Macbeth's Twist on Nihilism

When rereading Macbeth recently, the first thing that jumped out at me was Macbeth’s imp of the perverse (previous post). The second was Macbeth’s nihilism, which appears early in the play and increases as his doom draws near. Yet the nihilism in Macbeth is no mere dismal pronouncement of life’s meaninglessness.

Surely this celebrated soliloquy is one of the finest nihilistic statements in all of literature:

     Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

     Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
     To the last syllable of recorded time,
     And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
     The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
     Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
     That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
     And then is heard no more. It is a tale
     Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
     Signifying nothing.

From the Orson Welles film adaptation:

 

By this point, Macbeth’s life has completely fallen apart. Having attained the throne through murder, he finds himself a despised tyrant holed up in his castle and going mad. His wife and co-conspirator, Lady Macbeth, has committed suicide and he fears his own end draws near. He has played his part, and poorly, and now the curtain falls and he asks, as we all must, “What was the point?”

But here comes the twist. No sooner has Macbeth finished speaking than he learns an army approaches. His clock is up, but instead of further bewailing the dumb machinery of fate, he rouses himself to meet this final challenge on the battlefield:

     I gin to be aweary of the sun,

     And wish the estate o’ the world were now undone.
     Ring the alarum bell! Blow wind! Come, wrack!
     At least we’ll die with harness on our back.

Macbeth’s response to the meaninglessness of the universe is to create meaning through action. This is the kind of nihilism I like, positive nihilism, nihilism which says, along with Nietzsche, “Okay fine, so the universe itself doesn’t hold meaning, then I’ll give it meaning!” This is the heroic tenor par excellence, and indeed these four lines from Macbeth ring like passages from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”:

     Death closes all: but something ere the end,

     Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
     Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

And this:

     Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

     We are not now that strength which in old days
     Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
     One equal temper of heroic hearts,
     Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
     To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Macbeth and Ulysses, murderer and hero, may not be that dissimilar. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom quotes Nietzsche from Daybreak. In characteristic fashion, the philosopher denies the conventional moralistic reading of Macbeth in favor of something bolder and more life-affirming:

He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image with joy, and if the hero perishes by his passion this precisely is the sharpest spice in the hot draught of this joy. . . . How royally, and not at all like a rogue, does [Shakespeare’s] ambitious man pursue his course from the moment of his great crime!

This is a tempting interpretation of Macbeth, but let’s face it, it has problems. Macbeth’s pursuit of his course is very much like a rogue’s. He murders his guest and king while he sleeps. Then he hires common cutthroats to kill his dearest friend and friend’s son. I’m judging by conventional standards of morality, but if Macbeth’s behavior isn’t roguish, I don’t know what is. Although Macbeth does begin to stir earlier, it is only after all is lost that he exhibits anything I would say resembles Ulysses’ valiance.

Or rather, exhibits it again. Several lines in Macbeth make it clear that Macbeth was once a good man, a loyal servant to his king, and one hell of a fighter. According to Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, the historical Macbeth, who lived from 1040 to 1057, was also a better man than we see throughout most of the play. According to custom in nascent Scotland, there were legitimate reasons for rebelling against one’s king. Macbeth may have felt Duncan was too soft for protecting the land against invasion. Or Lady Macbeth may have had a blood feud with him. In Asimov’s words:

If Macbeth, encouraged by his wife, aspired to the throne, he did so in the approved Scottish fashion of the time. He raised an army and rebelled.

But this is the genius of Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare’s works can be read numerous ways, the thrust changing with each director, actor and viewer. Henry V has been played as pro-war and anti-war. Coriolanus is either one of Shakespeare’s best or worst. The introduction to my copy of Julius Caesar says that Shakespeare did not try to settle the debate about whether Caesar was a hero or a tyrant and his assassins heroes or villains. Shakespeare raises questions but only toys with answers.

And so it goes with Macbeth. Does the Scottish king’s nihilism reject or affirm life? I’ve provided some thoughts on the matter, but the only way you can answer that question is by engaging with the text yourself.

 

 

Other posts on Shakespeare:

The Imp of Macbeth's Perverse

Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (and Baltar in Battlestar Galactica)

Who Would Win a Fight Between Hamlet and Coriolanus?

 

 

The Imp of Macbeth's Perverse

 Whenever I approach a text, I’m less interested in what critics tell me I should get out of it than I am in what simply fascinates me about it. This is the authentic experience of a work of art, a meeting of two spirits, one within the reader and the other within the text. One such point of fascination for me when rereading Macbeth recently was the main character’s imp of the perverse.

The imp of the perverse is an expression that comes from Edgar Allan Poe’s story of that name. The story is narrated by a man in prison who murdered someone and then could not subdue an irresistible urge to confess it. He did these things precisely because he knew he should not. Furthermore, he insists that everyone has these urges:  

With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution.

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth demonstrate exactly this weakness. They cannot stop themselves from their crimes, and afterward cannot refrain from divulging them. In Lady Macbeth’s case, her weakness comes from a mental breakdown, whereas Macbeth himself, despite hallucinations and wild raving, maintains a slight grip on sanity. Nonetheless, he just . . . can’t seem . . . to stop himself. And the result is a lot of trouble. Having gained the throne of Scotland through murder, he can’t enjoy it, for his secret is out and he worries it will lead to his doom:

     We have scorched the snake, not killed it.
     She'll close and be herself, whilst our poor malice
     Remains in danger of her former tooth. 

On the surface, we may view the witches’ magic as driving Macbeth’s fate, but they are also representative of a force within Macbeth himself: his imp of the perverse. For this reason, I always feel sorry for Macbeth. He can’t hold back from his evil deeds and suffers as a result. Are we not all like this? Do not our personal failings frequently steer us into trouble? Even worse, we can tell ourselves, “You do not want to do that,” all the while knowing we will do exactly that. It’s as if there is a little demon inside driving our actions.

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom raises Nietzsche and Freud as subsequent thinkers who also believed that “we are lived, thought, and willed by forces not ourselves,” and certainly thinkers have long seen this externality to our very selves as the essence of being human. I think of the transcendental philosophers of the Enlightenment, as well as Heidegger and his concept of Dasein. Human beings are distinguished by their ability to step back from and look at themselves, and even to step back and look at themselves looking at themselves. In that light, the imp of the perverse is merely a term for a mischievous aspect of our innermost nature that acts independently of our conscious control.  

Shakespeare is full of protagonists with this problem. Like Macbeth, Hamlet sees a ghost that may be of his own imagination, and his fitful response lays waste around him, eventually leading to his own death. Romeo and Juliet’s drives are obviously hormonal and lead to self-immolation. Coriolanus is an interesting twist on the theme, for he willingly follows his nature to his doom. In fact, he insists on it, and this very stubbornness is part of his imp.

There are many reasons to read Shakespeare, but his insight into human nature is the most compelling. He wasn’t the first to present audiences with the dual nature of their species (surely examples can be found stretching back to antiquity), but he was able to do it in a way that has mesmerized audiences for centuries and will continue for centuries more. If you haven’t already seen the latest screen version of Macbeth, I recommend you watch it. And when you do, keep your eyes open for the character unlisted in either the dramatis personae or the credits:

The imp of Macbeth’s perverse.

 

 

Other posts on Shakespeare:

Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (and Baltar in Battlestar Galactica)
Who Would Win a Fight Between Hamlet and Coriolanus?

The Ancients' Guide to Love and Sex in the 21st Century

 

"Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come"

--Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI

Plato’s Symposium opens with some Athenian luminaries attending a banquet at the tragic poet Agathon’s place. The gathering begins with everyone agreeing not to drink and ends in drunken revelry. In between, the attendees deliver speeches in praise of love, the finest of them by none other than Socrates himself. I don’t intend to offer my own encomium to love here, but I do have some thoughts on the speeches in the dialogue.

A krater depicting a symposium. I took this photo a few years ago at an exhibit of ancient Mediterranean pottery at San Francisco Airport. From my notes: Symposia were male drinking parties. Wives were excluded, but hetairai (courtesans) were welcome. Music, dancing, games and "erotic activity" were also part of symposia.

PHAEDRUS

What I find most interesting about Phaedrus’ speech is his use of the word lover. Today when we use the word lover, we usually think of one of two in a mutual romantic relationship. A close look at Phaedrus’ speech, however, shows a subtle difference. He uses the word lover to mean one who is in love with another, with reciprocity common but unnecessary. When he makes an example of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, he admits Achilles’ love for Patroclus, but also makes a distinction between lover and beloved:

Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus—his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two.

Perhaps I like this distinction on a rational level because it suggests one of the key points in the dialogue, that love is by the inferior for the superior. I decided to reread the Symposium because of references to it in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein. In the novel, the narrator and titular character love each other as friends, but the narrator goes to great lengths to show that Ravelstein is the superior of the two, and thus the narrator’s devotion.

Or perhaps Phaedrus’ use of lover simply appeals to me because it allows for praise of unrequited lovers, who seek to be more virtuous and thereby win their beloved’s approval. The plight of one who moons over someone one-sidedly--a situation to which I’m no stranger--seems less unseemly when granted classical gravitas.

PAUSANIAS

Pausanias makes a distinction between high and low love:

Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting.

Judging by the jests they trade, Agathon and company have no small amount of appreciation for comely youths, so they would likely understand our modern obsession with sex, but Pausanias makes the commonplace assertion that when truly in love, you find something more in your partner. In wedding speeches and Facebook posts, husbands and wives are always talking about how “kind, caring and sweet” their partners are. This is something like that, but given how much time the great philosophers of ancient Greece spent pondering the “noble disposition,” I think Pausanias has in mind something higher than mere niceness.

But that’s for Socrates to elucidate. First, the playwright Aristophanes--of Lysistrata and Chiraq fame--makes a speech, but only after having overcome a bout of the “hiccough.”

ARISTOPHANES

Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein makes much of the sex myth in Aristophanes’ speech. The idea is that far in humanity’s past, man and woman were one being, but together they were so strong that Zeus found it necessary to weaken them by separating them. Severed from one another and finding themselves incomplete, men and women each yearned desperately for completion. Taking pity on them, Zeus provided a way for them to rejoin through love and sex. However, this was not limited to opposite-sex couples:

…or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.

Certainly there is poetry in this, and I used to view the search for love in this way. A good mate fills a hole inside, completes you, shines light in your darkness. Nowadays, however, I’m more inclined to see the search for “the one” in Lacanian terms. Everyone has a hole inside that is part of their psyche and can never be filled. Two people just means two holes. Thus, Lacan says that sex--seen as the ultimate fulfillment of two individuals each in the other--is impossible (previous post).

But Aristophanes’ myth, usually deployed for its picture of two individuals coming together in perfect harmony, could also be seen as explaining the very separation described by Lacan. And even Lacan didn’t mean to say that all hope was lost. While ultimate satisfaction isn’t possible, we can’t help but search for it, and the search has its own rewards.

SOCRATES

When it’s his turn, Socrates says that love is always of the beautiful, which is the good, and one who gains the good gains happiness. Since the good for Plato is the Form by which all other forms are known, love is nothing less than a vehicle to a higher state of being:

And the true order . . . is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This . . . is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute.

By now we are talking about love of abstracts, of truth. Socrates typifies this latter type of love more than any other figure in the ancient world, while the love he shares with statesman and general Alcibiades--a love characterized by mutual respect and chaste nights cuddling under a blanket--represents a higher type of love between two individuals.

Does anyone experience the higher forms of love anymore? Chaste romantic relationships do exist--just ask Colin Farrell about Elizabeth Taylor--and if all my time on Twitter has taught me anything, it is that the world is full of people passionate about ideas, art and knowledge. But whatever form love takes, Socrates would tell us to do it as best we can so it makes us better people.

Socrates Seeking Alcibiades in the House of Aspasia, Jean-Léon Gérôme.

 

Previous posts mentioning Plato:

Have a Holly Jolly (and Consumerist yet Discerning) Christmas

The Philosophy of Zombie Strippers