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90 Cards in this Set
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PHIL. the *disguise* is shameful
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Neoptolemus to Odysseus: Well, then, I will do it, casting aside such shame
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PHIL. Philoctetes is concerned people no longer speak of him
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Philoctetes to Neoptolemus: Surely I must be vile! God must have hated me / That never a word of me, of how I live here, / Should have come through all the land of Greece. Link to Dodds / Williams debate
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PHIL. P's pain, like Phedre's, rivets him to himself.
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Philoctotes: Oh! Oh! / It goes right through me! / ... I am being eaten up! Oh!
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PHIL: If the cure is, according to Heracles,
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glory, then the sickness must be shame. Heracles: ... an end in glory / out of this suffering.
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PHIL: N. on P.'s sickness
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N: you are sick, and the pain of the sickness is of God's sending
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PHIL: P transgressed
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*unknown* limits at Cryse
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PHIL: Cryse is ...
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a 'roofless shrine'
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PHIL: the sun...
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N: You will never know relief while the selfsame sun / rises before you here
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PHIL. Parallels with Phedre strongest here
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P: Hateful life, why should I still be alive and seeing? Why not gone to the dark?
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PHIL. Dennis Slattery
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writes that 'The wound of Philoctetes mutates into a wound of shame; that link, between Neoptelomus' shame and Philoctetes' outrage, binds them in the tension of tragic awareness'
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PHIL. Like Ajax,
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'an outcast / shamed by the Greeks'.
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AJAX. Meleaus wants A's body shamed and unburied
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M: Therefore I say, no man exists on earth / Who shall have power to give him burial, / But he shall be tossed forth / Somewhere on the pale sand,...
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AJAX. But is is his misrecognition for which Ajax feels shame
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A: Shamed by the Greeks to perish as I do [then calls for their death in prayer to Zeus] Atreus' sons have brought me to my ruin / ... sweep upon them for their ruin too.
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AJAX. Cavellian reading
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Ajax fears recognising the Greek generals because he does not want to be recognised himself.
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AJAX. Athena
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I can darken even the most brilliant vision. Odysseus cannot *see* him
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AJAX. Link to Iliad VI
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Winnington-Ingram noticed similaries between Ajax's speech to Eurysaces ('He won't be frightened, / Even by seeing this fresh-butchered gore, / Not if he really is my son... / ... Train him to have a nature like his sire') and Iliad book VI, in which Astynax does not *recognise* his father in his full armour ('In the same breath, shining Hector reached down for his son -- but the boy recoiled ... / ... / Screaming out at the sight of his own father...', then Hector says, 'Zeus! all you immortals! Grant this boy, my son, may be like me...'). By placing this reference in the text, Sophocles invites us to contrast two very different types of heroic action. But is Sophocles perhaps also inviting us to compare two different egs of misrecognition? Both mistake something innocuous for something fearful. In both cases, misrecognition has its roots in a feeling of smallness, of helplessness, or powerlessness, in the face of
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AJAX. Link to Iliad VI cont.
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the other's gaze. Misrecognition, as Cavell has shown, is often an attempt to evade the gaze of those you believe in front of you. For Astynax, a child, these feelings of powerlessness are quickly assuaged by his parents, who comfort him ('raising his son he kissed him, tossed him in his arms, lifting a prayer to Zeus...'), whereas for Ajax they cannot be, and the feelings become an all-consuming shame.
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OEDI.
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'unguessed shame'. The shame of misrecognition.
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TRACH. Shame
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'In darkness one may be / Ashamed of what one does, without the shame of disgrace'. Link to Dodds / Williams.
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TRACH. Attempts to possess the Other's gaze absolutely, so that it will not be Other.
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'He will never look / At another woman'. Leads to death of Other. Cf Othello. Also, contradiction here? The wish for shame? Jouissance. Shame is connected to love; both are about being looked at by the other... Love and shame are similar: both involve feelings of partiality and one can move from one to the other. See this in Othello. Also, there is shame in doing it but also shame in not doing it...
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OTH. O: 'my
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perfect soul'
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OTH. O: 'It is
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too much of joy'
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OTH. I: Who
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dotes yet doubts, suspects yet soundly loves
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OTH. O: to be
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once in doubt / Is once to be resolved
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OTH. O: cold
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cold my girl? / Even in thy chastity?
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OTH. O: Come,
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my dear love / The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue / That profit's yet to come 'tween me and you.
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OTH. Cavell
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does not talk about *shame* of impotence. McLaren writes of the *shame* of impotence in early modern Europe
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OTH. Link also to TRACH
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Othello and Heracles are 'Other'.
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MIL: 'Light
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the prime work of God to me extinct' (but it's still there...)
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MIL: Levinas'
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imagined reversion of the world to nothingness, after which '[quelque] chose se passe, fut-ce la nuit et la silence du neant... Cette 'consumation' impersonnelle, anonyme, mais inextinguible de l’être, celle qui murmure au fond du néant lui-même...' (93-4),
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BECK. Hamm: Our
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revels are now ended. [He gropes for the dog]. The dog's gone.
Clov: He's not a real dog, he can't go. (God isn't real, therefore he *must* exist) |
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MIL: Dark
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dark dark, amidst the blaze of noon.
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BECK: Hamm prays...
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'The bastard, he doesn't exist'.
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BECK: Hamm
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saw Noah, his father naked. He *was* God, the one whose gaze can inflict shame. Now he is blind; for him, God is everywhere and nowhere. Like Phedre.
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MIL: God's crime, along with existing
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is giving us what we want. Manoah: I prayed for children, and thought barrenness / In wedlock a reproach; I gained a son / And such a son as all men hailed me happy: / Who would be now a father in my stead? / O wherefore did God grant me my request?
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BECK: Hamm: Scoundrel!
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Why did you engender me!
Nagg: I didn't know Hamm: What? What didn't you know? Nagg: That it'd be you. |
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BECK. In Hamm's world
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the sun, Milton's 'prime work of God', never goes away; a God so cruel as to allow eternal life.
Clov: [Looking] Damn the sun. Hamm: Is it night already then? Clov: [Looking] No. Hamm: Then what is it? Clov: [Looking] Grey. |
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KL. Love bound up with shame. Cavell quote:
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'It can be said that what Lear is ashamed of is not his need for love and his inability to return it, but of the nature of his love for Cordelia. It is too far from plain love of father and for daughter'.
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KL. Cavell quote re shame in general
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... if the failure to recognise others is a failture to let other recognise you... then it is exactly shame which is the cause of this witholding of recognition...
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KL. Eagleton quote
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'if we are to escape the sealed circuit of he self, or the equally windless enclosure of self and other, we have to have sympathy for the other precisely as monstrous, to feel for the blinded Oedipus or crazed Lear in their very rebarbative inhumanity'.
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KL. Cordelia:
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Sure I shall never marry like my sisters / To love my father all
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KL. Gloucester scene
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Cornwall: Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly!
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KL. France
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on Cordelia's sin:
Should... / Commit a thing so monstrous to dismantle / So many folds of favour. Sure her offence / Must be of such unnatural degree. --- concentrate on word 'folds'. Like a disguise? Cordelia's confession has taken the disguise off of her true feelings. This gives Lear shame (for SC). But it also shows how disguise can be used to get close to someone... Plus his 'thing so monstrous', acc. Lupton & Reinhart, 'transvalues the inexpressibility topos of the speeches of all three daughters'. How love remains 'hidden', but pointed at by Cordelia. Not disclosed, but recognised as hidden. Phaps explains why 'recognition scenes, coming too soon or too late, are avoided, aborted, or ineffectual'. People are still in hiding. And hiding is shameful... Cavell does not write about this. |
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KL. Edgar
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disguises himself to hide from his father's wrath, Gloucester says 'Shame would have it hid'. Link to Ajax and Hector. But also, disguising oneself has its dangers, as Neoptolumus knows: it too can produce shame. Oedipus, of course, knows the extremities of shame that can emerge from a parent's failure to recognise you as their child. Ajax, avoiding the gaze of the Greeks by disguising them in his mind, knows the shame of avoiding the gaze of the Other, even though his avoidance, like Lear's for Cavell, is designed to *avoid* shame.
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PHE: She will never die and never live
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Une femme mourante, et qui cherche a mourir
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PHE. The eternal gaze of the Other
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plants the 'honteuses douleurs': Et moi, triste, rebut de la nature entiere / Je me cachais au jour, je fuyais la lumiere, / La mort est la seule dieu que j'osai implorer.
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PHE: Darkness no more a comfort than light
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Oeone to Phedre after she says she wants to see the sun 'pour la derniere fois': Vous vouliez vous montrer et revoir la lumiere / Vous la voyez, madame; et, prete a vous cacher / Vous haissez le jour que vous veniez chercher'. Showing is the same as seeing. TENEBROSO, link to Brittanicus
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PHE: Phedre
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*seule*: O toi, qui vois la honte ou je suis descendue.
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PHE: being gazed at by the Other produces
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jealousy AND shame: 'jaloux transports'.
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PHE: But, Phedre, death is a God; you will meet Minos at Hades' gates.
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Ou me cacher? Fuyons dans la nuit infernale.
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PHE: two quotes, one Cavell, one Levinas
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'Our normal existence is itself poisoning' (LINK THIS TO PHILOCTETES...)
'What appears in shame is precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself' (Levinas) |
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BRIT: Barthes
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'fetishism of eyes'. and 'l'etat parfait du *tenebroso* racinien, ce sont des yeux en larmes et leves vers le ciel'. Because *you can't see the sun*. BUT, also about not being able to see the nobility in the boxes and balconies?
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BRIT: Nero
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describing how Junie enters the palace: Triste, levant au ciel ses yeux mouilles de larmes / qui brillaient au travers des flambeaux et des armes.
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BRIT: To Nero, Junie will always
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be readable. He tells her to lock her love for Brittanicus in the bottom of her soul, but she is sure she will give signs to him of how she feels. He says 'vous n'aurez pas pour moi des langages secrets / J'entendrai des regards que vous croirez muets'. In this sense, as Emperor, he is like the walls: (Junie) 'ces murs meme, seigneur, peuvent avoir des yeux'.
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CACHE: Both
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Racine and Haneke make art about those the sun shines upon
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CACHE: We see
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*through* the tapes. Phedre addresses the nobility in the boxes. Centrality of watching to shame.
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CACHE: Sleeping pill scene
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Catherine Wheatley points out he is also seeking the darkness of cinema. He cannot escape. The barn--penultimate shot-- is shot from a dark barn looking out onto a yard in the light of day. Photo-graphia is light writing. Shame is the light of day that seeps around George's--the insomniac of the day--curtains.
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CACHE: Clandestine
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camera is everywhere and nowhere. Plus, George doesn't WANT to recognise it? The misrecognition that BEGINS the film ('How did I miss this guy? I can't figure it out / Maybe the camera was in the car / It doesn't look filmed through a window...
Link to the Jansenist God, but also to Cavell... he didn't *want* to recognise it, because it would mean acknowledging his sin and his shame. |
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CACHE: Wheatley quote
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'... the vast majority of taped scenes [in Cache] are shot from 'impossible angles': shot from outside walls where bookcases stand, or from a position too high for a handyman operator unless they were standing very conspicuously on the roof of a car'.
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CACHE: lit box, TV screens
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The tragedies of our lives are seen by a God so distant you cannot be sure he is really there. We know, though, from the immensity of our guilt, that someone has to be out there watching somewhere...
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WT PER: The imagery of pregnancy that surrounds the plays' moments of loss
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by the loss of maidenhead / A babe is moulded (per)
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WT PER: Decline
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Conceiving the dishonour of his mother / he straight declined
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TW PER. Death
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the pregnant instrument of wrath (Per)
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WT PER. Banishment
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'thy brat hath been cast out' (WT)
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WT PER. and grief
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"I am great with woe, and shall deliver weeping" (Per)
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WT PER. belief
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just as lacking in ocular proof as othello, the only way characters in the plays come to conviction about the condition of things unseen (i.e., suspected infidelity, a lost child, lost wife or lost father) is thru self-conscious belief.
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WT PER. L.'s fear of fertility
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Banishes Mamullis
brings herm in front of the trial before she has "strength of limit" reminds him and those at the trial of his anxiety re. an unknowable world, cf pericles, conjecture, faith etc. |
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WT PER. Both statue scene and recognition scene
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argue that rather than having faith in death in life (AND THIS FAITH KILLS MAMMILIUS!!), through the cipher of seeing the female body as inconsistent and therefore sinful, without limit, for the fact that it defies the knowledge and so control of men, one should have faith in life in death. it is Leontes' argument of 'no barricado' reversed. if there is 'no barricado', and so reality is governed by our own belief, then we should believe in life, for if we do, there will be life. In this sense they are non tragic. How facing the other is not necessarily tragic...
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TRACH and OTH connexion
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The handkerchief is linked to the robe? ''Twould make her amiable and subdue my father / Entirely to her love...'. And in both cases it is shameful (Othello feels shame, Deinara feels shame). Both make you all-powerful, both are meant to, in Green's words, 'ensure the efficacy of desire', but both help to determine death and, in O's case, jealousy, which is to say, the experience of partiality. But, in Othello, as Green as shown, magic itself is shown to be a side effect of, firstly, desire helped along by otherness (c.f. Brabantio and Othello's 'phallic power')...
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OTH. witchcraft stuff
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Brabantio suspects Othello of witchcraft. And yet the handkerchief, once possessed by the Egyptian woman who 'could almost read / The thoughts of people', she becomes omniscient, able to gaze into Othello's mind. 'Death and damnation!' (III.3). Green: 'Each of Desdemona's attractions is later transformed, under the effects of jealousy, into a magic power... in declaiming that Desdemona is a witch, is he doing any more than re-establishing her, after this loss of the handkerchief, in the series of maternal figures of primitive omnipotence, all powerful in evil as they were in good?'. Connect this to impotence and witchcraft, c.f. Montaigne, 'de la force de l'imagination'-- in which Montaigne ridicules the belief that witchcraft, rather than the imagination, caused impotence, something of which Othello knows well...-- All-knowingness and shame.
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MIL: Samson is unable to see, and so to know, God, and so despairs of the world:
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'...My hopes all flat, nature within me seems / In all her functions weary of herself' (595).
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MIL: However, Samson does seem to be able to destroy something like the world, to escape the gaze of God as he kills himself
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He tugged, he shook, till down they came and drew
The whole roof after them, with a burst of thunder Upon the heads of all who sat beneath (1650-3). Milton calls this temple a 'spacious theatre' (1605). In the Book of Judges, it is called a 'house' (KJV, Judges 26:26-7). |
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MIL: Yet this action takes place
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off-stage in a closet drama (Samson's father instructs the messenger to: '… give us if thou canst, / Eye-witness of what first or last was done'.
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MIL: The theatre has, then,
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*already* been destroyed... Its destruction by Samson is completely ineffectual
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BECK AND MIL: Link to Cavell and Endgame --
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a world in which there is nothing left to kill along with oneself.
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BECK MIL: a theatre is destroyed,
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but in a closet-drama, the theatre building is always already destroyed. And we may hear Milton's messenger in Hamm's statement that 'Outside of here it's death [Pause]' (p. 96). Of course, you can't kill death. There is nothing to see before the event of the theatre's destruction, and there is nothing to see after it.
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BECK MIL: Like Samson, like Hamm
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we are blind all the time, and not only will we never see any light, but nothing will ever kill us. We survived: we continue to 'witness' the drama, even after the collapse of the auditorium ceiling. But it's not much consolation. If we are alive, it is in a life like Hamm's, like Samson's, like Clov's.
HAMM: Wait! [CLOV halts.] How are your eyes? CLOV: Bad. HAMM: But you can see. CLOV: All I want. (p. 109) |
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BECK MIL: Cavell quotes Samson.
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Making the point that, in Endgame, wit is always the sound of wit (and this is Sampson's condition too: 'I hear the sound of words, their sense the air / Dissolves unjointed ere it reach my ear' (178)), he writes that '… wittiness need not make you laugh. The device of aphorism depends upon the sound of wit, and its effect is of hilarity, but with all passion spent' (127) [my emphasis]. Milton's drama concludes:
With peace and consolation hath dismissed, And calm of mind all passion spent. (1757-8) |
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BECK MIL: Samson is the inextinguishable murmur behind endgame
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Hamm is the husk of the husk that was Samson. Milton is what persists in Beckett through his extinction, '...in the land of darkness yet in light, / To live a life half dead, a living death / And buried...' (99-101).
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OTH. Brabantio:
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Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:
She has deceived her father, and may thee. |
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How KL links to WT and Per
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'O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! / Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow” after having seen how Regan puts Kent in stocks, coppelia kahn, identifcation with feminine 'illness', he has a womb that must be repressed down. yet womb also represents what you can't control or know, in which things grow but unseen, it represents feminine sexuality that cannot be controlled, c.f. leontes, 'strength of limit' 'no barricado for a belly', death imagery in birth imagery. figures for scepticism.
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Lacan, speaking of the scopic drive
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... the gaze that surprises me and reduces me to shame,
is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other. LINK TO JANSENISM |
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Gabrielle Taylor
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'in the experience of shame, one's whole being seems diminished or lessened'.
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PHIL. Dodds writes
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in 1951 of the connection in Sophocles between pollution and guilt.
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MIL. Two quotes expessions of same idea
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Light he prime work of god to me extinct
But peace , i must not quarrel with the will / of highest dispensation, which herein / haply has ends above my reach to know |
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CACHE quote, refusal to recognise others = refusal to let others recognise you
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he pauses the tape on a frame of himself leaving the house earlier that morning, in which he appears to be gazing straight at the camera. he wonders how he didn't see the camera man? "comment j'ai fait pour pas le voir ce type, c'est un mystere hein?"
what is he gazing at? the nothing that cannot be known and therefore cannot be silenced. the texture of cordelia's nothing is the texture of lear's abandonment, because it is the thing that must be hidden, and, therefore, cannot be known. he gazes right at it, and feels shame (Cavell), like Georges. The more one tries to know it, the more one fails to know it, and, therefore, the more ones shame at being partial, incomplete, is elaborated ---- France and the folds. Lear's womb. that which is unknown is female sexuality, here; hence the womb which must be suppressed; lear has 'nothing' within himself. link to othello's impotence. |
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CACHE link to SAMSON
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you cannot evade the gaze of the other as long as people are watching... link to phedre also.
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THIS IS KEY: our attempts
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to hide from the other bring us shame because they emphasise the fact that one cannot hide from the other, and therefore that it can see us all the time
-phedre, -king lear, -ajax, -philoctetes, -cache |
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KL, OTH:
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king lear and othello both have 'nothings', female sexuality in themselves they try to stifle, and that this is shameful, an otherness at the heart of themselves, even, that they try and fail to abolish.
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MIL. Like Barthes' Racinian characters, (Wallace point about displacement)
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Samson seems to confuse God with his 'intimate impulse': '... they knew not / That what I motioned was of God; I knew / From intimate impulse' that he should wed a Philistinian woman.
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