Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries by Eric Langley (review)

REVIEWS 259 Eric Langley, Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009) 312 pp. A thorough and engrossing exploration of early modern literary self-absorption and self-destruction, Narcissism and Suicide delves into the complexities of self-constituted subjectivity through a study of the rhetorical structures of repetition and mirroring that make up the language of the self, and the self through language. Adding further depth to the richness of this complex work, Langley circumscribes his meticulous textual close readings of carefully selected passages from works by Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries within a wider context of theological, aesthetic, philosophical, scientific, and rhetorical discourses. The result is a thought-provoking and multifaceted discussion of the competing attitudes towards reflexive models of self-knowledge and consciousness that prevailed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The study makes the argument that within conceptions of subjectivity predicated upon systems of reciprocity, in which lover and friend provide a model of shared identity, the self-reflection of the narcissist and the self-destruction of the self-slaughterer must be read, not as “exceptions to an ontological rule, but as uncannily extreme examples” (3). This hypothesis underpins Langley‘s work: mutually constructed individuality (i.e.. structures of dialogic ipseity), taken to its destructive limits, exemplifies a period-specific preoccupation with private agency and contending viewpoints on introspection. Overall, despite its sometimes dizzying conceptual maneuvers and occasionally convoluted rhetorical twists, the text successfully illustrates the complex negotiation that takes place between various models of gemination or self-doubling, even though they often lead to self-slaughter in an ironic search for complete independence. According to Langley, the essence of this process is captured by the apt term of “preposterous economy,” in which multiplication (or repetition) actually produces a fatal diminution, emptying out and effectively annihilating the linguistic signs that shape the self. In terms of structure, the book is appropriately divided into two mirroring parts, with three chapters dedicated to narcissism and three to suicide. As we might expect, the first chapter begins with a discussion of Ovid’s myth of Echo and Narcissus, which was often utilized as a didactic and cautionary tale against the excesses of pride and introspective self-absorption in early modern texts. However, as Langley postulates, Shakespeare employs the figure of Narcissus as an embodiment of a relatively new model of intromissive vision, in which introspection leads to a potentially subversive and individualistic subjectivity (28). Throughout the rest of the chapter Langley explains in copious detail how the rhetoric of reflection and the paradox of self-assertion and negation can be traced through translations of Ovid, Renaissance versions of Narcissus as an idolatrous himself-himself construction, as well as the speculum tradition of productive self-scrutiny, which aims to procure self-knowledge by going beyond the physical image into spiritual interiority. Alternatively, the second chapter incorporates a discussion of the intricacies of optic theory and how scientific perspectiva transformed poetic descriptions of vision effectively shaping conceptions of interiority and the development of an increasingly introspective model. In possibly one of the most lucid and stimulating discussions of this book, Langley examines the presence of Narcissus in the epyllion tradition REVIEWS 260 as a “surrogate version of the gaze of lovers,” focusing particularly on Shakespeare ’s Venus and Adonis while exploring the possibility that the narcissist might stand as an ambassador for the new model of post-Keplarian vision (55– 56). In conclusion, Langley evocatively determines through his analysis that “there are intromissive and extramissive narcissists, and both variants correspond to period conceptions of subjectivity” (84). The final chapter dedicated to narcissism begins the transition from the gaze of the narcissist to that of the involuted self-slaughterer, who, according to Langley, responds to the loss of external validation “with a reflexive retraction towards self-owned action” (110). To delineate this shift Langley provides a rhetorical and even architectural analysis of Romeo and Juliet (as well as Twelfth Night), framing the characters’ suicides as echoes produced by the power of sympathetic attraction and reciprocity. Conversely, Part II, drawing parallels across classical and Renaissance models of subjectivity and attitudes towards suicide, turns “from the reciprocal suicides of...