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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Peter Taylor in triple vision by John Matthias
2. Representation in millimetres by Alan Wall
3. Gianfranco Rosi’s marginalia by Simon Collings
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
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Shakespeare’s dysnarrativia.
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By ALAN WALL.
Dysnarrativia: the moment when language, or one language, breaks down, for internal or external reasons, leaving us unable to tell the established story of ourselves.
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On December 6th 1273, Thomas Aquinas informed his faithful secretary Brother Reginald that he would write no more. This indefatigable author had turned over his last sheet. Reginald was taken aback. Why? Because, said Thomas, all he had written seemed to him nothing now but straw. He had received a vision of the divine plenitude, and there was a disjunction between the intensity of that vision and the resources available to human language.
His language could no longer tell the story of himself in any way that mattered, since it could not recount the single greatest event he had experienced. This condition is dysnarrativia.
Shakespeare is an expert portrayer of dysnarrativia. When language buckles inside the human mechanism, when discourse is traumatically disrupted so that the channels of disclosure and command are blocked, then we observe a linguistic metamorphosis. This can sometimes be redemptive, as with Lear and Leontes, but it is often dark and destructive. Sometimes grammar disintegrates. The lexicon turns vicious and anarchic.
Lady Macbeth.
IF WE CANNOT tell the story of ourselves, we cannot tell the story of others either. ‘Tis all in pieces. All coherence gone’, wrote John Donne in 1611, five years after Lady Macbeth’s obsessive dreaming took place. The motors that are expected to push narrative along have broken down.
It is part of Shakespeare’s genius that he grasps how, as the conscious mind loses its narrative coherence, the unconscious starts to take over.
Freud came to believe that the recurrence of trauma in soldiers returning from the Great War was a form of belated rehearsal; the mind was trying to prepare itself post factum for that which it had not been prepared for when it actually occurred. The mechanized slaughter of the conflict surprised and astounded the western sensorium; it had no way of knowing this was coming. So it had to make amends for such lack of preparation in neurosis, nightmare and repetition. They had not volunteered for this, those poor benighted infantrymen. But Lady Macbeth had. She chose her actions with deliberation, even against her pliable husband’s wishes. So the dysnarrativia that afflicted both the returning soldiers and her ladyship is different in kind. One was passive; the other active. Lady Macbeth willed what the Austrian soldiers merely had to endure. But she had no proleptic knowledge of the force her will was unleashing; she did not understand then, as she does later, that ‘what is done cannot be undone’. What she appears to be rehearsing, in her later dreamwalking, is the unpreparedness of her will to perpetrate such an enormity, despite her vehement insistence at the time that it was ready for anything in order to fulfil ambition.
Freud was obsessed by the childlessness of Lady Macbeth; he seemed to sense that here lies the clue to her character.
The unconscious is a space free of morality; its only dictates are impulse and desire, but even there, memory cannot be evacuated so easily. The unconscious memorializes as it desires; its objects are provided by the sensual world presented to the sensorium, ravished as they may be by wishes deemed illicit in the conscious world.
The death of the child has become a uterine negation. ‘Bring forth man children only’ says Macbeth. But she will bring forth nothing. She will beget nothing but death. The re-runs of the slaughter she choreographed now fill her midnight sensorium. The light that must be kept glowing at all times beside her bed cannot obliterate this darkness. The figures shrouded in darkness in this play never stop moving. They function like the illuminati of the darker powers.
Macbeth must assassinate the future: he remembers too much of it. His imagination is paralysingly proleptic.
Macbeth must assassinate the future: he remembers too much of it. His imagination is paralysingly proleptic. He is an inverse image of Funes the Memorious in the Borges story. The latter is so crammed with the memorialized detail of the present and the past that he is disqualified from the daily functionings of life. Memory is all, and its weight is monolithic. The grammar of Macbeth’s imagination leads so ineluctably towards the future, the tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, that he must either slide into madness, or take up his sword and become time’s avenger, even before time has made its lethal deliveries. The memory of the future darkens Macbeth’s soul until there is no light to be had anywhere; his wife’s memory of the past inhabits the darkness that should bring her sleep. What connects them both is murder. And we recall that Macbeth announces that he murders sleep, and not simply his own.
The ultimate logic of secrecy is that your own mind becomes a prison. Now Lady Macbeth is a highly methodical woman. When she cries, ‘Out damned spot’, she is issuing commands even in her sleep. And such commands obey the requirements of economy in the old sense: actions pertaining to household management. So she is hygienically commandeering, even as a somnambulist. They must all scrub and scrub until the stains of sin should disappear. But the stains remain, imprinted too indelibly on the surface of her mind. When she is locked in sleep, she cannot escape the graffiti on those dark walls. They are written in Duncan’s blood. And she had not expected the old man to have so much of it.
Macbeth instructs the Doctor as to what precisely he wants — he wants a cure for dysnarrativia.
Macbeth instructs the Doctor as to what precisely he wants — he wants a cure for dysnarrativia. He wants the old world to be re-assembled, the old tale re-told. In any case, by this stage of the play he appears to think of conscience as little more than a womanish complaint. And it is of course a relatively recent addition to Lady Macbeth’s psyche:
We are still having a go at this, of course. And we are equally unsuccessful, even though we have substituted Fentanyl for poppy and mandragora. The grief of what you have done, what you have irreversibly done, is an unhealing wound.
Lady Macbeth helps to forge the grammar of her own life; she then finds its manacles inescapable. We are entitled to think that Macbeth and his wife entertained the fancy of being king and queen; perhaps even entertained the possibility of killing to achieve the throne. But to entertain a wish is neither to pursue nor to fulfil it. It is only when Duncan comes unexpectedly under their roof that the possibility of fulfilment arises. Macbeth immediately backs off; his wife immediately presses forward.
Outside the realm of human understanding.
‘I AM THAT I am’, says Yahweh in Exodus, or ‘I will be who I will be’, since Hebrew has no present tense for the verb to be. This verbal phrase refuses the ranks of serried nouns all round it; it will not be nominally contained. Moses is hunting for description and definition, so that he might carry them back to his people, like epistemological souvenirs, but he is given instead a formula for unlimited dynamism. Aquinas would later ponder whether the word God should really be a verb. Subsequent scholars have argued that theos derives ultimately from the Sanskrit di, to gleam.
‘What god are you?’ is not a functional question when addressed to Yahweh. To ask it means you are in the wrong language game.
This is a dysnarrativia between the language of God and the language of humanity; we might even say, the grammar of the human and the grammar of the divine. The linguistic structure of being in both is disjunct and unassimilable. ‘What god are you?’ is not a functional question when addressed to Yahweh. To ask it means you are in the wrong language game. You are trying to pluralise the indivisible. Faced with such a consuming light, you cannot shade your eyes with taxonomy. Ehyeh asher ehyeh, says the Lord. I am not designed to fit into the Israelites’ linguistic containers. Those containers will have to fracture and break even to approach me. Do not translate me into language that can never contain me, says Yahweh. This burning bush you see before you leaves no traces.
This is a revelation of light. In Macbeth we have revelations of darkness. When Macbeth asks the Weird Sisters what they are doing, and they reply, A deed without a name, they are effectively saying what Sweeney says in T. S. Eliot’s ‘Agon‘: ‘I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you.’ You are in one world of meaning, and I am in another entirely. Between the two lies the realm of dysnarrativia; the linguistic no-man’s land. Signifying nothing.
Is this the promised end?
ON LOSING HIS only son to the Plague — King Pest as he called it — Simon Forman wrote:
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It is willed then, but under duress. Edgar trawls the depths of language to avoid losing his life on the surface. The surface is the most dangerous plane: that is where you are visible and audible. That is where people imagine they understand you; their classifications follow. Classification often precedes punishment, and punishment might well be death. Edgar on the Heath is beyond the law. The grand prefect of the law is here, but he has shed his clothes and, it would seem, his wits along with them.
Edgar as Mad Tom comes close to glossolalia. His language is accessing sources entirely closed to the courtier he was such a short time back. We know some of the sources are from Samuel Harsnett’s denunciation of papish impostures. Hardly Edgar’s palace reading, surely? He would have been more likely to have had his head in Castiglione. But he impersonates with panache:
Perhaps as radical is Lear’s catastrophic fall from his previous narrative into a tale seemingly told by an idiot, and most notably glossed by the Fool. We are so used to the play that we don’t always register just how hideous is Lear’s curse upon Goneril:
In Elizabethan and Jacobean terms, sterility is the cancellation of the future for this particular individual or family. But see how close to the surface this language was (we are still in Act One). However confident we might be in our narratives, dysnarrativia is never more than a curse or two away.
Willed Dysnarrativia.
DYSNARRATIVIA IS NORMALLY thought of as involuntary. Damage to the neurophysiological machinery or a radical imbalance between psyche and world distort or occlude the language of the user. In Jakobson’s classic essay on metaphor and metonymy, he studied how stroke victims often suffered a swerving of linguistic use either towards the metaphoric or the metonymic mode.
But what happens if your dysnarrativia is willed? What kind of language are we looking at if the subject deliberately disconnects from communal usage and expectation, for whatever reason? Hamlet does just this. After his solitary encounter with the Ghost, he speaks in a riddling manner: his communications are of a sort that thwart expectations. Marcellus and Horatio are desperate to discover what secret knowledge, what longed-for gnosis, the Ghost has bequeathed to the Prince. And Hamlet finally reveals it:
Horatio is astounded by the banality of this and says so:
Why has Hamlet reverted to proverb and cliché to provide his answer? Is this a form of defence or equivocation? Is it possible that, full of the appalling revelation the Ghost has delivered, Hamlet decides to dissimulate there and then? If he speaks truthfully, he may be considered mad. His dissimulating manner will soon have him classified as mad in any case. And that appears to suit him. Dysnarrativia can at least supply an alibi.
We are entitled to ask what memory traces were there, ineradicably there, in the audience? Within living memory a king had married his brother’s wife, precipitating the Reformation in England when he sought to discredit his own betrothal by biblical proofs. How dark and silent a memory might that have been? Hamlet has an inner life; the outer life of the court ceaselessly attacks it. He is mournful, draped in black, still pondering his father’s death. But Elsinore is carnivalesque; it is a place of unceasing revels. You can even hear the sound of them out on the battlements. The King carouses. He would appear to have a bellyful of wine night and day. And the Queen undoubtedly enjoys his jocund company. So snugly do they fit together that one can’t help wondering if this relationship might not have got started before King Hamlet’s death. The old fellow was always away a lot on matters of state, after all. And those Danish winter nights can get seriously chilly. For some unstated reason, Claudius has never married. Maybe, in one respect, he never needed to. So now the world cries, Rejoice. But Hamlet doesn’t feel like rejoicing. Mourning and melancholia engulf him like a massive funeral cloak.
Hamlet inhabits his own persona of insanity the way a man might inhabit irony
He inhabits his own persona of insanity the way a man might inhabit irony; and his comments are ironic frequently enough. When that irony is exhausted he suffers from adjectival overload:
If only words could kill. But instead the Prince manœuvres his way through the labyrinth of his own enquiring and distrustful mind. He sees off his old chums Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern before they had the chance to see him off, with the aid of the King of England. He kills his lover’s father. He sees his lover’s funeral, having helped to drive her wits astray. He sees his mother poisoned by his murderous uncle, now her doting spouse, and finally gets to kill the avuncular assassin himself. The rest is silence; language it seems cannot cope.
Dysnarrativia?
BOTTOM SUFFERS A most peculiar form of dysnarrativia: he switches species. His language is still there, but it becomes no more than the means of enumerating a catalogue of appetities:
If I can no longer tell the story of myself, at the risk of my life, then I must tell the story of someone else instead, and become that someone in the telling.
The line between dysnarrativia and impersonation is a wavering one. If I can no longer tell the story of myself, at the risk of my life, then I must tell the story of someone else instead, and become that someone in the telling. Rosalind butches it up as Ganymede, in order to train Orlando to be a man; an acceptable one. He turns out to be a zealous student. Portia dons not only manhood but a judge’s robes. She then proceeds to administer justice in a most ingenious manner: she quibbles over the wording of the legalities. Some at the time might have thought this womanish. It worked, all the same. Mariana in Measure for Measure has to pretend to be a reluctantly yielding nun, in order to win back her beloved Angelo. This is an exercise of the bed-trick. As William Empson pointed out, it was based on the Elizabethan notion that all women are interchangeable after twilight. It goes back a long way before Elizabeth’s reign. The same trick was pulled between Jacob, Rachel and Leah in Genesis. There is probably a vague theology behind it: if God had meant us to recognise one another’s individual features in the hours of intimacy, he would not have switched the lights out.
But Hamlet’s father is dead, surely the most fatal form of dysnarrativia? Even so, he carries on speaking. Except that he is only heard in the echo-chamber of his son’s mind. Dysnarrativia, whatever else it might be, can be a form of enforced solitude. Or, in the case of Caliban, a non-linguistic creature is blessed with human language. Except that he now says the apparent blessing is no more than a curse, since all it has truly taught him is how to curse. It is not merely a question then of whether or not we can competently tell the story of ourselves. It is also a question of who owns the language in which we tell the tale. And what precisely is the place of our narrative in that linguistic hierarchy?
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An archive of Alan Wall’s Fortnightly work is here.
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Publication: Monday, 27 April 2020, at 13:26.
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