"High" Art and "Low" Blows: Titus Andronicus and the Critical Language of Pain

Abstract

Drawing on the history of performance and popular and critical reviews of Titus Andronicus, this article explores the definition of "gratuitous" violence. In both the popular language of theatrical reviews of the play and in critical and theoretical discourse, the mutilated body becomes "legible" through the deployment and disruption of a conceptual system grounded in a plethora of binary relations such as "primitive"/"civilized"; brutal/refined; immature/mature; bathos/pathos; bodied/rational; inarticulate/eloquent, unintelligible/intelligible. While these dichotomies are not necessarily parallel in terms of their conceptual content, they reveal the structure of a familiar dichotomizing logic that participates in making meaning from the violated body precisely by designating that body as beyond the pale, variously defined. The essay draws on Judith Butler's model of the abject to argue that the evaluation of violence, its gratuitousness or its legitimacy with regard to the constitution of the subject, is often one that rests on a concern for ownership and use, concepts that are inextricably linked with questions of epistemology and identity. "Gratuitous" is a designation that polices the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate uses of violence, between who can and cannot use it and see it, and between those violated bodies deemed "necessary" to the construction of the autonomous subject and those whose unruly presence represents a threat to that autonomy.