Among the colossi: Coriolanus and fascism

 Coriolanus is the most unloveable of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, and he casts an eagle’s cold shadow over the play. In the 30s, the play came in for a lot of attention from the likes of people like Wyndham Lewis, since there seemed to be such obvious hookups between Coriolanus and fascism – in an era when fascism still designated a tight bundle of material characteristics, instead of now, when fascism has been psychologized – although the thirties version, with the authoritarian doddard in the U.S., is coming back. Among the material characteristics for English writers (not only Lewis, but, for example, Shaw) was the idea that politics ultimately boiled down to leadership.

However, Coriolanus acted, even then, as a counter-case to the cult of leadership – even if it did not lead one to a possible politics of non-leadership. I am, of course, obsessed at the moment – the extended moment of this sad century - with the state, war, the treadmill of production, and my sense that a bad change of emotional customs is in the offing – a jump to an absolutely transactive ethos, in which exchange means all. Just as the jealous man sees the world in green and the man on the blue guitar sees the world in blue, I see the system of commodified violence, the epoch beginning with the mass death initiated in 1492, reaching its extreme limit in the death of the ocean and the theft of the atmosphere, those approaching norms of planetary mortality, in every raindrop that falls. Given this, I’m going to import my obsessions into a play that seems to invite them.

In the past, we read the play in conjunction with North’s translation of Plutarch’s life, and with Stanley Cavell’s essay, who does the wolf love?

The events in the play are set at the beginning of the Roman Republic. The plebians have rebelled against the debt they have been forced into in order to feed themselves, and which they are desperately repaying by selling themselves and their families into bondage. The oligarchs, of course, then as now, are on the lender’s side. The rebellion finds expression in a threat to migrate from Rome, and the plebes even settle on a hill near Rome. They are persuaded to come back by an embassy from the oligarchs headed by Menenius, depicted by Shakespeare as one of those grand old pols: a drinker, close to the oligarch families but able to understand, if not approve, of the plebe culture. Think of a machine Democrat – or even one of the Longs. Earl Long, for instance. Menenius tells the plebes the ‘parable of the belly’ – which is basically the same in North’s Plutarch and in Shakespeare – and – as much by his willingness to talk to them at their own level as by the parable itself – wins them back to Rome.

At this opportune time, the Volsces threaten the Roman state. Caius Martius (aka Coriolanus), who has been the most intransigent opponent of the plebes, and especially indignant at the creation of plebian offices, like the tribunes of the people (the ancient equivalent of DEI), joins the Roman army and performs such heroic feats against the Volsces that he almost personally drives them back. According Coriolanus is heavily favored to become consul. However, in order to take that office, he must gain the voice of the people through the ritual forms – and in the process, Coriolanus shows himself so scornful of the people and the forms that he incites the popular will against him and is exiled from Rome. In exile, he joins the Volsces to get revenge on his native city – only to be greeted, at the gates, by his mother, who begs him to spare Rome. Coriolanus bows to his mother’s will, betrays the Volsces, and suffers for that betrayal.

Now, one interesting note about the above described plot. In Plutarch, the revolt of the plebes is described like this: “… it fortuned that there grew sedition in the city, because the Senate did favour the rich against the people, who did complain of the sore oppression of usurers, of whom they borrowed money. For those that had little, yet were spoiled of that little they had by their creditors, for lack of ability to pay the usury: who offered their goods to be sold to them that would give most. And such as had nothing left, their bodies were laid hold on, and they were made their bondmen, notwithstanding all the wounds and cuts they shewed, which they had received in many battles, fighting for defence of their country and commonwealth: of the which, the last war they made was against the Sabines, wherein they fought upon the promise the rich men had med them that from thenceforth they would intreat them more gently…” In a brilliant bit of the negation of the negation, Shakespeare inverts this (o black magic moment, that hath such monsters in it!) and makes it Coriolanus who has to show his wounds to the people in order to get their voice – a ritual he is unwilling, in the end, to go through with.

So the people never really see his wounds – he is a wound tease – although the people (in the audience) have witnessed the getting of them. It is part of the unloveliness of Coriolanus that his attack on the people extents to an attack on the audience, of which it is a safe bet that 99 percent will not possess the bloodlines such as a Coriolanus would respect. Talk about putting a shark filled moat around identifying with the hero.

2.

In the Lion and the Fox, Wynham Lewis notices the small and large effects of “boy” in Coriolanus. How boy as an insult stirs him to homicidal rampage – and how boy encloses him, destines him to be the boy of his mother Volumnia, that unloving woman, from youth to manhood to death. It is a play in which Coriolanus’s downfall begins with his mother begging him to play a role and beg the plebians (whom she has taught him to despise) for their voices in order to become a tribune, to the end of his trajectory, when Volumnia pleads for Rome against her boy, who has betrayed it and is fighting against it for the Volscians.

A long quote here:

“The scene to which this critical confrontation of the mother and son should be compared is the last scene of all, when he is killed by Aufidius and his followers. The word with which he is dismissed from the scene of this world is “‘ Boy,”’ and he is shown as resenting it very much indeed. “

Aufidius. He has betray’d your business, and given up, For certain drops of salt, your city Rome

(I say ‘ your city ’) to his wife and mother ;

Breaking his oath and resolution, like

A twist of rotten silk; never admitting Counsel o’ the war; but, at his nurse’s tears,

He whin’d and roar’d away your victory ;

That pages blush’d at him, and men of heart Look’d wondering at each other.

Cor. Hear’st thou, Mars ?

Auf. Name not the god, thou boy of tears !

Cor. Ha!

Auf. No more.

Cor. Measureless liar, thou hast made my heart Too great for what contains it. Boy !

O slave !— Pardon me, lords, ’tis the first time that ever I was fore’d to scold.”

But during the ensuing lines he goes on repeating “Boy!” —which epithet appears to have entirely overpowered him …”

Lewis puts his finger on the “boy” imago and sees it as the center of a certain British “snobbery’. I think that, since 1927 when the book was published, that “snobbery” has been politically stretched to cover a vast political space – currently the alt-right space, the neo-fascist space. And, on the American side, a curious apotheosis of “boy” – which pairs with “alpha male” in organizations that call themselves, for instance, Proud Boys.

In that sense, Coriolanus is no guide to our present fascism – or rather, a surveyors point that marks out a way of seeing the conjunction of fascism and the male youth cult. The ambiguities of “boy”, exploited by the profiteers of ressentiment.

Are there clues of a different order, however, in the play as Stanley Cavell interprets it in Who does the Wolf love (1983)?

In Lewis’s book, he devotes some time to what he considers Shakespeare’s third period, when “the gigantic figures of Othello, Lear, Antony, Macbeth, Timon, Coriolanus, fill the period of Shakespeare’s utmost maturity and power. » He calls them “colossi” – an eminently sculptural name, which substitutes for the term “hero”. I think that is a very brilliant suggestion, although it comes out of Lewis’s rather mad externalization program, which did him no favors when he tried to write novels. Lewis was, perhaps, meant to be England’s Brecht, a dramatist, and missed his mark.

In Cavell’s essay, I am drawn to the interlacing of the strand of revenge, the strand of narcissism, and the strand of an existentially thwarted desire as a way of understanding the motion, so to speak, of the colossus Coriolanus. And from that knot, to understand a certain puzzle in the history of fascism, even as it is being enacted now: the way in which revenge can never be ultimately satisfied until some collective suicide is enacted. To put this in crude terms, the catastrophe that resulted in the destruction of most of Germany’s cities, the mass death and destititution of its own population as it robbed and killed the Other on a global scale, was always in the mix from the beginning. Just as the most interesting thing about the buncombe fascism of Trump is that, at every point, the revenge he seeks is on the America he supposedly leads. Depression and destitution are in the mix: they are not alien to the program, not failures proof against the program, but the secret end the program seeks.

Cavell sees this in Coriolanus:

“You may say that burning as a form of revenge is Coriolanus's projection onto Rome of what he felt Rome was doing to him. This cannot be wrong, but it so far pictures Coriolanus, in his revenge, to be essentially a man like Aufidius, merely getting even; the picture requires refining. Suppose that, as I believe, in Coriolanus's famous sentence of farewell, "I banish you!" (III.iii.123), he has already begun a process of consuming Rome, incorporating it, becoming it. Then when the general Cominius tried in vain to plead with him to save Rome, and found him to be "sitting in gold, his eye / Red as 'twould burn Rome" (V.i.63-64), he somewhat misunder- stood what he saw. He took Coriolanus to be contemplating something in the future whereas Coriolanus's eye was red with the present flames of self-consuming. Consuming the literal Rome with literal fire would accordingly only have been an expression of that self-consuming. Thus would the city understand what it had done to itself. He will give it horribly what it deserves. Thus is the play of revenge further interpreted.”

Once we absorb Cavell’s point, it is hard to see the logic of the play any other way. As he writes:

“The fact that he both has absolute contempt for the people and yet has an absolute need for them is part of what maddens him.”

The ability to be maddened is a property of the colossus. The charlatan, who approaches the colossus in his greed, is less worried by dependence on the crowd he or she needs. There is, as it were, an incomplete interiorization at work there: in as much as the charlatan really believes in the rewards, the money or luxuries, that he accrues for himself. The downfall of the charlatan is a lesser kind of tragedy – it is, even, a comedy. In a society with a democratic ethos, the charlatan is relatively easy to recognize – the comedians, in fact, get there first. But the colossus, that is another story. A bad one.

So what shall it be? This is the question we all have to wrestle with.

“AUFIDIUS

My lords, when you shall know—as in this rage,

Provoked by him, you cannot—the great danger

Which this man’s life did owe you, you’ll rejoice

That he is thus cut off. Please it your Honors

To call me to your senate, I’ll deliver

Myself your loyal servant or endure

Your heaviest censure.”