Is Othello the
Shakespearean tragedy of our times? It all seems to be there:
precarious employment, mobility, and the hand-to-mouth existence of a
globalized world.
Of course, there are questions of race and gender, and these have opened reservoirs of academic ink, with notable examples coming from Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, and Dympna Callaghan. But surely it is possible to move beyond Othello's identity as a "black man" and Desdemona's as a "woman"? Othello, we might note is happily accepted by the Venetian Senate. Desdemona perceives her "divided duty", but divided it on her own terms, the point the Senate want her to speak on in Act 1, Scene 3. As the possessor of her own free will, she is possessed by her father and husband only so far as they think that she is their possession. She does not see herself that way, and from her perspective he problem of a "divided duty" is not to whom she belongs, but where she belongs and the location of her home. That she ends up temporarily in the Saggitary, a pub, and following her husband on his wars indicates the fluidity of her place, yet we are given no indication of her discomfort with this fluidity, if, indeed, there is any.
If it seems difficult to imagine Desdemona pursuing a nomadic existence, then there should be no problem seeing her husband as nomadic, the man the audience is introduced to as an "extravagant stranger / of here and everywhere". Roderigo intends this as a term of abuse, undermining Othello's trustworthiness, but as a description of his nomadic existence it is something Othello endorses when he tells Iago that
But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea's worth.
His "travailous history" is also, he tell us, what makes him attractive to Desdemona, who overhears it first in her father's house.
This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She'ld come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse: which I observing,
Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not intentively: I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her tears,
When I did speak of some distressful stroke
That my youth suffer'd. My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
She swore, in faith, twas strange, 'twas passing strange,
'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful:
She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd
That heaven had made her such a man: she thank'd me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story.
And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:
She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
Given this, perhaps the question that should be asked is not how did the black Othello end up in Brabantio's house, but how did the nomadic Othello end up there to tell such a seductive story? The answer lies a few lines earlier, when we Othello tells us that
For since these arms of mine had seven years' pith
Till now some nine moons wasted, they have used
Their dearest action in the tented field
This is clear enough. Othello
has lost his job, and with it, paradoxically, his home. The man is
between gigs. He searched for digs, found Brabantio willing to oblige
him, and fell in love with his host's daughter, married her without his
consent, and, on his wedding night, is offered a new commission which
will restore him to his former life. He is faced with a choice between
employment and settled life.
Economic necessity impels him in
one direction. Social convention impels him in another. As a newly
married man, Othello should, Lena Cowen Orlin points out, be going about the rituals of a newly married couple and establishing
a household with Desdemona. But Othello's job is, first of all, not one
which lends itself to such a settled life, and, secondly, is what he
most closely identifies with himself. We can view this identification with employment in two
ways: he is a workaholic, or is an itinerent with a woman in every
port. In the first case, the nine months Othello spent in Venice might
have at first been spent in lamenting the loss of the self-definition
that comes with gainful employment, with marriage to Desdemona
motivated by a desperate attempt to replace that lost identity with a
new type of security. In the second case, Othello's marriage to
Desdemona and his refusal to settle resemble the dialogue ballads
between men in love with the sea and the women they are attracted to on
land discussed by Patricia Fumerton
in her book on the working poor of the sixteenth and
seventeenth-century England. Othello probably lies in between these
two, on the one hand, enjoying the freedom of his profession, on the
other, resenting its precarious economic security.
And it is this that resonates with our age. For as much as Othello and his more lowly counterparts among the early modern working poor "make a home of homelessness", to use Fumerton's phrase, such a position is also that which is now uncomfortably enjoyed by the temporary workers, freelancers (the word does not appear in Othello, despite the military context), and self-styled consultants of the twenty-first-century economy. Othello is asked to confront questions that we, in our increasingly insecure and mobile employment, are required to ask of ourselves. Where is the work and am I there? How can I be professionally defined outside of (our recent) traditional employment structures (if such ever existed) and, more problematically, frequently find myself taking up new and different work in order to make ends meet? How can I be part of my family when I am required to work away from home? Such questions, might prompt another and more disturbing question: am I who I say I am?
Othello, the play, rather than the man, offers two answers to this question. The direct one comes from Iago who tells us "I am not what I am", upsetting the "I am what I am" of the Old Testament God and echoed in Desdemona's "my lord is not my lord". The indirect answer comes from the Clown, who replying to Desdemona's desire to know the whereabouts of Cassio says that "for me to devise a lodging and say he lies here, or lies there, were to lie in mine own throat". While the indirect approach of the clown might seem preferable, its pun carries with it a sense of the falseness openly declared by Iago. The difference is that whereas Iago declares his dishonesty, the Clown refuses to participate in the creation of fictions. Specifically, the fictions he refuses to participate in are the fictions of home, and the logic of his pun moves from lodging, to lying down, to telling falsehoods, to lodging oneself in one's own throat.
This is, of course, is no small matter for someone, such as Othello, who hopes to straightforwardly account for himself in terms of a domestic or occupational home and finds himself without either house or job. For such "honest knaves" as Iago calls them, to be without these terms is to lapse into a parody of identity, akin to the mythical figure of previous recessions who daily leaves the house to go to a long lost job. Looking for proof of his own occupational home as a general or his domestic home as a householder he finds no proof, occular, immediately experiential, or otherwise. More than parody though the Clown's remark suggests that the very idea of home depends on fictions. That is, to take up Stephen Greenblatt's idea of narrative self fashioning, that the occupational home, more so than the domestic home, is fashioned in narrative.
The narrative which this most obviously speaks to in the twenty-first century is that is encapsulated in the phrase of being a slave to the CV, but in our mobile and interconnected world (wasn't one supposed to reduce the other) our narratives of identity are more frequently told in projections of ourselves across the internet, our Facebook updates, our blogs. And to understand Othello's crisis we only have to think of the space that lies between our self in front of the screen and our self, reflected back, on the screen.
