Having being roped into doing a little extra teaching on Shakespeare, I found myself reading Terry Eagleton’s sparky little tract on the subject, short but good value at about 10 concepts per cubit of prose. Particularly interesting were his remarks on Nothing, from which ensued the following reflections.
There are, of course, different kinds of nothing and different ways of seeing nothing. To be shown round a new unfurnished flat involves, in a sense, seeing nothing – seeing a place with nothing in it. But if you were to return home one evening, expecting to see your computer in its familiar place on your desk, and it isn’t there, you actively see – with dizzy anxiety - an absence, a vacancy whose volume is coextensive with that of the computer. Here, Nothing is the ‘absence of’ something - it’s a disturbing refusal of being where you expect something, where your gaze instead meets with a lack, a gap in reality.
The obvious precedent of this kind of Nothing, from a psychoanalytic perspective, is of course the male child’s surprise and anxiety at seeing the female’s ‘missing’ genitals. Where he expects to see a thing, he instead encounters an absence. This produces, among other responses, castrating anxiety, the sudden spectre of a subtraction, actual and symbolic. This idea is conveniently underwritten in Elizabethan English, where ‘thing’ and ‘nothing’ are slang for the male and female genitals respectively. Or at least, it is thought that ‘Nothing’ was slang for the female genitals, as when Hamlet replies to Ophelia’s ‘nothing’ with ‘that’s a fair thought to lie between a maid’s legs’. As Eagleton jokily points out, though, when Lear asks Cordelia “what can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters” we aren’t to imagine that she is replying ‘Female genitals, my lord’. Nevertheless, Cordelia’s reply perfectly fits the pattern described above. It’s a silence where Lear expects speech, a castrating absence. It ‘castrates’ his ego, for the solicitation of fawning and fulsome speech from his daughters is little more than an egotistical pageant, a flattering glass, cracked by Cordelia’s truncated response.
In Othello, the absent handkerchief is a ‘nothing’ in this sense. We have the anxiety of the eyes meeting with a gap, a blank in place of something. This nothing acts a vacuum into which Othello’s fantasies and ‘blown surmises’ are sucked. It is the task of an Iago to introduce silences, absences, tears in the fabric of the word-woven world. And it is this which then ‘motivates’ Othello’s desire – which is the desire to fill-in and re-possess these absences, these Nothings - just as the uncertainties or ambiguities of a text motivate us to go on reading – to go on and possess it, which is to say to resolve its ambiguities.
Eagleton relates all this stuff to a more basic anxiety about Nothing. Things themselves are mute, they do not have signs inscribed in their surface, but ask to be ‘completed’ by language. This muteness is unsettling, somehow pregnant with infinite meaning and utterly devoid of any at all. Reality only ‘settles down’ when covered with the radiant net of words. Words lend reality the illusion of stability, or: Language is a way of ‘muffling’ the anxiety-producing silence of the world. Thus it is the absence of words that open up ‘anxiety’, like the absence of the computer on the desk or the absence of the ‘thing’ in the imagination of the Freudian child.