Summer Sign-Off

I won’t be updating regularly until September. A bit of holiday, and the need for uninterrupted writing time, will break my blog rhythm. Before I go: a brief reflection on another visit to the Royal College of Psychiatrists annual conference, again at the invitation of my colleague Neil Hunt.
      I wrote about last year’s meeting here, and followed up here. This year there was a debate about Othello: is he a) suffering from morbid jealousy or some other identifiable condition, or is he b) the victim of manipulation? The audience wasn’t encouraged towards the answer ‘both’, or the more interesting answer ‘neither’, and opted for b).
      As before, psychiatric scrutiny of literary characters was attentive, energetic, and observant. They asked different questions of literary characters, and applied different criteria, from the ones literary critics prefer. I haven’t organised my thinking yet, about what productive affinities there may be between these two kinds of close reading, but I hope to at some point.

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The audience was shown some video clips of the 1995 film directed by Oliver Parker, starring Kenneth Branagh and Laurence Fishburne. One of them was very thought-provoking. Shakespeare’s hero undergoes some kind of fit after a magnificently disturbed speech:

Lie with her! lie on her! We say lie on her, when they belie her. Lie with her! that’s fulsome. — Handkerchief — confessions — handkerchief! — To confess, and be hanged for his labour; — first, to be hanged, and then to confess. — I tremble at it. Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shake me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips. — Is’t possible? — Confess — handkerchief!– O devil!

In the film, most of the speech is replaced with clips of Desdemona in flagrante. The reasons for this are clear enough: this is an efficient and effective way of realising what’s on Othello’s mind. However, presenting us the contents of the mind in visual form, as pictures or cinematic action, isn’t simply a more authentic representation of inner life than Shakespeare’s theatre could manage.
      The spiky distortion in Othello’s words gives us something harder to grasp, less smooth than the easy assumption that our imaginations are filmic, an alternative version of how the mind might be working before it’s translated into more convenient form by a director or by our own attempts to explain it.

E-mail me at rtrl100[at]cam.ac.uk

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