WATSONWORKS
Blog 10
ASPECTS OF STORYTELLING
Previous: Blogs 7, 8 and 9 have focused
triggers, props, frames, codes and character.
Blog 9 suggested that in constructing a story the Five Codes of Narrative posed by Roland Barthes might be useful to the writer, though Barthes was careful not to regard these codes as prescriptive. Just the same, the Codes offer a checksheet for writers to examine at which level a story is operating.
Vladimir Propp’s work on folktales was also examined, his key proposition being that across the board stories contain stock characters with stock functions (heroes, villains, helpers etc.). An identification between folktales, their themes and their persona, was made with the News, itself replete with heroes and villains functioning in a context that purports to be real but is not only coloured by myth, but often driven by it.
Also, see FEEDBACK from Anna Perera
PART 4:
Fiction and News
Certain parallels can be discerned between the narrative approaches of news and folktale; and also, of their function. The Cold War of the 1950s onwards was often reported, particularly in the popular press, as a cautionary folktale in which heroes (us) were on guard against the villains (the Russians): Wedom/Theydom was the dominant narrative structure. In our Red Riding Hood basket were nuclear weapons and granny in the forest might varyingly have symbolised democracy or the free world in peril.
We recognise how narrative can be used to bring about socio-cultural cohesion, uniting audiences – a generally-agreed function of storytelling. We identify with stories while at the same time feel defined by them, recognising their moral value.
Order, disorder
In Visualising Deviance: A Study of News Organisation (Open University,1987) Richard Ericson, Patricia Baranak and Janet Chan speak of news journalists as a 'deviance-defining elite' who 'provide an ongoing articulation of the proper bounds to behaviour in all organised spheres of life'.
In stories, order is disrupted; some sort of deviance has occurred, upsetting the norm: the story, fiction or news report, portrays the disorder but works towards restoration.
For John Hartley, disorder is a news value. We might argue that it is also a fiction value. Writing in The Politics of Pictures: The Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media Routledge, 1996), Hartley says that the 'fundamental test of newsworthiness is disorder – deviation from any supposed steady state...'.
A first principle of news media performance is to alert the public mind to visions of order by portraying the opposite: binary framing in action. For Hartley visions of order are 'photo-negativised into stories of disorder'.
‘Fictionworthiness’
If, then, 'the fact of fiction', as Ericson, Baranak and Chan put it, can be seen as central to the news, it comes as no surprise to learn that this mode of 'fact-fiction' has proved an influential model for 'fiction-fiction'.
In a paper published in the European Journal of Communication, June 1993, Milly Buonanno linked newsworthiness with what she termed fictionworthiness. She examined the ways in which Italian TV fiction has increasingly used the news as a model for its own themes and approaches.
Buonanno posed a number of criteria for fictionworthiness:
1. Substantive criteria: that is, factors concerning ‘the prerequisites likely to confer importance and interest on a story’. These could be major issues of the day.
2 . Criteria relevant to the product: that is, factors ‘concerned with specific elements of story content, in particular aspects that are considered more interesting and appealing and which maintain viewing enjoyment’. Buonanno believes that ‘in the same way that one says of journalism: “Bad news is good news” one could say of fiction that a “bad” story – that is to say a sad and tearful, violent and criminal story – is a good story’.
3 . Criteria relevant to the media. The kind of news stories that have always fascinated the press – tales of crime and misdemeanours – have long proved fictionworthy and are a staple diet of TV drama.
4 . Criteria relevant to audience.
5 . Criteria relevant to competition.
The attraction of the news-as-story is obvious: it is dramatic, contemporary, relevant and familiar. Also, it is often stranger than fiction. As Buonanno puts it, 'we live today in a reality which surpasses and challenges every fantasy'.
Noting the mutual reinforcement one text gives another, she says, ‘just as television seemingly becomes ever more a highly 'newsworthy' subject for the press, equally news becomes ever more 'fictionworthy' for television.
Shared values
On the casting-couch for fictionworthiness are stalwarts from news values. At least on Italian TV those characters of high social status, the elite, find themselves fictionworthy. Buonanno cites Dallas as an American parallel while confessing that 'the exceptions are mainly to be found in British productions, where more often working-class environments are presented'.
Proximity is a fiction value as it is a news value. A story is 'considered to be much more interesting if it possesses accessibility – geographically, temporally and culturally'. Perhaps the dominant fiction value arising out of news practices is topicality. Buonanno writes:
A story of topical interest is not simply a story set in the present, but a story which aspires to recount and testify to the reality of the present in its most relevant and significant form.
The image of TV as a mirror of society, a true reflector of realities, also appears to prevail in fiction values. As audience, we have an appetite to know 'how things are now', either by revelation or confirmation, through a process of surveillance, while a dominant aim of those assembling 'realities', in fictional or news form, is one of legitimising one definition of 'truths' against another.
Hot on questions, cool on answers
Crime series often provide us, in addition to dramatic stories, with visualisations of contemporary urban society characterised by poverty, unemployment and the loss of community values. Cops often have the role thrust upon them of social workers and social psychologists as well as law-keepers.
What such series draw back from doing is offering any formula for solutions, an institutional remedy for the socially rooted crimes they so effectively highlight. The producers will honestly and justifiably say, That is not our job. Further, if the causes of the crimes dealt with in crime series were energetically addressed and brought to resolution, crime writers would be out of a job.
In his chapter on Narrative in The Media Studies Book: A Guide for Teachers (Routledge, 1992), edited by David Lusted, Adrian Tilley remarks that, 'narratives are about the survival of particular social orders rather than their transformation. They suggest that certain systems of values can transcend social unrest and instability by making a particular notion of 'order out of chaos'. This may be regarded as the ideological work of narrative.
The implication here is that narrative is about rendering things 'natural': What happens on screen is 'the ways things are'; natural, and therefore to be expected, put up with, coped with: c'est la vie! Such a standpoint deserves to be analysed and challenged, hence, in Tilley's view, the importance of narrative analysis which 'can make the "natural" relations between narratives and social orders not only less natural but possibly even open to change'.
Fiction and public debate: the ‘Jordache Story’
This is a moment to remind ourselves that the 'work' as Barthes defines it only becomes 'text' when it is 'read' by audience. Whether texts are straight fiction, straight documentary or docu-dramas, audiences respond both to narratives and to the issues framed by those narratives. Soaps in particular prompt individual, group and public responses that modify or alter attitudes and certainly raise issues higher on public agendas.
Few stories alerted public interest in Britain during the late 1990s as the 'Jordache Story' which unfolded in the British soap Brookside between February 1993 and May 1995. This brought incest to public attention perhaps more dramatically than ever before.
After serving in prison for domestic violence, Trevor Jordache persuades his family to take him back. Once more he is violent towards his wife Mandy. He has in the past already sexually abused his elder daughter, Beth. Now it is 14-year-old Rachel's turn. Mandy and Beth plot his death. They bury his body in the garden. Prison follows for both of them. Beth takes her own life. Rachel gives evidence of how Trevor raped her. Mandy is released from prison.
Such was the interest, controversy and serious debate which the Jordache Story provoked that Channel Four Television commissioned Lesley Henderson of the Glasgow University Media Group to investigate public responses. In the Conclusion to her report, Incest in Brookside: Audience Responses to the Jordache Story (Channel Four TV/Glasgow Universiity Media Group, 1996), Henderson affirms the significance of contemporary popular story-telling in relation to issues of social importance:
This study reveals that Brookside’s child sexual abuse storyline communicated complex and important messages about the issue...[it] increased knowledge and understandings about the language, reality and effects of abuse...By addressing the difficult topic of child abuse Brookside illustrates how a traditionally 'entertainment' genre can be used to enhance knowledge and understandings about a social problem.
Lesley Henderson's research also identified important areas of audience resistance, to the way the events were handled, to the way characters responded to those events; and also to the way other media, in particular the press, attempted to 'get in' on the story.
Giving the game away
By announcing beforehand what was going to happen next in the story, the press provided an additional 'frame' around the actual drama as it appeared on screen.
This served as a secondary text to the primary text of the programme itself and inevitably influenced the 'reading' of the story. The Daily Mirror (23 June 1995) reported that Beth would commit suicide. Under the headline BETH US DO PART, the Mirror declared, 'Beth, jailed in the body-under-the-patio cliff hanger, can't face another five year sentence. Although an appeal is pending, she decides to end it all'.
The Mirror became part of the story, and its sensationalist announcement, Henderson points out, 'provoked distress and anger' particularly among those groups tested in research who themselves were 'survivors' of child abuse.
That Beth should not face things out, and thus fail to prove an inspiring example, was bad enough; but to be told so bluntly in the press made matters worse. Indeed the reports in the press, Henderson says, 'sparked protests and demonstrations'.
Not only did newspapers 'give the game away' by telling readers what was going to happen, they imposed their own judgmental attitude. TV Quick (22-28 July, 1995) announced – BETH: A WASTED LIFE. 'Such coverage,' believes Henderson, 'presented "Beth's" death in a way which undermined all the positive strengths of the character and placed her firmly in the category of "victim scarred for life".’
* * *
Some time ago on radio, a ‘realist’ storywriter was asked whether she believed stories could ‘make a difference’. Her response was unequivocal and, for writers, film makers etc., depressing. She said ‘No!’ Lesley Henderson’s research seems to indicate otherwise. Part 5 of ASPECTS OF STORYTELLING will turn attention to THE POWER OF STORIES.
**FEEDBACK on Blog 9**
From ANNA PERERA
Hi Jim,
I've been reading your storytelling blogs with fascination. Thank you. Particularly enjoyed the examination of Barthes’ intense deconstructions into a comprehensible and usable way of understanding narrative and loved your investigation into the significance of the handkerchief in Othello. Wish I'd read this or come to the same conclusions before I began my last book because I could have added another layer to the story. Are you aware of what you're doing when you write? My method is to access a particular feeling that vibrates with authenticity and when I'm unable to get that hum, I delete and sit back until it comes. In a way I'm unaware of what I'm doing while being rigidly connected to everything I've ever learnt, read and felt.
Aren't we lucky to be doing what we love? Your statement [referring to Iago pressing ahead with his revenge on Othello, even though he had already received his wished-for promotion to lieutenant], 'For some people the game is everything,' jumped out at me.
All the best,
Anna
*Anna is the author of Guantanamo Boy (Puffin, 2009, paperback, £6.99) one of the best and most powerful novels for Young Adults that I’ve read in years. But forget the teen label. It will grip and disturb any reader, fifteen or fifty.
*The May issue, Blog 11, will also spotlight Michael Scammell’s biography of the remarkable Arthur Koestler, Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual (Faber, 2010).
Wednesday, 14 April 2010
Monday, 15 March 2010
FRAMES IN STORYTELLING, Part 3
WATSONWORKSblog 9
This is Part 3 of a series on aspects of storytelling. Blog 8 looked at the role of props in stories, while Blog 7 focused on triggers that give stories direction and momentum. Part 3 welcomes on board a couple of authors whose ideas have influenced the theory of narrative .
The following is a summary and adaptation of Chapter 6, Narrative: The Media as Storytellers in Media Communication: An Introduction to Theory and Process(UK: Palgrave/Macmillan, 3rd edition).
Frames, codes and characters
Every story has its narrative format or frame. In some stories the narrator, the storyteller, is evident. First-person narrative is admitting that the story is to be told from a single point of view. It is a subjective account. Third-person narrative distances the author from what goes on in the story.
The author is like the Holy Spirit, intangible but ever-present. We are aware that this is a contrivance. Yet if our disbelief is suspended by artful storytelling we forget authorship and find ourselves adopting the 'real' world of characters and action 'free' of authorial strings. In fact, that is one of the criteria of effective narrative, to make the strings invisible.
Equilibrium, disequilibrium
What is common to all stories is the transition from a state of order, of equilibrium, to disorder, disequilibrium. In every story something has happened, is happening or is about to happen which levers the story in to action. When, or if, equilibrium is restored, the story has closure.
Sit-coms by and large have closure, while soaps shut down one narrative only to open up others. In sitcoms, each 'upset' has to be 're-set' by the end of the programme. With soaps, however, disequilibrium is a constant. Though some story-lines are resolved, the 'whole' story of the soap remains in a permanent state of disequilibrium – of new dramas, new crises, new twists of fate.
For a soap opera time is a key element in the framing process. There are 30-minute slots to be filled, each to conclude with unfinished business, preferably dramatic and suspenseful, while not being so dramatically 'final' that the series cannot continue into an endless blue yonder.
Soaps need time, to bed down, unfold, and in their own time they reflect the timescales of audience. In some cases, the time-frame of the soap is as important as the timeframes within it.
The soap 'frame', thus presented with time in largesse, requires many characters and many plots. Soaps are full of talk, of gossip; we generally learn of action by report rather than see it occur.
The action is largely in the cutting, the quick-bite scenes that frame both the story and the time in which it takes place. Soaps move through time but they also suspend it to suggest simultaneity, of actions taking place at exactly the same moment.
One suspects that the template or mould out of which soaps emerge is not all that different from the one which produces popular narratives of all kinds, including the news. They must attract and hold attention. They must gratify both cognitive (intellectual) and affective (emotional) needs. They must facilitate identification and personal reference as well as diversion; and they must convince us of their fidelity.
The power of the frame rests both in its capacity to exclude and to structure the 'storyworld' in terms of dramatic contrasts; what is termed binary framing. Things are defined in relation to their opposite – heroes-villains; good-evil; kind-cruel; tolerant-intolerant; beautiful-ugly.
Genre, codes and character
In the maelstrom of available stories narrative modes interact and overlap as never before, but for convenience they continue to be classified under the term genre. We recognise common characteristics governed by codes that regulate form and content. Variety works within a frame of sameness.
Each genre contains a range of signifiers, of conventions that audiences come to expect while at the same time readily anticipating experiment with those conventions. Knowledge of the conventions on the part of audience, and recognition when convention is flouted, suggests an active 'union' between creator and consumer.
Audience, as it were, is 'let in on the act'; and this 'knowingness' is an important part of the enjoyment of narrative genres.
When the hero in a Western chooses not to wear a gun (a great rarity), audience (because we are familiar with the traditions of the genre) recognises the salience of this decision. Such recognition could be said to constitute a form of participation.
We use our familiarity with old 'routines' as a frame for reading this new tweak of narrative. We wonder whether convention will be flouted altogether as the story proceeds or whether the rules of the genre will be reasserted by the hero finally taking up the gun to bring about resolution.
Barthes’ narrative codes
We can explore the difference between narrative forms and we can assess their similarities. In his book S/Z Roland Barthes writes of a number of codes, or sets of rules, which operate in concert in the production of both 'real' and fictional stories; and he argues that all stories operate according to these five codes 'under which all textual signifiers can be grouped' in a narrative.
S/Z is a singular and highly readable volume. It takes the form of a detailed deconstruction of a 23-page story, Sarrasine, written by Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) in 1830. Each line in the story is linked, by Barthes, to one or more of the five codes of narrative.
The Action (or Prioretic) code portrays the events that take place in a story. It is the code of 'what happens', detailing occurrences in their sequence.
The Semantic code or code of the seme deals with character; with characterisation, which Barthes names the Voice of the Person. Actions are explained by character. Essentially the semantic function is to make clear, to explain, to bring about understanding; and thus in a story it can be instrumental in bringing about revelation.
The Enigma (or Hermeneutic) code, the Voice of Truth, involves the setting up of mystery, its development and finally its resolution. A good detective story usually contains many enigmas, some of them deliberately placed there by the author to mislead – clues which take Sam Spade or Inspector Morse on a wild goose chase, enjoyable to the audience, before further clues bring them back into the 'frame' of discovery (of who committed the murder).
The Referential (or Cultural) code, what Barthes refers to as the Voice of Science, has the function of informing and explaining. In a historical novel or drama the referential code operates to explain to us how people dressed, what their homes looked like, how they travelled from place to place. The French film term, mis en scene, meaning ‘placed in scene’, detailing the ‘staging’ of the story, is an equivalent of the referential code.
As the term suggests, the Symbolic code works at the ‘meaning’ level of imagery where elements of the story – character, incident – are transformed into symbolic representations such as justice, reward, love fulfilled, good triumphant.
The hand of fate
Symbol works at every level of the story. In a Hollywood-style gangster movie of the 1940s and 50s, the gangster's (invariably blonde) moll symbolises in her dress, speech, body language, not only her own relationship to a patriarchal world, but to that of all women 'under the thumb' of males.
In Westerns (almost invariably) the dress, hair and demeanour of women, and the context (bar or chapel) in which we encounter them, will symbolise what their ranking order is in the social milieu of the story.
They will also signify the woman's fate: in George Marshall's Destry Rides Again (1939) the saloon-bar singer Frenchie, played by Marlene Dietrich, falls in love with the hero, played by James Stewart (who doesn't wear a gun). Love is not permitted to overcome her dubious past and her criminal present except by sacrifice. Frenchie is shot in the back while protecting Destry/Stewart. She fulfils destiny and at the same time opens the way for the hero to marry the 'nice' girl in the story.
Symbols employing metaphoric forms illuminate and enrich the texts of stories and they work in unison with semantic codes. The TV Inspector Morse drove an old red Jaguar. This symbolised the kind of person Morse was – cultured, somewhat oldy-worldy, resistant to the more traditional brashness of policing. It also helps to explain how such a detective, from whose car stereo emerged the strains of opera, never pop or jazz, went about his profession.
Driving the action
Symbolic coding not only fills out our view of character, it propels the action. In a Western, when the hero buckles on his gunbelt, we know that the villains have pushed their luck one notch too far. Confrontation lies ahead: resolution will be brought about by violence exercised in the name of justice.
How we decode such a story is another matter, and this will obviously depend, among other things, on who we are, male or female, what our attitude is to the use of guns and the degree of openness or closure that the text of the story permits us: are we intended to cheer when the heroine blows away the villain, or are we to be left with the nagging doubt that there might have been another way to arrive at a resolution of the situation?
The look of the thing
A case can be made for an addition to the codes Barthes discusses – a code of aesthetics, that is, the artistic, compositional, stylistic element of expression. We talk of writers or artists finding their voice, their uniqueness manifested in the artefacts they create.
For example, the work of the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) is recognisable not only for its politically oriented narratives but because of his narrative style, characterised by innovative editing or montage.
We relish films such as Battleship Potemkin (1925) or Alexander Nevsky (1938) for the sheer beauty of the composition, of lighting, of the handling of movement. It is fact, it is drama, but it is also poetry.
Gender coding
Being aware of different narratives codes helps us in our appreciation of texts. The action code in a number of genres (and in real life too) is traditionally associated with male characters.
Maleness equals action suggesting decisiveness that may further indicate dominance. Enigma codes traditionally relate more to women: femaleness is associated with mystery; often suggestive of a secret, victimised past.
The obvious alternative for a novelist, playwright, film maker, creator of a comic strip, TV commercial or story for children is to switch the conventions so that females appropriate 'male' codes.
This generally means breaking with social conventions, shaking a subversive finger at the rules. The outcome may underline cautionary messages as happens in Ridley Scott's movie Thelma and Louise (1991) where the rebellion of the two protagonists against a world dominated by men's demands, men's expectations and men's abuses is resolved only by their suicide: cold comfort for such a spirited lunge for personal freedom.
No hard rules
It is important to note that Barthes, in positing his five codes, is not claiming to fix narratives within prescriptive rules. On the contrary; he writes in S/Z, 'The code is a perspective of quotations, a mirage of structures; we know only its departures and returns'.
Just when we think we understand the symbolism of 'blondeness' in narratives, we find that it has been extended or transformed by new encoding. In Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief (1955), the blonde Grace Kelly is the epitome of refinement, sophistication and distinction.
Indeed attempts to link blondeness with dumbness have often turned out to be witness to the opposite. Marilyn Monroe was often cast 'dumb' and often played dumb, but we know she was an altogether more complex personality, and an altogether more talented actress than the stereotype allowed.
Propp's people
In a study of Russian folk tales, Vladimir Propp classified a range of stock characters identifiable in most stories. These may be individualised by being given distinguishing character traits or attributes, but they are essentially functionaries enabling the story to unfold.
In Morphology of the Folk Tale Propp writes of the following archetypal story features:
· the hero/subject whose function is to seek
· the object that is sought
· the donor of the object
· the receiver, where it is sent
· the helper who aids the action and
· the villain who blocks the action
Thus in one of the world's best-known folk tales, Red Riding Hood (heroine) is sent by her mother (donor) with a basket of provisions (object) to her sick granny (receiver) who lives in the forest. She encounters the wolf (villain) and is rescued from his clutches, and his teeth, by the woodman (helper).
Story levels
This formula can be added to and manipulated in line with the requirements of the genre, but it does allow us to differentiate between story level and meaning level, between the denotive and the connotative, between the so-termed mimetic plain (the plain of representation) and the semiosic plain (the plain of meaning production).
The tale of Little Red Riding Hood, examined at the connotative level, is rich in oblique meanings and in order to tease these out we begin to examine the characters and events as symbols. We may perceive the story as a parable; that is, a tale with a moral: little girls should not be allowed in the forest on their own, however great their granny's needs.
But then we begin to ask more questions – why did Red Riding Hood's mother send her on such a perilous journey in the first place; does the wolf stand for more than a wolf, granny more than a granny; and what is the significance of the stones which in some versions of the story end up in the wolf's stomach?
We are seeing that even the simplest of stories, long part of the cultural heritage of many countries, is a moveable feast, its connotative richness varying from reader to reader and context to context; and stories produced in contexts are significantly modified by new contexts.
Read it on the ads…
It would be instructive to select a number of popular narrative forms to see how far they conform to Propp's formula, then turn to the primary folklorists of our age – the advertisers. In a commercial, the subject is the character who stands in for the consumer. The object is what the product being advertised can do for the subject/hero/heroine, such as bringing happiness, satisfaction, fulfilment, glamour, enviability.
The donor or giver is the originator of the advertisement. And the villain? – any factor that deprives the subject of his/her desires (like dandruff, bad skin, obesity, thirst, hunger or irritable bowel syndrome).
**********************
In Blog 10, I’ll be having a look at the connection between values underscoring fiction and those which direct and rule the news; a connection which prompts exploration of the notion of proximity and overlap between fictional and real life narratives. It remains to be acknowledged that fiction, particularly that on the printed page, is as likely to disconnect from reality as connect with it.
Notes in passing: that handkerchief…
Blog 8 looked at props in stories. Listening to the excellent production of Othello on Radio 4 the other day, I got to thinking how significant and central was the handkerchief given to Desdemona by Othello, passed on to his mother by an Egyptian, with ‘magic in the web of it’.
What’s interesting is how the same object is viewed through contrary perceptions. Othello’s attitude to the handkerchief is one of reverence and superstition.
Not lost, but what if it were?
Desdemona had dearly cherished it, but with her husband’s sudden coldness towards her on her mind plus her determination to have Cassio reinstated as the Moor’s lieutenant, she is tempted to relegate it in significance: ‘It is not lost; but what if it were?’ A position that is sensible but disastrously mistimed.
Meanwhile Emilia, in possession of the handkerchief, is less mindful of its value to Desdemona and more of the imperious demands of her husband, Iago, who ‘hath a hundred times woo’d me to steal it’. For her it is an object of placation. She demeans its value by calling it a ‘napkin’. She acknowledges that Desdemona ‘loves the token’ yet immediately decides, ‘I’ll have the work ta’en out’.
Thus the same object, the same prop, means different things to different people, according to the situation they perceive themselves in. For the audience, the missing handkerchief signifies the beginning of a tragic outcome.
Why, what’s that to you?
‘Do not chide; I have a thing for you’, is Emilia’s response to Iago’s demand for the handkerchief. She is curious enough to ask her husband what he intends to do with the handkerchief only to receive the curt response, ‘Why, what’s that to you?’ She lets the matter rest for, like all the members of the cast, Emilia cannot begin to imagine Iago’s evil purpose.
The issue of the handerchief matches Shakespeare’s two grander themes, the first concerning reputation. Iago considers this ‘an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving’. But to Cassio it is ‘the immortal part of myself’.
Yet it is not so much respect for reputation that governs the plot of Othello but trust, the misinvestment of it. Othello trusts Iago; Cassio trusts Iago, Desdemona trusts him and so, amazingly, does Emilia.
One ounce of doubt on their part and Iago’s plan would be done for. It could be said that none of those involved in the tragedy actually, or deeply, trusts the others – enough. Iago meanwhile trusts no one but himself.
And the green-eyed monster?
Looming over all the other ‘properties’ is, of course, Othello’s jealousy; but it could also be described as his insecurity concerning his own persona and background.
A general of Venice he may be, but the attitude and response of Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, would have been widely shared. He trusted in his daughter and that trust has been set at nought – ‘O treason of the blood!-/Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters’ minds’.
Brabantio calls Othello ‘thou foul thief’ and can only believe that Othello ‘hast enchanted her’. By marrying Desdemona without her father’s consent, Othello must have known he might not have won that consent voluntarily. Othello later confesses his wonderment at Desdemona’s choice.
Brought before the Duke of Venice, Othello eloquently makes his case, but what really wins it is Venice’s military necessity, a Turkish fleet ‘bearing up to Cyprus’, consequently the importance of Othello’s generalship.
The Shylock connection
It’s no mere coincidence that Venice is the setting both for the ‘sooty bosom’ of the Moor (as Brabantio puts it) and another member of a persecuted minority, Shylock in the Merchant of Venice.
Ultimately, in matters of the heart rather than war, Othello has a brittle self-view. The ‘green-eyed monster’ thus has him at its mercy, aided by some diabolical tweaking from Iago. In his case, career-opportunism might actually be considered only the part-motivator of his actions.
After all, following Cassio’s disgrace, Iago becomes the Moor’s lieutenant. Careerwise, he has got what he wanted. He could have handed back the handkerchief, heading off, for Othello, ‘such perdition/As nothing else could match’; and everyone would have lived happily ever after! Alas, for Iago, the game is everything.
He will have been well-content with the human devastation he has caused. One wonders how far his genius for manipulation might have carried him in the modern world.
To feed back on the above or correspond on like matters, please contact the author on Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk
On previous blogs:
HISTORY’S NEGLECTED WOMEN (No.4, October 2009)
IN PRAISE OF WOMEN’S SOCCER (No.5, November 09)
LAST FLIGHT OF THE HEYFORD K6875 (No.6, Dec 09)
TRIGGERS & PROPS IN STORYTELLING, 1 (No.7, Jan 10)
PROPS PROPEL, Part 2 (No. 8, Feb.10).
THANKS FOR READING THIS!
JIM.
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