The role of the hero – Othello and The Winter's Tale.

The Hero is the person who is bereft in the Wilderness ($), who is socialized in the City (S₁), who receives information or advantage in the New Place (S₂), who attains the object of desire in the Garden (a). Though the choice of starting point in this narrative cycle may confer on the Hero the appearance either of agency or passivity, the essence of the Hero is to be involved in a characteristic succession of processes. In many cases, the identity of this character will be obvious; where it is not, by identifying the processes we may identify the Hero and vice versa.

To illustrate this, I am going to consider two plays of Shakespeare's: Othello and The Winter's Tale. Each has the structure S₁> S₂ > a > $, allied to Lacan's discourse of the university, in my terms the sardonic narrative. The key to understanding how this works in Othello is identifying the Garden: the phase in which some character has obtained (though temporarily only, for the Garden is not the terminal phase in this kind of narrative) their object of desire.

Act IV, 2 fits this description – the point in the play by which Iago has convinced Othello of Desdemona's unfaithfulness: the point, in effect, by which Othello has been seduced by Iago. It would seem, then, that Iago must be the Hero, while Othello will play the role of Princess, the immanent genius of the Garden.

How does this work for the rest of the play? Act I begins in the City (Venice); all the characters are introduced; Iago stirs up conflict by revealing to Brabantio Othello's relationship with his daughter. If Iago is to be the Hero, Othello, in terms of narrative role, has to be the Villain – the character with whom the Hero comes into conflict.

In Act II the principal characters have removed to Cyprus - the New Place. Iago  obtains preferment from Othello at the expense of Cassio: Iago therefore is Hero, Othello is King.

Then in V, 2, the Wilderness, Iago is undone by Emillia's revelations. We might expect that Othello would play the role of Donor here, and indeed the handkerchief, which seals Iago's destruction, is a token that Othello originally bestowed.

If we conceive of a 'tragic hero' as the victim of Fate, Othello qualifies for this description to the extent that he inhabits a succession of roles wished on him by the heroic trajectory of Iago; what makes the play so uncomfortable for the audience, it seems to me, is that it is their natural inclination to invest in the success of the Hero, while the Hero's actions in this play make that impossible.

In The Winter's Tale, on the other hand, the same structure is realized in quite a different way. Once again, we begin in the city, here the court of Sicilia, where Hermione falls under the suspicion of her husband Leontes for much the same reason as Othello is first persuaded to distrust Desdemona. There can be little doubt that Leontes is Villain in both the structural and the conventional senses; he is contested by a succession of characters and finally overcome by the words of the Oracle.

Act III, 3 brings us to the New Place, the sea-coast of Bohemia. The New Place is associated with death; here it is introduced by the deaths of Antigonus (pursued by a bear), and of his company in a shipwreck. The dispensing of information by Father Time (IV, 1) suggests that he is playing the role of King.

By IV, 4 we are clearly in the Garden with Florizel and Perdita, and equally clearly Perdita is the Princess, but this idyll is abruptly terminated by Polixenes, and the transition to the Wilderness marked by the journey to Sicilia, where in V, 2 Paulina plays Donor to Leontes by revealing that Hermione is still alive (Hermione revalorizing Leontes here just as the handkerchief revalorized Iago).

Who is the Hero? The role of Father Time, I think is a giveaway, for the target of his information is the audience. It is the audience who are involved in every phase: Antigonus, Paulina and the Oracle are proxies for the audience in resisting the manifest injustice of Leontes, Florizel and Leontes proxies for the audience's desire that Perdita and Hermione should be reinstated (we note that the union of Florizel and Perdita is reported, not enacted: the conclusion of their story plays out far from centre stage). The audience is made the confidant both of Father Time and of Autolycus.

A play, in other words, where the audience will have no difficulty identifying with the Hero, but where, as in Othello, the identity of the Hero is paradoxical. But we might expect that from a sardonic narrative.

Kinds of attraction:

Doing a bit of half-serious family history, I’m struck by the way people got together in the 19th century –lets say in the period from about 1850 to about 1950. I’m talking about country properties: they didn’t interact much with nearby towns, but people travelled from property to property – to siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins – and in the process visited those people's friends – all the time. Each family had a network, in other words, and the result was that marriages were usually within the network, and families often developed multiple links over time, as cousins married brothers, and so on. In my own family there are at least three such connections in a hundred years.

Mothers and daughters travelled to see their extended families (and perhaps in the case of mothers to take a break from childbearing); sons travelled for work experience in places where, though the environment might be demanding it would not be unfriendly; people travelled to parties, weddings and celebrations. In my mother’s family’s case the path stretched from Wangaratta to Wentworth to Menindee to Wilcannia to Thargomindah to Longreach – they were all on the circuit, and people were coming and going all the time.

The result, it seems to me, was that the likelihood of marriage between two nodes in this network would be simply (in the ideal case) the product of the number of available partners at the two places irrespective of the distance between them – whereas townspeople stereotypically married the girl next door.

We know from geographers that the mutual intercomprehension of two places is a function of the product of their populations divided by the distance between them, and Newtonian gravity, of course, is proportional to the products of two masses divided by the square of the distance between them.

It seems to me that these relations are all the same phenomenon, but applied to a one-dimensional, a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional frame of reference respectively – so for the one-dimensional case we have N₁ x N₂ / D⁰, for the two-dimensional N₁ x N₂ / D¹, and so forth.

Then I’m led to wonder whether we mightn’t see the same sort of effect at work in the outer reaches of giant galaxies, where gravitation, as I understand it, can be anomalously strong.

Just a thought.

'Frozen'

Two little girl princesses in some distant northern land. The younger (Anna) badgers the elder (Elsa) to get up and play with her. Elsa, though reluctant, is finally persuaded. She can make snow and ice appear with a wave of her hand, and they play snow games in the hall of the palace till Anna is injured. After this, Elsa is sequestered in her apartments for fear her gift will cause harm, though Anna continues to knock on her door and beg her to play.

In due course the king and queen are drowned; Elsa, now grown up, is to become queen. Foreign dignitaries arrive for the coronation. Anna makes the acquaintance of Prince Someone-or-other, they share some flirtatious high-jinks, and she believes she is in love.

In the coronation ceremony, Elsa is asked to remove her glove, thus unveiling her frost-dealing hand. When Anna comes to ask for permission to marry the Prince, Elsa rebuffs her and lets loose a storm of winter on the country. The people mutter, Elsa flees to the mountains and conjures up an ice palace for herself.

Anna borrows the Prince’s horse and sets out to find her sister and get her to lift the spell of winter. When the horse can go no further, she falls in, at a general store in the wilderness, with Kristoff, a mountain man with a sledge drawn by a reindeer; she enlists him to take her to Elsa’s retreat. After many adventures they get there, picking up Olaf, a talking snowman, on the way. Anna petitions Elsa, who evicts them with the help of an ice monster.

Anna & co, pursued by the ice monster, are forced to retreat down perilous cliffs, etc. In the course of this Kristoff notices that Anna has incurred a deadly and progressive injury – a splinter of ice has pierced her heart. It seems this can only be cured by true love, which is defined as putting someone else’s need before your own.

Meanwhile, the Prince’s horse has returned riderless to the palace, whereupon the Prince sets out to search for Anna, accompanied by an armed force some of whom have orders to kill Elsa if they find her. They have a much easier job of reaching the ice palace than Anna and Kristoff did, and capture Elsa even while the attempts on her life are frustrated by her own efforts and those of the Prince.

The Prince now announces that his intention all the time has been to secure possession of the kingdom. Elsa is confined to the palace, her potent hands locked into sleeves. Here, while Anna and Olaf search for Elsa, Anna is overcome with outer and inner frost and left for dead; Olaf revives her by lighting a fire to his own danger.

Elsa summons an explosion of cold; her prison is blasted open and she escapes; Anna, tracking her through the snow, reaches her sister just as she herself is transformed to solid ice. This breaks the spell; summer is restored, the kingdom put to rights – and Olaf is granted a little peripatetic snow-cloud to save him from melting.

What are we to make of all this?

There are, of course, familiar elements. The paired journeys – difficult and easy. If the storekeeper who introduces Kristoff looks like a Donor out of Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Kristoff and his reindeer are surely Helpers from the same schema, and Olaf can fill the role of the Hero’s wisecracking sidekick (the girl Luned in The Lady of the Fountain, the cat Jiji in Kiki’s Delivery Service). The Prince’s volte face was a surprise, but I could wear it as ‘False Hero is unmasked’. But who is the Hero, and what sort of a narrative is it? For without knowing that, what satisfaction can we take from its conclusion?

I am, of course, assuming a narrative of four stages – the garden (a), the wilderness ($), the city (S₁) and the new place (S₂) – occurring always in that order, but subject to cyclic shifting so that any of the four elements may be initial. Propp’s folktale, for example, begins with $ and ends with a.

Each of these stages has its governing character –the Donor, the Villain, the King and the Princess respectively – with whom the Hero interacts, and the transitions between stages are marked by the requirement to perform tasks ($ to S₁, S₂ to a) or undertake journeys (a to $, S₁ to S₂). Given this framework, it should be possible to identify who is performing the various roles.

Anna is the focal character, and as such entitled to the first audition for the role of Hero. If we can leave aside for a moment the complicated initial relation between the two sisters, the release of Elsa’s destructive powers (violation of a prohibition) ushers in the wilderness phase, Anna’s meeting with the Donor, her acquisition of Helpers, their difficult journey. Like the Green Knight’s castle in its frozen wilderness, the ice palace stands for the city – the site where the Hero must encounter the Villain. Who then has to be Elsa.

This is where identifying Anna as Hero begins to lose credibility. The difficult journey should properly have preceded the meeting with the Donor, we might have expected a task or tasks prior to entry into the city – but allowing for some telescoping of these elements, what do we make of Elsa as Villain, and what is new about the place in which Anna finds herself after their encounter? The new place is connected with denouement, explanation, unravelling, ultimately with death: Anna has been struck by a terminal affliction, certainly, but no overarching explanation is offered for the course the story has taken so far.

We could conclude that the scriptwriters were just using an incoherent grab-bag of familiar elements – Olaf the snowman thrown in to appease the toddlers, for example, as Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review suggests – but is that even possible, given the unconscious pressures writers and readers alike are subjected to by the act of story-telling? The way Anna’s hair is lifted by the wind may be delightful for the beauty and sheer virtuosity of the effect, but a thousand such effects – and there must be a thousand – are not enough to compensate for a worrying unease: not only do we have no resolution, but it is not even clear what it is that needs to be resolved.

The only other character prominent enough for the role of Hero in the story is Elsa – but what then to make of the three injuries/rebuffs she gives Anna? The threeness is suggestive – it’s often associated with the tasks the Hero must fulfil to make the transition from wilderness to city or, as with Gluck in The King of the Golden River, from new place to garden. Yet Anna’s actions don’t easily square with the kinds of task the Hero is typically asked to fulfil, whether it be sharing a meagre morsel with a beggar, or turning aside from a quest to help an old woman. The best fit for the interaction of Elsa with Anna is Propp’s D⁹ : ‘Combat with a hostile Donor’.

This, finally, is the key to unlocking the significance of the tale and to explaining what makes it superficially so impenetrable. The problem is ideological: once one realizes that ‘Frozen’ is a Satanist fairytale, everything falls into place. The supreme good in this story world is not the welfare of others, but self-fulfilment. What Elsa is trying to win from Anna, and what Anna is so reluctant to give, is autonomy.

A common feature of the wilderness phase is the revalorization of the Hero by association with some precious or beautiful thing: Cinderella and the glass slipper, Owein and the magic ointment. For Elsa, it is her own creation – the ice palace – not something bestowed by a kindly stranger. The city is her confrontation with the Prince (the Villain), whose villainy is now completely explicable: he doesn’t want to marry Elsa because he is a villain, but he is a villain because he wants Elsa – his earlier flirtation with Anna is seen to have been a sighting shot.

From here it’s an easy journey for Elsa to the living death of confinement (?marriage) within what is now the Prince’s palace, all her powers held in check. A supreme effort – difficult task – blasts her out of this new place and makes possible the garden finale: Elsa reconciled with Anna, who has at last learnt to love Elsa for what she is rather than seek what Elsa can do for her. Unlike the conventional Hero, Elsa doesn’t win the Princess – she is the Princess in her own fairytale. In a significant coda, Olaf too is freed to do his own thing – to remain a snowman whatever the weather.

Anna’s story, though foregrounded, is a subplot, and a subplot of the Bildungsroman variety, which begins with S₂ and moves through a and $ to S₁. This kind of story often begins with a separation from parents – here Anna’s separation from Elsa is the event that initiates her entry to the new place. Her flirtation with the Prince (who here plays the role of Princess) is the garden, she journeys to find rejection from Elsa in the wilderness (Kristoff playing the role of Donor by telling her what true love is), and through the difficult task of overcoming her own resentment she arrives at last in the city, a new social synthesis where her broken relationship with Elsa is re-formed.

Though the story shares with Andersen’s Snow Queen the motif of the debilitating shard of ice in the heart, it is hard to imagine anything quite so different as ‘Frozen’ from Andersen’s erotic allegory. But a Satanist fairytale is something, I suppose – Aleister Crowley would have liked it, and the fantasy of becoming an autonomous being appeals to the adolescent in all of us.