, we neglect the complexity of  the world created by Chaucer, in which fortune alone does not account for all of its changing conditions. Although the figure of  Fortune provides one framework for interpreting the narrative and is present throughout Troilus and Criseyde, the opening lines of  the poem situate Troilus’ double sorrow not within the scheme of  Fortune’s ever turning wheel, but within a character’s specific action: Criseyde’s forsaking. The narrator’s words illustrate this point: For now wil I gon streght to my matere, In which ye may the double sorwes here Of  Troilus in lovynge of  Criseyde, And how that she forsook hym er she deyde.8

The poem singles out Criseyde’s apparent betrayal as the catalyst for the sorrow of  Troilus and the end of  love and their relationship. As Joseph F. Graydon af firms, Chaucer has ‘adopted a scheme for the construction of  his tragedy that places the emphasis upon decision and action developing from character, rather than the automatic working out of a fatal result’.9 In these lines, it is Criseyde’s betrayal that bears the burden of  Troilus’ sorrow. The emphasis is placed on her forsaking of  Troilus, even suggesting that the climax of  the poem rests entirely within that act. That Troilus loves Criseyde only amplifies the sorrow and the sense of  loss he feels when she is transferred to the Greek camp and then fails to return after the tenth day as she had promised. In the moment that Criseyde accepts Diomede’s of fer of  love and protection there, the love between her and Troilus is

7 Ibid., 152. 8 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, I. 53–6. 9 Joseph Graydon, ‘Defense of  Criseyde’, PMLA, 44/1 (1929), 141–77, 149.

Ambages and Double Visages

315

utterly undone. Criseyde’s action renders her promise to Troilus false, and it is from this apparent retraction of  her own words that his sorrow stems. Criseyde’s betrayal is the source of  Troilus’ sorrow, but, as the language of  the narrator suggests, the narrative is also about how she forsakes Troilus. And it is only by paying attention to the manner in which the language of  the poem characterizes that betrayal and its preconditions that we gain insight into why Criseyde forsakes her lover. Simply put, if we are to understand anything about the sorrow and tragedy that the poem is ostensibly about, we must not consider the forsaking of  Troilus in isolation. David Aers has said in his essay, ‘Criseyde: Woman in Medieval Society’, that Chaucer’s construction of  Criseyde ‘involves a profound exploration of  the ways in which individual action, consciousness, and sexuality, the most intimate areas of  being, in fact are fundamentally related to the specific social and ideological structures within which an individual becomes an identifiable human being’.10 Betrayal therefore cannot be understood apart from all of  the conditions that engender and even sustain its existence, nor can Criseyde be understood apart from all of  the social forces that constitute her very way of  being within the world of  Chaucer’s poem. Criseyde’s betrayal does not occur within a vacuum. Her consciousness, sensibilities and actions are all touched by the variant realities of  her world, and to consider her merely as an example of  female infidelity ignores the specific social structures that give shape to that world. Thus, the conditions that allow for betrayal are just as significant as her forsaking of  Troilus. As Aers suggests, Criseyde’s social situation as a widow, abandoned by her father, Calkas, and thus without a male protector, is emphasized at the beginning of  the poem precisely because of  the role it plays in her decisions and the choices available to her. But because it is within the structure of courtship that Criseyde’s betrayal occurs, and it is there that trust is violated and bonds are breached, we must also examine the conditions that characterize courtship in order to understand the role of  betrayal in the lives of  the characters. Given that the courtship between

10

David Aers, ‘Criseyde: Woman in Medieval Society’, Chaucer Review 13/1 (1979), 177–200, 179.

316

Felisa Baynes-Ross

Troilus and Criseyde takes place within a culture of ambiguity and that it depends for its initial success upon the orchestration of elaborate schemes marked by duplicity, it can come as no surprise that an act of  treachery ends it. The world that her Trojan lover, Troilus, constructs for Criseyde, with the help of  her uncle and their go-between, Pandarus, provides fertile ground for betrayal. When these two begin a secret courtship, and when Troilus relies upon Pandarus’s schemes to realize his desire for Criseyde, he subjects his happiness, not to the ‘arbitration of  Fortune’, as Gerald Morgan claims, but rather to the rules of  the game he plays.11 If duplicity is central to obtaining Criseyde’s love in the first place, then it must also have its share in love’s undoing. What is more, since the forms of  treachery in the poem, ‘from the blatant to the subtle, from the malicious to the unthinking, are manifold, an appeal to fate alone cannot explain’ how Criseyde finds her role.12 Although Troilus and Criseyde’s courtship is a secret one, it does not remain immune to the reality of war, the kinds of ideologies that dictate a woman’s social position in (Chaucer’s) Troy and the expectations that come with being a Trojan prince. On the contrary, all of  these factors come to bear on their relationship. For Troilus and Criseyde, their love af fords them no impenetrable barrier from everything external to it. Rather, everything, from social expectations to the actions of others, exerts pressure upon their courtship, altering their choices and possible actions. In addition to this, however, their courtship also constitutes a cultural framework of its own, one that thrives on ambiguity, where confused meanings are abundant and deception becomes a habitual practice to manoeuver situations in one’s favour. It is precisely within this space that truth is often compromised to secure personal interest and where, for the same reason, treachery wears many faces and people are considered to be things to be manipulated.

11 12

Gerald Morgan, ‘The Ending of  Troilus and Criseyde,’ The Modern Language Review, 77/2 (1982), 257–71, 268. Monica E. McAlpine, The Genre of  Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 188.

Ambages and Double Visages

317

Before elaborating the conditions that lay the groundwork for treachery, we will consider the way in which betrayal is represented in Chaucer’s poem. The words of  Diomede are perhaps the most insightful here. Diomede’s definition of  betrayal allows us to understand, not only the world that Criseyde crosses over into, but also the one she leaves behind in Troy. In a conversation with Criseyde, Diomede reveals a hint of doubt about her father’s loyalty. Although Diomede assures Criseyde of  his own trustworthiness and vouches that he ‘naught ne lie’, this assurance hinges somewhat upon whether Criseyde’s father is leading the Greeks with ‘ambages’ or ambiguities.13 For Diomede, betrayal is possible in the moment of ambiguity, a moment of multiple meanings and shifting loyalties. Diomede clarifies his use of  the word ambages: ‘That is to seyn, with double words slye, | Swiche as men clepen a word with two visages’.14 In his articulation of  this structure of disloyalty, Diomede presents doubleness as the central aspect of  betrayal. One betrays by speaking ‘double words’, by becoming caught in the middle of shifting discourses. According to the definition Diomede provides, the betrayer is double-tongued; he not only says one thing and means another, but also operates within two distinct and discrete modes of discourse, blurring the lines between any real sense of allegiance. Diomede sees ambiguity as the simultaneous utterance of two words in one, and it is within such indeterminate enunciations that meanings become undecidable. In a sense, betrayal results from the ability and capacity to translate one’s speech into two dif ferent discursive systems and to operate in both as though bound by each.15 The betrayer is of  two persuasions,

13 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V. 900, 897. ‘Ambages’ means ambiguities in Middle English and plays a crucial role in the structure of  betrayal in Troilus and Criseyde. 14 Ibid., V. 897–9. 15 ‘Discursive systems’ are understood here in the Foucauldian sense to refer to the whole system of practices, statements and networks of institutions that structure speech and behaviour. In other words, betrayal is about inhabiting two dif ferent modes of  behaviour. All of  Troilus’ public actions are governed by the code of martial honour, and it is within that system that his public persona is constructed. In private and with Criseyde, however, he becomes a servant of  the religion of  love, and his bouts

318

Felisa Baynes-Ross

and he manipulates discourse to meet desire, while remaining vulnerable himself  to the consequences of  his ‘double words’. But Diomede’s reference to visages also suggests that betrayal is a kind of performance, a putting on and wearing of  two faces. The betrayer is not only double-tongued, but also two-faced. For Diomede, betrayal therefore belongs to the world of masquerade, and the act of  betrayal involves not only the spoken word, but also a kind of play-performance in which the betrayer’s outward appearance of desire is nothing but a show that masks his true intent. If  this quality of ambiguity is, as Diomedes suggests, at the core of what it means to betray, then the courtship between Troilus and Criseyde is problematic from the start, because it is precisely within this kind of double talk and play-acting that their love emerges. When Troilus enlists the help of  Pandarus to initiate a meeting between himself and Criseyde, he turns himself into a willing subject and participant in Pandarus’ duplicitous schemes. Pandarus’ plan to bring the two together involves some ‘intricate manoeuvres and outright lies’.16 First, he concocts a story about Poliphete, whom he claims is out to seize Criseyde’s possessions, and then he petitions Troilus’ brother, Deiphebus, for his help. After manipulating Deiphebus into agreeing to host a dinner party where Criseyde will be invited to explain her case and, in ef fect, rally the support of everyone, Panadarus returns to Troilus and discloses the entire plot: And al this thing he told hym, word and ende And how that he Deiphebus gan to blende, And seyde hym, ‘Now is tyme if  that thow konne, To bere the wel tomorwe, and al is wonne’.17

Pandarus has certainly set the wheels turning, but the success of  his scheme also depends on Troilus’ ability to play his part well. If  Troilus is a good dissembler, then all will be won. Troilus’ role in this theatrical enterprise is of  lovesickness and desire are symptomatic of  that discourse. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of  Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). 16 Benson, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, 90. 17 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, II. 1495–8.

Ambages and Double Visages

319

to feign illness and confine himself  to bed with the ultimate goal of  luring Criseyde to his bedside. Troilus does just this, and his complicity in the deception allows Pandarus to carry out the plan ef fectively, to ‘blende’ or blind Deiphebus. The carefully calculated ruse achieves its desired end, and Troilus has his private meeting with Criseyde. However, when Pandarus initially proposes this plan, Troilus responds that feigning an illness is unnecessary, as he is ‘sik in ernest’.18 Indeed, Troilus has often remarked on his epic lovesickness even before he decides to follow Pandarus’ plan, and it is his evident lovesickness that prompts Pandarus to assist him in winning Criseyde’s love for him as a cure. Yet, as real as Troilus’ sickness may be, he becomes caught up in a grand scheme that blurs the line between the real and the simulated, between the truth and the feigned. Troilus’ claim that he is already sick, that at this point, he has no need for pretension, reveals some unwillingness on his part to engage in the double-talk. Still, by of fering his lovesick body as evidence for what is undoubtedly a lie, he mingles truth and falsehood in such a way that they become indistinguishable. Withholding the real reason for the dinner party, he adopts the ambiguous discourse that Pandarus has placed on his tongue and leads Deiphebus with ambages. He deceives both his family and Criseyde, and this is one of  those moments where we see Troilus slipping away from the ideal of  trouthe with which he is so often associated in the poem.19 Of course, he forgets his well-rehearsed speech once he is in front of  Criseyde, and Benson cites this breakdown of  Troilus’ language as an indication of  his ‘painful sincerity’, which ‘is in sharp contrast to the artful pragmatism of  Pandarus’.20 This may well be the case, but Troilus

18 19

Ibid., II. 1529. As Richard Firth Green indicates in ‘Morality and Immorality’, in Corinne Saunders, ed., A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2006), ‘the oldest senses of  the word seems to have been those of a “covenant, contract or bargain”’ and more abstractly, it expresses ‘moral qualities,’ such as ‘“reliability, good faith, integrity”’ (Ibid., 210). In Chaucer’s poem, this prominent moral virtue is attributed to Troilus. His constancy and steadfastness are opposed to Criseyde’s fickleness and change of  heart. 20 Benson, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, 100.

320

Felisa Baynes-Ross

nevertheless has his share in the discourse of ambiguity. In order to obtain his secret desire, Troilus assents to his assigned role in Pandarus’ plot. Here, it seems, to win his goal, he falls away from the ideal of  trouthe. If  Pandarus is a false friend for deceiving Deiphebus, who consents to hosting the dinner party purely out of a desire to assist Criseyde, then Troilus has also violated his brother’s trust, and perhaps more importantly, Criseyde’s – right on the threshold of  their courtship.21 Comic as they may seem, these tricks and skillful manoeuvers draw the lovers into a courtship that is deeply embedded in a discourse of double meanings. Right from the start, love develops and is consummated within the larger context of  theatrics, masquerade and false pretenses. And it is another lie – this time, an accusation that Criseyde has betrayed Troilus for Horaste – that sets up the stage for the climactic union between the lovers. This accusation, which is entirely Pandarus’ invention, provokes Criseyde, and she is brought to tears as she declares her innocence and fidelity to Troilus. The intensity of  her emotion kindles in Troilus a similar passion. This invented story is what allows the lovers to be convinced of each other’s mutual love and desire. Even more unsettling is the way that, for the lovers, the possibility of  betrayal is what sparks the intense emotions in this scene: It is precisely because of  this wrongful accusation that Criseyde is moved to af firm her love with her tears and kisses, that Troilus swoons, and that this exchange between them culminates in the act of consummation. Their love is literally begotten amidst all of  the ambiguities. Here, as John Fleming has said, ‘the dynamic power that commands the action is the power of  the lie, untruth’.22 What controls the movement of  the lovers and propels Criseyde into Troilus’ arms is the lingering possibility of  betrayal and Criseyde’s desire to af firm her fidelity, all of which are responses to a single, artful falsehood. It is not Fortune that is at work here, but rather Pandarus’ double tongue. Pandarus’ ‘lingering presence’ in this scene is thus the lingering presence of duplicity – double meanings

21 22

Ibid., 74. Cited in ibid.

Ambages and Double Visages

321

and false faces.23 This, and not fate, is what sets the lovers on the path of a ‘doomed potential’.24 Troy, love and courtship are all parts of a discourse of ambages, and this constellation might explain why the lovers are so often preoccupied with the possibility of  being betrayed. In a world where love is born out of and thrives on ambiguity, yet another performance of  betrayal cannot but follow. Troilus certainly depends on Pandarus’ schemes to bring him and Criseyde together, but even before this happens, Troilus is involved in his own ambiguous performance. When his desire for Criseyde is initially aroused, he quickly masks his inner desires in public. Troilus’ response to his own feelings is to adopt what Thomas Kirby calls a ‘policy of dissimulation’.25 Troilus, though burning with desire for Criseyde, is careful to keep it hidden from the rest of society. He conceals ‘his desir in muwe | From every wight yborn, al outrely’.26 In order to hide his af f liction, Troilus wears in public, not the face of  the love-struck man, but the face of  the martial prince. And although he burns hot with desire for Criseyde, so that every move and thought is deeply af f licted by love, he is careful to keep these symptoms closely guarded. However, these intense feelings can only be denied for so long; this is, after all, the courtly lover whose heart cramps at the sight of  Criseyde’s tears and is so overcome with emotion that he faints. As much as Troilus ‘pretend[s] not to have’ what he in fact Steven R. Guthrie, ‘Chivalry and Privacy in Troilus and Criseyde and La Chastelaine de Vergy’, Chaucer Review 34/2 (1999), 150–73, here 170. Pandarus’ voyeuristic tendencies are often discussed in current Chaucer scholarship. The scene takes place in Pandarus’ house, where the sleeping arrangements ensure that he has access to Criseyde’s room. See Gretchen Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006) for a study of  the go-between tradition. A point of note here is that she sees Pandarus’ deception of  Criseyde in order to deliver her to Troilus’ bedside, as a ‘violation of one of  the most important traditions of idealized going between’ (ibid., 163). 24 E.T. Donaldson, ‘The Ending of  Troilus’, in Stephen A. Barney, ed., Troilus and Criseyde (New York: Norton, 2006), 475–87, 485. 25 Thomas Kirby, Chaucer’s Troilus. A Study in Courtly Love (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1958), 207. 26 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, I.381–2. 23

322

Felisa Baynes-Ross

does, love seems to speak in spite of  his denial, making its presence visible on the body:27 And fro tis forth tho refte hym love his slep, And made his mete his foo, and ek his sorwe Gan multiplie, that, whoso tok kep, It shewed in his hewe both eve and morwe.28

Troilus’ love pangs cannot be denied. He suf fers sleeplessness and lack of appetite, and his increasing sorrow and anxieties are visible in his physical appearance. It would seem that Troilus is betrayed by his body, but rather than compromise his reputation as the martial prince, Troilus decides to mask his own sickness: Therefore a title he gan him to borwe Of other siknesse, lest men of  hym wende That the hote fir of  love hym brende, And seyde he hadde a fevere and ferde amys.29

When simple dissimulation proves inadequate, Troilus begins to wear yet another mask. The changing faces of  Troilus now become dif ficult to keep track of. In public, he is the martial prince and in private, he is the lovesick man, pining for Criseyde. Troilus’ existence becomes ambiguous, to say the least, as his life consists in an ongoing project of  balancing two identities: the martial prince and the courtly lover. Even his sickness must change faces, as Troilus borrows ‘a title’ of some other illness so that no one would think that from ‘the hote fir of  love hym brende’.30 A supposed fever becomes the mask behind which the real cause of  his af f liction is hidden. His body literally becomes the site of ambiguity, enlivened by the multiplicity of its meanings.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of  Michigan Press, 1994), 3. 28 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, I. 484–7. 29 Ibid., I. 488–91. 30 Ibid., I. 487–90. 27

Ambages and Double Visages

323

Like Troilus, Diomede’s attempt to woo Criseyde is also marked by ambiguous discourse – the very same ambages that he so carefully defines for Criseyde. Although Diomede wants Criseyde to trust his words and to see him apart from that discourse of duplicity, his actions prior to his entrance into Calkas’ tent suggest that he might not be as straightforward as he wishes to appear in conversation. Nearing Calkas’ quarters, ‘This Diomede, as fressh as braunche in May, | Com to the tente ther as Calkas lay, | And feyned hym with Calkas han to doone’.31 Diomede approaches the tent under false pretenses. Feigning to have business only with Calkas, he secures access to the actual object of  his desire. The narrator continues: ‘But what he mente, I shall yow tellen soone’, signaling an opposition between Diomede’s meaning or purpose and the expressions (verbal or non-verbal) he might have used to authenticate the alleged reason for his visit.32 The narrator’s cue also suggests that Diomede’s private meaning and purpose reveal a very dif ferent visage from the one he displays to Calkas and Criseyde. If we read Diomede’s actions in the context of his own interpretation of ambiguity, we see that he is operating according to his own criteria for betrayal. It seems that, as much as Diomede wants to position himself  beyond the world of ambiguity, false pretenses and betrayal, the moment he enters Calkas’ tent, he commits himself  to that world, and the tent becomes the setting of a staged performance. As the narrator of  the poem tells us, Diomede’s public visage does not ref lect his intentions towards Criseyde: This Diomede, of whom yow telle I gan, Goth now withinne himself ay arguynge, With al the sleghte and al that evere he kan How he may best with shortest taryinge Into his net Criseydes herte brynge. To this entent he koude nevere fyne; To fisshen hire he leyde out hook and lyne.33

31 32 33

Ibid., V. 844–7. Ibid., V. 487. Ibid., V. 771–7.

324

Felisa Baynes-Ross

Diomede’s real purpose for entering Calkas’ tent has more to do with fulfilling his own private desire to secure Criseyde’s heart (and body) than with conducting business with her father. That his secret meaning is at odds with his public persona reveals that he has already entered the sphere of ambiguity and deception. Just as in the case of  Troilus, what stands out in this episode is that the fulfillment of  Diomede’s private desire depends entirely on his ability to conceal that desire. Just as the initial access to Criseyde in her father’s tent is achieved with deception and cunning, so, too, must Diomede’s ultimate desire of winning Criseyde’s heart be achieved ‘with al the sleghte and al that evere he kan’.34 Diomede’s conversation with Criseyde is of a particular design. He wants to bring her heart into his net in the shortest time possible. This is a mission of entrapment, and the game of  love has now become a rather dangerous hunt. When Diomede enters Criseyde’s tent under the guise of  business with Calkas, he places love and courtship in the world of ambages and double visages. Each word exchanged is the casting of a net, another performance, another deception and, perhaps, another betrayal. The metaphor of  the hook and line further heightens the sense of entrapment. Like a baited fish or bird, Diomede draws Criseyde away from the world of  Troy and into his own. When he advises Criseyde of  the futility of weeping ‘for love of som Troian’, he baits her with the prospect of something better in Greece.35 He even suggests that to weep for a Trojan is an act of self-beguilement. According to his logic, to give up Troy is to release herself  from self-deception. Again, what Diomede wants is to place himself and the world of  Greece in opposition to the desolation and emptiness of  Troy. He represents himself as ‘the real thing’ (as it were), ignoring that his own conversation with Criseyde could not have happened without his own beguiling performance. As he advises Criseyde to give up what she has already temporarily left behind, he of fers in its place a world and experience without guile, a thing she can ‘sen with [hir] ye’.36 He tells

34 Ibid., V. 773. 35 Ibid., V. 877. 36 Ibid., V. 901.

Ambages and Double Visages

325

Criseyde that she will witness the truth of  his words with her own eyes, and he forgets that, up to this point, everything she has witnessed and all that he has of fered Criseyde is nothing more than his own simulacrum of such a world. In an ef fort to make his words seem more credible and to present himself an appealing substitution for what Criseyde has left in Troy, Diomede heightens the drama of  his performance. Specifically, he attempts to simulate the gestures and expressions of  the Trojan courtly lover: And with that word he gan to waxen red And in his speche a litel wight he quok And caste asyde a litel wight his hed, And stynte a while; and afterward he wok And sobreliche on hire he threw his lok, And seyde, ‘I am, al be it yow no joie, As gentil man as any wight in Troi […].’37

In this dramatic performance of  the courtly lover, Diomede simulates the kinds of actions we associate with Troilus and other star-struck lovers. We are reminded of  Troilus and his burning desire for Criseyde; his love for her is so overwhelming that it builds to ‘torment and adversite’.38 Troilus takes to his bed in numerous bouts of – purely conventional – lovesickness, and he even remarks that his experience is a ‘wondre maladie’.39 This ef fect is precisely what Diomede tries to recreate in his gesticulations to Criseyde. The shaking voice, the reddening of color to his face and the way he turns his head in Criseyde’s direction, are all meant to suggest a depth of real emotion. This performance takes on life and meaning as he brings a bit of  Troy into the Greek camp. But more than that, Diomede wants Criseyde to understand that he has the same potential and capacity to love and perform the rituals of courtship as any man in Troy. In ‘The Value of  “Eschaunge”: Ransom and Substitution in Troilus and Criseyde’, Molly Murray agrees that ‘Diomede himself exemplifies the characteristics of 37 38 39

Ibid., V. 925–30. Ibid., I. 404. Ibid., I. 419.

326

Felisa Baynes-Ross

every one of  Criseyde’s beloved Trojans’.40 With these gestures, Diomede invites Criseyde to read his body as visual proof of  his intent and his likeness to Troilus, ‘the archetype of  the courtly lover’.41 If  Diomede’s corporal enactment and self-masking are convincing, then he has essentially blurred the line between Greece and Troy, himself and Troilus, even truth and treachery. Diomede’s play-acting reveals that he, too, can play the game of  love and that, even while he denounces ambiguity, his own body is animated by it. Convincing though his actions may be, we cannot ignore the fact that Diomede is performing another act of play and masquerade here. Diomede essentially takes on Troilus’ ‘idiom, which consists largely of paralanguage – blushing, stammering, and fainting’ and ‘has much to do with the quality of  “trouthe” that is so characteristic of  Troilus’.42 Yet Diomede’s displays do not arise from the kind of passionate feelings that we witness with Troilus. While Troilus must depend on Pandarus’ artful schemes to initiate his courtship, Diomede needs no such help. His courtship with Criseyde is a carefully calculated seduction in which his ability to simulate the language of courtly love is only part of  the plan. Diomede is no courtly lover. From the moment that he enters Calkas’ tent to begin his suit with Criseyde, he has already envisaged the outcome of  his plan to bring Criseyde into his net. As Jerome Mandel has said, ‘Chaucer details with such loving care Troilus being suddenly and irrevocably surprised by love, progressing in love, learning in love [and] succeeding in love’.43 Troilus’ ambiguities do not have to do with the question of genuine feelings. His blushing, fainting and stammering ref lect the breakdown of  language in the midst of emotional intensity, his whole corpus is animated and transformed by love. We see no such transformation with Diomede, nor do we see him losing his composure with Criseyde 40 Molly Murray, ‘The Value of  “Eschaunge”: Ransom and Substitution in Troilus and Criseyde’, ELH 69/2 (2002), 335–58, 345. 41 Benson, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, 87. 42 Guthrie, ‘Chivalry and Privacy in Troilus and Criseyde and La Chastelaine de Vergy’, 151. 43 Jerome Mandel, ‘Courtly Love in the Canterbury Tales’, Chaucer Review, 19/4 (1985), 277–89, 279.

Ambages and Double Visages

327

in Calkas’ tent. Diomede’s conversation with Criseyde is the product of a well-rehearsed and timed performance. Diomede is not the courtly lover who is so overtaken by his love for Criseyde that his language becomes confused or breaks down. He produces the symptoms of  Troilus’ love sickness, but ‘[h]is words like his manners, do not ring true; they are only skin deep’.44 Unlike Troilus’, Diomede’s whole body does not bend under love’s overpowering force. To win Criseyde’s heart, Diomede engages in a full performance of courtly love and romance. From the moment he sets foot into her tent, he begins a kind of stage play. It is with cunning and deception that he gains access to Criseyde, and he continues to play out his own definition of ambiguity in an attempt to convince her that she must give up everything in Troy. Diomede’s play-acting achieves the desired result. Criseyde accepts his of fer and forsakes her Trojan lover, and again, we must bear in mind the fact that all of  this would not have happened without Diomede’s initial deception. What he has created for Criseyde is not just a world resembling the one she lost in Troy, but also a world of  love and romance that equally rests upon double words and double visages. It is clear that both courtships, the one between Criseyde and Troilus and, later, Criseyde and Diomede, have one quality in common. Both are constructed within an ambiguous discourse, situating love within a culture of  betrayal. Even before Criseyde forsakes Troilus, then, ambiguity, which Diomede determines as a sign of  betrayal, already plays a central role in all of  Criseyde’s relationships. Although it may seem at first that Criseyde is chief ly to blame for Troilus’ sorrow, she is hardly the first to behave treacherously towards those who are dearest to her. Calkas’ outright abandonment of  her at the beginning of  the poem, the many manipulations of  her own uncle Pandarus, and even her lover, Troilus, who more than once wears a false face to win her love, all contribute to this culture that breeds treachery and duplicity, of which Criseyde herself  becomes a part. Of course, there is no uniform face for treachery within the poem.

44 Thomas Kirby, Chaucer’s Troilus. A Study in Courtly Love (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1958), 231–2.

328

Felisa Baynes-Ross

The manner in which Calkas thoughtlessly forsakes the Trojans and his own daughter to avoid the imminent destruction of  Troy is not quite the same as Troilus’ dissembling, which is motivated by love and the desire to win Criseyde. And then there is Pandarus, who demonstrates very few qualms about pretending to look out for Criseyde while serving Troilus’ interests – and who, like a hypocrite, curses Criseyde when she breaks her promise to return to Troilus. Because Pandarus, like Diomede, executes his scheme with deliberateness and without a show of remorse, we do not mistake his speech and actions for anything but an artfully contrived performance. But what are we to make of  Criseyde’s betrayal, an instance of  treachery that is not only followed by tears of remorse, but also happens in spite of  ‘good entente’ and her ‘purpos evere to be trewe’?45 Here, a consideration of  Criseyde’s social reality becomes useful for examining this split between Criseyde’s good intent and her forsaking of  Troilus. According to Aers, Criseyde’s social reality has much to do with her final decision to accept Diomede’s of fer, and the circumstances leading up to her betrayal as well as the structure of  the poem itself support such a reading. Just at the brink of  treachery, Criseyde appears situated in precisely the same place from which her plight begins in Troy. Criseyde’s distress and solitude recall the passage in which we are first introduced to her in the poem. We meet Criseyde at Hector’s feet, burdened by ‘hire fadres shame, his falseness, and tresoun, [and] | Wel neigh out of  her wit for sorwe and fere’.46 Widowed and abandoned by her traitorous father, Calkas, who betrays Troy to the Greeks, Criseyde is in a ‘meschaunce’, a vulnerable position without a male protector.47 Her father’s shame and treason are precisely what construct Criseyde’s social reality at the beginning of  the poem, and the striking similarities between these details and the dismal picture the narrator paints of  her existence in the Greek camp ensure that they should not be dismissed or overlooked when we contemplate Criseyde’s betrayal.

45 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, IV. 1416–20. 46 Ibid., I. 107–8. 47 Ibid., I. 92.

Ambages and Double Visages

329

In the Greek camp, Criseyde is in the midst of despair, and the entire description of  her time there is devoted to her pain, tears and her solitary state. Just before she commits to leaving Troilus, the narrator seems intent on painting the worst picture of  Criseyde’s situation. This picture of  loneliness and destitution recalls her sad state in Troy when she is abandoned by her father and forced to seek Hector’s protection. In the Greek camp though, there is no one to whom she might petition, which only heightens her distress and need, both of which are repeatedly emphasized by the narrator. It is after Criseyde has fallen into despair that Diomede emerges as a substitute for Troilus’ love and Hector’s protection, and this substitution is underscored by Diomede’s explicit attention to her sorrow when he first speaks to her. The narrator allows us glimpses of  Criseyde as she looks upon the place where she was born and lived, and we witness how this sight of  Troy brings on an entire night of weeping for Criseyde. She is called a ‘woeful creature’, and her apparent distress and complete loss of  hope is fully detailed.48 Perhaps these are meant to move us in the same way that Criseyde’s tears and petition once moved Hector. Importantly, it is only after despairing that she betrays Troilus, and only after contemplating the awful truth that stealing away in the night to fulfill her promise to Troilus would put her in grave physical danger, that we see ‘hire herte slide’.49 What motivated Criseyde to seek Hector’s protection in Troy is her adeptness at assessing her situation as well as the options available to her. This ability also becomes crucial to her decision to accept Diomede. She must have known that her own position was threatened. As people spoke of  her father’s name and deed, she must have known how it would taint her own. These are the circumstances that constitute her world, and their force is evidently felt by Criseyde, who responded to this urgency by petitioning for Hector’s protection. Criseyde attempted to reverse Calkas’ damage with her cries for mercy at Hector’s feet. That she took up her own cause and became her own advocate reveals that Criseyde sees herself, not as a hapless victim of  Fortune, but, at the very least, as someone who can attempt to

48 Ibid., V. 713–14. 49 Ibid., V. 769.

330

Felisa Baynes-Ross

secure a space for herself among the very people her father betrayed. Thus, in the Greek camp and on the threshold of  treachery, Criseyde must have known that she had run out of any such options, and that the situation in the Greek camp demanded that she make another space and meaning for herself  there. In her essay, Murray insists that, just as the medieval chivalric practice of ransom deferred death and opened new exchanges and possibilities for its participants, Criseyde’s transferal to the Greek side opens a series of exchanges and the production of multiple meanings. Murray argues that the act of ransom can be ‘culturally generative’, in that it allows for improved economic status, political alliances and new relationships.50 Perhaps as Criseyde thinks about her own separation from Troy and from Troilus, as well as the act of  treachery that she is about to commit, she sees her acceptance of  Diomede’s love as the only way to produce some meaning for herself in Greece. This is not to say that betrayal is a moment of complete self-liberation for Criseyde, but, as the narrator informs us, when she does accept Diomede, he ‘refte hire of  the grete of al hire peyne’.51 The pain of  her loss – which she considered fatal, even before she is separated from Troilus: ‘How should I lyve if  that I from hym twynne?’52 – is made tolerable with this new alliance. Comparing herself  to a fish without water or a plant without root in her response to Diomede, she continues to see her impending separation from Troilus as a moment of death, the negation of  her own existence. But in accepting Diomede, she forgoes death, opening up the possibility for a dif ferent life, for new waters, where she learns to endure without Troilus. Her acceptance of  Diomede’s love then, becomes a ‘point of new departure’.53 She may not, like Calkas, have had the ability to calculate the outcome of  her decision in advance, but, judging from the present circumstances, Criseyde acts according to the options she finds available. Just as Calkas’ betrayal occurs at the moment that he sees the

50 Murray, ‘The Value of  “Eschaunge”’, 339. 51 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V. 103. 52 Ibid., IV. 758. 53 Jill Mann, Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), 19.

Ambages and Double Visages

331

impending doom of  Troy, so, too, does Criseyde forsake Troilus when she believes that there is no use in turning back. Although Diomede’s earlier recommendation to relinquish Troy and release herself  from self-deception is suspect and self-serving, it seems to hold some truth for Criseyde. Perhaps the greater part of  her pain, which Diomede takes away, is the burden of  her loss. Thus, when she is drawn into Diomede’s net, it is hardly a moment of callous infidelity, but a moment of reckoning with an irretrievable loss. Before finally accepting Diomede, Criseyde contemplates the way her betrayal of  Troilus would be considered by others. She has ‘falsed Troilus’, and she knows that in this moment of unfaithfulness, the love she once showed him would be nullified and forgotten by those who wish to use her name as proof of woman’s changeability.54 She knows the kind of meaning this act of  betrayal will convey to the public. That she proceeds in spite of  this knowledge only emphasizes the inevitability of  Criseyde’s choice. Moreover, Criseyde’s consideration of  the possible ef fects of  her treachery does not merely ref lect anxiety about her reputation. Again, this is a moment in which Criseyde fully contemplates her own state, her act and the way it will be read by others. What Criseyde displays here is a ‘sense of [her] place’.55 Inscribed in her mind is the ‘whole social order’, the guiding principles that adjust her expectations according to her place within the system.56 Just as Criseyde knew exactly where she stood in Troy, she knows her place among the Greeks. To return to Troy and Troilus is simply out of  the question, and she does not accept Diomede until she sees that ‘ther is no better 54 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V. 1053. 55 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of  Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 466. 56 In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu writes that taste is an acquired ability to make distinctions based on one’s place in a given social world. He writes that a ‘sense of one’s place’ guides ‘the occupants of a given place in social space towards the social positions adjusted to their properties, and towards the practices or goods which befit the occupants of  that position’. Ibid. In other words, when Criseyde assesses her own situation, she is able to discern not only what befits a woman in her position, but also what options are available to her in that society. She can anticipate what ‘goods’ she will receive as well as those goods from which she will be excluded.

332

Felisa Baynes-Ross

way’.57 As McAlpine suggests, ‘Criseyde is divested, by virtue of other people’s choices, of all her worldly securities’.58 At this point, it has become evident that Hector’s gracious forgiveness for her father’s treachery cannot really undo all of its ef fects. What she has lost as a result of others’ actions must now be secured with her own choice, as frustrating and limiting as it may be, and so she accepts Diomede’s of fer. Paradoxically, as Criseyde asserts, it is with betrayal that she attempts to be honest. As she acknowledges her own dishonour in forsaking Troilus, she vows, ‘To Diomede algate I wol be trewe’.59 What Criseyde is claiming here is that, even in the moment of  treachery, there is still a possibility for some truth and honesty. On the surface, her words seem fraught with ambiguity, but this is precisely what Criseyde wants to end. According to Diomede’s definition, she seems to be uttering two words here, lingering between two modes of discourse. But when Criseyde decides to love Diomede, she does not still cling to her love for Troilus – that she gives up. Even down to the last moment, Criseyde struggles to maintain a sense of trouthe amidst the ambages. Again, as McAlpine notes, Criseyde is ‘still trying, in straitened circumstances and with diminished inner resources, to preserve what integrity she can amid the deepening ambivalences of  her widow-hood, its losses, loyalties, and needs’.60 Her expressed desire to remain faithful is a reminder of  Criseyde’s habit of attempting to redress her circumstances. If she can no longer be true to Troilus, then she must be true to Diomede. The Criseyde we see here, attempting what may seem impossible to us, is the same Criseyde who pleaded before Hector back in Troy. She is the same Criseyde who, despite her lack of a male protector, tries to reverse her father’s treachery and its potential repercussions for herself. What Criseyde attempts to undo with treachery is not Fate, but a whole series of  betrayals that precedes her own. She forsakes Troilus, whose policy of dissimulation inscribes itself on their courtship and makes the

57 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V. 1069. 58 McAlpine, The Genre of  Troilus and Criseyde, 186. 59 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V. 1071. 60 McAlpine, The Genre of  Troilus and Criseyde, 186.

Ambages and Double Visages

333

talk of  love a discourse of ambiguity. In the Greek camp, her straitened circumstances leave her no alternative but to accept the of fer of yet another dissembler. Diomede, in an attempt to reproduce the world of  Troy, reproduces, not a world of  truth, but an entirely ambiguous discourse. The only truth to be had there is the one Criseyde hopes to create by being faithful to her new lover. Criseyde’s vow to be true to her new lover is also an attempt to seize some agency with respect to the way she will be read by others. This vow comes immediately after she expresses concern that her name will be reproached for betraying Troilus. What she of fers is an alternate gloss to the one she imagines many books will present. Twice, Criseyde remarks on the impossibility of  her circumstances. She can neither see a better way nor can she do any better. She can devise no plan that would allow her to remain true to Troilus. If she cannot avoid betrayal, then, perhaps, she can alter the way it is perceived by others. Just as the narrator underscores the many conf lictual conditions, that precede Criseyde’s betrayal – from the treachery of others, to the ease with which Criseyde is transferred to the Greek camp, to her utter distress before she leaves Troilus – so, too, does Criseyde attempt to complicate our reading of  her betrayal. Chaucer seems to grant Criseyde a brief moment to of fer us the possibility for another reading. It is only after the many details of  her distress that we witness Criseyde’s betrayal, and even then, the narrator does not leave us to draw our own conclusions without presenting another picture of  Criseyde’s remorse when she decides to leave Troilus. As the narrator confesses his own pity and desire to excuse her treachery, we cannot help but think that this is a reading Criseyde would endorse. Admittedly, although an examination of  the circumstances leading up to Criseyde’s betrayal broadens our understanding of  her motivations for leaving Troilus, her treachery still confounds. Troilus’ response is likewise one of disbelief, and he refuses to accept that he has been betrayed until it is explicitly clear that there can be no other reason for Criseyde’s delay. His unwillingness to accept that he has been betrayed, that ‘Diomede is inne’ and he is ‘oute’, stems from a misplaced faith in the power of  human

334

Felisa Baynes-Ross

love.61 Because of  his love for Criseyde and certainty of  her love for him, Troilus believes her ‘every word’ as though it were ‘gospel’.62 Admirable as this may be, it prevents Troilus from ever really contemplating the whole of  Criseyde’s situation, both as a woman and a widow in Troy. To expect Criseyde to orchestrate a treacherous escape is a telling sign of  Troilus’ naivety. Unlike Criseyde, who fully considers the possible dangers of attempting to escape, Troilus can only contemplate possible reasons for her delay, and even so, he still expects her to surmount every obstacle. As a woman, Criseyde looks beyond the immediacy of  her own feelings, knowing that these must always be measured against the larger social forces that have separated her from her Troilus and that impede the possibility of  their reunion. If we have learned nothing else from the sorrow and tragedy of  this poem, we learn that, in a world where love is sustained by ambiguity and masquerade, betrayal is never absent. As determined as Criseyde is to remain true to Troilus, she succumbs to treachery in the moment of despair. While she expects reproach for her infidelity, it is not Criseyde’s betrayal that first mingles love with ambages. As her courtship with Troilus illustrates, love was already double-tongued from the start. Thus, when Troilus remarks, ‘but who may bet bigile yf  hym lyste, | Than he on whom men weneth best to triste’, he touches on a note of  truth that rings through from the poem’s opening to its close.63 The import of  Troilus’ statement is that we are best beguiled by those we trust the most, and, although he clearly has Criseyde in mind when he utters these words, he could not have described the entire movement of  Chaucer’s poem better. After all, Criseyde betrays the very man whom she claims she cannot live without, but even before that, she is repeatedly deceived and manipulated by those whom she trusted most: her uncle Pandarus, her father Calkas, and even Troilus, who slips on false faces before her. In Chaucer’s poetic world, the many instances of  treachery point to the elusiveness of maintaining a real sense of  trouthe in

61 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V. 1519. 62 Ibid., V. 1265. 63 Ibid., V. 1266–7.

Ambages and Double Visages

335

a fallen world. That so many of  Chaucer’s characters exhibit the tendency to speak ambiguously is evidence that betrayal is foremost presented as a human condition – and not as proof of woman’s changeability, as the focus on Criseyde may suggest. It is no wonder that the poem ends with an admonition to turn to God, who is introduced as a contrast to everything that changes and passes in this world. The occurrences of  betrayal in the poem are many, but pinpointing the moment of  Criseyde’s turn and reconciling her decision with her intent becomes an elusive project. But, perhaps, Troilus’ refusal to believe that Criseyde has betrayed him owes itself  to his failure to accept a simple truth: ‘The heart is deceitful above any other thing, desperately sick; who can fathom it?’64

Bibliography Aers, David, ‘Criseyde: Woman in Medieval Society’, Chaucer Review 13/1 (1979), 177–200. Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of  Michigan Press, 1994). Benson, David C., Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (London: Unwin Hyman Inc., 1990). Boethius, The Consolation of  Philosophy, trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906). Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of  the Judgement of  Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Chaucer, Geof frey, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Stephen A. Barney (New York: Norton, 2006). Donaldson, E.T., ‘The Ending of  Troilus’, in Stephen A. Barney, ed., Troilus and Criseyde (New York: Norton, 2006), 475–87. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of  Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).

64 Jeremiah 17.9, in M. Jack Suggs, Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, James R. Mueller, eds, The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

336

Felisa Baynes-Ross

Gordon, Ida L., The Double Sorrow of  Troilus. A Study of  Ambiguities in Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Graydon, Joseph, ‘Defense of  Criseyde’, PMLA, 44/1 (1929), 141–77. Green, Richard Firth, ‘Morality and Immorality’, in Corinne Saunders, ed., A Concise Companion to Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2006). Guthrie, Steven R., ‘Chivalry and Privacy in Troilus and Criseyde and La Chastelaine de Vergy’, Chaucer Review 34/2 (1999), 150–73. Kirby, Thomas, Chaucer’s Troilus. A Study in Courtly Love (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1958). Mandel, Jerome, ‘Courtly Love in the Canterbury Tales’, Chaucer Review 19/4 (1985), 277–89. Mann, Jill, Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002). McAlpine, Monica E, The Genre of  Troilus and Criseyde (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). Mieszkowski, Gretchen, ‘Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus’ (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006). Morgan, Gerald, ‘The Ending of  Troilus and Criseyde,’ The Modern Language Review 77/2 (1982), 257–71. Murray, Molly, ‘The Value of  “Eschaunge”: Ransom and Substitution in Troilus and Criseyde’, ELH 69/2 (2002), 335–58. Suggs, M. Jack, Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, and James R. Mueller, eds, Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Taylor, David, ‘The Terms of  Love: A Study of  Troilus’s Style’, in Stephen A Barney, ed., Troilus and Criseyde (New York: Norton, 2006) 502–21.

Notes on Contributors

Felisa Baynes-Ross is a PhD student in the English Department at Fordham University. In her master’s thesis, she explored the schematized glossing of  biblical texts in Chaucer’s Wife of  Bath’s tale and prologue. Her research interests include medieval literature, biblical hermeneutics and colonialism in the Caribbean. Gillian Granville Bentley is a PhD candidate at King’s College London. She holds a BA in Classical Studies from Georgetown University and an MA from King’s College London. In her doctoral thesis, she explores the relationship between post-Classical performance culture and the ancient Greek novel, particularly in Chariton, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus. Dr. Bernd Blaschke has been leading a project at the Excellence-Cluster ‘Languages of  Emotion’ at the Free University Berlin since 2010. His publications include the monograph Der homo oeconomicus und sein Kredit bei Musil, Joyce, Svevo, Unamuno und Céline as well as many articles on emotion and comedy. He has also edited volumes on the ‘Limits of  the Economic’ and ‘Detours, the Aesthetics and Poetics of  Travel’. Dr. Eric Dodson-Robinson is Assistant Professor of  English at West Chester University. He is currently completing a book about representations of agency and identity in revenge tragedy and film, and he has published widely on Seneca, Shakespeare and the European dramatic tradition. Anne Julia Fett is completing her PhD at the Universities of  Bergamo, Perpignan and Sydney within the framework of  the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate ‘Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones’. In her dissertation, she examines the relationship between writing and filming in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. She has published articles on Pasolini and Fassbinder.

338

Notes on Contributors

Horst-Jürgen Gerigk has been Professor of  Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of  Heidelberg since 1974. He is one of  the co-founders of  the International Dostoevsky Society and member of  the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. In 2011 he was awarded the ‘Humboldt-Professur’ of  Ulm University. His books include Lesen und Interpretieren (2006), Ein Meister aus Russland. Beziehungsfelder der Wirkung Dostojewskijs. Vierzehn Essays (2010), Puschkin und die Welt unserer Träume. Zwölf  Essays zur russischen Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (2011) and Dostojewskijs Entwicklung als Schriftsteller. Vom ‘Toten Haus’ zu den ‘Brüdern Karamasow’ (2013). Dr. Joachim Harst is Assistant Lecturer at the University of  Bonn in the Department for Comparative Literature. He has recently published his dissertation on the problematic relationship between theology and theatricality in baroque martyr plays, which also forms the basis for his essay in this volume. Other fields of study include the question of philology, (postmodern) cinema and his second book project, ‘Universal History of  Adultery’. Rebecca Haubrich received an MA in Comparative Literature and German Studies from the Goethe University of  Frankfurt (Main) in 2011. In her thesis, Verwobene Formen. Zu den Metamorphosen der Sprache, she focuses on the structural metamorphoses of poetic language in Ovid’s artist-myths and their lyrical transformations from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently working on the myth of  the journey into the underworld and its relation to philology, which she is planning to pursue further as a Graduate Student in the German Department of  Brown University. Before coming to Brown, she was a Visiting Research Scholar at Yale University (2012/13). Anna Henke is a Graduate Student in the German Department at Yale University. In her dissertation, she examines the role that reading plays in critiquing systems of morality by tracing the various permutations of  the figure of  forgiveness in Walter Benjamin’s early fragments and essays.

Notes on Contributors

339

Dr. Kristina Mendicino is Assistant Professor at Brown University and Assistant Editor of  The German Quarterly. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Interrupting the Origin – Prophecies of  Language, in which she examines prophetic language and prophecies of  language in the writings of  Hegel, Humboldt, Hölderlin and Schlegel. She has published on Euripides, Hölderlin, Goethe, Nietzsche and Celan. Ritchie Robertson (FBA) is Taylor Professor of  German at Oxford University and a Fellow of  the Queen’s College. His books include Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (1985); The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939: Emancipation and its Discontents (1999); Kafka: A Very Short Introduction (2004), which has been translated into German, Chinese and Japanese; and Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine (2009). He is currently editing a collection of essays on Lessing and the Republic of  Letters. Dr. Betiel Wasihun is Montgomery-DAAD Fellow and Tutor in German at Lincoln College, Oxford University. In 2010 she published a monograph on the phenomenon of competition in texts by Kafka, R. Walser and Beckett, with a primary focus upon Kafka. Other authors she has worked on include Eichendorf f, Özdamar and Murakami. She is currently writing a book that examines the ethical and emotional dimensions of  betrayal in a cross-section of  literary and filmic traditions.

Index

absolutism  121, 127–8, 133, 135, 139, 141–2 Adams, Maurianne  305 adultery  2, 151, 288, 297–8 Aers, David  315, 328 af fect  16, 86, 175, 183, 194, 199–200, 203, 214–15, 231, 239, 274, 302–4 allegiance  9, 113, 136, 232, 239, 317 ambage  18, 317, 319, 321, 323–4, 332, 334 ambiguity  18, 29, 32, 152, 212, 217, 269, 316, 317–18, 320–3, 327, 332–4 anger  91, 196, 286, 298, 306, 309 antichrist  18, 272, 281, 283 aporia  6–7, 9 Aristophanes  54–5, 57, 300–1 Attic tragedy  289, 292 authenticity  163, 182, 184, 186, 189, 221, 225, 299, 323 autobiographical pact  182 autobiography  13, 16–17, 106, 181–5, 189, 196–7 Baker, Howard  82 Balzac, Honoré de  211 Barish, Jonas  292 baroque  15, 25–30, 32, 34, 38–41, 43 Bauer, Alexandra  192, 197–9 beauty  234, 239–40, 242–3, 246–51, 253, 259, 272, 275 Benjamin, Walter  17–18, 230–47, 251–4, 257–9 Benson, David  313, 319 Bernstein, Elitsur  182, 194 betrayal trauma  187, 192

Bible: Genesis  81, 91–3 Psalms 5–6 Isaiah  40–1, 281–2 Matthew  49, 64, 69 Mark  2, 51, 57, 264, 272 Luke  62, 73 John 272 Acts 2 Romans 51 Galatians 75 Philippians 71–8 Thessalonians  262, 271, 283 Hebrews  272 Book of  Revelation  267, 281 Boethius 313–14 bond  14, 89, 97, 121, 123, 157, 159, 182, 189, 199–200, 315 Borges, Jorge Luís  15, 23–30, 38–43 Boveri, Margret  111–12 Boyle, Anthony  83 Braden, Gordon  83 Brooks, Peter  211–12 Broyard, Anatole  161–2 Burns, Elizabeth  289 calculation  16, 131, 134–5, 186, 192, 199, 203, 319, 326, 330 categorical imperative  122 Chariton  18, 285–7, 289, 291, 293, 295, 297–8, 300–1, 303–9 Chaucer, Geof frey  10, 15, 18, 313–17, 326, 333–5 Cinthio, Giraldi  287

342 Index Cohen, Leonard  229 comedy  54, 57–8, 300, 305 Communism 112–13 concealment  2, 10, 13, 16, 52, 78, 130–1, 136, 154, 176, 222, 245, 261, 275, 297, 321, 324 conscience  36–7, 90, 96–7, 110, 113–15, 170 consciousness  16, 47, 53–4, 56–9, 63–8, 70, 95, 113, 115, 170, 220, 315 conspiracy  36, 126, 140, 297 Cornell, Julien  110 courtship  315–16, 318, 320–1, 324–7, 332, 334 crime  7, 16, 34, 63, 84–5, 87, 89–95, 98–100, 114, 122, 172, 307 critic  232–48, 251–9 Cunlif fe, John  82 Dante (Alighieri)  125 decision  14, 17, 63, 96, 106, 134–5, 165, 167–8, 203–5, 235, 252, 300, 314–15, 328–30, 335 desire  115–16, 172–3, 176, 182, 235, 243, 252–3, 256, 258, 263, 266, 268, 273–5, 277–80, 313, 316, 318, 320–1, 323–5, 327–8, 332–3 disguise  37–8, 122, 165, 220, 265–6, 270, 277, 279, 282 dishonesty  142, 217 disloyalty  34, 317 dissembler  131–2, 318, 333 dissimulation  141, 242, 261, 321–2, 332 dissonance  8, 10, 17, 167–8, 172–3, 175–6, 220 distrust  139, 141, 198, 261, 288 Döblin, Alfred  203 Doob, Leonard W. 109 Dössekker, Bruno see Wilkomirski, Binjamin

double, Doppelgänger  12–13, 16, 99, 103, 114, 278 double-faced, two-faced  217, 318 duplicity  4, 15–16, 51, 151, 217, 266, 316, 318, 320, 323, 327 duty  122, 124, 137–8, 142–3, 195 Elsaesser, Thomas  205, 212, 215, 219, 224 emotion  15–17, 86–8, 124, 135, 139, 143, 166, 181–2, 187, 192, 195–6, 203, 209–10, 212, 214, 216, 224, 297, 299–300, 302–3, 307, 309, 320–1, 325–6 enemy  97, 99, 107, 109–12, 130, 135, 285 Erasmus 126–7 eternal return see repetition ethics  11, 15–17, 59–60, 67, 86, 88, 97, 122, 132, 143, 149, 160, 162, 167, 175, 183, 193, 197 fascism  111, 113 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner  17, 203–10, 212–24 Felman, Shoshana  155 Festinger, Leon  167 fidelity  159, 287, 299, 303, 320 Fleming, John  320 forgiveness  82, 90, 92, 97–100, 332 form  16, 49–51, 54, 56–8, 66–7, 70–8 Franco, Dean  162 Frank, Anne  184 fratricide  16, 84, 90, 291 friend  107, 113, 115, 122–5, 130, 136, 138, 140, 142–3, 181, 188, 191, 285, 288, 300–1, 304, 308, 320 Ganzfried, Daniel  185 Gates, Henry Louis Jr  161 Geheimnis see secret

Index Gide, André  189 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Faust  115, 248, 250, 256 ‘Die Heidenröslein’  275 Die Wahlverwandtschaften  17, 233, 238–40, 249–50 Golgotha 58 Gorgias 294 Grabowski, Laura  186 Graydon, Joseph F.  314 Greenblatt, Stephen  304 grief  40, 57, 89, 192, 196, 298, 302 Grosjean, Bruno see Wilkomirski, Binjamin Gross, Kenneth  299 Gryphius, Andreas  29–30, 32–3, 35–6 Hamacher, Werner  52, 54–7, 62 Hamsun, Knut  16, 103–7, 109–11, 113, 117 Harlem Renaissance 147 Hegel, G.W.F.  15–16, 47–67, 69–71, 74–8, 111, 113 Heidegger, Martin  155 heredity  84, 93–5, 97–9 Heuer, Wolfgang  187 Heywood, Jasper  81 Hitler, Adolf  106–7, 109, 121 Holocaust  14, 17, 182–5, 193–4, 196–9 honesty  124, 126, 130, 141, 189, 296, 298, 302–3, 332 Hülle see veil Hunter, G.K.  83 hypocrisy  151, 217, 328 hypokrites (actor)  301 illusion  176, 214, 220–1, 223–4, 293–4 impostor  261–2, 265, 276 infamy  23–4, 28, 30, 38–41 infection  85, 87, 90, 91, 99, 264, 274 infidelity  237, 276, 315, 331, 334

343 James, Henry  211 jealousy  18, 286, 288–9, 295–8, 300, 302, 304 Judas  2–5, 10, 15–16, 24, 30, 36, 38–43, 47–8, 54, 57, 65–6, 125 judgement  11, 34, 60­–4, 67, 113–15, 199, 233–6, 240–1, 243, 248, 252, 254–5, 257–8 justice  34, 60, 62, 126, 134, 137, 172–3, 176 Kant, Immanuel  16, 122–5, 128, 134–5, 138, 142–3, 172 Kenner, Hugh  108 kenôsis  68, 73–8 Kirby, Thomas  321 Kleist, Heinrich von  16–18, 147–9, 151–2, 155, 157, 159–60, 164, 166–8, 174–5, 177 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb  47, 257 Koestler, Arthur  16, 103–5, 111–13 Kolakowski, Leszek  206 Korsgaard, Christine  124, 142–3 Kuzniar, Alice A.  219 Lacan, Jacques  7, 192–3 Lada-Richards, Ismene  293, 296–7 Leander, Zarah  219–21, 224 Lejeune, Philippe  182 Leiris, Michel  189 Levi, Primo  184 Libanius  296, 309 Lightfoot, J.B.  76 logogryph  157, 261, 263, 270–1, 279, 282–3 loyalty  33–4, 133, 136, 150, 155, 175, 317–18, 332 lie  12, 121–4, 129–30, 152, 154, 181, 204, 215–16, 271–2, 290–1, 317–20 McAlpine, Monica E.  316, 332 Machiavelli, Niccolò  104, 125, 127–34

344 Index Mächler, Stefan  181–2, 185–6, 193–5, 199 madness  7, 90, 106, 108, 117, 171 mask  12, 17, 18, 37, 54–8, 211–12, 214–15, 304, 317–18, 320, 322, 326 Mead, George Herbert  165 Meier, Armin  209 melodrama  209–15, 219–21, 223–5 Messiah  15, 38, 40–1, 47–8, 51, 74–8, 265, 272, 283 Michaels, Walter Benn  162–3 Milton, John  30–1 mime  296, 297–8 mimesis  18, 29, 273–9, 289–94, 300, 304, 308 Minnelli, Vincente  212 Miola, Robert  83–4 mirror  126, 206, 214–17, 223 mise-en-scène  210, 212–13 Molière 47 monarchy  30–3, 36, 125–6, 130, 133–4 Morgan, Gerald  316 motive  135–6, 140, 167, 173, 194–5, 297, 303 Murray, Molly  325–6, 330 Nagy, Gregory  293 names, naming  3–6, 9, 10–11, 14–15, 17, 18, 42, 72–7, 115, 152, 153, 157, 182, 185, 231, 263, 268–9, 269–71, 276–8, 283, 331, 333 New German Cinema 210 Nowell-Smith, Geof frey  212 oath  127, 155, 158–9 ocular proof  288–9, 300, 305, 309 Origen 3–6 other, the  167–8, 175, 267, 270–1, 273, 279, 284 Ovid  81–3, 280

Parrish, Timothy  12, 154, 161–3, 171 passing  147–9, 160–6, 170–7 Paul, Jean  114 perception  162–3, 171, 219–20, 231–2, 234–8, 241, 244, 250–2, 254–60, 270, 276, 278, 289–90 performance  12–13, 91, 131, 148–9, 154, 165, 170–1, 180, 183, 185–7, 191, 194, 196–200, 278, 281, 285, 289–94, 297–8, 300–9, 318, 321, 323–8 phantasma  193, 277–9 Plato  18, 283–4, 289–92, 294, 304, 308 Plutarch  81–2, 289–90, 292, 294, 308 Poe, Edgar Allan  116 Pontius Pilate  26–9, 34, 36, 38, 43 Pound, Ezra  16, 103–5, 107–11, 113, 117 pre-emotion (propatheiai) 86–8 promise  121, 125–7, 129–31, 138, 155–60, 184, 314–15, 328–9 race  147–52, 161–7, 171, 175, 177 Ray, Nicholas  212 reception  81–4, 183–4, 238–44 reconciliation  10, 47, 66–7, 69, 71, 88–9, 97–9, 168, 172–3, 176–7, 249, 335 Reformation  31, 67–8, 141 repetition  25–9, 34–5, 37, 41, 43, 229 revenge  33, 84–8, 90–1, 94–7, 148–9, 152, 169, 174, 190, 275, 277–8, 280–2, 286–7, 294–5, 297, 307–8 revolution  34–6, 67, 77–8, 105, 121, 139–40, 148–9, 157, 169, 211 Rosenmeyer, Thomas G.  86, 90 Roth, Philip  9–14, 16–17, 147–55, 161–3, 165–7, 170–3, 176–7 Rougemont, Denis de  159–60 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  189

345

Index salvation  2–4, 15, 27–30, 34–42, 48, 66, 82, 89, 92, 94, 98–100 Satan  3–5, 115, 125, 265, 271, 278 Schein see semblance Schiller, Friedrich  16, 121, 125, 132, 134–43 Schmitt, Carl  107 secret  24, 42, 52–3, 93, 110, 151, 154–5, 159, 171–2, 233–4, 238–44, 251–2, 255–9, 266, 274–6, 316, 320, 324 self-betrayal  11–12, 14, 16–17, 28, 34, 40, 65, 176–7, 203–5, 214–17 self-incrimination  153, 184, 189 semblance  37f., 73f., 234, 243–57, 263, 268–9, 294–5 Seneca  16, 81–100 sex change  17, 204, 207, 221 Shakespeare, William  125, 127–8 Cymbeline 81 Hamlet  6–9, 16, 81–100 Henry IV 130–1 2 Henry IV 129–30 Julius Caesar 8–11 1 Othello  285, 287–9, 292, 294–309 Richard III 129 Timon of  Athens 81 Sierck, Detlef see Douglas Sirk Simmel, Georg  242–7, 252, 255–6 simulation  141, 242, 261, 263–4, 266, 268, 274, 278, 319, 321–2, 325–6, 332 Sirk, Douglas  210–14, 219–21, 223 Skinner, Quentin  126–7 social construction  149, 160, 162–3, 165–6, 177

Solger, K.W.F.  242–3, 245–6, 252–3, 256 Solon  289–92, 308 Sophocles  296, 300 Sparr, Thomas  184, 195 Stevenson, Robert Louis  16, 103, 114–17 Stratford, Lauren see Laura Grabowski Strätling, Regine  189 substitution  18, 245, 261–84, 325–6, 329 Terboven, Josef  106 Tesauro, Emanuel  26–7 tragedy  16, 32, 38, 57, 81–100, 132–43, 289–92, 300, 314–15, 334 translatability  231–3, 236–7 trauma  181–2, 184, 186–7, 190–5, 198–9 trouthe  319–20, 326, 332, 334 Unseld, Siegfried  184, 195 universal  5f., 23–31, 34–5, 41, 54–5, 64–5, 67, 69–71, 82, 89, 98–9, 126, 134, 142–3 veil  18, 214–15, 217, 219, 235, 239–42, 245–59 Virgil  81, 83, 125 Werlen, Hans Jakob  152, 156, 168, 174 Wiesel, Elie  184 Wilkomirska, Wanda  185 Wilkomirski, Binjamin  17, 181–200 zelotypia see jealousy Žižek, Slavoj  192–3 Zoralnik, Eva  185

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY This series promotes inquiry into the relationship between literary texts and their cultural and intellectual contexts, in theoretical, interpretative and historical perspectives. It has developed out of a research initiative of the German Department at ­Cambridge University, but its focus of interest is on the European tradition broadly perceived. Its purpose is to encourage comparative and interdisciplinary research into the connections between cultural history and the literary imagination generally. The editors are especially concerned to encourage the investigation of the role of the literary imagination in cultural history and the interpretation of cultural history through the literary text. Examples of the kind of issues in which they are particularly interested include the following: – The material conditions of culture and their representation in literature, e.g. responses to the impact of the sciences, technology, and industrialisation, the confrontation of ‘high’ culture with popular culture, and the impact of new media; – The construction of cultural meaning through literary texts, e.g. responses to cultural crisis, or paradigm shifts in cultural self-perception, including the establishment of cultural ‘foundation myths’; – History and cultural memory as mediated through the metaphors and models ­deployed in literary writing and other media; – The intermedial and intercultural practice of authors or literary movements in ­specific periods; – The methodology of cultural inquiry and the theoretical discussion of such issues as intermediality, text as a medium of cultural memory, and intercultural relations. Both theoretical reflection on and empirical investigation of these issues are welcome. The series is intended to include monographs, editions, and collections of papers based on recent research in this area. The main language of publication is English.

Vol. 1 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World Since 1500. Papers from the ­Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 1. 316 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-160-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6970-X Vol. 2 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): German Literature, History and the Nation. Papers from the C ­ onference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 2. 393 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-169-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6979-3 Vol. 3 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination. Papers from the C ­ onference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, C ­ ambridge 2002. Vol. 3. 319 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-170-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6980-7 Vol. 4 Anthony Fothergill: Secret Sharers. Joseph Conrad’s Cultural Reception in Germany. 274 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-271-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7200-X Vol. 5 Silke Arnold-de Simine (ed.): Memory Traces. 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity. 343 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-297-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7223-9 Vol. 6 Renata Tyszczuk: In Hope of a Better Age. Stanislas Leszczynski in Lorraine 1737-1766. 410 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-324-9 Vol. 7 Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 1. The Art of Urban Living. 344 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-532-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7536-X Vol. 8 Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 2. The Politics of Urban Space. 383 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-533-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7537-8 Vol. 9 Christian J. Emden and Gabriele Rippl (eds): ImageScapes. Studies in Intermediality. 289 pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03910-573-1 Vol. 10 Alasdair King: Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Writing, Media, Democracy. 357 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-902-9 Vol. 11 Ulrike Zitzlsperger: ZeitGeschichten: Die Berliner Übergangsjahre. Zur Verortung der Stadt nach der Mauer. 241 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-087-2

Vol. 12 Alexandra Kolb: Performing Femininity. Dance and Literature in German Modernism. 330pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-351-4 Vol. 13 Carlo Salzani: Constellations of Reading. Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality. 388pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-860-1 Vol. 14 Monique Rinere: Transformations of the German Novel. Simplicissimus in Eighteenth-Century Adaptations. 273pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-896-0 Vol. 15 Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones (eds): Constructions of Conflict. Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, Culture and Media. 282pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-923-3 Vol. 16 Ingo Cornils and Sarah Waters (eds): Memories of 1968. International Perspectives. 396pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-931-8 Vol. 17 Anna O’ Driscoll: Constructions of Melancholy in Contemporary German and Austrian Literature. 263pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0733-8 Vol. 18 Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag (eds): Other People’s Pain. Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics. 252pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0260-9 Vol. 19 Ian Cooper and Bernhard F. Malkmus (eds): Dialectic and Paradox. Configurations of the Third in Modernity. 265pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0714-7 Vol. 20 Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun (eds): Playing False. Representations of Betrayal. 355pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0867-0