The Real Thing

“Shylock and Jessica” by Maurycy Gottlieb (1876)

Most people think the title of The Merchant of Venice refers to Shylock, who is the most prominent character in Shakespeare’s play. But the title page plainly identifies Antonio as “a merchant of Venice" and Shylock simply as “a Jew." This is, in some way, odd since Shylock is the one that Bassanio goes to when he needs the money. Antonio, who is the shipping business, doesn’t have the dough. And therein lies the germ of at least one of the many conflicts the play illuminates. Shylock cannot be a real merchant since being a Jew he would have been excluded from many of the activities of the merchant class, of which Antonio is a member.  He's condemned to the shadows of commerce, marginalized and made to feel as if any pretensions he might have to respectability were manifestations of a false self. Indeed Antonio looks down on Shylock for being a moneylender. And Shylock is in turn  contemptuous of the Janus-faced individual who has no qualms about seeking help from someone he vilifies to others. Clearly Shylock is as much a merchant as Antonio. Only he’s in what we now call finance. To take the racial element out of the mix, Shylock is a Venetian Warren Buffett while Antonio is the owner of one of the companies that would potentially comprise a proto-Berkshire Hathaway. Shylock wants his pound of flesh, but if he weren’t suffering from loss aversion, a neuropsychological issue by which people make decisions that are emotionally rather than rationally driven, he might be willing to take a piece of Antonio’s action rather than his flesh when his adversary's chickens (aka boats) come home to roost. Of course, for all the mixture of scholasticism and biblical scholarship that the play exudes (with its caskets, rings and bond), reason is hardly what’s at work. In one of the most brilliant though not oft quoted passages, Shylock explains his seemingly “motiveless malignity” (to quote Coleridge’s famous lines about Iago) thusly, “So I can give no reason, nor I will not/ More than a lodged hate and a certain loathing/I bear Antonio, that I follow thus/A loosing suit against him.” And later he declaims, “You have among you many a purchased slave/Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules/You use in abject and in slavish parts…Shall I say to you/ ‘let them be free and marry them to your heirs/ Why sweat they under burdens?’…The pound of flesh which I demand of him/ Is dearly bought, ’tis mine, and I will have it.” Even though he's offered three times the amount of the loan, Shylock still refuses to allow it to be paid off. So he's hardly a Shylock, for what he’s afraid of losing is not his money, rather the possibility of vengeance against the person who "hates our sacred nation...my bargains and my well-won thrift/Which he calls interest” and who called him a “misbeliever, cutthroat dog/And spet upon my Jewish gabardine.” When Portnoy’s Complaint was published Philip Roth was criticized for his portrayal of a Jew who masturbated into a piece of liver. Shakespeare, of course, was not Jewish, but the criticism over the ages has been similar. The English critic John Gross wrote a book called Shylock: A Legend and its Legacy about how Shakespeare’s character was used for Nazi propaganda. We live in particularly litigious times where multivalent literary creations run afoul of identity politics. Clearly Shylock’s humanity needs no apology. However, let’s play the devil’s advocate and make one. What would Shylock be today? Perhaps he’d be one of those money managers who refuse to invest in companies that produce fossil based fuels? After all, besides defaming Jews, Antonio's plainly a colonialist. Imagine the degree to which indigenous populations must have been exploited for the sake of the wealth merchants like him sought to accrue?

Little Death in Venice

Now it’s time to return to a painful subject: the decline of furtive browsing. Back in l992, John Gross wrote The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800. But no one has yet produced a history of the decline of the X-rated section at newspaper kiosks, nor has anyone attempted to document the stinging feeling of shame inflicted by the withering glances of prudish news agents, whose forbidden merchandise served as an incubator of male desire. Playboy, Penthouse and even Hustler are still sold in independent drugstores and in most newsstands, but they have become lifestyle magazines that are an accepted feature of mass culture. Back in the heyday of newsstand sex, magazines like Gent and Sir were printed on cheap paper stock, which actually blurred the images of the models, whose lurid poses were rendered with shabby photography. The layout of the shots in the old editions of Gent and Sir had an extemporaneous quality, as if they were taken on the run, in the kind of scruffy motel rooms to which the reader might retreat after being chased away from the newsstand for stealing free looks. The Internet, with its free and easily accessible pornography, has killed one of the great coming-of-age experiences that defined adolescence for the American male. Fallen women in lacey lingerie have been replaced by emboldened vixens whose high-definition sexuality has denuded fantasy of both its privacy and its mystique. Where will the male libido find the guilt and transgression that had previously been the hallmark of tortured adolescence, and incidentally of great works like Lolita and Death in Venice? There was a brief period before the death of porn magazines when a whole new bevy of publications, Cheri, Club and Club International, emerged to carry on the tradition of fetishistic objectification. The Notorious Bettie Page, Mary Harron’s 2005 film about the famed bondage model who later became a devout Christian (and her Henry Higgins, Irving Klaw), was a swansong for the great age when the fumes of the tobacconist were the madeleine of illicit desire. When Ronald Reagan was a television announcer, he  declared, “At General Electric, progress is our most important product.”  In the case of pornography, progress hasn’t improved anything.