Saltburn (2023)

In 2019's old age, before the plague hit, I set myself the task of reading through the entire Arden Third Series—or at least the Shakespeare canon. Since then I have read 19 canonical works cover-to-cover, plus the 'Shaxberd prolly contributed' entries Double Falsehood, Edward III, and Sir Thomas More; plusplus a few works of other early modern play-makers. I must say with no little delight and gratitude to the good folks at Arden that this has been a mostly rewarding, enriching journey... until I came to The Merchant of Venice.

I have two issues here that I would like to discuss at some length: First: the text of the 159-page introduction by John Drakakis is turgid almost to the point of illegibility; and second, the editor is a fucking asshole.

SIX DEGREES OF TURGIDITY
This hifalutin wackademic twaddle is so abysmally awful and opaque it actually makes me angry... because while I am committed to reading through the series, the intro is like reading a prescription bottle submerged in molasses. Lemme demonstrate:

The cultural mechanisms for which Lyotard seeks to offer an account emerge in late 16th century England as a confrontation between a troubled Christianity and its own uncertain limitations, particularly those that impinge upon the proscription of certain kinds of economic activity. It also raises fundamental questions of what meanings the [sic] Merchant of Venice generates through the various conversions that take place in the play: from Jew to Christian, from bachelor to married man, from virgin to wife. Are these, as Leslie Fiedler once suggested, analogues of potentially disruptive energies that only the communal (and in this case theatrical) reaffirmation of social rituals can contain? (pp.28-29)

Where to begin? Working backward: 'Are these analogues of potentially disruptive energies...'? The last sentence is a tar baby. 'Energies' is far too amorphous a word, redolent of any number of vapid new-age drolleries, to drop without prior definition or delimitation. And we're not talking about energies anyway; we're talking about analogues of energies, which please explain to me what that even means. Further, the last sentence is a non-sequitur, having no discernable connection to the matter it succeeds.

Re 'the ... reaffirmation of social rituals': the 'conversion' 'from bachelor to married man' is called marriage and it is true that marriage is a social ritual. Assuming 'theatrical reaffirmation' of that social ritual means people getting married on stage, what in the unholy frottage of dung demons does it even mean to suggest that only stage marriage can 'contain' 'analogues of potentially disruptive energies'? This is word salad merely.

But soft: the last sentence begins with 'Are these ... analogues of...?' These what? What is the antecedent here? Conversions? Fine, let's jump back a sentence:

An ostensibly well-educated author who manoeuvers into his discourse 'conversions... from Jew to Christian, from bachelor to married man, from virgin to wife' must be assuming the reader will fail to notice these three items are not members of any useful set of 'conversions' that could possibly bear on the topic under discussion (generally, antisemitism). But still creeping backward: apparently The Merchant of Venice 'generates' 'meanings' through these various conversions. (Honestly? if I were not committed to reading through the series, an author telling me that a Shakespeare text 'generates meanings' would itself make me throw this book promptly away.) Regarding these meanings, some unknown it raises fundamental questions. Never mind what those questions are. They're fundamental, and they're raised.

And yes, two sentences in a row begin with un-anteceded pronouns. What in the world is it? Sigh.

Let's be charitable and assume the pronoun's number is off and the intended antecedent is those pesky 'cultural mechanisms' that open the first sentence, which 'emerge ... as a confrontation between a troubled Christianity and its own uncertain limitations, particularly those that impinge upon the proscription of certain kinds of economic activity.'

Dude, seriously: that is a perfectly absurd number of words when you could have just said 'usury'.

What does it mean to 'impinge upon a proscription'? I suppose that would mean un-proscribing or working to un-proscribe something. (But why would you say it like that? This is like indicating your intention to cheer up a sulking friend by telling them you are going to decapitate their ill mood and fuck its skull.) Is Drakakis trying to say that religion-inflected banking norms were in flux? And by 'a confrontation between a troubled Christianity and its own uncertain limitations' (tautology much?), is he talking about Christians uneasy about the changing norms of Christian society tending toward tolerating usury? If so, why can't he just fucking say that? This is not clever or esoteric; it's muck. It's so perfectly mucky, it's muck of a muckness.

Wait, everybody deserves a second chance, so let's give Drako his. (BTW, mal foi really is an appropriate surname here.) Out of that 'confrontation' between Christians and their evolving norms manifest 'The cultural mechanisms for which Lyotard seeks to offer an account...' So what are these mechanisms M. Lyotard is accounting for? Back a paragraph:

One converts the Jew in the middle ages, they resist by mental restriction. One expels them during the classical age, they return. One integrates them in the modern era, they persist in their difference. One exterminates them in the twentieth century.

Ah, I see. First of all, nice quote. Not problematic at all, with its genericizing 'one's. And it makes the overarching meaning perfectly clear: Exterminating Jews emerged out of Christian anxiety about high interest rates; and said extermination can only be contained by getting married on stage.

But let's keep moving backward:

Writing from the other side of the Holocaust and with an acute awareness of the postmodern condition...

Ah, mon pauvre, don't worry: science is coming up with new therapies all the time.

...Lyotard wrestles with the problem of how to represent that which, by definition, resists representation.

Here we go again: what, pray tell, is that? Whose definition? Never mind: it matters not in the slightest whose definition, since we have no idea what is being defined.

... For [Lyotard], western anti-Semitism...

Wait, this cannot be the antecedent for what 'by definition resists representation'. Can it? How appallingly, egregiously presumptuous is it to claim that antisemitism 'resists representation'? Or are we talking about 'the Jew(s)'? I don't know. I cannot know, because the insipid author will not tell us; in either case, the same criticism of appalling presumption applies. Quoting some French asshole on how we just cannot possibly know what a Jew is doesn't let your post-doctoral, post-structuralist, post-legibility Welsh-Scots asshole off the hook.

...is not to be confused with xenophobia, but with the desire to incorporate a radical otherness into its structures.

OMG, really?

1. So western antisemitism is to be confused with the desire to incorporate a radical otherness? Thank you, Dr. Drakakis, for telling me what to confuse. Can I get some guidance on conflation?
2. I have never read a more perfectly idiotic sentence than this one which equates antisemitism with 'the desire to incorporate a radical otherness'. Saying 'red is not red; it is green' does not fucking make red green; and the Arden Shakespeare has no business validating this toxic waste by publishing it.

... It is 'one of the means of the apparatus of its culture to bind and represent as much as possible—to protect against the originary terror, actively to forget it' (23).

Setting aside the demonstrable nonsense phrases 'apparatus of its culture' and 'originary terror', let me see if I understand: Antisemitism isn't antisemitism; it's a sincere attempt to... no, never mind. Not even going to try. This sentence really doesn't mean anything. It is patent gibberish.

Shame on Lyotard; double shame on Drakakis; treble shame on The Arden Shakespeare.

This challenge to an identity politics that perceives in the [sic] Merchant of Venice a mimetic representation of an actual Jew is an attempt to confront western Christian culture with its own discomforting limitations, in which the figure of 'the jew [sic]' functions as an excess that always escapes representation.'

Forgive me my gauche habit of reading concatenated words and attributing to them their normal meanings, but this asshole continues to whitesplain how antisemitism is not antisemitism; how, if you perceive antisemitism in Merchant, you are engaging in inappropriate identity politics because nobody could possibly know what a Jew is.

A second Daniel!

I need to go back just one more paragraph to another blockquote from Lyotard, because WTF:

'The jews' are the irremissible in the West's movement of remission and pardon. They are what cannot be domesticated in the obsession to dominate, in the compulsion to control domain, in the passion for empire, recurrent ever since Hellenistic Greece and Christian Rome. 'The jews', never at home where they are, cannot be integrated, converted, or expelled. They are also always away from home when they are at home, in their so-called own tradition, because it includes exodus as its beginning, excision, impropriety, and respect for the forgotten.

There is no irony here; no levity. Change my mind.

I cannot even tell if Lyotard is trying and failing to be remotely fucking human, but this is probably the most baldly offensive, condescending paragraph I have ever read. 'Domesticated'? 'So-called'? Use of Catholic language ('remission') to frame Judaism? It is also enormously turgid and clumsy; what does the last sentence even mean? And again, what is the it in 'because it includes'... that unparsable list of nonsense? Tradition? The Jewish tradition 'includes ... impropriety'? In what sense? Respect for the forgotten? Is there even a point to this list?

This is horseshit writing that a primary school teacher would rouge garishly and return with a failing mark. Which makes it easy to see why Drakakis likes this charlatan.

100 YEARS OF SHUT THE FUCK UP
I am not even a Jew; my objections above are based on basic human decency and interpersonal compassion. But I am a gay man. As such, I have never looked to Shakespeare to write downlow blowjobs into his plays. I've read or seen Merchant a half dozen times; I know what the text says; and I have a scant but reasonable understanding of 20th and 21st century queer-relevant criticism of Merchant and other Shakespeare work. Thus I am frankly aghast what John Drakakis has to say about the Antonio-Bassanio relationship:

...Bruce Smith [draws] attention to what [he] describes as 'The scenario of two male friends set at odds by a woman'..., although [he] eschew[s] as anachronistic any homosexual identity that might be ascribed to Antonio. ... Smith draws an important distinction between sexuality as a marker of identity and sexual activity within whose discursive purview homosexual acts came under the heading of 'the general depravity to which all mankind is subject'. Moreover, by disentangling a Renaissance concept from a modern politics of oppression, Smith dispenses with a familiar model that 'overvalues the importance of sex' as part of the process of identity formation...

I mean... I can't even. can you even? I'm seriously asking The Arden Shakespeare: Can you fucking even?

I thought the likes of Dr. David Reuben—who cannot or will not construe same-sex attraction as anything other than lust, usually of the pathologically uncontrollable variety—and David Halperin—who insists there can have been no such thing as homosexuality until somebody invented the word—had long been laughed out of the public arena; but here's the Arden Fucking Shakespeare giving this malignant mountebank a megaphone.

As to 'a modern politics of oppression': the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Seriously, fuck this fucking fuck. I just rent his book in twain. I'm done. One more time, though: SHAME ON THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE.