The Forgeries of Eros
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream fairies live between visible and invisible bodies, overhearing the world in wakefulness and as vulnerable as humans in sleep. Humans are visible bodies of an under-hearing in sleep. In various states of waking, they are prey to their own senses, and reproduce knowledge like vegetation growing from the slits within speech, interposing dialogues between dream and reality. What sleep encloses and what encloses sleep are woven together in the dramatic life of botany as a way of speech, like a mouth opening and closing to the animalism of the tongue. While human desires may bear their figures of speech in feral forms, certain kinds of knowledge “(mis)graft” the bodies of fairies and humans alike, closer in resemblance to the herbage composing a forest, either from within a body as tendrils of speech unfurling into the dream vision of the play, or as moments of sensory “art” invading the mind through a cognition mirrored by speech into a vision of reality sustained against the dream’s skim (I.1.137, II.2.110). Upon waking with Oberon’s charm, Lysander describes Helena as “transparent” (II.2.110). Forty lines later Hermia wakes to another form of transparency: “Lysander—what removed? Lysander, lord—What, out of hearing, gone? No sound, no word?” (II.2.157-8). Sight intrudes upon bodies, just as hearing circumscribes the origin of the intrusive force, while serving as a mechanism for the disappearance of the intruded subject: “out of hearing” one is “gone,” through hearing one arrives at being “gone,” or released from hearing one is “gone” into a freedom of absence near memory. Between seeing and hearing are the body’s ways of reading. Each sense employs its art upon the natures of presence and absence mediated by the body’s entrapment of self, dictating how bodies naturalize to themselves or one another in their erotic bindings. The irony of Eros is how a semblance of freedom through speech impassioned with the veracity of an animal, also shows an asexual confusion in the reproductivity of the senses that make an erotic force visible, not unlike the vegetation of dreaming, and the vegetation which writes by a fairy’s hand the events of the dream. The force of Eros is centrifugal, and the images of lovers are drawn from the center Eros evades. The center is a transparency of vision through appearance, perhaps like the center of a word and its own eroticism in the forestry of eros. Between sound and sight are the rest of the senses bound to the parts of a body, as laws and lawlessness remain bound respectively to Athens and the Greenwood, and as the mechanicals are given their parts to act, along with “parts” of the script to make into memory (I.2.89). As Bottom speaks for his dream: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was” (IV.1.207-210). Human senses cannot translate a dream for one another, and in that recognition a body becomes a succession of untranslatable parts in a union of knowledge. It is the heart Lysander claims to see through a “make” of nature in Helena’s transparency, yet the heart which cannot return a dream into speech (II.2.111). A serpent from within Hermia’s dream eats her heart, and its skin is “weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in” (II.1.255-6, II.2.155-6). A fairy is the size of a soundless heart. One recalls the order of recognition for what is lost: first “no sound,” then “no word,” as if without sound there will never be word. Yet one is also reminded of how the “parts” of a script contain the words of the character along with the endings of the speech leading into each part, as words await their sounds in transgression of their assigned bodies and the hearts they conceal (I.2.89). The inconstancy of partitions are written into the parts creating them. While transparency is an effect of the charm, the translatability of the body remains dependent from the surface of translations by senses altered through fairy charms. A sound is both a child of the animal tongue, and procreative like a plant in its freedom between bodies. A sound caught in its form as a word is the double vision of a body, and a translation of vision through the body near Helena’s desire “to be to [Hermia] translated” (I.1.191). Helena does not necessarily desire to translate herself into Hermia, or to be a state of Hermia in translation, but rather to be, in a state of being which appears to Hermia as “translated,” or in a way of being which exists only from the vantage of Hermia in her own translation. Who they are translated into, by whom, for whom, from whom, are not certain. A body translates desire into sound to be translated, to become knowledge, and vision translates the body into its knowledge of a body’s world. This is true for both fairies and humans across their monarchical identities. Transparency does not finish the precise desire within translation, nor does the transposing effect of love fully answer the questions translation may pose (I.1.232). Questions of the body in this unfinished state seem to create the nature of words in their unsettlement with one another across the kinds of life who voice them. What are the differences between a body “out of hearing” and a body one might see through? What is a body that it may be considered, reported, and translated? A word is animal and vegetative. A word was made flesh, but is a word made fairy? Are fairies translatable or does their immortality impart them only as translators? What is a translator that cannot herself be translated, and what is being if being cannot utter words like “to be or not to be?”
Being transparent or transposed are kinds of metamorphosis by degrees. Bottom’s translation into an ass is different too, by degrees, from Helena’s desire for translation, and not only because of their differences in rank and kind, or the erotic worlds they inhabit. To define translation further, we may need to consider the act of forgery in the realm of metamorphosis as a vegetative growth, a kind of oneiric cause for the emotional worlds in translated and untranslatable being. Hermia wakes from her dream of the serpent with fear. In Robin’s report to Oberon of Titania falling in love with Bottom, he describes the fear of the mechanicals upon seeing Bottom’s head:
“Their sense thus weak, lost with their fears thus strong,
Made senseless things begin to do them wrong.
For briers and thorns at their apparel snatch;
Some sleeves, some hats—from yielders all things catch.
I led them on in this distracted fear,
And left sweet Pyramus translated there;
When in that moment, so it came to pass,
Titania waked and straightway loved an ass.” (III.2.27-34)
Fear makes one swoon, elicited by the senses, but it is also a distracted fear, a fear which draws or drags apart the reproductive mends of imagination in their literacy of senses. The way “briers and thorns” snatch onto the clothes of the mechanicals as their senses are weakened by fear is not only the physical reality of timidity rendering bodies more permeable to the fragmentary ways of nature, but also a telling of nature interpreted by bodies into fragments of human drama, that one might enclose oneself with into a state of yielding. Compare how “from yielders all things catch,” with Helena’s desire for translation:
“Sickness is catching. O, were favour so!
Your words I catch, fair Hermia; ere I go,
My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye,
My tongue should catch your tongue’s sweet melody…” (I.1.186-9)
To catch is to hinder the movement of the desired word, voice, or melody—the life of a sound caught between a nominal and verbal state of being. Oddly, Robin describes Bottom left in his translated state not as Bottom but as “Pyramus” (III.2.27-32). In fact, Bottom seems to disappear, like the centrifugal disappearance of Eros, as “monster,” “Pyramus,” “mimic,” and “ass” become metonyms for Titania’s new love (III.2.6, 14, 19, 34). The comedic failure to act is a form of the untranslatable, and Bottom’s “misspeaking” may be read as a forgery with small discrepancies by letter, a translation of the body into normal and abnormal freedoms of speech: “generally,” and “severally,” “Thisne” and “Thisbe,” “odious” and “odours,” as if certain words were minor burls in the speech pattern of bark digressing from their thread of reproduction (I.2.2, 45-6, III.1.77-8). Eros laughs at itself. A kind of forgery takes place where translation cannot.
Fairies permeate water and fire, “[girdling] round about the earth in forty minutes,” yet they sleep and wake (II.1.2-5, 175-6). While the transposition of time through the body of fairies turns the space of a dream indeterminable, fairies still share the endurance of time as human bodies. Robin’s speech to Oberon also obtains another dimension as a report of events containing Titania while she is asleep. The language translating the world as it occurs around Titania’s sleep has no counterpoise of language that will arise from her, for this moment of the world is untranslatable into her own memory. Memory is a “blind” reading, a kind of love which looks with the mind, having moved past the need for eyes. The comedy of the mechanicals memorizing their parts disturbs the meaning of blind love, just as the blindness of love percolates through fairy and human bodies. In one reading the blindness of love requires a capacity for translation, which Titania and the lovers are unable to fulfill for themselves. Mending a textile is a forgery of jealousy, for words are easy to repair awry like charms of false love placed on eyes of true love (III.2.89-91). Jealousy is a naturalizing expression for the untranslatable, a reaction to the incapacity of a body, which is both rational and irrational; rational because a creature of love, whether fairy or human, will know jealousy, and irrational for not only the intensity of its manners, but the strangeness of its affect, visible between language and nature, in the way a writing of dreams may accompany the heart concealed beneath the speeches of love trespassing either world of fairies or humans.
Bibliography
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edited by Peter Holland. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994.