notes from 4 October

TITUS ANDRONICUS, DAY II

I. Tracey presents:
1. Definitions: consume, revulsion
2. Interest derived from A Woman Killed with Kindness and its preoccupation with gastronomic consumption
3. How does revulsion in Titus implicate readers as we “consume” the play, etc.?
1. Of interest: “banquet” and “fly” scenes
2. Parallels drawn between reading and eating; (and, of course, Lavinia acquires semiotic meaning after she is consumed by the Goths; the raped Lavinia can only be read when she 'consumes' the staff)
3. So how are readers expected to react?
1. “Terrible” punning and word play: banquet
1. Hand puns: “awful” and “heartbreaking”
2. Language made literal on the stage (but is this particular to Titus, or a quality of performed script in general?)
2. Reception history

II. Discussion
1. “Actually seeing” a performance in which players knowledge the audience's presence (versus “just reading?”); spectatorial contract
2. Text-on-stage: Lavinia's writing; Philomela fable; messages to the gods
1. Titus as storyteller
2. Marcus's & Lucius's (elder) recapitulate the action at the end; inadequately?
1. Marcus inappropriately re-frames everything he encounters by a classical story (Dido, Philomela); Tamora's allusions are spot on (is that part of why she must be destroyed by her fellow wild beasts?)
3. Obscenity
1. Is this counterproductive? Does such obscenity as Titus wants cause us to “turn away,” or “eject us?”
2. Taymor
1. Asides: Tamora, Aaron, The Boy who interpolates the audience at first, and, afterwards, Aaron does this, owing to his ob-scene position.
1. Nested narratives, multiple points of entry, multiple sites for identification.
1. Revulsion as a didactic tool, asking the audience to negatively identify?
2. Does revenge make otherwise revolting violence palatable?
4. Decorum and indecorum
1. “Pleasurability for undergraduates”
1. Lifts dramatic resonance out of inaccessible, high culture and establishes the revolting―the indecorous―as the heart of the classical tradition
1. “Recirculating these stories without understanding what they do”
2. The Senecan tradition smacks of Saturnalian cannibalism
3. “Gothically” wounded Christs from early Catholicism
2. “Centuries-long 'anxieties of influence'”
3. Shakespeare's over-the-top, gut-wrenching violence anticipates Brecht's frustration with masturbatory spectatorship?
5. Consumption
1. Aaron in perpetual consumption by the Earth
1. Who is the only father who does not commit infantacide
1. How do we interpret this with Aaron's presentation as a Machiavellian figure? “Super-exceptional” masculinity, in both instances.
1. However, Aaron will teach his child to “raise a camp” i.e. to recapitulate Romanesque violence and martial culture―which counters a sympathetic , or subversive, reading of Aaron
2. Baby as Empress's child; as Aaron's child (and substitute for the sovereignty monopolized by Tamora?)
2. The Pie, followed by Lavinia, Tamora, Saturnine, and Titus for desert
1. Neroic orgy―the most honest embodiment of the classical tradition?
6. Lavinia
1. Neither is she available for valorization because of Tamora harangue
2. Discretion: Lavinia's fair, interpretable body, Aaron's dark, opaque body (no “alehouse-painted sign”)
7. Drama and accessibility
1. Isn't the death of everyone of account alienating (if only within the context of the spectatorial contract)?
2. Why is the terrible sea omitted from Taymor's adaptation?
3. Lavinia and the inaccessibility of trauma to non-victims/survivors, coupled with her high visibility: she is “in total tension with the action”
4. Staging