Cute Shylock

If we take Sianne Ngai’s account of the cute seriously, cute emerges as an aesthetic only in avant-garde poetry and art in the late twentieth century; unlike the zany, which Ngai traces to the commedia dell’arte of sixteenth-century Italian popular theater, cuteness does not possess an historical genealogy prior to the twentieth century. Or at least, Ngai does not provide one. It is certainly possible to identify features of early modern culture and literature that match Ngai’s descriptions of the cute, and also to posit that such features arose out of certain historical conditions, and in particular may represent places at which the positive pressure of commodification meet the negative pressure of desacralization. This essay takes a slightly different approach, arguing that unlike Marlowe’s Barabbas, who represents the dark double of the zanni of the commedia dell’arte, Shakespeare’s Shylock presents us with the factory in which cute is being manufactured. As in other cases of making—sausages and laws are the usual examples—this is not a pretty sight, and certainly not a cute one. There have been, since Shakespeare’s play, cute Shylocks (there is in fact what amounts to a cute Shylock meme), but Shylock himself is, I argue, pre-cute: he is what was to have become cute. The elements of cute are present in his story, notably in his eagerness for a piece of Antonio’s flesh, by which Shylock expresses his commitment to an aesthetic of cutification-by-truncation much like the aphaeresis by which the acute becomes the cute in Ngai’s argument. Shylock explains this aesthetic in the fourth act as one of aversion and disgust that finds the disgusting aesthetically valued precisely in its uselessness. And it may be that if in the classical account of disgust too much of what is desired produces disgust, an excess of the disgusting leads in the direction of the cute.