Jenna to Jess (Blog 12)

Jess,

I'm intrigued by your question set on Cavell, perhaps less so as an approach to photographs and more so as a way to look at props.

4) "The Avoidance of Love" - Henry Cavell

When "reading" a photograph, like Bernstein does in "Dances with Things", is there a Cavellian notion of separateness going on that we can interrogate further? Is there a "Desdemona" and a "Mrs. Siddons"? Is there this "monument" of the photograph, in opposition to (or conversation with) the reality of the subject? (inspired by Cavell's discussion of yokels, identifying oneself with onstage characters, and Othello - pg. 145)

In terms of your question about separateness and photographs, I think you have something. I could think of some photographs that prompt the desire to interfere in the way that the yokel might want to interfere to save Desdemona, but I’m not really sure whether or not that interference is the same type of interference that Cavell discusses. For me, I think it is just a question of presence/present. It is true that a photograph can be in our presence, but its subject is not. (Unless you happen to be Christopher Reeve’s character from the movie Somewhere in Time and form such a bond with an image that you create a method of mentally tricking yourself to travel back in time to the moment of its inception. Then you can be in the subject’s present.) In terms of a shared present, Cavell writes, “It is not that my time is different than theirs but that I have no present apart from theirs. The time in which that hint is laid, in which that knowledge is fixed, in which those fingers grip that throat is all the time I have. There is no time in which to stop it” (154). I suppose I have difficulty imagining that, when gazing upon a photograph, I have no present apart from that shown to me on paper, which prevents me from fully connecting Cavell’s separateness in the theatre to the separateness of photographs. But I do think there is an argument for connecting Cavell and Bernstein, I’d just need to use a different means of forming separateness. 

Now, here is why I’m interested in your question- it seems to me that Sofer’s observations about props suggest a method through which to interfere in the theatre, or rather, a way to use the theatre to interfere. Cavell and Sofer are not a perfect couple either. Props may be a way to interfere with a playwright’s meaning but, as Cavell notes, it is impossible to interfere in the moment of a character’s present. The prop does not exist that could prevent Desdemona’s strangling. However, the two are nice inverses of each other. Cavell’s piece suggests that through our frustrations of not being able to interfere during moments of tragedy in the theatre, we might purge that frustration in “real life” situations in which we do have the ability to interfere. Sofer’s suggests that theatrical objects, like props, could provide a way to interfere in the “real life” situations in which we are unable to interfere. 

Through the concept of ghosting, Sofer presents a means through which props insert themselves into conversations occurring outside of the playhouse. He writes, “One concrete example of such ghosting was the Elizabethan player’s use of actual church vestments and properties for satiric ends. In one familiar example, Marlowe’s Mephistopheles wears the robes of a Fransciscan friar (and thus confirms the audience’s presumed suspicion that all friars are devilish)” (64). Similarly, Sofer’s project is “to argue that Kyd’s appropriation of the handkerchief was not didactic, as has been argued by recent scholars of Reformation drama, but an opportunistic bid to recast the late medieval ‘contract of transformation’ embodied by the bloody cloth as an addictive ‘contract of sensation’” (64). As Sofer later suggests, this transgressive use of prop during the play’s perversion of Mass, “no doubt played into Kyd’s spectators’ fear and loathing of Catholic Spain” (85). In both cases, props have the ability to comment on problematic issues like the corruption of the Church or a fear of war with Spain that might be dangerous to discuss freely in public.Through ghosting, these topics are quite approachable. 

I wonder if we might consider the “real life” scenarios in which Cavell hopes that theatre might encourage us to engage as the ghosts of Desdemona’s death. Paired together, Cavell and Sofer present a lovely connection between world and theatre in that one may provide the catharsis that is denied in the other. Yet, such work can only be accomplished by recognizing one as the other’s ghost.