THE AESTHETICS OF MUTILATION I ‘TITUS ANDRONICUS’ ALBERT H. TRICOMI When T. S. Eliot so flamboyantly denounced Titus Andronicus as ‘one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written’, he naturally invited rebuttal.’ But while an apology for Titus can certainly be erected, the fact is that the imputed stupidities of the tragedy attract far more interest than any of its, mediocre achievements. Indeed, if we would only persist in the study of those very ‘stupidi- ties” that many critics would rather forget, we would discover that the ways in which the figurative language imitates the literal events of plot makes The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus a significant dramatic experiment. In the play's spectacularly self-conscious images that keep pointing at the inventive horrors in the plot- ting, in its wittily-obsessive allusions to dis- membered hands and heads, and in the prophetic literalness of its metaphors, Titus reveals its peculiar literary importance. The peculiar language of Titus Andronicus is particularly apparent in the literalness of its central metaphors. In a play preeminently concerned with the mutilation of the human body, Titus makes nearly sixty references, figurative as well as literal, to the word ‘hands" and eighteen more to the word ‘head’, or to one of its derivative forms.* Far from being divorced from the action as many critics claim,3 the figurative language points con- tinually toward the lurid events that govern the tragedy. The figurative language, in fact, imitates the gruesome circumstances of the plot, thus revealing that Shakespeare sub- 1 ordinates everything in Titus, including metaphor, to that single task of conveying, forcefully the Senecan and Ovidian horrors that he has committed himself to portraying. Such a relationship between language and event is really quite strange. Ordinarily meta- ¥ Selected Essays: 1917-1932 (London, 1932), P- 82, Effective rebuttal has occurred with relative in- frequency. See Hereward T. Price, “The Author of Titus Andronicus’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Xun (1943), 55-815 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1962), pp. 158-65; Alan Sommers, ‘Wilderness of Tigers”: Structure and Symbolism in Tius Andronicus’, Essays in Criticism, x (1960), 275-895, and A. C.'Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, 1967), pp. 63-89. For a superb theory con- cerning the language of Titus Andronicus, see Eugene Waith, ‘The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Survey 10 (Cambridge, 1957)s PP-39-49- 3 Laura Jepsen, ‘A Footnote on “Hands” is Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus’, Florida State Univ. Swudies, xx (1955), 7-10; Oxford Shakespeare Concordance: Titus Andronicus (Oxford, 1972), PP. 95-6) 99. 2 The works of Muriel Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, Eng. 1935), Pp. 989, and Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (New York, 1952), pp. 104-10; J. Dover Wilson (ed.), Tieus’ Andronicus (Cambridge, Eng., 1948), pp. ix-xii; and Wolfgang Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (New York, 1951» pp. 22-7, have provided deservedly influential insights into the discontinuity between image and occasion in Titus Andronicus, but the sense in which the figurative language embodies the events in Titus hhas never been analyzed. An explanation of the decorous tone of the poetry in Titus can, however, be found in Waith's essay, ‘Metamorphosis of Violence’.SHAKESPEARE SURVEY phor is endowed with the capacity of extending almost infinitely the imaginative compass of a play. Through its embedded metaphors especi- ally, a play usually translates its immediate events in images that reach far beyond the poor limitations of the stage. In Titus Andronicus, however, metaphor, for the most part, draws its images directly from the narrower events of plot. It becomes literalized. This is a very daring and even dangerous enterprise to undertake, Deliberately relinquishing its natural prerogatives, metaphor strives instead to unite language and action in an endeavour to render the events of the tragedy more real and painful. When Marcus offers Titus the throne, for example, he employs a peculiar metaphor, saying, ‘And help to set a head on headless Rome’ (1, i, 186). Since Titus is being offered the throne of Imperial Rome, Marcus's state~ ment seems to be a happy one. As such, the metaphor appears to be just that, an em- bellished phrase, a polished, if affected, mode of speech. But, as it happens, this mere meta- phor, with all its ominous overtones, is later raised to factual reality when Saturninus, ironically made that ‘head’ of Rome through Titus’s support, beheads two of Titus’s sons. In a more specific sense as well, the figures employed direct our perceptions toward isolated parts of the human body. When in the first act Lavinia asks her father to bless her, she uses the rather precise phrase, ‘with thy victorious hand’ (1, i, 163), and Bassianus does likewise when he explains how Titus, ‘With his own hand’ slew his youngest son (t, i, 418). In both instances the figurative phrasing points ahead to the mutilations of future events, to the shearing off of Lavinia’s hands, and then, to Titus’s willing sacrifice of his own hand when bargaining for the lives of two of his sons. But while the keen critic may discover a rather brutal principle of retribution in Titus’s loss of a hand for having killed ~ with his own 2 hand ~ one of his sons, I am more concerned here with the oddly alluring relationship between language and event. Constantly pointing toward and underlining, the events that we witness upon the stage, metaphor in this tragedy strains to keep the excruciating images of mutilation ever before our imagina- tions even when the visual spectacle is no Ionger before us. The words ‘hand’ and ‘head” appear copiously as figures of speech whose effect is to saturate every aspect of the play with remembered or foreshadowed horror. Follow- ing the scene of Lavinia’s mutilation, Marcus presents his niece to Titus whose first words to her, Speak, Lavinia, what accursed hand ‘Hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight? (a5, 66-7) recreates the horrible event in the imagination. Of course, the literate response is so artificial as to invite derision, and, no doubt, the whole idea of asking the dumb to speak is a question- able way of inviting pathos. But the pun on hands, which is equally self-conscious and full of artifice, is not without its redeeming features. Titus’s paronomasia rests on two notably dissimilar kinds of usage. When he refers to ‘the accursed hand’, he employs a simple form of synecdoche, but when he speaks of Lavinia’s handlessness, he alludes to nothing but the visual reality before him. Furthermore, the paronomasia draws our attention to the image of the rapist using his hand in the act of shearing off Lavinia's own, effectively underlining, Hamlet-like, the ‘un- Kindness’ and unnaturalness of the act. So while we may argue that Titus’s self-conscious word-play largely replaces genuine personal response, we must acknowledge that the bitter contrast between the mere metaphor and the experienced reality of Lavinia's handlessness is. powerfully conceived. This remark of Titus’s illustrates one of theAESTHETICS OF MUTILATION IN ‘TITUS ANDRONICUS’ play’s basic concerns — exploring the gulf be- tween metaphoric descriptions of events and the irrefutable realities they purport to com- municate. Shakespeare’s interest in these matters, so abstract in its way, appears grounded, however, in the dramatist’s involve- ment in the relative merits of words as con- trasted with dramatic events. So concerned is the play with the deceptive powers of poetic description that it offers several instructive lessons contrasting the vacuous rhetoric of rape and the palpable reality of Lavinia’s ravishment, hands lopped off, mouth bleeding. As the play opens, Saturninus, who has just announced his betrothal to Lavinia, finds that Bassianus has already married her and berates him in an exaggerated rhetorical outburst, saying, ‘Thou and thy faction shall regret this rape’ (I, i, 404). Bassianus, sensitive to the proper signification of words, rejoins hotly, Rape call you it, my lord, to seize my own, My true-betrothed love. ..? (1, i, 405-6) In this way the play continually investigates the chasm between the spoken word and the actual fact, an investigation, incidentally, whose meaning is fully experienced only when Lavinia appears before us raped and bleeding in fact. Similarly, this ironic denigration of metaphor occurs again when Lucius, hearing the villainous Aaron explain how, They cut thy sister’s tongue and ravish’d her, And cut her hands and trimm'd her as thou sawest. (yn 93) seizes on the disgustingly prettified figure and retorts, ‘O detestable villain! call'st thou that trimming?” (v, i, 93). Far from being used in- advertently then, the language self-consciously focuses upon itself so as to demonstrate the mannet in which figurative speech can diminish and even transform the actual horror of events. But since the purpose of the tragedy is not to dilute but to highlight the nightmare that befalls the Andronici, the play deliberately 3 “exposes” the euphemisms of metaphor by measuring their falseness against the irrefutable realities of dramatized events. On these occasions, the play turns its back on metaphor, rejecting it as a device that tends to dissipate the unremitting terrors of the tragedy. Only in the literalization of its metaphors, it appears, does the tragedy seem to be at ease with itself. I Such a self-consciously didactic use of meta phor is really quite distinctive in Elizabethan drama, to say nothing of Elizabethan tragedy, but far more strange is the deliberate con- striction of the figurative language as it binds itself to the gory plot. So firmly does the figurative language yoke itself to the action of Titus that mere thetorical flourishes tend, prophetically, to realize themselves in actual events. In the scene where Titus first bears witness to his daughter's. mutilation, for example, he expresses his grief, not un- expectedly, in hyperbolic outburst, My grief was at the height before thou cam’st, Give me a sword, Ill chop off my hands too, For they have fought for Rome, and all in vain (a1 i, 70-3) To be sure, the unusual nature of the event goes far to justify the strained pitch of the thetoric, but the speech fully realizes its tragic possibilities only in subsequent events, For while Titus begins by speaking an exaggerated language of sorrow, Shakespeare forces his hero to live up to the terrible potential of his hyperbolic outburst. Shylock-like, the drama- tist takes Titus’s speech out of the realm of mere rant and exacts of him the pound of flesh he promises. That is to say, the exaggera- tion of Titus’s rhetorical figure is, through an act of the dramatist’s imagination, realized in terms of a hyperbole of plot, which acts as if it were a figure of speech brought to monstrous