Abstract

While I acknowledge others' commentaries on the interpretive aspects of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, I argue that in the play Shakespeare draws attention to the "split" itself implied in the interpretive process: the disjunction between "thing" and "thing-translated-into-language." The exploration of such a disjunctive "space" evokes philosophical, rhetorical, narratological, and epistemological questions about the nature of human identity, human truth, and human experience. Such concerns come to bear in this play upon a Rome undergoing epistemological change and a hero within whom the conflicts of a divided city moving from a martial to a civil culture are epitomized. Coriolanus exemplifies the man whose approach to the self and the world is strictly "serious"; he insists on the validity of only one narrative, that of warlike Roman virtus. For him, only one way of being in the world is possible: he sees himself as possessing a fixed self existing in a world governed by absolute principles that do not change. Thus, Coriolanus resists interpretation by others, distrusting how words, to him, corrupt or alter the "truth" of pure action. Such a stance, in relation to a changing and highly "rhetorical" Rome, causes Coriolanus to become embroiled in full-blown epistemological crisis. His inability to resolve the dilemma leads to his banishment, his planned attack against Rome, and his violent death. The hero has one brief moment of self-confrontation and self-recognition when he is cornered and forced into the "split"---a place for him of utmost contradiction, contingency, and narrative collapse---that he avoids throughout the play. Because Coriolanus has resisted recognizing his self-divisions and complicity in the narrational, he cannot appropriate the efficacies of this "space between," and his return to an unchanged "absolute" self leads to his destruction. Shakespeare "marks off" a "split" in this play by emphasizing inconclusiveness, dividedness, incompleteness, irresolution, and fragmentation. Verbal art itself emerges as inhabiting the mediating "space" between "thing" and "language."