Saturday, June 5, 2021

Macbeth and the cascading analog



Sometimes when thinking about literature or art you have to coin a phrase to capture the idea you are thinking about.  I don't know, pardon my lacuna of knowledge, any phrase to describe the use of successive symbols to create relationships of ideas in a work.  Consequently I'm using the term "cascading analog" and opposing it to "horizontal analog".  

Analog is the use of one thing to signify another.  It is the connecting of ideas, saying "this equals this" leading to greater understanding.  So for instance, saying that Thomas Jackson is "like a stone wall" doesn't mean that he is low to the ground or that he has loam on him but that he is impenetrable like a stone wall.  This is an analog called simile.  When we say "She's as sweet as Tupelo honey, like honey from the bee" we are using simile.  

When on the other hand we say, "Ted is a mule" we don't mean that he has four legs and grey fur - rather that Ted is stubborn and ornery.  This is the analog called metaphor.  

Simile and Metaphor are the two major forms of analog in human language and thought.  Our whole process of thought, in fact, is based upon analog since we create mental images to comprehend anything & build a network of mental images when trying to make sense of something new.  

Sometimes when a poet or artist uses such analog they extend it over the length of a soliloquy, poem, or entire work.  So for instance Shakespeare compares his beloved to a summer's day in sonnet 18.  Similarly, George Herbert in "The Pulley" uses the metaphor of being pulled up and pulled down by our strengths and weaknesses.

Sometimes the analog is explicit (obvious) as in Robert Burns' "Red, Red Rose" or the Rolling Stones' "She's a Rainbow".  Sometimes the analog is implicit (hidden) as in Wilbur's "Death of a Toad" or Melville's "Moby Dick" (which if you've read it before you are 30 you probably have read it wrong!).  

"Horizontal analog", therefore, is when a series of related images appear over the course of a (longer) work.  This type of analogy operates similar to how a dream might unfold, presenting the same idea in various forms.  Plato, for instance, uses horizontal analog in his work “The Republic” presenting his idea of justice (as a ratio between the lesser and the greater) in one form after another.  Here the artist says that justice looks like this, but more than that it looks like this, and again it looks like more than that, it looks like this, and &c.

“Cascading analog” operates like a waterfall of images, not seemingly related to each other and happening in quick succession rather than drawn out over the course of a long work.  This series of quick flowing images normally occurs with a monumental event of some kind and indicates that the speaker is trying to deal with something new and overwhelming.  Monumental experiences in life tend to overwhelm us and inundate us with new and difficult to process impressions.  Like a combat veteran trying to explain to civilians what warfare is like, or like a survivor of cancer or someone who has experienced a natural disaster like a tsunami, they express the immensity of the event by trying to connect it to the experiences they already have and with which they are familiar.

Shakespeare uses horizontal analog throughout his play, “Macbeth”, connecting images of water, darkness, sleep, dismemberment throughout the play.  The real question of the play is not whether Macbeth is a murderer, or what a bad king looks like, or even what damnation looks like.  Rather it is the question of the loss of meaning or purpose in life.  How does one fight against purposelessness?  For Shakespeare this seems to have been a perennial question appearing in numerous different works.  Next to Hamlet, Macbeth is probably the bard’s greatest answer to this nominalist question.

During the course of the play Macbeth chooses to act in such a way to secure a permanent hold on happiness through power.  His choices, however, lead him deeper into blood, chaos, and madness.  By the end of play he has lost everything including even the “eternal jewel” of mankind (his soul) which he seems to have “Given to the common enemy of man” (Satan).  With his wife dead, his friends and allies fleeing from him (“fly false thanes and mingle with the English epicures”), and a massive army besieging his gates Macbeth seems to be at the end of his tether.  This might appear to be for most an obvious consequence of the choices leading to damnation & might evoke in some audience members a schadenfreude and self-congratulation that they, at least, are not damned.

In a masterful use of images, however, the poet suggests that such a response is shallow, unreflective, and not the point of Macbeth’s final trajectory.  The Bard uses cascading analog to symbolize the overwhelming finality of Macbeth’s ultimate destruction.  Faced in Act V, scene 5 with the reality of Lady Macbeth’s death and the loss of his entire life going into the sewer he utters the great “tomorrow” speech.

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.

At first read the comments on life seem a jumble of unrelated images.  But as a cascading analog they work to describe the immensity of what Macbeth is finally realizing in the play; the ultimate conclusion of the path he has chosen.  Each image relates to each successive image analogously.  First, the pace of the opening line hangs on the drudgery of the word “and” – yet again waking up to another tomorrow w/o hope, change, or forgiveness.  This series of tomorrows sets up a triune relationship between images (similar to the trinity of the weird sisters, the murderers, and the three major assassinations of the play).  Days creep by in a petty pace (notice the dental alliteration like spitting; p,p – d,d); time is likened to a record book (the Domesday book) of syllables already set down by fate (or “wyrd” in Anglo-Saxon).  Past history is then compared to a candle or lantern leading fools to their death (again the dental alliteration of d,d; “day to day” “dusty death”).  Humans are all fools, in this vision, if they follow this lantern, namely the pattern of human history w/o providential redemption.  Indeed, the examination of human history w/o the lens of salvation (“The fool in his heart has said, ‘there is no god’” says the Psalm 14) seems to indicate a bleak and violent emptiness to our existence. 

Macbeth’s utterance of “Out, out, brief candle!” then echoes (in a use of horizontal analog) Lady Macbeth’s earlier utterance of “out, damned spot! Out, I say!” in Act 5, scene 1.  The utterance also ushers in the final three analogs of the soliloquy wherein Macbeth compares life to

  1. A walking shadow
  2. A poor player (actor)
  3. A tale (told by an idiot)

This leads a reader to question “how is life like a walking shadow?”  “how is life like an actor?”, “how is life like a tale?”  Shakespeare uses metaphorical analog here, not simile suggesting that the intensity of Macbeth’s vision.  Life, for him, has become a mere phantom of what it should be; a ghost, the place where the sun is not.  Though it moves around and walks, nevertheless it is as ephemeral as the thaumatapoioi, the shadows, in Plato’s cave image.  Such an empty, dark, lifeless existence resembles a bad actor who struts and frets a brief time (an hour) on the stage of the world (“all the world’s a stage” – “As You Like It” Act II, scene 7).  The double meaning is that the poor player is also a bad sport; someone who in losing is petty, small-souled, pusillanimous in his paces.  If life doesn’t get its way it takes its ball and goes home.  Instead of the brilliant and joyful experience of life which we each hope for (honour, love, obedience, troops of friends) this vision of life in the septic tank of hell becomes an empty repetitive tale full of noise and anger but meaningless.  The vision expressed also implies that the maker of the world, God, makes only shadows, writes only bad plays, is an idiot in his creations.  The end of such a vision is itself, hell, nothingness, the Tartarus or cave of shadows.  It is an overwhelming vision of existence without life so immense that Macbeth cannot succinctly express it. 

His is a vision that has abandoned salvific realism for materialistic nominalism.  Whether he fights against this vision is the real crux of the play the outcome of which is ambiguous.  Does Macbeth realizing that he has been “tied to the stake and cannot fly” defiantly reject the deep damnation of his own taking off?  Even realizing that, “Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane, / And thou (MacDuff) opposed, being of no woman born,” Macbeth proclaims that, “I will try the last.”

Indeed, there is something valiant and almost salvific when Macbeth proclaims

Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'

Is “the last” which MacDuff defies the “last syllable of recorded time”?  is it the last obstacle to his own damnation?  Or is it the last thing opposing his attempt at total rule?  It is at least, or so it seems, a return to martial virtue where Macbeth so excelled at the beginning of the play.  Though his bitter statement that he 

will not yield,
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet,
And to be baited with the rabble's curse

Might be the ignoble and damning utterance of Satan’s “non serviam” it might also prove his salvation.  He refuses to submit to his doppelganger and adversary, MacDuff, and in that at least he is not damned.  His rejuvenated martial prowess offers him some sense of meaning or purpose to life.

Perhaps the play is not suggesting that Macbeth represents an obvious or explicit metaphor for what damnation looks like.  Instead, perhaps the play is offering a vision of one man dealing with the consequences of his own horrible choices, loss of manhood and meaning in life, and being “cow'd (of his) better part of man” – an experience so overwhelming that it defies being captured in words.  Against such a tsunami of horrors, whether they be of our own making or others, perhaps the only noble response is defiant endurance and opposition and in that sense perhaps Macbeth finds salvation after all.


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