Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare

6. Crumpled Handkerchiefs: William Shakespeare’s and Michel Serres’s Palimpsested Time

six Crumpled Handkerchiefs William Shakespeare’s and Michel Serres’s Palimpsested Time We must obey the time. —William Shakespeare, Othello, 1.3.301 . . . Some other time. —William Shakespeare, Othello, 3.3.55 Othello has long been regarded as afflicted by a temporal anomaly in need of correction. Cracking the infamous ‘‘double time’’ conundrum—do the events of the play take place over a day and a half or over a much longer duration?—was a favorite parlor game of Shakespeareans for more than a century, and the temptation to straighten out the play’s story into an orderly, linear succession of events remains irresistible to many readers.1 In this chapter , by contrast, I consider how the play refuses linear temporality. Rather than a singular progression that can be geometrically plotted, time in Othello is a dynamic field whose contours keep shifting, bringing into startling and anachronistic proximity supposedly distant and disparate moments. So if some of the play’s critics have sought to heed Othello’s injunction to ‘‘obey the time’’ by making its events march in lockstep with a unilinear chronology , I instead follow his advice, to Desdemona, to find ‘‘some other time’’ —not another moment in time but, rather, another understanding of temporality altogether. 170 conjunctions This other temporality is materialized in Othello’s most untimely stage property: the handkerchief. It is untimely inasmuch as it keeps moving from hand to hand at the wrong time, and with disastrous effects. Desdemona inadvertently drops it when it is least in her interest to do so; Emilia picks it up and gives it to Iago, wrongly believing he wants it for himself when he hopes to plant it on Cassio; Cassio gives it to Bianca, mistakenly thinking that she will happily ‘‘take out the work’’ (4.1.148), that is, have its embroidered pattern copied; Bianca throws it back at Cassio as ‘‘some minx’s token’’ (4.1.147) that suggests his infidelity to her; a jealous Othello misconstrues its sudden appearance as proof of Cassio’s relationship with Desdemona. But if the handkerchief is untimely in its movements from character to character, it is even more untimely in its polychronicity. As we shall see, it is simultaneously antique Egyptian token and disposable European trifle, old pagan fetish and New Testament instrument of healing, obsolete emblem of true love and present marker of promiscuity. By quilting together old and new, pre- and post-, past and present—just as the play (at least in Iago’s imagination) knots ‘‘old black ram’’ and ‘‘young ewe’’ into the infamous ‘‘beast with two backs’’ (1.1.88–89, 116)—the handkerchief hints at how Othello refuses temporal as much as racial purity. Rather, the play, like the handkerchief, trades in an impure, preposterous temporality that we might call crumpled time. Explaining his topological understanding of time, Michel Serres resorts to a metaphor that has a serendipitous relevance to Othello: If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities. . . . Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed. If, further , you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant. . . . As we experience time—as much in our inner sense as externally in nature, as much as le temps of history as le temps of weather—it resembles this crumpled version much more than the flat, overly simplified one.2 In this chapter, I read Othello’s napkin in proximity to Serres’s handkerchief. Both help illuminate the crumpled time of Shakespeare’s play, in which supposedly discrete points—different historical ‘‘moments’’ but also temporally coded distinctions of religion, race, and sexuality—are repeatedly made to be ‘‘suddenly . . . close, even superimposed.’’ Though in their racial and religious Crumpled Handkerchiefs 171 guises such superimpositions unleash within the play the fear of miscegenation and Venetians ‘‘turning Turk,’’ they are equally flashpoints for critique and the possibility of ‘‘some other time.’’ Indeed, Othello’s handkerchief suggests how polychronic matter can activate a heterodox temporality of conjunction , one that disregards the entrenched partitions and distances informing the geometric lines of chronological time. To this extent, Othello’s handkerchief is reminiscent of the palimpsested matter theorized by Cixous and Cavendish. Like the latter, the handkerchief operates in a metonymic mode...