Coriolanus: Monster
I have nothing but scattered evidences for an idea whose cornerstones I cannot lay. I do not think, insofar as I remain coherent, that what I have to present here is uninteresting. Indeed, I saw its fragments when I first read the play—and was tantalized. I watched bloom a theory which seemed to encompass everything—to explain the opaque Coriolanus, both play and man. Like Tantalus, I would reach for textual evidence to only find such a theory plucked from me even by some single moment in the play. I don't know where to begin, so I'll just start from the top.
—
I don't know quite how to say this:
I think, for Coriolanus, external appearance IS reality. I would not say that he believes this, because belief seems too open to being discredited. I do not think he can doubt this proposition—I think it is axiomatic, and that the universe responds to him as if it were true. I think this is true until he reconciles with his mother in Act V, Scene 3, after which point he joins the reality of the other characters in the play. I think this can be demonstrated circumstantially by examining some corollary topics.
So where's the problem? In short, I cannot decisively answer the most basic questions of all: So what? What would it mean for Shakespeare to figure such a character? How is he a hero, and why is it tragedy for him to die? The answers, to me, seem to be obscured by—what else?—his relationship with his mother. If what I suggest is true, then how did his upbringing at her hands bring it about? How did it allow her to undo this state in the reconciliation scene? The impetus for all his actions and decisions would seem to be one she instilled in him. Several times, she claims agency in his creation, and he apparently knows and agrees: "..as thou hast said / My praises made thee first a soldier.." But to what extent does she continue to create or control him? Given the fact that her life and livelihood face the very real risk of annihilation in his march on Rome—"Wife, mother, child, I know not"—to figure her as a puppet-master over an egoless Coriolanus is as unreasonable as dismissing her altogether.
I can suggest a few possibilities, but cannot decide between them. I submit that the question is posed really very early in the play—in the third scene, in fact—while his mother and wife are discussing both Martius and his son. In my final reread, one phrase struck me. This phrase is so full of both meaning and ambiguity that I forfeited my hopes of an easy solution to the problem—perhaps of any solution at all.
"I, considering how honour would become such a person—that it was no better than, picture-like, to hang by th' wall if renown made it not stir—was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame."
Volumnia, of course. In the most simplified, strictly literal interpretation of the play, this line effects a blunt characterization of her as a barbaric narcissist-by-proxy using her son to glorify herself. This can't be the complete picture, though. Far from it. I don't believe that the man who had within the previous ten years of his life written Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear could ever be so ham-fisted. This portrait isn't so much false, I feel, as it is irrelevant. Whether or not my specific figuring of the play's language is correct, there is too much subtlety for a character who can so elegantly express self-immolation in grieving as when she says "Anger's my meat; I sup upon myself, / And so shall starve with feeding. / .. lament as I do, / In anger, Juno-like."
Additional glances at the passage reveal a factorial of alternate meanings. She might be equating honor with fame, but she also might be setting them as opposites, or even as compliments. By "person", does she mean simply—as the Norton notes offer—his lovely appearance, or does she also mean him as an individual? The "it" that would stir might be the person, but it also might be the honor. Even "such" might either demonstrate or intensify—or both. The most harrowing of all possibilities lies in the ambiguity of the word "become"—especially given the way she then countenances the possibility of his death: "Then his good report should have been my son; I therein would have found issue." I do not believe she doesn't love him as every mother loves her child, nor he anything less for her. I feel this for the same reason that I am certain Othello loves Desdemona even as he kills her: Coriolanus weeps, "O mother, mother!" even as she kills him; that is, "[prevails] most mortal to him".
But oh, that "become". Even at its most innocuous "make more beautiful," this is beauty in the eyes of a woman who loves every one of his twenty-seven scars—who thinks that the blood on her dying son's forehead would be transcendently lovely; beauty for a woman who thinks that a son not risking death is no better than an inanimate object. I contend that she certainly does mean "become" in this sense, because they both seem obsessed with beauty—and so exteriors.
But what about "turn into"? The interpretations this definition allows suggest to me the origins of Coriolanus' idiosyncratic reality. I couldn't say precisely what it means, but I get the whiff of the formation of a new person—a new persona, a mask—concurrent with the suggestion that his highest goal might be to become some sort of roaming piece of art. Couple these feelings with the fact that she has been so peculiarly ready, "when / for a day of kings' entreaties a mother should not / sell him an hour from her beholding,"to banish him from her sight, and possibly forever at that. One is given the sense that from a very young age, Coriolanus was instilled with a deeply neurotic ontology of identity, appearance, and beauty. Whither he might therefore be driven, though, is a mystery to me. Maybe he is obsessed with becoming decorated with honor, title, oak garland, and perhaps wounds until he is finally beautiful enough for his mother to wish to see him—or until the whole world has seen him, and he has no excuse not to join her as a painting on her wall. If so, his remark on leaving the city might be evidence: "I shall be loved when I am lack'd." Maybe he isn't even doing it for her sake, just for his own; perhaps he believes that his love for any other and the love of another for him are determined by his appearance (because one is what one looks like). I require that any understanding of "appearance" must include titles and honors; they, too, are things which can be laid upon a person. I don't think this is a stretch, because whether his motivation is a compulsive self-beautification or not, he does seek ever more respectable titles: "... Indeed I would be consul."
I have scarcely proved anything, and I haven't even begun to delve into my insecurities about this proposition. Nonetheless, I'll proceed through some corollary propositions to further sketch this sense. Coriolanus, I submit, is a man obsessed with showing, compelled to demonstrate himself, and that in the oldest sense of the word, Coriolanus is a monster: an appearance that is a warning; an entity for whom time does not exist; some unnatural being in which natural man is joined to the unnatural unknown.
—
Mars
The boldest claim I have to make is that Caius Martius Coriolanus is impenetrable. He is like the god of war: immortal, invincible, indomitable. The notion that he is godlike, that he is Mars in some sense, is nothing new, of course—his mother named him Martius for that precise reason. When he is at his most warlike and vicious after having joined the Volscians, representatives from both cities note how godlike he has become. Cominius says, "He is their god: he leads them like a thing / Made by some other deity than nature, / That shapes man better.." and Aufidius' lieutenant informs Aufidius, "Your soldiers use him as the grace 'fore meat". His mother, in the reconciliation scene, as it were, lifts this notion by insisting that he is not a god, but merely "imitate[s] the graces of the gods.." and Aufidius, in his betrayal, outright denies him this deity: "Name not the god.." I propose, then, that this invincibility is an inevitable function of his unusual ontology of appearance/identity. Insofar as he is without an interior, nothing can enter into him. The play, I think, figures this in a number of ways.
The Mars parallels are clear, but the theoretical evidence that he might be truly impenetrable needs elucidation. I begin by noting that the name given him for valor contains this notion. "Coriol" is for circumference, for around-ness, as it were, denying any aspect of interiority or non-surfaceness; and "anus,"—which I submit that Shakespeare knew through Latin, even if the word itself hadn't yet breached English—suggests that he excretes only and takes in nothing. This excretion echoes an earlier line of Martius' in response to the prospect of war: "..we shall ha' means to vent / Our musty superfluity."
I suggest also that Coriolanus' failures with words are correlated with his successes with swords—and that his ceaseless, senseless excretion of death figuratively prevents any words or swords from entering him. Menenius says as much: "His heart's his mouth: / What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent; / And, being angry, does forget that ever / He heard the name of death." His mother suggests, too, that his language forestalls his death (as does hers): "..I mock at death / With as big heart as thou.." In some sense, he is his own actions, his own words/sword, and this, his own excretion. When the soldiers lift him before he leads the attack Aufidius' division, he asks them, "..make you a sword of me?"
Allowing the blur of phonetics to alter the meanings of some of the lines, we can see more examples of a man protected by his emission of—his identification with—unfeeling, inanimate (invulnerable) words. Here, Lartius: "..Who sensibly outdares his senseless (s)word" and Menenius: "..his (s)word, death's stamp.." Even the stage directions contain this figurative phenomenon. When he has run out of words with which to defend himself to the Senate, he "draws his (s)word"—for as Volumnia later says, "action is eloquence."
On the battlefield, he is preceded (and protected) by meaningless noise, and in his wake, he leaves the wordlessness of death: "These are the ushers of Martius: before him he / carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears: / Death, that dark spirit, in 's nervy arm doth lie / Which, being advanced, declines, and then men die." The most remarkable instance of verbal apparel guarding him from death is when, at the apex of his power, he wears nothing—and so is nothing—for those whom he would destroy: "He would not answer to: forbade all names; / He was a kind of nothing, titleless, / Till he had forged himself a name o' the fire / Of burning Rome."
Three separate times, another meaning of his name appears in conjunction with invincibility. Martius, of course, also contains "mar," which Shakespeare cannot help but have also seen in "mare," Latin for "sea". The first appears in Cominius' speech before the Senate on behalf of Coriolanus' consulship: "..he waxed like a sea .. as weeds before / A vessel under sail, so men obey'd / And fell below his stem: his sword, death's stamp, / Where it did mark, it took.." The second is in his farewell to his mother: "..you were used to load me / With precepts that would make invincible / The heart that conn'd them." The third is in his wishes for his son during the reconciliation scene: "..that thou mayst prove / To shame unvulnerable, and stick i' the wars / Like a great sea-mark, standing every flaw.." Why Shakespeare might have chosen to correlate this specific notion of invincibility with the sea is unclear, but insofar as he thinks of himself by the name of Martius (which he cannot, of course, after he will attempt peace instead of war), I think it likely that he possesses this watery invulnerability.
The language of drama, of acting a part, pervades the play. If this ever applied to Coriolanus to suggest that he might somehow play falsely, that he might not be what he appears, this would prove extremely problematic. The truth is that he never does. On the contrary, it may be that he is always acting a character whose personality he derives from his appearance—this I will grant, and even support. If this is true, he does not perform any other role until the reconciliation. If one will grant that and also grant his incapacity for dishonesty (incapacity in the most profound sense of inability to contain and hide falseness), then this role is several times correlated as inextricable from war. That is, the one part he knows how to play, the part that is him, is a violent one. Volumnia would do her best to teach him another role, "..My praises made thee first a soldier, so, / To have my praise for this, perform a part / Thou hast not done before," but he has already spoken his doubts about executing it: "You have put me now to such a part which never / I shall discharge to the life." He insists that he has but one role, and it is not feeble: "Why did you wish me milder? would you have me / False to my nature? Rather say I play / The man I am."
The language of dramaturgy also figures the evaporation of this invincibility. Once he encounters his mother, wife, and child at the Volscian camp, he says, "Like a dull actor now, / I have forgot my part, and I am out, / Even to a full disgrace." The destruction of invincibility is an impossible event, and fortunately for my proposal, that is exactly what is figured: "Strike the proud cedars 'gainst the fiery sun; / Murdering impossibility, to make / What cannot be, slight work." I wouldn't go so far as to say that I believe it, but I do notice at least the possibility that, rather than dying in him, this invincibility is transferred to his son. Consider the reprise of the butterfly, which might foretell that the butterfly which Young Martius "mammocks" today will tomorrow be the "brats" of Rome whom Coriolanus intends to destroy. Volumnia suggests that his son, "by the interpretation of full time, / May show like all [him]self." The conclusion of his address to his son is also very interesting in this regard: "..standing every flaw, / And saving those that eye thee!" Those that "I" him—those who make Young Martius into Coriolanus?
—
Marred
The other common spelling of his name, "Marcius," denies me a pun which the Norton's "Martius" gracefully offers. At last count, Coriolanus has twenty-seven wounds on his body which are never revealed on stage. This fact excites Volumnia and Menenius, who exchange the following words, respectively, in anticipation of Coriolanus' return: "O, he is wounded; I thank the gods for't." "So do I, too, if it be not too much. Brings a victory in his pocket, the wounds become him."
Here, a return to the problematic "become," which has not become any easier to untangle since its first appearance. They both must feel that these scars increase his beauty. The question that will deforest scalps with scratching is that of the extent to which his wounds turn into him. I offer this answer: to the extent that he shows them. I do not know precisely what Coriolanus' end is, what it is that he would ultimately like to be, given his precarious identity.
It has been suggested that Coriolanus is the struggle of a man to define himself on his own terms, and the centerpiece of this argument is thus: immediately before the reconciliation scene, Martius vows to be unswayed by his mother's and wife's arguments: "..I'll never / Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand, / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin."
This interpretation affords a great deal of traction in interpreting Coriolanus' motives and the overall movement of the play. I do not think it is completely wrong—far from it, Martius is extremely wary of the marks, verbal or physical, that others place upon him. I do think, though, that it is incomplete, and that it fails to accommodate his more nuanced motivation. He does not seem absolutely opposed to being adorned and in some sense created by others. As I've written, I cannot fully explicate his motives. Perhaps he himself doesn't even know and is driven from moment to moment in a struggle to preserve himself. Whatever the full explanation might be, I can detail, if nothing else, the various movements he makes in the context of his appearance-as-identity.
The most obvious example of his equating reputation with appearance, and appearance with identity is his conception of slander. He reacts to slander in a way that suggests he cannot distinguish words from blows. No one likes to be slandered, and no one can be expected to keep perfectly calm in the face of verbal aggression, but Menenius offers a useful example of what is, for Rome, a normal conception of one's own ill-repute: "I am known to be .. hasty and tinder-like / upon too trivial motion; one that converses more / with the buttock of the night than with the forehead / of the morning.." and immediately after Menenius lays it to the tribunes, foisting the worst of slanders on them, Brutus calmly retorts, "Come, come, you are well understood to be a / perfecter giber for the table than a necessary / bencher in the Capitol." The tribunes, often called villains, at least demonstrate an awareness that a word cannot wound as a sword can. This throws into relief Coriolanus' physical reactions to slander. Presumably in self-defense, he draws his sword immediately after both the tribunes' and Aufidius' accusations of treason. Both scenes are filled with a kind of verbal chaos whose resemblance to a battlefield I do not think is accidental. The first: "'Tribunes!' 'Patricians!' / 'Citizens!' 'What, ho!' / 'Sicinius!' 'Brutus!' 'Coriolanus!' 'Citizens!' / 'Peace, peace, peace!' 'Stay, hold, peace!'" and the second: "'Tear him to pieces.' 'Do it presently.' 'He kill'd / my son.' 'My daughter.' 'He killed my cousin / Marcus.' 'He killed my father.'"
Less stark examples abound. He notes, "When blows have made me stay, I fled from words." Words in some sense are even more dangerous than steel. He is remarkably unnerved by the opinions of plebians for a man so physically powerful. I suggest that if every insult is a blow, the wielder is irrelevant; he cannot ignore the plebians, and wishes them away: "Think upon me! hang 'em! / I would they would forget me.." Other characters equate reputation with damage to his physical appearance. Menenius, encouraging him to repair his reputation, uses the language of healing wounds: "Come, go with us; speak fair: you may salve so.." In reproaching Coriolanus, he also says, "You'll mar all.." just as an anonymous patrician says of him, "This man has marr'd his fortune." The tribunes' own plotting also figures the destruction of his reputation as the destruction of his form: "..their blaze / Shall darken him for ever." Even in their hopes to repair the damage Coriolanus has done, Menenius speaks as if repairing a garment: "..this must be patch'd / With cloth of any colour."
This much is no great surprise, and even serves to support the theory that Coriolanus wants nothing but to be author of himself. There are yet other instances in which he rejects not only slander, but also praise. This would seem to suggest further that he would be master of his own appearance. I suggest that something more complicated is going on: the only instances in which he rejects kind words are those that are for his past actions. I submit that his conception of identity means that what is already done by definition cannot be what he currently is. He is loathe to hear about the past because the past does not exist—and so to praise it is to offer good words to nothing. He refuses to hear his mind-boggling triumphs trumpeted not hours after they are performed, even suggesting that to speak of them is to lie: "..As if I loved my little should be dieted / In praises sauced with lies." He says of his mother—whose respect I would think is most important to him of anybody's—"..my mother, / Who has a charter to extol her blood, / When she does praise me grieves me." Cominius' language also suggests this, when he tells Coriolanus, "If I should tell thee o'er this thy day's work, / Thou'ldst not believe thy deeds.."
Two moments highlight this for me best. The first is when he, having just performed his most miraculous feat in the entire play—the single-handed siege of Corioles—is asked by Cominius how he possibly managed it: "But how prevail'd you?" To which Marcius responds simply, "Will the time serve to tell? I do not think." The matter for him cannot be elucidated, nor ought it be. He immediately returns to discussing mundane battle planning. If Coriolanus' only motive is to glorify himself, no other moment could present a better opportunity. And yet, he does nothing. The other moment has him standing before the Senate in the hearing for his consulship. Cominius is preparing to recount Coriolanus many brave deeds on the battlefield, and Coriolanus stands and attempts to leave. To explain himself, he offers this: "I had rather have one scratch my head i' the sun / When the alarum were struck than idly sit / To hear my nothings monster'd." He would rather receive a wound, an actual mar on his appearance, than to hear his past glories recounted. This man is no narcissist. His language suggests, rather, that his deeds are gone—they do not exist—and that to speak of them to attempt to show who Coriolanus is is to monster them—to create an inhuman contradiction between past and present.
As I said, I don't believe that Coriolanus is opposed to receiving changes in his appearance/identity from others. He seems quite pleased to receive certain adornments. The most profound relationship between another and his appearance is that with his mother. Volumnia explains this relationship to him very briefly: "I holp to frame thee." I suggest part of the reason that he is so bound to her is that she has helped him to best make himself more beautiful. But this means, of course, that one cannot deny his occasional willingness to be defined by others. The real difference between these praises, which he accepts, and the previously-listed praises, which he rejects, is that these are laid upon him—they are things which he can bear always. He has three times accepted the oak garland for the war. His reaction toward the awarding of the title of Coriolanus, too, is by no means the immediate rejection that he gives to the praise of his deeds: "I thank you. / I mean to stride your steed, and at all times / To undercrest your good addition / To the fairness of my power." He is very clear, too, that this praise, far from monstering his nothings, helps to make him more beautiful. When Volumnia is first trying to receive an audience in the Volscian camp, she makes sure that Coriolanus knows that they have played the role most important to him: "Even he, your wife, this lady, and myself, / Are suitors to you." They help to suit him. Menenius makes the point well that what is being offered in the title of consul is not some glorification of his deeds, but indeed, an adornment—most interestingly, an adornment that becomes him: "We met here both to thank and to remember / With honours like himself."
I can offer, too, a look at the way Caius Martius Coriolanus makes attempts to present himself. These conceptions highlight, I think, a delicate concern for the notion that one only exists insofar as one is seen—and so one is not looked at, one does not exist. First, in gratitude for the bestowal of the oak garland and the name of the war and further in anticipation of the bestowal of the consulship, he very much wants to go and be seen by the patricians: "Ere in our own house I do shade my head, / The good patricians must be visited; / From whom I have received not only greetings, / But with them change of honours." He is much disturbed by his trial of humility in the toga, and, given freedom to change his garment, says this: "That I'll straight do; and, knowing myself again.." Insofar as he cannot control his own appearance, he does not seem to be able to recognize that he continues to exist. This concept is echoed in his farewell after his banishment, when he says, "..you shall / Hear from me still, and never of me aught / But what is like me formerly." His reputation is his appearance, and neither can be any other but him entirely. He would seem to want to be, more than anything else, a creature of blood and death. He remains caked in the blood of others long after he could have washed it off, as Cominius notes: "The blood upon your visage dries; 'tis time / It should be look'd to: come." He offers, while under attack in the Senate, a suggestion that he is the fighting that others have seen: "There's some among you have beheld me fighting: / Come, try upon yourselves what you have seen me." He effects a noteworthy change in his method of showing himself to Aufidius. While they are enemies, he would appear to make himself that creature of blood, to be visible only as a walking reminder of death: "..'tis not my blood / Wherein thou seest me mask'd.." Later, though, in Aufidius' home, he tries five times to show himself and clearly identify himself by his appearance before he is forced to do so by name.
What manner of fallout is there, then, in terms of his appearance and his identity after the revelation to him of the interior? Our experience with him in this new state is very limited, and only a few details serve to help indicate that his conception of himself has changed in a fundamental way. Aufidius talks with his co-conspirators and informs him that Coriolanus "..Intends to appear before the people, hoping / To purge himself with words.." The most common usages of "purge" necessarily involve an inside which is to be flushed of impurities. He is willing to be seen crying before others and willing, too, to think of himself as comical and ridiculous: his eyes "sweat compassion" and "..the heavens do ope, / The gods look down, and this unnatural scene / They laugh at." When Aufidius accuses him of being a traitor, he becomes furious, but now he is aware that it is not his visage that changes, but his own interior: "Measureless liar, thou hast made my heart / Too great for what contains it." He is able to recall the past and identify his deeds as belong to himself in the present: "If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there, / That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I / Flutter'd your Volscians in Corioli: / Alone I did it."
Coriolanus' last words are a gesture of anger, a threat toward Aufidius. Some people would suggest that this makes the play profoundly boring, because it means Coriolanus learns nothing—he just dies for an ideal that he has touted all play long. I do not think this is the case. I think that the evidences of the previous paragraph indicate that he undergoes a profound change—and that the tragedy is that he has less than a day in his new, now fully human state, before he is killed. There is no reason to suggest that his continuing to be willing to fight means that he has learned nothing. Presumably Cominius is not so misled as Coriolanus about the interior—presumably he is as human all along as Coriolanus is now—and yet, he is assuredly willing to do battle. I can think of no better proof that something important has gone on in this man's soul that he would invite people to come and mar him: "Cut me to pieces, Volsces; men and lads, / Stain all your edges on me." Nor can I think of a better symbol for a man's knowledge that he is not his appearance than his death by penetration—the destruction of what is invisible.
<—>
Note: I wanted to examine one additional aspect of Coriolanus' appearance/identity ontology that I was going to name, in continuation of puns on Martius, "Market" from "mart". I'm not going to make any attempt to argue beautifully, but I thought that I ought to at least suggest the outline my argument would take:
Coriolanus cannot see the interiors of others, either, and so he is forced to judge others by their external appearances, too. This is executed in the play by means of a great deal of market language. I think Coriolanus considers the plebians to be coins—and of course, the only way to know how much a coin is worth is by its appearance. He says "I love them as they weigh," but he has no true access to the concept of weight, it being a measure of contents. His only judge of weight must be the weight indicated by their shoddy appearances. I was going to stress an identity between the interior he finally sees in Volumnia and Virgilia (they both have wombs, don't they?) and the interior of Rome (room?). This tapers nicely with what is said of Coriolanus: that despite his power, he lacks "a heaven to throne in". I was going to suggest that Aufidius is the most deadly type of man to Coriolanus, for Aufidius appears noble, but is from the first (even before he meets Coriolanus) attempting to find someway to "potch" him. The name itself, A-fid, not-faithful, suggests this to me. I was going to contrast Coriolanus' initial refusal of the spoils of war with his later reassurance to the lords of Corioles that the war had been more than paid for. What is perhaps most interesting and suggestive of the profound change that Coriolanus has undergone is this: in the final scene, he enters with commoners.
As a complete aside, something I thought was particularly interesting but couldn't even work into a paper of this little focus was the notion of Coriolanus as a drum—he can only speak by being hit.