Abstract
At the end of The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare offers a scene so improbable that in order to perceive it, Paulina informs Leontes, “It is requir’d / You do awake your faith” (5.3.94-95). What we are about to see, of course, is the living statue of Hermione—art become life, imagination turned into reality. This theatrical spectacle is paradigmatic of a Shakespearean aesthetic in which characters and audience alike are confronted with an impossibility that somehow gestures toward a deeper truth. The invitation to accept the living Hermione is powerful, leading to the conclusion that the playwright’s gift is an invitation to accept the openness or, in more recent critical terms, the indeterminacy of both art and life. Yet the final scene is prefigured by another, less-positive encounter with an impossible image, the product of Leontes’s frantic response to Hermione and Polixenes in the opening scenes of the play. In this chapter I will argue that the two scenes are more alike than is generally acknowledged, that Leontes’s dilemma in facing each image involves not a choice between certitude and openness—between understanding and faith—but an ethical judgment: a response to a demand from another. And while there is no doubt that his first response is wrong, the fact that he makes a choice constitutes the ethical nature of his character contra indeterminacy, against endless deferral. It is in this choice that he asserts his responsibility and enables his future redemption.
Nothing is more free than the imagination of man.1
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Notes
David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1777),”, Essential Works of David Hume, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York, Toronto, and London: Bantam Books, 1965), 44–167, esp. 47.
Levinas developed his philosophy of alterity over a long career: see especially Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969);
Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978);
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).
Howard Felperin, “‘Tongue-tied Our Queen?’: The Deconstruction of Presence in The Winter’s Tale,”, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 3–18, esp. 16.
See, for example, J. Hillis Miller, “Presidential Address 1986. The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base,” PMLA 102 (1987): 281–91. Miller notes that the rise of historicism is a response to the charge that deconstruction amounts to “language playing with itself” (284).
See especially Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York and London: Routledge, 1992);
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
Simon Critchley makes the case for an ethical deconstructive practice in The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
See John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida; and John Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993). For the interest this discussion is beginning to hold for early modernists, see Jackson and Marotti, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies.”
See Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy”, The Levinas Reader, ed. Seân Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 75–87.
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43. See also Derek Attridge, “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other,” PMLA 114 (1999): 20–31.
M. M. Bakhtin makes a similar argument in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990): “The entire world, insofar as it is already actual, already present-on-hand, fails to stand up to a meaning-directed criticism immanent to the very same world.… The word that has been pronounced sounds hopeless in its already-pronouncedness; the uttered word is an embodiment of meaning in mortal flesh. All being that is already present-on-hand in the past and the present is only a mortal incarnation of the yet-to-be meaning of the event of being, the meaning of the absolute future; such being is without hope (outside the sphere of future accomplishment). … The other human being, however, is wholly in this world; he is the hero of this world, and his life is accomplished totally in this world” (133).
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958), trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), xix, xvii.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,”, The Levinas Reader, 129–43, esp. 132. For a discussion of the connections between Levinas and aesthetics, see Peter Schmiedgen, “Art and Idolatry: Aesthetics and Alterity in Levinas,” Contretemps 3 (2002): 148–60;
Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), passim.
On some of the strands of criticism concerned with ethics, see Lawrence Buell, “In Pursuit of Ethics,” PMLA 114 (1999): 7–19; Attridge’s essay in the same special issue of PMLA (20–31) directly addresses the importance of Levinas’s thought to literary study.
Attridge, “Innovation, Literature, Ethics.” 24. See also John J. Joughin, “Shakespeare, Modernity, and the Aesthetic: Art, Truth, and Judgment in The Winter’s Tale,”, Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium, ed. Hugh Grady (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 61–84, esp. 61–62. See also Joughin’s introduction to his own edited collection Philosophical Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 1–17.
Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 31.
Although I cite the line numbers from the Riverside edition, I am here quoting the text of the 1623 Folio. While the Folio is the sole authority for the play, nearly every edition that I consulted amended this speech, often making it more, rather than less, difficult and always, in my opinion, removing its most important qualities. I am in agreement with David Ward on this point. For his definitive argument in favor of the Folio text, see David Ward, “Affection, Intention, and Dreams in The Winter’s Tale” Modern Language Review 82 (1987): 545–54.
Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 44. See also Janet Adelman’s argument that Hermione’s pregnant body is the catalyst for Leontes’s “psychosis [which] illustrates in its purest form the trauma of tragic masculinity, the trauma of contamination at the site of origin” (Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest [New York: Routledge, 1992], 226). Although I am not concerned directly with gender here, these arguments do not contradict my own.
Stephen Orgel, “The Poetics of Incomprehensibility,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 431–37, esp. 433–34.
William E. Engel, Death and Drama in Renaissance England: Shades of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 167.
See Alan Singer, “Beautiful Errors: Aesthetics and the Art of Contextualization,” boundary 2 25 (1998): 7–34, esp. 7–8. Singer argues that the privileging of perfection in art (assumed in conceptions of the autonomy of aesthetic objects) denies the aesthetic its role in the realm of human action, which is always provisional.
See Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 134.
See Engel, Death and Drama, 165–68; and John Sallis, Stone (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994). As Sallis observes: “That which is presented—doubled on stage—is not itself present, not present as itself, on stage” (124).
Adelman’s sense that Leontes’s jealousy is a product of the male anxiety about maternal origin is exactly right in this context. Also see Lynn Enterline, “’You speak a language that I understand not’: The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter’s Tale” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 17–44.
Walter S. H. Lim, “Knowledge and Belief in The Winter’s Tale,” SEL 41 (2001): 317–34, esp. 327. Ruth Vanita in “Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII” (SEL 40 [2000]: 311–37), also associates the “visionary resolutions” of the play with questions of faith. In particular, she sees the play as a celebration of “female fictive lineage” that suggests a nostalgia for the medieval past and the comfort of the cult of the Virgin Mary (311–12).
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© 2011 James A. Knapp
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Knapp, J.A. (2011). “Disliken the Truth of Your Own Seeming”: Visual and Ethical Truth in The Winter’s Tale . In: Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117136_8
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