at least one daughter, maybe two ( 1. 3. 142 , 171 ). Hence, to clear his name, he
exoticizes neither himself nor his past; he shows how he has effectively, seduc-
tively, exoticized his “travailous history,” how he has stressed his distresses and
singled out the “disastrous chances” from its “all.” The intertextual transaction
betweenOthelloand its exotic referents works thus against the grain of
“truth.” For exoticism appears here as the linchpin of Othello’s strategy, not
just of his story. What we see then is an important narrative “process,” the
Moor engaging in a cross-cultural exchange that works to transform, rather
than merely play to, Venetian culture.
While Othello’s testimony seduces his Venetian spectators, teasing out
their desires to hear of his exotic experiences in “this great world,” instead of
creating or confirming a boundary between the two, between the traveler’s
exotic “everywhere,” and the domesticated “here” of Venice, he suggestively
bridges the gap.^65 That is, he embeds the “great world” within Venice as part
of its own symbolic economy, producing his extraordinary experiences as a
source of imagery and meaning for Venice itself. Just before Othello makes a
narrative transition between his past elsewhere and his courtship here, be-
tween his history and Desdemona’s, he emphasizes what is perhaps his most
exotic figure, the Cannibals, first describing them as subjects who “each other
eat” and then renaming them as or listing them beside “the Anthropophagi.”
If these two figures are technically different, the one group eating only its
own, the other happy to eat others, they reinforce each other almost to a point
of redundancy.^66 With this emphasis set, Othello then inserts the image as
metaphor into his depiction of Desdemona, explaining that she “devour[ed]
up my discourse” with “a greedy ear” ( 1. 3. 149 – 50 ).
Critics have explored at length the implications of this translation for
the representation of the desiring female and female desire, which are thus
rendered exotic, if not monstrous.^67 Equally important, though, are the im-
plications for the exotic figure itself, which here serves as the rhetorical vehi-
cle for representing Venice. According to Quintilian, metaphor (“translatio”)
relies on the transfer of one term “from the place to which it properly be-
longs” to another term, which is somehow insufficient and needs clarifica-
tion or ornamentation.^68 And in Othello, it is the image of cannibalism that
is transferred out of its proper context to supplement the depiction of the
implicitly insufficient Venetian subject, holding a meaning that the subject
herself does not. One effect of its deployment may be to defamiliarize the fa-
miliar, to turn the desiring female into an exotic. Yet the inherent “double-
nesse” of metaphor—which fascinated, if not troubled, rhetoricians such as
178 chapter seven