The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts

Conclusion

t q onclusion he revived popularity of Titus Andronicus in the contemporary theater has occasioned an instructive renegotiation of established terms for considering violent texts. Traditionally, works that exhibit excessive, prurient violence “for its own sake” have been cordoned off from those including violence in appropriately contextualized and morally contained episodes. That Shakespeare himself might belong in the former camp rather than the latter has prompted a rethinking of the categories. One conclusion is the recognition that we need to ask more subtle questions about textual violence, about its provenance and purpose as well as its form and extent. In this book I have attempted to contribute an added dimension to such considerations by demonstrating how deeply the appeal of violence infuses our literary traditions and by accounting for its centrality in numerous and various texts from the English Renaissance period. All accounts of our relationship to the past and to past texts depend on a historical narrative of some sort, and mine is no exception . Where the dominant (though sometimes unacknowledged) paradigm of recent cultural historicist work has put forward an only slightly revised and ironized version of Burckhardt’s tale of the emergence of the dominant individual, I have traced a more deeply recursive path. Looking back to the way violent literary forms characterized the Renaissance moment , I have probed the connection between emergent structures of identity and a desire for imaginative shattering of the self. Basically this has involved an extended analogy between the psychoanalytic account of the development of the conscious individual and the historical narrative of subjective emergence. The growing consolidation of a sense of autonomy as the de- fining characteristic of self-experience occasioned a corresponding development of textual and aesthetic modes capable of dispatching the markers of individuality, temporarily undoing the ego’s structuring bonds. Thus, arising in conjunction with codes for understanding the self through the discourses of religion, erotic love, political agency, and ethical conduct were texts that turned demands from each arena toward the production of pleasure. I have used various terms to consider the dissolution of identity proffered by these textual interactions: jouissance, catharsis, masochism. In each case, the contemplation of described or enacted violence works both phenomenologically and psychologically on readers or viewers, displacing the ordinary structuring bonds of selfhood to effect a radical emotional response. The psychoanalytic terms of Freud and Lacan help us understand why the installation within the emergent subject of a drive toward its own destruction occurs: not because people are innately cruel or aggressive but because the ego imposes an alienating unity that fails to contain all aspects or levels of the subject’s experience and knowledge. In light of the evident failure of emerging codes of moral and political subjectivity to encompass the wider expanse of emotional, physical, and religious experiences documented in the early modern period, the notion of a misfit or misalliance between the ego and subjective experience takes on great resonance. People accustomed to considering themselves fluid in their emotions and dispersive in their energies no doubt found ways to benefit from stringent ethical codes and to exercise agency in available channels. But they seem also to have sought out occasions to engage with texts that allowed temporary reversion to a psychically disunified, emotionally shattered self-experience. The power of these texts helps us appreciate the misfit between the humanistic self or ego and the dehiscent sense of something Lacan calls the Real that refuses to match up with the self in its official versions. In his reading of Lacan, Richard Boothby proposes that the “death drive operates on two levels, imaginary and symbolic,” and this distinction proves helpful in considering the implications of an aesthetics of masochism. Within the Imaginary (in Lacanian terms the level of ordinary existence), the death drive or primary masochism produces actual violence, either in active form or mimetically through images of literal violence, while the Symbolic allows a mediation or sublimation of literal violence. “In either case, the death drive attempts to have its way with the imaginary ego, seeking to t 160 q The Shattering of the Self deconstruct its false unity.”1 Complex manipulations of the death drive that encourage symbolic mediation have an obvious advantage over the simple reiteration of images of literal violence. Confronting the centrality of violence in English Renaissance literature might enable us to see the potential benefit...