there may be none. Before “this” lies the (Venetian) lover, an Indian, maybe
Judean, and Arabian trees; after lies the pat dichotomy, Venetian against Turk,
done and undone by the Moor’s claim to be both the Turk and the Turk-
killing defender of the Venetians. The images get increasingly detailed, vivid,
and physically immediate as Othello goes along, climaxing when he not only
describes but actually enacts his startling suicide. At this, his darkest, most
self-destructive moment, he might well be setting aside the exotically sugges-
tive figures of the East and confining himself within the more readable, po-
tentially incriminating opposition between Venetians and Turks, which has
authorized his political, if not domestic, place in Venice. Even so, it is impos-
sible to tell whether Othello’s self-representation is continuous or discontinu-
ous, a collage or a progression, impossible to tell whether the figures augment,
supplant, or, in a Derridean sense, supplement each other. Is Othello, like
Hamlet, improvising his way through a number of identities, across the rubs,
until he gets it right? Or is he picturing himself as an amalgamated, multicul-
tural subject, whose identity extends provocatively beyond any preordained
geographical boundaries or any ready-made tensions or elisions between
Venetian, Turk, and Moor?
More important than the answers, which will in any case be indetermi-
nate, is the fact that at the very moment Othello hands his story over, he re-
sists settling its terms. “Set you down this” is not the be-all and end-all here,
either for him or for the play. Within the dramatic fiction, the prospect of
setting down “this,” the Moor’s story, appears somehow unsettling, unsatisfy-
ing, and untenable—even, if not especially, to the Moor himself. Othello be-
gins, in fact, by asserting and immediately dismissing a bold self-evaluation:
“I have done the state some service, and they know’t— / No more of that”
( 5. 2. 338 – 39 ). Shakespeare may be pointing to a “fact” of Venetian history, that
foreigners could become citizens on the basis of “service” to the state—a fact
that could clarify how Othello occupies the place of “Moor of Venice” in the
first place.^3 “That,” however, provides a false and fleeting start, its absolutes
(“I have done” and “they know’t”) absolutely rejected as the sum of his part:
“no more of that.” Before suggesting more elusive and exotic models, Othello
adds a preemptive caution: Lodovico is to “extenuate,” to minimize or excuse,
“nothing,” nor alternatively, to say anything (“aught”) “in malice.”^4 Although
Othello anticipates being judged, for better or for worse, he positions his case
between the extremes of exoneration and condemnation. To speak of him as
he is is to imagine an indefinite middle ground, for which there are no words,
between a series of different, not exactly oppositional poles—the wisely and
2 introduction