Successful Failures of Language in Titus Andronicus (or How Titus Kicks Poststructuralist Ass)

Shakespeare’s works have come to represent the ideal form of written language; his plays, along with a handful of other canonical early texts have formed the foundation for literary studies for centuries, precisely because of the well-wrought verse.  And yet, Shakespeare was first and foremost a dramatist, not a poet; his plays were written in the popular verse style, but their aim was performance, not silent study.  Language, his texts seem to suggest, is at best a tenuous method for communication, and while supplementary action still falls short of perfect delivery, it at least reminds us of the fickleness of meaning attending a strictly verbal event.  This anxiety of signification permeates his work, making him a proto-poststructuralist hero.  Titus Andronicus (as I will continue to remind you all) has long been banished from the aforementioned canon of literary works, largely because of its crudely constructed verse.  And yet, it is precisely the “substandard” language of the text, I would argue, that most effectively communicates its own failure to communicate, pitting voicelessness against loquaciousness in such a way as to champion the former--Titus hits the mark precisely by missing that mark.

Jacques Derrida’s lecture/essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” effectively birthed poststructuralism in its critique of structuralist anthropological methodology.  Concerned by the idea of a fixed center of a structure that is supposedly entertaining “freeplay” of the contained elements, he insists that it just doesn’t add up: “…the center is not the center,” he tells us (279).  What this means, then, is that “…language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse…everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified is never absolutely present outside a system of differences” (280).  To insist upon a fixed center is to betray a desire for meaning, a meaning that can never be pinned down. 

Shakespeare’s text really elucidates this struggle and desire for meaning.  His characters pitifully cling to meaningless associations (national, romantic, filial, etc.) and the depressing but inevitable conclusion is that the Roman state is so inherently flawed that the violence and betrayal that seeks to upset it is ultimately just another cog in its bloody machine. Repeatedly in the play, characters fight for a linguistic genealogy, a line which begins with some kernel of truth they can harvest to combat an increasingly present sense of subjective morality.  When God utters “I am that I am,” he provides the verbal, ontological root that many seek; Shakespeare, however, substitutes that text with another foundational Western text—Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  When her uncle, Marcus, discovers the raped and mutilated Lavinia, he makes a speech that has gone down in Shakespeare history as one of the worst abuses of language.  The speech includes the necessary allusion to the mythical Philomela, who suffers a similar fate, and carries on for forty-six lines of overly wrought, poorly utilized metaphor.  Famously known as a failure of language, I argue instead that this is the brilliance of its misuse. Marcus’s speech is the verbal equivalent of grasping at straws; facing his ravished niece, his words are at best seen as attempting to heal a wound and at worst as upstaging the very real traumatized girl.  The literally voiceless girl’s presence still trumps the overabundance of verbal signification performed by her uncle.  The overuse of bad language here points to the present absence of Lavinia’s voice, and while it does not actually render it more effectively, it does express the utter impossibility of ever doing so through language.