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Miscellaneous Details
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Tag: sci-fi
Creative reality
I enjoyed these recent interviews with a couple of creatives. It's good to see some more work from Simon Stålenhag is on its way.
Simon Stålenhag puts a darker twist on his nostalgic sci-fi worlds – The Verge
There's a weird coincidence in that it features police brutality and face masks — it has nothing to do with COVID or the protests in the US. I did it before they broke out. And that made me feel like I was afraid people might see this as a cheap exploitation of real-world events.
There are a lot of faceless enforcers of state violence. That's a theme in The Labyrinth. While doing this, those images started pouring in from the protests in the US. When I started thinking about it, it was from protests in Spain in 2016 or 2017, I remember thinking it's so weird that a democracy can have these thugs on the payroll to do these things. […]
It felt really weird when I really saw stuff in the news… reality is worse than your imagination.
Reality may be worse than your imagination for that artist, but it's better for this one.
A conversation with animator and director Anna Mantzaris explores her penchant for nuanced emotion and finding humor in the mundane – Colossal
Sometimes reality is better than your imagination. Sometimes when I try to make things up, I cannot make them as funny as a really good observation of something that happens. You're like, "This is too good to be true. This is so weird."
I thought I had already shared a link here to Anna's witty and poignant Enough animation, but I can't find it now, so I guess I didn't. So here it is.
Staff Pick Premiere: Enough is enough – Vimeo Blog
Mantzaris' work lives somewhere between tragedy and comedy – a duality beautifully realized in her visual aesthetic. Her characters are stuck in a modern world defined by a sense of loneliness and isolation, where communication is either muffled or noisy, but never pleasant. … "I knew I wanted the characters to be quite awkward, imperfect but yet sympathetic," explains Mantzaris. "I wanted them to have a soft feeling to contrast the not so soft actions."
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 12 December, 2020 12 December, 2020 Categories Art & DesignTags animation, Anna Mantzaris, art, books, sci-fi, Simon StalenhagLeave a comment on Creative reality
Science fiction, present tense
23 of the best sci-fi books everyone should read – Wired UK
It is a pro-science novel that at its heart shows Dr Frankenstein as the callous fiend of the story, who created a being and was not willing to accept responsibility for his actions. In an age where the space between technical life and death is narrower than ever, and scientists are playing with the makeup of what makes us humans, Frankenstein can still teach an important lesson: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 22 July, 2020 5 August, 2020 Format LinkCategories Media & SocietyTags books, sci-fi3 Comments on Science fiction, present tense
Trailer From The Loop
Two years after I first saw his work, it's finally hitting our screens.
'Tales From the Loop', a wondrous Amazon Prime series based upon the artwork of Simon Stålenhag – Laughing Squid
The series takes its title from a pair of books written by Stålenhag about "paintings from a childhood that never was and a future that could have been." The series focuses on a machine that unlocks such a future for those who enter.
Tales From the Loop enlivens the gravity-defying dystopia of Simon Stålenhag's illustrations – Colossal
Launching April 3, the television series is based on the understanding that "not everything in life makes sense" as it chronicles the lives of those residing in the Loop, a machine built to uncover answers to the world's mysteries. It features a gravity-defying universe that sees floating objects, snow ascending from a pile on the floor, and pieces of a house ripped upward. Retro robots even foster relationships with the families and children immersed in the explorative environment.
Next month, then, for Amazon Prime customers. Let's hope it'll spill out wider for those of us who aren't primers. Meanwhile, here's an interview with the man behind those melancholic images.
Simon Stålenhag: meet the artist behind Amazon Prime's mysterious new TV show – Digital Arts
Tales from the Loop is based on the books and artworks of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, so to coincide we've looked backed to when we interviewed him about how he conceives and paints his sci-fi worlds – and what the hell is really going on.
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 7 March, 2020 6 March, 2020 Categories Art & DesignTags art, books, sci-fi, Simon Stalenhag, television2 Comments on Trailer From The Loop
Happy Robot Day!
They come in all shapes and sizes, but they're all 99 years old today, kind of.
Today in History 1921: The word 'Robot' enters the English language – Boing Boing
On January 25, 1921 the Czech play Rossum's Universal Robots premiered, entering the word into the Science Fiction vocabulary.
The Czech play that gave us the word 'Robot' – The MIT Press Reader
Thus, "R.U.R.," which gave birth to the robot, was a critique of mechanization and the ways it can dehumanize people. The word itself derives from the Czech word "robota," or forced labor, as done by serfs. Its Slavic linguistic root, "rab," means "slave." The original word for robots more accurately defines androids, then, in that they were neither metallic nor mechanical.
The contrast between robots as mechanical slaves and potentially rebellious destroyers of their human makers echoes Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and helps set the tone for later Western characterizations of robots as slaves straining against their lot, ready to burst out of control. The duality echoes throughout the twentieth century: Terminator, HAL 9000, Blade Runner's replicants.
Machine Morality and Human Responsibility – The New Atlantis
This year [2011] marks the ninetieth anniversary of the first performance of the play from which we get the term "robot." The Czech playwright Karel Čapek's R.U.R. premiered in Prague on January 25, 1921. Physically, Čapek's robots were not the kind of things to which we now apply the term: they were biological rather than mechanical, and humanlike in appearance. But their behavior should be familiar from its echoes in later science fiction — for Čapek's robots ultimately bring about the destruction of the human race.
Before R.U.R., artificially created anthropoids, like Frankenstein's monster or modern versions of the Jewish legend of the golem, might have acted destructively on a small scale; but Čapek seems to have been the first to see robots as an extension of the Industrial Revolution, and hence to grant them a reach capable of global transformation. Though his robots are closer to what we now might call androids, only a pedant would refuse Čapek honors as the father of the robot apocalypse.
I hope someone's planning a big celebration next year.
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 25 January, 2020 Categories Media & SocietyTags language, robots, sci-fi9 Comments on Happy Robot Day!
Boy meets girl meets robot
So what to read next, after Dune? More sci-fi? Ian McEwan's "retrofuturist family drama" seems to be getting some attention.
Man, woman, and robot in Ian McEwan's new novel
It's London, 1982. The Beatles have reunited (to mixed reviews), Margaret Thatcher has just lost the Falkland Islands to Argentina, and Sir Alan Turing, now seventy, is the presiding spirit of a preemie Information Age. People have already soured on the latest innovations, among them "speaking fridges with a sense of smell" and driverless cars that cause multinational gridlock. "The future kept arriving," Charlie ruminates. "Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before."
Buyer's remorse is a recurring theme in Ian McEwan's witty and humane new novel, "Machines Like Me" (Nan A. Talese), a retrofuturist family drama that doubles as a cautionary fable about artificial intelligence, consent, and justice. Though steeped in computer science, from the P-versus-NP problem to DNA-inspired neural networks, the book is not meant to be a feat of hard-sci-fi imagineering; McEwan's aim is to probe the moral consequences of what philosophers call "the problem of other minds."
In "Machines Like Me", Ian McEwan asks an age-old question
Amid all the action, there are sober passages of philosophical discussion between Charlie and Adam. But in parts the novel is funny, too. To Charlie's disgust, Adam's encyclopedic recall of Shakespeare makes him seem the better catch to Miranda's father, a writer, who assumes Charlie is the robot, because he isn't interested in books.
Late in the story it emerges that other androids around the world are committing suicide in horror at the behaviour of their flesh-and-blood masters. Adam wonders about the "mystery of the self" and his fear that he is "subject to a form of Cartesian error". Strip away the counterfactual wrapping and "Machines Like Me" is ultimately about the age-old question of what makes people human. The reader is left baffled and beguiled.
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan review – intelligent mischief
This is the mode of exposition in which he [Kipling] seems to address the reader from a position of shared knowledge, sketching out an unfamiliar reality through hints and allusions, but never explaining it too completely. This inside-out style is the default mode of modern SF. It is economical and of special usefulness to makers of strange worlds, plunging a reader into a new reality and leaving them space to feel like a participant in its creation. It's the opposite technique to that of McEwan's narrator, who explicitly sets out his world, overexplains the historical context and never turns down a chance to offer an essayistic digression.
To my taste, this is a flat-footed way of doing sci-fi.
'It drives writers mad': why are authors still sniffy about sci-fi?
Machines Like Me is not, however, science fiction, at least according to its author. "There could be an opening of a mental space for novelists to explore this future," McEwan said in a recent interview, "not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas." There is, as many readers noticed, a whiff of genre snobbery here, with McEwan drawing an impermeable boundary between literary fiction and science fiction, and placing himself firmly on the respectable side of the line.
But perhaps we've had enough about robots and AI recently.
Never mind killer robots—here are six real AI dangers to watch out for in 2019
The latest AI methods excel at perceptual tasks such as classifying images and transcribing speech, but the hype and excitement over these skills have disguised how far we really are from building machines as clever as we are. Six controversies from 2018 stand out as warnings that even the smartest AI algorithms can misbehave, or that carelessly applying them can have dire consequences.
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 6 May, 2019 10 February, 2020 Categories Media & SocietyTags AI, book reviews, books, Ian McEwan, robots, sci-fiLeave a comment on Boy meets girl meets robot
Dune. Done.
So. They're remaking Dune.
7 things we know so far about the Dune remake (& 3 things fans are hoping for)
Dune has quickly become one of the most anticipated upcoming movies. With plenty of talent and a beloved source material already behind it, there were plenty of fans looking forward to this big screen adaptation. However, with big names being announced to the cast seeming every day, excitement for the film has skyrocketed.
I thought now would be a good time to read the book, to see what all the fuss is about. All I knew of it was from the David Lynch film. It didn't make much of an impression, to be honest.
Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world
Every fantasy reflects the place and time that produced it. If The Lord of the Rings is about the rise of fascism and the trauma of the second world war, and Game of Thrones, with its cynical realpolitik and cast of precarious, entrepreneurial characters is a fairytale of neoliberalism, then Dune is the paradigmatic fantasy of the Age of Aquarius. Its concerns – environmental stress, human potential, altered states of consciousness and the developing countries' revolution against imperialism – are blended together into an era-defining vision of personal and cosmic transformation.
The book is over 50 years old. You can buy this collector's edition from the Folio Society for £75, or the e-book together with its five sequels on Amazon for £1.99. I chose the latter.
Manny Rayner's review of Dune
So that was the Dune we know and love, but the man who rewrote it now would get a rather different reception. Oh my God! These Fremen, who obviously speak Arabic, live on a desert planet which supplies the Universe with melange, a commodity essential to the Galactic economy, and in particular to transport. Not a very subtle way to say "oil"! They are tough, uncompromising fighters, who are quite happy to use suicide bombing as a tactic. They're led by a charismatic former rich kid (OK, we get who you mean), who inspires them to rise up against the corrupt, degenerate… um, does he mean Westerners?
Dune has made a huge impact on many people, one that it failed to make on me, but then I watched this. My goodness, imagine if this had been made instead.
Jodorowsky's Dune | Official Trailer HD (2014)
I knew Jodorowsky from watching the incredible, hypnotic Santa Sangre many years ago, and knew he had wanted to do something with Dune, but hadn't really appreciated the full extent of his surrealist and psychedelic project until I watched that documentary. Goodness me.
And what an incredible legacy that film-that-never-was has left us. Dan O'Bannon and HR Giger's work on Alien, for example. But also Dan O'Bannon's collaboration with Moebius.
"The Long Tomorrow": Discover Mœbius' hard-boiled detective comic that inspired Blade Runner
Alejandro Jodorowsky may never have made his film adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, but plenty came out of the attempt — including, one might well argue, Blade Runner. Making that still hugely influential adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ridley Scott and his collaborators looked to a few key visual sources, one of them a two-part short story in comic form called "The Long Tomorrow."
The Long Tomorrow, by Moebius
As we were still in the stage of preparations and concepts, there was almost nothing to do and he was bored stiff. To kill time, he drew. Dan is best known as a script writer, but is an excellent cartoonist. If he had wished, he could have been a professional graphic artist. One day, he showed me what he was drawing. It was the story board of 'The Long Tomorrow'. A classic police story, but situated in the future. I was enthusiastic. When Europeans try this kind of parody, it is never entirely satisfactory, the French are too French, the Italians are too Italian … so, under my nose was a pastiche that was more original than the originals.
And from The Long Tomorrow to Blade Runner and back to Dune, with the news that Denis Villeneuve, the director of the Blade Runner remake, will direct this new Dune remake.
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 5 May, 2019 10 February, 2020 Categories Media & SocietyTags Alejandro Jodorowsky, book reviews, books, movies, sci-fiLeave a comment on Dune. Done.
Simon Stålenhag's sci-fi to hit our screens
I was happy to read that the work of sci-fi illustrator Simon Stålenhag may be on our screens, in the not-too-distant future.
Simon Stålenhag's dystopian art to come to life in a new Amazon sci-fi TV series
Its eight-episode run will tell the tale of the town of people who live above 'The Loop', a machine built to unlock and explore the mysteries of the universe. A cast hasn't been announced, but we do know Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Know) will be directing the pilot, while Legion's Nathaniel Halpern and Planet of the Apes sequels director Matt Reeves are on board as executive producers.
They're talking about his book Takes From The Loop, but my money's on his other work, The Electric State, being the bigger winner. As I mentioned before, this one may also make it to the big screen, if the Amazon page for its Kindle edition is to be believed.
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 22 July, 2018 6 March, 2020 Categories Art & DesignTags art, movies, sci-fi, Simon Stalenhag, television
Dystopian Swedish sci-fi
Digital Arts has some images of wonderfully atmospheric paintings from Simon Stålenhag, an artist and designer from Sweden.
Simon Stålenhag's incredible paintings show an alien invasion that has gone wrong
The artist's near-photorealistic style provides a wonderful contrast to its otherworldly subjects.
They're from his new book, The Electric State, due out this September. This is the description from Amazon of the hardcover version.
The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
A teen girl and her robot embark on a cross-country mission in this illustrated science fiction story, perfect for fans of Ready Player One and Black Mirror.
In late 1997, a runaway teenager and her small yellow toy robot travel west through a strange American landscape where the ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside, along with the discarded trash of a high-tech consumerist society addicted to a virtual-reality system. As they approach the edge of the continent, the world outside the car window seems to unravel at an ever faster pace, as if somewhere beyond the horizon, the hollow core of civilization has finally caved in.
And this is the description from the Kindle edition's page.
The Electric State eBook by Simon Stålenhag
Stranger Things meets On the Road in this hypnotic, lavishly illustrated novel.
Set in a post-apocalyptic 1997, The Electric State is the story of Michelle who, accompanied by her toy robot Skip, sets out across the western United States in a stolen car to find her missing brother. Told in achingly melancholy, spare prose and featuring almost a hundred gorgeous, full-colour illustrations, The Electric State is a novel like no other.
Rights in The Electric State have already sold in thirteen territories and Deadline reports that the film rights were snapped up by the Russo Brothers' production company (Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War) with Andy Muschietti (Mama, It) attached to direct.
There are many more images from his various projects on his website.
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 10 April, 2018 6 March, 2020 Categories Art & DesignTags art, books, movies, sci-fi, Simon Stalenhag, via Digital Arts
Oops! I did it again
Keith Haring should be 60
Peter and the Typographic Wolf
Introducing children to data visualisation
Oh Facebook, what have you done now?
Mixed messages
Looking through Cindy Sherman's Rear Window
The writing in the walls
Technology can't stand still (unfortunately)
Miscellaneous Details Create a website or blog at WordPress.com


Malala Yousafzai was an advocate for education from a young age. At age 11 she gave a speech entitled, "How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?" In the few years following that speech, she was targeted by the Taliban for speaking out for girls' education. She believes so deeply in the importance of education that even after a Taliban attack that almost led to her death and threats that are still aimed towards her today, she continues to be a tireless advocate for the 66 million girls worldwide who are deprived of education.
This weekend, I had the privilege of hearing Malala speak about education and the global refugee response at DePauw University. Malala spoke with courage, conviction and great compassion. One thing that struck me was her belief in the necessity of investing in education rather than war. She believes that the most effective things that can fight terrorism are education and dialogue. When children are provided with secure places to grow and learn, she believes this helps prevent them from turning to extremism. She does not support governments pouring billions of dollars towards war funding when they could instead pour resources towards preventative measures such as education for vulnerable children.
On her Malala Fund website, she wrote that if the whole world stopped spending money on the military for just eight days, there would be $39 billion dollars. That money could provide 12 years of free, quality education to every child on the planet. To put this in perspective, in 2015, military expenditures accounted for about 54 percent of the U.S. discretionary spending, according to The National Priorities Project. In contrast, education accounted for only six percent of the budget.
She challenges world leaders who believe that it is sufficient for children in developing countries to only become literate and not further their education, while their own children are studying algebra, mathematics, science and physics.
Malala is also deeply concerned about the refugee crisis and committed to their opportunities for education. There is an enormous need for the education of about half a million refugees in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon who have been displaced since childhood, and people like Malala are stepping up to meet that need. She urges us to focus on the humanity of children in crisis and to take action, responding not only to their most basic needs, but their needs as whole people. On her 18th birthday, she opened a school to educate 200 Syrian refugee girls in Lebanon.
Malala is a visionary and a peacemaker, and she is not content to simply accept the inequalities and injustices in the world. When she was asked this weekend what one of her biggest achievements was, she responded by saying that she will not see her work as a true achievement until she sees all children receiving an education.
We have much to learn from leaders such as Malala and her faithful and zealous response to desperate needs in the world. What would it look like for more young people to boldly act on their convictions? What would the world look like if we turned to conversation instead of conflict, and to books instead of bullets?


text:
BN will not contest Chempaka polls, says Najib
Md Izwan
February 26, 2015 06:49 am +08
KUALA LUMPUR (Feb 26): Ruling coalition Barisan Nasional will not contest the Chempaka by-election, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said today at the Umno supreme council meeting in Kuala Lumpur.
Najib, who is Umno president and BN chairman, said the coalition would instead focus on flood relief efforts in Kelantan, the state which houses the Chempaka seat.
The seat fell vacant after the death of its incumbent Datuk Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat of prostate cancer on February 12.
Najib said the decision was made after meeting Kelantan Menteri Besar Datuk Ahmad Yakob yesterday. Kelantan is still rebuilding areas devastated by floods in December, the worst that the peninsula has experienced in decades.
"The Umno supreme council has decided not to contest in the by-election," Najib told reporters yesterday after the meeting at the party's headquarters in the Putra World Trade Centre.
Besides flood-relief efforts, he said Umno also wanted to preserve Muslim unity in Kelantan, where the majority are Muslims and the state government is led by PAS, an Islamist party with the opposition.
"We feel that we need to work towards unity of Muslims even though we have different political persuasions, we need to prioritise the unity of believers," he said.
He said BN's decision not to contest the Chempaka by-election should not be disputed, as it had also chosen not to contest in previous by-elections, such as Bukit Gelugor.
Najib added that the no-contest decision was well received by the Umno grassroots.
Following Nik Aziz's death, a few Umno leaders such as Kelantan Umno chief Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamed and Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin said it was not necessary for BN to contest the by-election.
Among the reasons cited was the need for the federal government to focus on helping the PAS state government rebuild Kelantan after the floods.
But there are also views that a no-contest move would fuel further speculation that Umno and PAS, arch-rivals who compete for the Muslim Malay vote, were eager to form a unity government in Kelantan.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Teorem o dovoljnim uvjetima za konvergenciju niza jedan je od temeljnih teorema iz matematičke analize. Koristi se u dokazivanju svojstava nizova, ali i redova.

Njegov iskaz glasi:

 Svaki ograničen i monoton niz  realnih brojeva je konvergentan.

Dokaz
Pretpostavimo, bez smanjenja općenitosti, da je niz  rastući. Kako je on po pretpostavci i ograničen, skup  je odozgo ograničen pa po aksiomu potpunosti ima supremum u skupu , odnosno postoji
. Po definiciji supremuma vrijedi  za svaki  te za svaki  postoji  (za neki ) takav da je . Kako niz  raste, za  dobivamo
, odnosno . Odavde zaključujemo da je niz  konvergentan i . Dokaz se, dakle, provodi analogno za padajući niz.

Izvori

Matematika

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
/*
Function Description

Complete the bonAppetit function in the editor below. It should print Bon Appetit if the bill is fairly split. Otherwise, it should print the integer amount of money that Brian owes Anna.

bonAppetit has the following parameter(s):

bill: an array of integers representing the cost of each item ordered
k: an integer representing the zero-based index of the item Anna doesn't eat
b: the amount of money that Anna contributed to the bill
*/

package main

import (
  "log"
)

func main() {
  bonAppetit([]int32{2,4,6}, 2, 3)
  bonAppetit([]int32{2,4,6}, 2, 6)
}

// Complete the bonAppetit function below.
func bonAppetit(bill []int32, k int32, b int32) {
  var total int32
  total = 0

  for key, val := range bill {
    if int32(key) != k {
      total += val
    }
  }

  var sharedHalf int32
  sharedHalf = total/2
  if sharedHalf == b {
    log.Printf("Bon Appetit")
    return
  }

  log.Printf("%d", (b-sharedHalf))
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Honorary Advisors
Dan Sarofian-Butin
University Strategy Advisor
Dan Sarofian-Butin, PhD, is a Full Professor in, and was Founding Dean of, the School of Education & Social Policy at Merrimack College. Dr. Sarofian-Butin has a B.S. in Management Science from MIT, an M.A. in Liberal Education from St. John's College, and a Ph.D. in Social Foundations of Education from the University of Virginia.
Dr. Sarofian-Butin has been named as one of the top 200 "Public Presence" Education Scholars five years in a row and blogs at the Huffington Post and InsideHigherEd. Dr. Sarofian-Butin has consulted for, among others, the US Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U), been a visiting scientist at MIT's Office of Digital Learning, and has been the keynote speaker at institutions such as Duke University, the University of Toronto, and the Ohio State University.
Dr. Sarofian-Butin is the author and editor of almost one hundred academic publications, including eight books, several of which have won prestigious awards and been translated into three languages. He is the editor of Palgrave's series Community Engagement in Higher Education, an Associate Editor of the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning and a board member of the Journal of College and Character.
Dr. Sarofian-Butin's scholarship focuses on engaged learning, community engagement, educator preparation and policy, higher education policy, and, most recently, the rise of digital learning technologies and their influence on high impact pedagogical practices. From 2009 through 2016, Dr. Sarofian-Butin founded and was the Executive Director of the Center for Engaged Democracy, which served as a central hub for developing, coordinating, and supporting academic programs – majors, minors and certificates – focused on community engagement, broadly defined. In 2020 Spring, he won the award of 2020 Writing Advocate of the Year. This award is given to one professor each year who strongly supports student writing at his university.
Dr. Jeffrey Fast
Honorary Advisor
Dr. Jeffrey Fast has been a teacher and administrator in America's leading independent schools for almost 40 years. After graduating from Oberlin College, he served in the Peace Corps in the Philippines teaching English at both secondary and collegiate levels. He received his MA in English Literature fromYork University in Toronto, then moved on to receive his PhD from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, England. Upon his return to America, he took on both teaching and administrative positions at The Webb Schools in California, serving for 15 years as English department head, Dean of Students, Director of Curriculum, and Director of the Summer Studies Program. He also taught English to Japanese students at The Toin Gakuen School outside Yokohama in one of his sabbaticals. After Webb, Dr. Fast moved to Boston, and took on teaching and administrative positions at Belmont Hill School, serving as English department head, Director of Curriculum, and Form Head for the past 22 years. He currently teaches sections of 9th grade English, as well as several advanced English electives — Shakespeare, Faulkner and the Southern Tradition, Search For Faith, Literature of Social Reflection.
ADMISSION COUNSELORS


text:
Shakespeare Seminar Online
Über das SSO
Hinweise für Beiträge
Ausgabe 15 (2017)
Ausgabe 9 (2011)
Rupp/Wald (Vorwort)
Frobenius
Walkenhorst
Karremann
Young Dittmann
Sunny Tien
Call for Statements
Studienausgabe
Boydell-Katalog
Sie befinden sich: Start > Publikationen > Shakespeare Seminar Online > Ausgabe 6 (2008) > Young Dittmann
Shakespearean Foodways: Feasting, Fasting, Playing and Digesting
"A Gap" in the Body: The Witches' Cauldron and the Permeable Self in Macbeth
by Joo Young Dittmann
Standing in the heath after his disturbing encounter with "[t]he weird sisters" (1.3.30), Banquo states: "Were such things here as we do speak about?/Or have we eaten on the insane root,/That takes the reason prisoner?" (1.3.81–83).[1] Indeed, the play depicts the process in which Macbeth's "reason", that is, the rational part of the soul in Aristotelian terms, is gradually dissolved after his meeting with the sisters.
Banquo's description of demonic possession through the language of food intake reflects a crucial concern of early modern medical theory, in which quality of diet was supposed to determine one's physical and psychological state. Authors of medical treatises repeatedly asserted the significance of diet in sustaining the balance of one's bodily and psychic disposition. Warning his readers of the danger of poor diet, Thomas Paynell writes that "Surfet and diversites of meates and drynkes lettying and corruptyng the digestion febleth man . . . Yll diete (as me thynketh) is chief cause of all dangerous and intollerable diseases".[2] Similarly, William Vaughan, the author of the popular Directions for Health,notes: "Physicians hold that men be diversly affected, according to the dyet which they use".[3]
In these writings, the impact of food on the body was considered to be ambivalent. While sound dietary regimen nourishes the body, poor diet or diet that does not suit one's physiological temperament can prove serious damage. Even the same food was believed to make various impacts on different humoral complexions. Furthermore, the inseparability of body and mind in early modern thought attributed to food the power to affect not only one's physical health but also one's soul.[4] These ambiguous effects of food were a central topic not only of medical discourse but also of witchcraft disputes. In early modern witch-lore, with its potential power to breach the boundary of the body, food was frequently used as a medium of bewitching.[5] These discursive overlays indicate the significance of food in relation to the body, selfhood, and subjectivity. With its ambiguous relation to the body, food offers a point through which to explore the conflict-ridden relation between interior and exterior, between the subject and the world, between container and contained.
The anxieties about potentially dangerous effects of food elaborated in medical theory and witchcraft tracts pervade Macbeth. The play is fraught with references to multifarious impacts of eating and drinking on the body, interrupted feasts, and images of malnurtured and disorderly bodies. Banquo's speech quoted above, as if echoing the concern of witchcraft tracts, links bewitchment with ingestion of poisonous food. The chief guest Duncan is murdered after a banquet, and Banquo is slaughtered on his way to supper. Furthermore, under Macbeth's tyranny, Scotland is metamorphosed to a malnurtured, open, and bleeding body suffering from internal imbalances. Variously associated with occult power, dissolution of selfhood, and breakdown of political order, food in the play refers to a wide range of meanings that suggest the uneasy relation between inside and outside, between constitution and blurring of boundaries.
This essay explores the play's pervasive concern with poisonous food, malnutrition, dissolving boundaries, and deconstitution of selfhood in the light of early modern medical discourses and witchcraft disputes. As recent scholarship has shown, the body is not a transhistorical entity. Rather, it is a malleable construct, whose figurations entail historically specific modes of inscription.[6] As discursive sites of inscription and articulation, Macbeth, witchcraft tracts, and medical discourses participated in complex and sometimes contradictory processes of fashioning the early modern body. In this essay, I aim at examining cultural dynamics enmeshed in the representations of the body these texts provide, focusing on the following questions: how does the era's preoccupation with ingestion and digestion of food point to the historical formation of the specific model of the body and selfhood?; how can we read the pervasive motif of the disorderly and malnurtured body in Macbeth?; and finally, how can we understand the varying figurations of food, the body, and subjectivity in medical treatises, witchcraft tracts, and Macbeth in the historical context of early modern England?
Critics have emphasized the specifically material understanding of selfhood in early modern England. Relying on the authority of Galenic humoralism, writers of the period claim that the material state of the body is determined through the balance of four humors, and the body thus constituted affects one's physical as well as psychological state. However, sustaining the balance of body and mind was a difficult task, since bodies were imagined as a vulnerable boundary characterized by "its faulty borders and penetrable stuff" that "interacts differently with the world than the 'static, solid' modern bodily container".[7] In this pre-Cartesian understanding of body and mind, subjectivities are perceived as a porous and volatile entity susceptible to external influences. As Timothy J. Reiss indicates, the early modern subject is "embedded in and acted on by […] the material world and immediate biological, familial and social ambiences […] [T]hese circles preceded the person, which acted as subjected to forces working in complicated ways from 'outside.' But because of the embedding, that 'outside' was manifest in all aspects and elements of 'inside'—of being a person".[8]
Medical treatises in this period repeatedly sought to overcome this vulnerability. Although the body is embedded in its surroundings, these writings claim that it can sustain itself through self-discipline and vigilant monitoring. Sir Thomas Elyot states in his highly esteemed Castel of Helthe that one's "castel", that is, one's own body can be sustained through regulating external factors.[9] Elyot's arguments concerning the significance of the sustenance of health as well as his figuration of the human body as a spatial image of "castel" were echoed by writers of the period. In 1562 William Bullein declares that one must defend one's "little Fort" "against sickenes, or evill diate". Similarly, in 1604 James Manning writes that one should "look after his castle" and "keepe the cage as cleane as he can".[10] At the center of this argument, as Margaret Healy observes, lies the compulsion to sustain the bounded sense of the self: as "a model which can stand for any bounded system", the body must have secure boundaries which protect itself from harmful external influences.[11]
In these writings, choice of diet plays a crucial role in sustaining bodily and psychic health. As an external substance incorporated into the body, food occupies a liminal position in its relation to the body: it is at once inside and outside, same and other. In this sense, food functions as 'extimité' of the early modern body, the intimate exteriority that simultaneously constitutes and threatens the integrity of the body.[12] Early modern medical discourses attempted to domesticate anxieties about the 'extimate' effects of food. The popular genre of dietaries and health manuals aimed at instructing readers how to govern one's body through regulating external factors, especially dietary regimen. These texts discuss at length digestive and nutritive qualities of foods and their impacts on each humoral temperament and prescribe suitable diets to each complexion. For instance, "in a cholerike stomake", states Elyot, "biefe is better digested than a chykens legge, forasmoche as in a hotte stomacke fyne meates be shortly aduste and corrupted. Contrarywise in a colde or fleumatyke stomake grosse meate abydeth longe undigested, and maketh putrified matter: light meates therefore be to suche a stomacke more apte and convenyent".[13] Not only prescribing suitable food to each humoral temperament, writings in this period also repeatedly warned readers of the harmful impact of poor diet and excessive appetite. "As a lamp is choked with a multitude of oil", writes Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, "so is the natural heat with immoderate eating strangled in the body […] [the stomach] is a pernicious sink, and the fountain of all diseases, both of body and mind".[14] Overall, in this symbolic economy, as Michael C. Schoenfeldt argues, eating is a highly codified symbolic ritual that materially constitutes the self, and sound dietary regimen serves as a crucial means to sustain physical and psychological well-being, in other words, "literal acts of self-fashioning".[15]
This attempt to sustain bodily boundaries is thwarted in Macbeth. The image of the disorderly body that escapes the control of the subject pervades the play. Macbeth's almost hallucinated state after his encounter with the witches provides a vivid description of dissolution of boundaries:
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion,
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings.
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so much my single state of man that function
Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is,
But what is not. (1.3.129–41)
This passage as a whole depicts bewitchment as a transferential process. As if drugged by "the insane root" (1.3.82), Macbeth undergoes physical transformations over which he has no control: his hair is "unfix(ed)" by "horrid image", and his "seated heart" leaves its place and knocks at his rips "against the use of nature". What is at stake is not only integrity but also agency: his internal organs elude his grasp and seem to have lives of their own, shaking his "single state of man". This corporeal metamorphosis is accompanied by psychic transport. In his enraptured mind, distinctions between "good" and "ill", being and non being, truth and falsity ("nothing is,/But what is not"), present and future, are blurred: the "horrible imaginings" of the future (i.e. the dead Duncan) comes to take the space of reality, and the very thought of murder precedes his "function" of man.
The dramatic plot that follows stages various forms of unbounded bodies that elude the control of the subject. In her invocation to the "spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts" (1.5.38–39) to "unsex" (1.5.39) her, Lady Macbeth wishes her body to be transformed into an open, disorderly body, not unlike the witches'. At the same time, the play represents the dissolution of the bounded sense of self in scopic terms. Instead of ensuring the spectator of a position of visual mastery, in Macbeth, the spectacle disintegrates visual agency of the spectator. Duncan's corpse, like "Gorgon", destroys the sight of the spectator (2.3.65–66); Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking has "mated" the onlooker's mind and "amazed" his sight (5.1.68); confronting "the air-drawn dagger" (3.4.62), Macbeth is no longer able to sustain his visual mastery over the object of seeing, and his "eyes are made the fools of o'th'other senses" (2.1.44). Likewise, the sight of his own bloody hands blinds Macbeth's eyes ("What hands are here? Ha: they pluck out mine eyes", 2.2.62), and the spectacle of Banquo's ghost dislocates Macbeth's attempted display of power.
The play forges a link between this dissolution of self and poor diet. Instead of nourishing the body, food in the play is a poisonous substance that harms physical and psychological health. Pleading to exchange her milk with gall, Lady Macbeth becomes the agent of infiltration, who poisons those whom she feeds: she claims to "pour [her] spirits" (1.5.24) in Macbeth's ear and drugs the guards to facilitate the murder of Duncan:
When Duncan is asleep,
Whereto the rather shall his day's hard journey
Soundly invite him, his two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only. When in swinish sleep
Their drenchèd natures lies as in a death,
What cannot you and I perform upon
Th'unguarded Duncan? (1.7. 61–70)
Intensifying the concern of early modern medical writings, this passage foregrounds the potentially ambiguous effects of food. While featuring as a sign of hospitality, wine simultaneously functions as a poison that disintegrates "memory" and "reason", two mental qualities that sustain the integrity of the self, into formless "fume". The guards, drugged by "wine and wassail", are beside themselves, lapsing into the comatose state of sleep. This infiltrating power of drugs and foodstuff was a pervasive concern in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. In this period, accusations of poisoning were prevalent, culminating in the conviction of the Portuguese Jewish doctor, Roderigo Lopez (1594) and in the Overbury case (1613). As Tanya Pollard indicates, the cultural anxieties about poisoning centered upon the fact that poisoning was extremely difficult to prevent. Again what is at stake is the subject's agency: with its power of invisible infiltration, poisonous food renders the self a site vulnerable to malign plotting of another.[16]
In Macbeth, not only affecting the guards, the destructive consequences of drinking pervade the entire murder scene. Macbeth's psychic and physical state is compared with that of a drunken man who has failed to discipline himself ("Was the hope drunk/Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since?/And wakes it now to look so green and pale/At what it did so freely?", 1.7.35–38). With its insistent knocking at the gates (which echoes the 'knocking' of Macbeth's heart depicted in Act 1 Scene 3), the castle itself is turned into a disorderly body that has lost control over itself. Throughout the play, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth imagine themselves in terms of a malnurtured, diseased body deprived of sleep, "great nature's second course,/Chief nourisher in life's feast" (2.2.42–43).
This malnurtured body provides a suggestive gloss to the horror represented in Macbeth. Not only representing the crisis of subjectivity, the malnurtured and poisoned bodies embody the sense of cosmic disorder, as dramatized through the two banquets in the play. Banquets are social rituals that reaffirm the social bond. As such, in banquets, food signifies the symbolic bond between the king and the subject: in banquets the king is "fed" (1.4.55) in "commendations" of the subject (1.4.55), and "the sauce to meat is ceremony" (3.4.36). Macbeth fails to sustain this symbolic function of banquet. Instead of nourishing their guests, the Macbeths poison them. Furthermore, in the second banquet, distracted by Banquo's ghost, Macbeth fails to fulfill his symbolic role as host. Due to his breaching of this symbolic function, Macbeth is accused of robbing his country of peaceful feasts (3.6.33–37) and of transforming Scotland into a disorderly body that is "[a]lmost afraid to know itself" (4.3.167). This image of the malnurtured, disorderly body, combined with the trope of poisonous food, creates a powerful semantic pull that points to the shattering of subjectivity, familial bond, and nation.
Considering the early modern preoccupation with the bounded sense of the body, how can we understand the disorderly bodies in Macbeth? The play implicates the witches in a threat to boundaries. As has often been noted, they are themselves embodiments of boundary transgression. Simultaneously inhabiting the natural and supernatural world, confusing the rational with the enigmatic, and challenging gender distinction that sets off men from women, the sisters confuse the boundaries marked by the rules and norms of society. At the same time, their language disrupts a stable referring function of language. In their words, "fair is foul, and foul is fair" (1.1.12), and Banquo is "[l]esser than Macbeth, and greater", "[n]ot so happy, yet much happier" (1.3.63–64). Furthermore, they attach Macbeth to three incompatible signifiers of "Thane of Glamis", "Thane of Cawdor", and "king" (1.3.46–48). This linguistic disruption and the specters of boundless bodies provide a telling emblem of the world where distinctions are dissolved, where "what seemed corporal/Melted, as breath into the wind" (1.3.79–80).
As a form of power that involves interaction between the bodies, witchcraft dissolves secure boundaries. In early modern witchcraft disputes, fantasies of witchcraft are often articulated through the image of porous, disorderly bodies. The witch was believed to shift shape, unfixing the contour of bodily boundaries. Furthermore, she could invade the body of others through her curse, her evil eye, or her food.[17] While the truth of witchcraft could not be proven, anxieties concerning potential danger of witchcraft pervaded sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In village-level witchcraft beliefs, witches were accused of poisoning, causing illness and madness. At the same time, even the royal power was not in a safe distance from this transformative power of the witch. Both Elizabeth and James expressed their concern about the occult. In 1580, Elizabeth decreed an Act condemning anyone who attempted to harm the queen by witchcraft or conjurations. In Scotland, more than 300 witches were accused of aiding the earl of Bothwell's conspiracy against James VI.[18] At the center of these disputes lie anxieties concerning the dissolution of boundaries facing the power of another. Witches transgress boundaries that distinguish self from other, natural from unnatural, rational from enigmatic. In early modern witchcraft disputes, the fear of possession was frequently articulated through the language of contagion. In his Daemonologie, James I defines the witch as "the direct haunting […] [of] societie, with that foule and vncleane Spirite". Even Reginald Scot, who argued against the existence of witchcraft from the perspective of skepticism, seems to lend some credence to the contagious power of the witch's evil eye: "For the poison and disease in the eie infecteth the aire next unto it, and the same proceedeth further, carrieng with it the vapor and infection of the corrupted bloud: with the contagion whereof, the eies of the beholders are most apt to be infected".[19]
The play as a whole foregrounds the formative impacts of the witches. Not only associated with "the insane root" (1.3.82), the weird sisters set the climate of "fog and filthy air" (1.1.13), which was considered to harm one's health by causing disruption of humors.[20] Their meeting with Macbeth is framed by descriptions of their power to cause corporeal transformations. The first witch, as a revenge on the sailor's wife who denied her food, claims to use her magic to "drain" her husband "dry as hay" (1.3.17), deprive him of sleep, and toss him at sea, making him "dwindle, peak, and pine" (1.3.22). While it is not clear whether their maleficium can achieve the desired effects, the torments they devise establish them as threatening figures of infiltration. In addition, their use of fragmented body parts for their magic ("a pilot's thumb", 1.3.26) symbolically links them with an antithesis to the wholesome, balanced body.
The brew concocted by the witches in Act 4 Scene 1, made out of ingredients such as "poisoned entrails", "[f]illet of a fenny snake", "[l]iver of blaspheming Jew" and "[n]ose of Turk, and Tartar's lips" (4.1.5, 12, 26, 29), powerfully evokes their potentially destructive power. While this brew is not literally consumed, the poisonous image pervades the whole play. Composed of fragments of body parts, the simmering cauldron is figured as a parodic, disorderly body that in turn produces fantasmatic bodies that bewitch Macbeth. As an antithesis of the balanced body promoted in medical discourses, the cauldron provides a rich commentary upon the play's prevailing concern of bodily disintegration. In this scene, the play again presents the anxieties about boundary transgression through the language of food. As has been observed, in spite of its gruesome ingredients, the making of the brew evokes the process of everyday cooking: the list of ingredients is a perverse recipe, and its detailed cooking instructions such as "[m]ake the gruel thick and slab", "[c]ool it with a baboon's blood" (4.1.32, 37) hint at discourses of cookery.[21]
At the same time, with its image of contagion, the witches' poisonous brew evokes Lady Macbeth's milk she pleads to exchange with gall. Lady Macbeth's invocation is all the more striking, if we take into account the symbolic significance of breast milk in early modern England. Considered the most purified form of blood, in this period, milk defines the female body as a source of nourishment that materially constitutes the infant. "We may be assured", writes James Guillimeau in The Nursing of Children, "that the Milke […] hath as much power to make the children like the Nurses, both in bodie and mind; as the seed of the Parents hath to make the children like them".[22] This symbolic significance of breast milk attributes to the maternal breast ambivalent power to form and de-form the infant. Through her invocation, Lady Macbeth, like the witches, is turned into an agent of poisoning, as she herself states in her fantasmatic imagination of infanticide: "I would […]/Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums/And dashed the brains out" (1.7.56–58).[23]
Through presenting Lady Macbeth and the witches as perverse nurturers, the play sets a link between the threat of infiltration and women's domestic labor of nurturing and food preparation. It is the 'extimate' nature of food that attributes to women the power to dissolve bodily boundaries: since they are responsible for feeding, they can also harm others.[24] As a potentially harmful nurturer, the witches and Lady Macbeth serve as a point onto which the threatening ambiguity of the formative power of food, the fear of malnurturing, and the anxieties about porosity of the body are projected and displaced. It is the early modern fascination with boundaries that nourished the era's cultural preoccupation with the perverse nurturing, the recurring motifs central to the imagination of the witch-craze and early modern medicine.
By representing the potentially harmful impact of feeding and nurturing, Macbeth registers the anxieties about the porosity of the body elaborated in early modern medical discourses and witchcraft tracts. In spite of their differences, both early modern medical treatises and witchcraft tracts seek to sustain the boundary of the body and selfhood: medical treatises aim at containing the porosity of the body through self-discipline; witchcraft tracts attempt to negotiate the anxieties about boundary transgression by defining the witch as a source of contamination.
The play shows an ambivalent stance toward the possibility of sustaining boundaries. On the one hand, through its depiction of Lady Macbeth and the witches, the play defines the sphere of the feminine as a threat to the balanced body. Furthermore, as Janet Adelman states, it stages a process of excision of the feminine, through which patriarchal power consolidates itself. Presented as powerful figures at the beginning, the witches and Lady Macbeth disappear in the course of the play. Macduff, whose Caesarian birth symbolically sets him off from the contaminating effect of women, defeats the bewitched Macbeth, and the fantasy of male parthenogenesis is achieved.[25] On the other hand, however, the play questions the possibility of cultural reordering through excision of the feminine. First of all, it leaves ambiguous the role of the witches. Although they are associated with infection and perverse feeding, in the larger context of the play, the witches' agency in Macbeth's transformation remains opaque. The play even questions the validity of their existence, whether they are "fantastical" or "that indeed/Which outwardly [they] show" (1.3.51–52). Even the significance of the witches' brew so powerfully associated with the image of contagion remains ambiguous. The spectacles produced by the brew, while they dissolve Macbeth's selfhood, paradoxically affirm the patriarchal fantasy of autotelic birth.
The play further complicates the issue by blurring the distinction between the witches' prophecies and Macbeth's choice, bewitcher and bewitched, poisoner and poisoned. Macbeth's ambition is largely forged by Lady Macbeth, who is symbolically fused with the witches throughout the play. This commingling of bewitcher and bewitched is further highlighted in the sleepwalking scene, where Lady Macbeth is turned into a bewitched sleepwalker. Furthermore, as Stephen Greenblatt states, the play dramatizes the overlapping of the demonic with the secular through the strategy of "translacing", "a mode of rhetorical redistribution in which the initial verbal elements remain partially visible even as they are woven into something new".[26] Macbeth's first line echoes the sisters' speech ("So foul and fair a day I have not seen" 1.3.36). The witches' greeting of Macbeth—"All hail Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor./All hail Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter" (1.3.47–48)—is echoed by Duncan ("Thane of Cawdor:/In which addition, hail, most worthy Thane", 1.3.103–4) and Lady Macbeth ("Great Glamis, worthy Cawdor,/Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter", 1.5.52–53). The commingling of the demonic and the secular is also apparent on the intertextual level. In Holinshed's text which serves as the source of the play, it is not Lady Macbeth but Duncan who drugs his opponents with poisoned brew.[27]
As such, the play represents witchcraft as 'the uncanny' in Freudian terms, a peculiar intermingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar, of the proper and the improper. The witches are both inside and outside the self and the symbolic dimension. Thus, the symbolic function of witchcraft overlaps with that of food: both function as the intimate exteriority that blurs the division between inside and outside, between self and other.
This fusion of the demonic and the secular poses another problem: since it is impossible to localize the source of contagion, there can be no easy remedy. Together with its depiction of disorderly, malnurtured bodies, Macbeth also represents various attempts at cure. The play opens with the language of suturing, a surgical reattachment of fragmented body parts: the "bloody man" (1.2.1) is sent to a surgeon, and the body of Scotland is restored through Macbeth's heroic victory. Lady Macbeth seeks to contain her husband's irrational psychic transport through rationalization and calculation. Replying to Macbeth's reluctance to see Duncan's dead body, she attempts to contain his anxiety by defining the image of the dead Duncan as an inanimate object: "The sleeping and the dead/Are but as pictures" (2.2.56–57). To his anxious question of "[w]ill all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood/Clean from my hand?" (2.2.63–64), she calmly replies: "A little water clears us of this deed" (2.2.70). Likewise, after being informed of his wife's precarious state of health, Macbeth desperately seeks a cure, asking the Doctor for an "oblivious antidote" (5.3.44). Malcolm describes his battle against Macbeth in terms of a purgatory cure: "Let's make us med'cines of our great revenge/Tocure this deadly grief" (4.3.216–17).
The play, however, frustrates these attempts at cure. The sutured body of Scotland is again disintegrated by Macbeth's regicide. In spite of their attempt to sustain themselves, the Macbeths succumb to forces that cannot be explained. Upon Macbeth's request of an "antidote", the Doctor, echoing early modern medical discourses, states that the disorderly body must be cured through self-disciplining: "Therein the patient/Must minister to himself" (5.3.46–47).
Malcolm's victory seems to have cured Scotland by expulsing Macbeth. The play as a whole, however, foregrounds the fragility of his new reign by drawing attention to structural problems inherent in the feudal patronage system. With its utter dependence on loyalty, in the feudal patronage system, the bond between the king and the lords is ultimately performative. The sovereign power is justified not because of the ruler's natural property but because of the symbolic system sustained through iterative performances of social codes.[28] Hence the significance of communal events such as royal banquets, or hospitable gathering as symbolic rituals that reaffirm social bond through displays of hospitality. As Jacques Derrida has shown, drawing on the work of Emil Benveniste, hospitality, deriving from the Latin hostis which refers to both host and stranger, shares with the word 'hostility' its etymological root.[29] The two banquets Macbeth holds show the fragility of the social bond predicated on hospitality. Due to its performative nature, displays of hospitality can be manipulated, as Duncan states at the beginning: "There's no art/To find the mind's construction in the face" (1.4.11–12). This potential separation of signifier from referent, face from mind, informs the play's anxieties about equivocation and disguise and at the same time highlights the fragility of the feudal bond. The Macbeths, "look[ing] like th'innocent flower" while being "the serpent under't" (1.5.63–64), sever the symbolic bond that sustains society by blurring the line between hospitality and hostility. Malcolm's testing of Macduff in Act 4 Scene 3 again calls into question the possibility of sustaining the feudal symbolic bond by problematizing the capacity to know one another. Both Malcolm's and Macduff's language is frustratingly equivocal like the witches' prophecy, and, due to this semiotic confusion, it is extremely difficult to draw a clear line that distinguishes hospitality from hostility. By locating the unsettling specter of dissolution of boundaries not only in witchcraft but also in sovereignty, Macbeth shows that even the most hegemonic symbolic formation is not able to constitute itself as a coherent entity.
As a discursive construction, early modern medical theory participates in a regulatory production of the body. Early modern medical discourses negotiate anxieties about the porosity of the body by regulating the relation between the self and the other, interior and exterior. Here, the healthy and balanced body functions as a social imaginary that must be sustained through vigilantly regulating what threatens its integrity. As such, not only designating dietary taboos, these writings engage themselves with the question of identity and difference, self and other.[30] In this symbolic economy, the balanced, healthy body is constituted through expulsing what cannot or should not be incorporated in this body: hence the compulsive demonization of poor diet, excessive appetite, and ungoverned lifestyle. In this framework, the uncontrolled body that is unable to govern itself functions as a domain of the abject, through the differentiation from which the balanced body defines itself and onto which the anxieties about the porosity of the body are displaced.
Critics have suggested that the early modern subject's attempt at sustaining itself through disciplinary regimen contributes to the emergence of the distinctively modern form of subjectivity that governs itself through conscious control.[31] While this attempt at boundary construction was prevalent in this period, the regulatory production of the body was not so much a totalizing as a fragmentary and contradictory cultural process. With its representation of disorderly, porous bodies, Macbeth calls into question the possibility of sustaining bodily boundaries through self-conscious disciplining. Instead of being neatly disciplined by the subject's acts of self-fashioning, in the play, bodies are porous and uncontrollable (non)entities that exceed the grasp of the subject. This impossibility of sustaining boundaries is also apparent in the history of witch-hunting. Early modern witch-hunters sought to escape from the inexplicable, supernatural, and potentially malign power of witches by persecuting them. Similarly, witchcraft tracts attempted to negotiate the fear of witchcraft by defining the witch as a source of contagion. The disturbing mystery of witchcraft, however, remained unresolved. Perhaps it was the very irresolvability of the truth of witchcraft that provoked compulsive repetition of the drama of witch-hunting. As such, the figure of the witch questions the attempts to construct secure boundaries by drawing into attention what exceeds this regulatory construction of the body, a surplus that cannot be integrated into the symbolic structure of the bounded body.
In Macbeth, even after Malcolm reorganizes the social body by expulsing the Macbeths and abjecting them as "this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen" (5.9.36), his victory cannot entirely eliminate the specters of disorderly bodies and the witches' cauldron vividly staged throughout the play. They are at once within and outside Malcolm's rule: they are not a part of the play's newly restored all-male society, yet, at the same time, they circulate within the symbolic dimension as ghostly apparitions. As such, the specters of witchcraft and disorderly bodies mark negativity, that is, contradictions, ambiguities, and fissures that simultaneously exist within and exceed symbolic organizations. In the representational framework of the play, these specters function as an anamorphic stain, which exists at once inside and outside the field of meaning and distorts ostensible meaning from the margins.[32] The play has shown another anamorphic stain in one of its most compelling depictions of dissolution of boundaries: Banquo's ghost. His appearance as a ghostly specter visible only to Macbeth utterly dislocates Macbeth's claim of power and agency as the newly crowned king, making "a gap" in the feast (3.1.12). Like Banquo's ghost that disrupts Macbeth's display of agency, these specters of dissolved bodies leave "a gap", an anamorphic stain that casts an uncanny shadow over Malcolm's rule and, furthermore, over the contour of the bounded self.
[1] All quotations from Macbeth are from William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. by A. R. Braunmuller, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
[2] Thomas Paynell, Regimen sanitatis Salerni (London, 1528), sig. A2v, quoted in Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 24.
[3] William Vaughan, Directions for Health (London, 1626), quoted in Michael C. Schoenfeldt, "Fables of the Belly in Early Modern England", in David Hillman, Carla Mazzio, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 251.
[4] For the early modern notion of the inseparability of body and mind, see Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
[5] Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 128.
[6] For some instances, see Thomas Lacqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Hillman and Mazzio (1997); Paster (1993); Paster (2004).
[7] Paster (2004),p. 23. In the early modern preoccupation with the vulnerability of bodily boundaries, we can observe the increasing influence of the newly emerging Paracelsan paradigm of the body. In Galenic humoralism, disease was caused by internal imbalance of humors. This Galenic conception of disease, however, began to be complemented and displaced by the newly emerging understanding of the body asserted by the Swiss physician Paracelsus. Challenging the Galenic system of internal balance, he claimed that origins of disease lie outside the body. As Margaret Healy argues, early modern medical texts tended to combine these theories, which produced the era's idiosyncratic understanding of the body (Healy [2001], p. 6, pp. 18–49). For the increasing influence of Paracelsianism in early modern England, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19–47.
[8] Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 2.
[9] Sir Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helthe (London, 1541), introduction by Samuel Tannenbaum (New York: Scholar's Facsimiles & Reprints, 1937).
[10] William Bullein, A newe booke Entituled the Government of Healthe (London, 1558), sig. C2v, quoted in Healy (2001), p. 24; James Manning, A New Booke Intituled I am for you all, Complexions castle (London, 1604), p. 2, quoted in Healy (2001), p. 34.
[11] Healy (2001), p. 18. The quotation is in Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 116.
[12] For the notion of 'extimité', see Jacques-Alain Miller, "Extimité", in Mark Bracher et al., eds., Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 74–87.
[13] Elyot (1541), 16.
[14] Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), ed. by Holbrook Jackson (London: J. M. Dent, 1972), p. 226.
[15] Schoenfeldt (1997), p. 243. See also Schoenfeldt (1999), p. 11.
[16] Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 7–9.
[17] For the association of witchcraft with the image of disorderly bodies, see Purkiss (1997), pp. 119–44; Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 23–26.
[18] Peter Stallybrass, "Macbeth and Witchcraft", in Alan Sinfield, ed., Macbeth: New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 26–27.
[19] King James I, Daemonologie (1597), ed. by G. B. Harrison (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), p. 16; Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), ed. by Montague Summer (London: John Rodker, 1930), pp. 281–82.
[20] For the early modern notion of miasma as disrupting humors, see Healy (2001), p. 40–43.
[21] Purkiss (1997), p. 212; Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 231; Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 199.
[22] James Guillimeau, The Nursing of Children (1612), sig.li4, quoted in Kathryn Schwarz, "Missing the Breast: Desire, Disease, and the Singular Effect of Amazons", in David Hillman, Carla Mazzio, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routeldge, 1997), p. 152. For the symbolic significance of breast milk in the early modern period, see ibid., pp. 147–69.
[23] In the early modern period, the witch was frequently associated with perverse nurturing. For the projection of anxieties about feeding and nurturing onto the witch, see Purkiss (1997), pp. 133–34; Willis (1995), pp. 27–81. For the play's overlapping of the occult with the domestic, see Wall (2002), p. 199; Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 225.
[24] Critics have attended to the play's preoccupation with destructive nurturing, often focusing on psychological dynamics of nurturing. For some instances, see Stallybrass (1992), pp. 30–33; Janet Adelman, "'Born of woman': Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth", in Alan Sinfield, ed., Macbeth: New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 53–68.
[25] Adelman (1992), p. 60.
[26] Stephen Greenblatt, "Shakespeare Bewitched", in Jeffrey N. Cox, Larry Reynolds, eds., New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 125.
[27] A. R. Braunmuller, "Introduction", in Macbeth by William Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 14.
[28] For the significance of iteration in performative construction of norms, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993).
[29] Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
[30] Not only constructing boundaries of selfhood through disciplinary regimen, early modern medical discourses also consolidated national and gender identity. Wendy Wall observes that writers in this period often emphasized the danger of foreign food, setting a link between diet and national identity (Wall [2002]). At the same time, these texts contributed to fashioning gendered subjects by constructing the female body as disorderly and excessive (Paster [1993], p. 23–63).
[31] Schoenfeldt (1997); Schoenfeldt (1999).
[32] Early modern painters used the pictorial device of anamorphosis in order to suspend ostensible meaning of a picture. The most well-known example of anamorphosis is Holbein's picture titled The Ambassadors. This is a portrait of two foreign emissaries surrounded by objects signifying worldly achievements. However, at the bottom of the picture is a stain which, if viewed from a certain angle, is a skull. This stain, at once visible and invisible, alters the ostensible meaning of the picture from the margins. For an account of the use of anamorphosis in early modern paintings, see Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 10–20. For an analysis of the anamorphic function of Banquo's ghost, see Philip Armstrong, Shakespeare's Visual Regime: Tragedy, Psychoanalysis and the Gaze (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 187–91. For the representational effect of anamorphosis, see Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981),pp. 79–90.
Der Artikel erforscht die Darstellung von Nahrungsmitteln und deren Auswirkungen auf den menschlichen Körper in Macbeth vor dem Hintergrund medizinischer Diskurse und Hexenschriften der frühen Neuzeit. Abhandlungen dieser Periode zeigen eine eigentümliche, intensive Beschäftigung mit den materiellen Einflüssen von Nahrungsaufnahme auf den menschlichen Körper. Im Rahmen der medizinischen Theorie dieser Zeit war die Aufnahme von Nahrungsmitteln ein Zeichen für Durchlässigkeit von Grenzen, da eine externe Substanz in ein geschlossenen Ganzes eingegliedert wird. Medizinische Abhandlungen dieser Zeit versuchten demzufolge auch, die Begrenzungen des Körpers und der Subjektivität aufrechtzuerhalten, indem der potentiell schädliche Einfluss von Nahrungsaufnahme streng reguliert wurde. Aus den gleichen Beweggründen strebten Hexenschriften dieser Zeit danach, dem Schrecken von Grenzüberschreitungen zu begegnen, indem sie Hexen als den Grund für Verseuchungen ausmachten, die folgerichtig vertrieben werden mussten. Der Artikel vertritt die These, dass Macbeth eine ambivalente Haltung zum Prozess der regulierenden Konstruktion auf den Körper einnimmt. Macbeth erkennt das Verlangen nach Grenzen und auch die Ängste, diese aufzuheben. Gleichzeitig stellt Macbeth die regulative Konstruktion auf den Körper, wie er in den medizinischen Diskursen und Abhandlungen über Hexerei ausgearbeitet wird, in Frage und betont die vergebliche Bemühung, die körperliche Integrität durch Regulierung und Vertreibung aufrechtzuerhalten.
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