In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the Jewish
moneylender Shylock demands a pound of Antonio’s flesh as payment for a debt.
Considering that Shylock is the villain and a rather unpleasant character
(whether or not he is also an anti-Semitic caricature), it is easy to lose
sight of how formidable a challenge Shylock presents. His argument is
unchallengeable. Antonio freely entered the contract knowing the risks and
failed to pay back the loan. Shylock has every right to his pound of flesh and
no power on Earth can stop him. Not even the Venetian Court can refuse Shylock
as to do so would undermine the very notion of contract, the foundation of the
State. To say no to Shylock would simply be to destroy the State and leave
Shylock’s right to revenge unharmed. This is similar to the White Witch’s claim
to kill the traitor Edmund. For Aslan to deny her a kill would be to go against
the Emperor’s magic and destroy Narnia.
Antonio’s flesh was valuable to
Shylock as an excuse to kill Antonio but also to strike at the Christian
society around him. It was not be enough for Shylock to knife Antonio in a
dark alley with the authorities privately deciding to not pursue the matter.
Shylock needed to kill Antonio in public with the court’s full agreement that he was right and that they were powerless to stop him. Thus, any attempt to argue
with Shylock or ask for mercy simply demonstrated that he was right and brought him ever closer to his moment of glory when he would be able to sink his knife
into Antonio's body with the full consent of a defeated court. This enflamed Shylock's desire for revenge and made him less likely to compromise.
Portia is able to defeat
Shylock, in the end, precisely because she refuses to fight him on his chosen
ground. She acknowledges that he has the right to cut a pound of flesh from
Antonio’s body. The catch is, of course, that Shylock cannot shed a drop of
Antonio’s blood. Portia’s insight is that Shylock, by pursuing Antonio, has
also made himself vulnerable to the charge that he is trying to murder Antonio.
If Shylock is going to put Antonio on trial for his pound of flesh there is no
reason why Shylock should not be on trial for attempted murder, particularly as
it was Shylock who decided to initiate this case in the first place. Here lies
Shylock's dilemma. He might be perfectly justified in claiming Antonio's flesh
but he cannot do so without convicting himself of murder. Thus, it is not
enough that Shylock is right. He still loses. (My father should take note that
I am conceding a point he has long tried to make to me that sometimes being
right is not enough.)
One could ask, how foolish is Shylock to believe
that a Christian court was actually going to let him kill one of their own. Of
course, they were going to find an excuse to turn this around and punish the
Jew. Shylock was blind to this possibility because he thought that Venetian
society simply hated him as a Jew even as they needed him as a moneylender,
demonstrating their hypocrisy. Since he believed that Venice had no
intellectual case against him, it made sense that all he needed to do was come
with facts and logic and he would smash through any opposition. No amount of
prejudice could deny that Antonio freely entered this grisly bargain and that the
State needs contracts to be enforced even unpleasant ones.
What happens, though, once we
acknowledge that Venice was not run by hateful Christians, who deep down had a
guilty conscious for their intellectually indefensible prejudice? What if it was something far more dangerous; people with a well-worked out narrative in which Shylock the Jew was a harmful
outsider and that Venice was better off without him? All of a sudden, Antonio's
murder was not an incidental part of Shylock's quest for justice, but the
primary issue as it fits into that preexisting narrative about the Jew. Now
Shylock was no longer someone who offered a necessary service, but a devil who
tricked good Christians into mortgaging their very flesh. Such a Shylock cold be
denied his bond with a clear conscience. One could even rob him of his wealth and
threaten to kill him if he did not convert and believe that one was righteous
for it. On the contrary, it was the people who thought that Shylock had a point
and should be shown mercy who were guilty of murder and the moral corruption of
the city.
Here the issue of whether
Shylock was part of Venice or an outsider becomes important. If Venice could operate without him then Shylock, even if he was unpleasant and disliked, was part of the society no different from, if not the heart, perhaps the
large intestine within the political body. As a part of Venice, all promises to
him were sacred and must be followed even to the point of death. If Shylock was a
foreign parasite then all promises were null and void and he could be lied to much
in the same way that, except for radical Kantians, we accept that it is ok to
lie to Nazis. Nazis are outside the web of moral responsibility so there never
was an obligation to be truthful with them in the first place. By pursuing his
pound of flesh, Shylock reminded Venice of why they might consider him an
outsider in the first place. Thus, Shylock's argument, though correct, created a catch-22 and was invalidated by his very act of making it.
Shylock is important to our
political discourse because all claims of absolute justice amount to a demand
for a pound of flesh. The danger of demanding a pound of flesh is that, even
when you are right, you are placing yourself on trial with your enemies, those
who already possess a narrative to justify killing you, as the judges. To
pursue such justice, therefore, requires a mind-blindness to not see that your
enemies honestly believe that they are right to kill you and are not simply
haters whose prejudices can be overcome by your carefully selected
facts.
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