Fractal Conflict, Spectacle Violence

You write that

If this culturally contingent tendency of comrades to grasp for totalising power is, as you put it ‘downstream of a worldview in which ‘the group comes first’ because, on some level, ‘The Group’ is the moral patient’ — then I would like to know where this comes from, because I don’t think it’s rooted in historical activist politics.

I agree. It’s not a consequence of historical activist politics. Old unionist poems are strong evidence when read in their historical context. At least in the beginning of the modern labour movement, ‘success’ of the movement was by definition identical to the improvement of the conditions of real, individual workers seen as whole humans.

If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy flowers, for bread is food for the body, but flowers are food for the mind.

I wrote that

I think one can read this pattern of culture—in its birth, its presence, its absence, its effect—in places as varied as The Iliad, The Massacre at Paris, the Australian Western Desert, the archetype of the ‘Christian Patriarch’, and the Heraclitean deathroll of a crocodile.

I now take that list of ‘places’ to be a kind of hasty mud map sketched by one of my subagents (without my parliament’s complete consent). A contents page. Perhaps a dare.

The Iliad is your terrain. Today, I’ll start with what, for me, feels like the most familiar ground: The Massacre at Paris. My apologies.

Christopher Marlowe died drunk, aged 29, with a friend’s dagger in his eye. Before that, though, he was a successful spy and playwright. He wrote Dr Faustus, Tamburlaine (Parts 1 & 2), Edward II, Dido, and The Jew of Malta. All great plays of the Elizabethan English stage. Unfortunately, his remaining play, The Massacre at Paris, is not so great. The Massacre at Paris really sucks.

At least as the playtext survives, The Massacre is a shitty, shitty drama. Rick Bowers describes it as filled with “scenes of violence that are brutal, abrupt, and noncausal” (131). Paul Menzer says it “reads like it was written on the back of a cocktail napkin” (363). I’m not kidding when I say that both critics are being kind. The play has got a lot of bloody violence and very little of the Marlovian language we ordinarily expect. No great soliloquies. No great character studies.

The thing is, beneath the surface, The Massacre is also an incredible illustration of the structures of transpersonal conflict. More precisely, I think it’s an account of the phenomenology by which personal conflict is transformed into transpersonal, impersonal, collective conflict. It’s a (fictionalised, historically-specific) catalogue of some of the social, cultural, and institutional mechanisms by which less toxic modes of individual thought — many of which focus on assessing tradeoffs to maximise wellbeing, minimise suffering, and satisfy preferences of actual agents — are subtly altered and restructured until one feels that one must, instead ‘do bad to do good’ or ‘sacrifice oneself for the wellbeing of The Group’ (even and especially if that ‘wellbeing’ doesn’t correlate with increased wellbeing for any members of The Group).

Marlowe’s play depicts, on stage, the events of a real-world massacre that occurred nineteen years prior to the play’s performance: the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of August 1572, in Paris, in which a series of targeted assassinations of high- status Huguenots (= French Calvinist Protestants) spiralled quickly into widespread religious violence, eventually killing somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 across France. Today, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre is generally understood to be a key turning point in the French ‘Wars of Religion’: the Huguenots were crippled, and the Catholic-perpetrated violence was (in a strategic sense) ‘successful’. Written by someone who was working in the midst the ongoing Catholic-Protestant religious conflict in Europe, with intimate knowledge of the aftermath of that massacre on the Continent, The Massacre is—for us—a case study in exactly the mindset we’ve been discussing. Narratively and structurally, Marlowe gives us a window into one mechanism by which ordinary individuals in post-Agrarian cultures become motivated to kill people who are otherwise total strangers. I imagine this is a theme to which we’ll return in the future—touchstone texts include SLA Marshall’s Men Against Fire, Joanna Bourke’s An Intimate History of Killing, Dave Grossman’s On Killing, and Daniel Bell Jr’s Just War as Christian Discipleship. Today, let’s stick with one Elizabethan playtext.

There are 22 scenes in The Massacre. While you should feel free to jump this summary, here’s scene-by-scene list of staged events for later reference:

The marriage of Henry, the young Huguenot King of Navarre, to Margaret of Valois, the sister of Charles (the Catholic King of France) and daughter of Catherine de Medici (the Catholic Queen Mother). The marriage is an attempt to put to bed existing conflict. Nobody is happy about it.
We meet the Duke of Guise, a deeply Machiavellian member of the Catholic League. He’s a man with a plan: use a gift of poisoned gloves to kill Henry of Navarre’s aging mother (who is also, obviously, a Huguenot). In so doing, set Huguenot against Catholic once again, stoke the violence, and use the ensuing chaos to make a play for the crown. Real ‘chaos is a ladder’ vibes.
Guise’s poisoning plan works. The Old Queen of Navarre dies. The Lord High Admiral is shot by a sniper while carrying the Old Queen Navarre’s body, and he’s seriously wounded. Catholic/Protestant conflict starts ramping up again.
The Catholics (King Charles, Catherine the Queen Mother, the Duke of Guise, Duke Anjoy, Duke Dumaine) all set to scheming. A general massacre is planned, with explicit discussion about how isolated murder will be made to spread into the streets by means of theatrical staging. King Charles, ever the soft touch, visits the wounded Admiral.
The massacre gets going. Guise and his men kill the already-wounded Admiral, and then kill Loreine, a Huguenot preacher.
The massacre continues. They kill Seroune, another preacher.
The massacre continues. They kill Ramus (the King’s professor of Logic). The young King of Navarre (Henry) and his brother, the Prince of Condy, realise that Guise is to blame. Guise & friends let Navarre & Condy leave, but kill their schoolmasters.
Duke Anjoy (a Catholic, and brother to King Charles) flees to the safety of Poland to ensure the continued safety of the Catholic crown (in the event of revenge/violence from the Huguenots).
Two soldiers are tasked with disposing of the Admiral’s body. They argue over how to do it, remarking that the heretic’s body will contaminate any part of the world it’s disposed in. Guise, the Queen Mother, and the Cardinal of Lorraine (the Guise’s brother) discuss the ongoing massacre.
Massacre of the Huguenots continues. Unnamed protestants are killed, and their bodies dragged away.
King Charles (the Catholic King) dies of a broken heart. All assembled high-status Catholics agree that the massacre of the Huguenots has been successful, and so Catherine (the Queen Mother) calls for the Duke Anjoy to return from Poland and take his dead brother’s crown and become the new King of France. It’s pretty obvious that Catherine is still very much in charge (in our Game of Thrones, a kind of Cersei).
Duke Anjoy returns from Poland and is crowned King. At the feast, they catch a cutpurse and cut his ear off. (Off stage, we learn, Navarre has escaped.)
The Duchess of Guise hangs out with her Maid, writes a letter to her secret love (Mugeroun). The Duke of Guise catches her. Predictably, he’s furious (and then scheming).
Navarre learns that Guise is raising an army to attack Navarre & finish the job he started in the massacre. Navarre immediately raises an army to oppose Guise.
Duke of Guise sends the Duke Joyeux as general of the army.
Navarre successfully kills the Duke Joyeux, defeating Guise’s army.
One of the Guise’s men kills Mugeroun (in revenge for the affair with the Duchess of Guise).
Navarre hears that Guise is on the out with the King. Navarre decides to offer aide to the King of France against Guise. More violence planned.
Before Navarre and the newly-crowned King of France can join forces, the King of France organises for three assassins to kill the Duke of Guise. The murderers hide in the next room. Guise is invited to court, and enters. The King briefly makes nice with Guise, then leaves. The murderers reenter, kill Guise. The King fetches the Guise’s son (and others) to behold the body of his now-dead father. The King sends the murderers away to kill Guise’s remaining brothers.
Working for the King, the murderers kill Guise’s brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine.
The Guise’s other brother, the Duke Dumaine, gets news of the other deaths. The Friar who gives him the news offers to kill the King of France in revenge.
The Friar goes to kill the King of France. He stabs the King with a poisoned knife. The King stabs (and kills) the Friar in return. An English ‘Agent’ appears, as does a surgeon. When it becomes clear to all that the King will die from the poison, he names his successor. The King dies, and yet more violence is promised, and the play ends.

All this occurs in something like ~1250 lines. (Like I said: a lot of violence, not much talk.)

Back in 1983, Julia Briggs wrote a paper called ‘Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris: A Reconsideration’. In it, at length, she catalogues the “forms of ritualized violence” that occur across the course of the play (259). She argues that those instances of violence are structured in a series of mirrored repetitions. As Leah Marcus, summarises it, more recently:

the play’s structure hinges on a series of ritualized repetitions: the second half with its ‘massacre’ of the Guise faction repeats with differences the first half with its reenactment of the St Bartholomew’s Day killings: so the soldier’s assassination of Admiral Coligny in the first half is replicated by his assassination of Mugeroun in the second half; both the Admiral and the Duke of Guise are promised safety, then murdered, and so on. (153)

By ‘ritual’, here, the critics mean something like ‘a thing with defined stages’. First, a separation from ordinary meaning; second, a liminal space of symbolic reversals and necessary ambiguity; and, finally, a return to the ordinary (with new identities). On this reading, the play is taken as a kind of ‘tragic glass’: movement into a liminal space of totalising violence, reflected and repeated with symbolic reversals, and then finally a return to a domain of (relative) ‘order’, with new identities standing in for the old.

While this description gets us somewhere, it is—I think—a kind of near miss reading. Briggs and Marcus are both concerned with a linear unfolding in The Massacre’s events. By talking about the play in terms of a ritual structure, they’re focusing on the ways in which elements of earlier scenes are repeated in later ones (with different significance). What’s striking, really, is that isolated scenes in The Massacre, such as Scene 19, strongly resemble the play as a whole. It’s not so much that Marlowe’s Duke of Guise dies, in Scene 19, in a way that resembles and ritually repeats the earlier death of the Admiral, though he absolutely does; rather, it’s that the scene which depicts the death of the Duke of Guise depersonalises his death by turning it into a kind of miniature theatrical spectacle for even the fictional characters participating in it. This depersonalisation-through-theatrical-spectacle is how the whole play works. (Spoiler: it’s also how modern Western culture often does its violent thing.) While it’s a mechanism of self-similarity under displacement that Marlowe is pointing us towards, it’s also self-similarity under change of scale.

I’ll save you from a repetitious reading of ‘violent theatrical spectacle’ in every scene in The Massacre, but we need to talk about Scene 19 at least. In the framing that ‘sets up’ the murder of the Duke of Guise, in the characterisation within the scene itself, and in the post-murder stage reactions that immediately follow, violent conflict is self-consiously staged like the play of which the violence is a part. In so doing—I want to say—such violence is made psychologically possible.

The scene opens with a conversation. Cossin, Captain of the Guard, prepares our ‘Three Murderers’ for their ordered action. The three assure Cossin that they are “resolute” and ready to perform. Cossin, in turn, assures them that they will be paid and instructs them to “take [their] standings within this chamber” [when performed, this is literally a space on stage where the actors stand and pretend to be hidden ‘in the next room’, waiting]. In fourteen lines of dialogue, violent action is promised in exchange for money, and the Murderers—the company of actors in the coming spectacle—are directed in their starting positions. The ‘outer’ audience [that’s you] is shown the businesslike preparations for a violent spectacle: a director addressing his cast. Parallels to Scenes 2 & 4 (in which the Duke of Guise plans and directs the violence of The Massacre) are made, here, pretty explicitly. With the concealment of the murderers, this preparatory mode transitions into a three line choric prologue:

Now falls the star whose influence governs France,

Whose light was deadly to the Protestants;

Now must he fall and perish in his height.

What the Captain is doing is describing a universalised model for what is about to unfold. It’s not a murder; it’s the tragic, inevitable fall of an apparently great man. A genre of a play that we’ve all already seen a thousand times. It’s no mistake that our miniature chorus-figure is literally the Captain of the Guard. The person telling this is a ‘trustworthy’ (read: predictable) figure of impersonal state power. A cop. He’s instructing the audiences, both real and stage, in the fact that they’re about to watch a de casibus tragedy … which is itself predictable, role-governed, and subsumptive-of-the-individual. Just like him. As all things should be. Troni Grande defines a de casibus model of tragedy according to three features:

first, in a tragic universe, retribution overtakes all sinners, especially the ambitious or power-hungry; second, Fortune (often regarded as the servant of divine providence) reigns supreme, and her wily shiftiness can be neither controlled nor eluded; and, third, death is a spiritual as well as a physical fact, leading to self-reflection, repentance, and worldly renunciations. (54)

Ambition—real, concrete goal-directedness, which entails a certain kind of unpredictability—is, here, taken to be synonymous with ‘sin’ and tied to unavoidable consequence. In the de casibus model, if you are an ambitious, goal-directed, worldly agent, you will be brought low by superstructural forces, will be made to repent, and will become ‘properly socialised’ in death. In what would otherwise be horrifyingly specific (an identifiable murderer; an identifiable victim) we’re told to see only an improvisational enactment of the general and the spiritually unavoidable.

When the murder itself kicks off in Scene 19, yet more theatricality ensues. Throughout the violent inset scene, Marlowe foregrounds the fact that every character on stage is acting. The characters on stage, it seems, know this as well as we do.

Obviously, in this, there are the murderers. As I said before, the natural reading of the scene’s opening is that The Murderers are a company of three ‘actors’. They exist on the stage for only two scenes (19 & 20), and are introduced with the sole purpose of performing the inset violence as directed. What’s weird, I think, is that everyone (even the characters) seem to notice. Their role as performers is emphasised by two more subtle aspects of their characterisation: first, the perceived social status, and second, the possible use of doubling.

In the space of thirteen lines, the Duke of Guise twice calls the murderers “peasants” and “baser men”. Even accounting for the arrogance of “proud Guise”, there is truth to this assessment. The murderers are attendant figures in a playtext whose cast is largely composed of Kings, Queens, Lords, and Dukes. While other messengers and attendants appear in The Massacre, they tend to be present on stage for only brief and instrumental periods. The sustained presence of the murderers marks them out as unusual figures in the scene and, by extension, marks the scene itself as unusual. And, it seems, the character of the Duke of Guise is aware of this weirdness. He talks as if he knows that he and they are playing parts.

A more practical factor also marks the murderers as unusual: doubling. The actors who play the murderers would have been present on stage in earlier roles. By my count, population of The Massacre is at least 53 characters. The usual population of an Elizabethan company was well below that number. What characters in the play could double with the murderers? Well, two interesting possibilities. On the one hand, the roles of murderers may double with Lords, such as the two Lords of Poland and the actor who plays King Charles. On the other hand, the murderers may be played by three of the Guise’s many victims. This latter category—the victims—comfortably includes the anonymous protestants, two priests, schoolmasters, and the Lord Admiral. Either choice (victims or lords) would certainly lend the Guise’s line “Villain, why dost thou look so ghastly? Speak.” an interesting resonance. But regardless of which roles are doubled, the mere fact of doubling adds another layer of distance and self-reflexivity to the murderers and the spectacle violence they perform.

So: murderers are playing roles. What of the others? Within Scene 19, both the Duke of Guise and the King are depicted in an interlinked reversal of their ‘normal’ roles. Here’s what I mean:

In the play as a whole, the Duke of Guise exhibits many of the traits of a Marlovian ‘Machevill’. He’s ambitious, vicious, and unscrupulous. Much like The Jew of Malta’s Barabas, the Guise “fits the stereotype of the underhanded, scheming anti-Christian villain which had become popularly synonymous with Machiavellianism” (Minshull 53). In the earlier movements of The Massacre, the Guise is a craftsman of death, orchestrating and directing the majority of the violence on stage. In this regard, I think, it’s natural to see Guise as extending Barabas; he’s similarly representative with what Andrew McCarthy called a “playful inversion of the craft of dying to crafting the deaths of others” (70). Yet in the miniature spectacle of Scene 19, this craftsmanship is nowhere to be seen. The Guise of the inset is not so much unscrupulous as he is uncertain: he is taken aback by the appearance of Epernoun at the door; he hesitates, seems to doubt himself, and even asks that his murderers “Give [him] leave to speak” in the moment of his death. When the Guise turns to his sword in an echo of an earlier scene, it is as if out of fear and misplaced hope more than any kind of savage craftsmanship. And while his penultimate cries repeat the earlier anti-Huguenot sentiment, Leah Marcus suggests that the Guise’s death retains “elements of tragedy in spite of his villainy” (157). In short, the Guise of Scene 19 is powerless.

The King is precisely the reverse. Whereas the King of the outer play is characterised by a profound powerlessness (first as the Duke Anjoy, and then as crowned monarch), the character we see in Scene 19 inhabits precisely the part of the Machevill that the Guise once held. As Catherine de Medici observes, this change is sharp: he is “a changeling”, not her son. He crafts the death of the Guise with a speech that basically amounts to blank verse stage directions; he assures his victim of safety; he delights in the spectacle that results from violently betraying that just-promised protection.

Both King and the Guise are separated from their previous selves. Playing different parts. More precisely: they’re no longer ‘self-directed agents, bound by rules’, but rather ‘improvising within a set of constraints defined by narrative parts’.

Momentary role-reversal is one thing. What makes the treatment critical is the role collapse with the reaction of the inner audiences (ie, the other characters watching on) once the violence is complete.

After the re-entrance of the Captain, and the King’s remarks on the “sweet sight” of the Guise’s body, the King calls for further inner audiences, commanding that the Guise’s son be brought in to see his murdered father’s body. At first, the King seems to figure himself as the author of the spectacle and controller of its effects. He thinks this new role that he’s just been playing is Real and Permanent. He goes so far as to explicitly suggest that the spectacle has given him status and power, as if those things are a stable currency one can keep in savings. The violence is, he thinks, completion:

Let Christian princes that shall hear of this

(As all the world shall know our Guise is dead)

Rest satisfied with this.

His use of the phrase “rest satisfied” may signal the redemptive possibilities of “making the duke of Guise a demonic scapegoat figure” (158).

Except it doesn’t last. That second onstage audience that the King himself has called for—the Guise’s son—quickly unravels any suggestion of power and restful satisfaction. Instead of submission, as the King expects, stage directions tell us that “he offereth to throw his dagger”. In response to the boy’s anger, the King immediately recognises a need to “kill the Duke [Dumaine]” and “strangle the Cardinal” before “these two […] make one entire Duke of Guise” and the effects of the spectacle twist out of his control. In other words, the King begins to recognise a dangerous mimetic tendency in the world of the outer play. Much like the two henchmen tasked with disposing of the Admiral’s body in Scene 9, everyone can see the problem wrought by violence: a pervasive risk of infection. Like the body of the Admiral, the violence of The Massacre “will infect the fire, and the fire the air, and / so we shall be poisoned”. As Lawrence Manley observes, this is “a very Marlovian moment, as the purest hatred coincides with the truest revelation: we breathe the smoke of those we burn” (126).

Catherine de Medici is no more supportive of the newly played King-as-Machevill, either. She curses her son, the King, calling him a “miscreant” and a “Traitor to God and to the realm of France!”. These accusations have previously been directed at the Guise himself. Almost word for word. Even as the King vows that he is “lawful King of France”, the outer and inner audiences recognise the futility of his protest. As Penny Roberts observes, “as with the death of Coligny, the victim, Guise, is ennobled by a martyr’s fate […] while his murderer, [The King], appears sullied” (39). While the King is momentarily made a Marlovian Machevill by the structure of the spectatorial inset, he cannot sustain the fiction; the reactions of the inner and outer audiences destroy that possibility.

More importantly, I think, the fact that he can’t sustain the fiction generalises. More than the simple dissipation of the King’s momentary generic artifice, all the reactions to the death of the Guise are layered collapses into each other, and into generic structures. It is almost as if generic structures, stylised narrative roles, and stereotyped behaviours are all that can remain once the spectacle is done. The spectacle was violent, immoral, and constituted by such generic structures. Nobody can understand their complicity in the violence except by continuing the stereotyped dance. In the case of Catherine de Medici, for example, the audience sees a sudden movement out of the ambitious manipulator into the generic Elizabethan feminine: in the words of Alison Findlay, “she collapses emotionally and generically from political overreacher into the feminine genre of complaint” (244).

After first being shown a kind of ‘play-within’ in which the characters are sharply differentiated from the ‘play-without’—in which neither the Duke of Guise nor the King are quite themselves—the real-world theatre audience is then shown a totalising deconstruction of that model: a tearing apart of the artifice of the miniature de casibus tragedy of violence that’s just unfolded. In a very real sense, there are no agentic ‘survivors’ of this iterative dissolution of roles. By the time the scene is done, nothing feels ‘real’ for any natural definition of the word. All there is to grasp is artifice. We see that, while perhaps the King thought he was in control of the violent spectacle and its effects, he wasn’t. Instead, he was subsumed by a narrative role. The subterranean culture that had generated him was the ‘real’ author: a culture that contained the King, but which used long-run symbols to supplant each individual’s interests and turn each person into a kind of helpless actor improvising at the edges of a strictly-scripted part.

We may as well use the technical term at this point. Every scene in The Massacre is intensely metatheatrical. The play itself is a violent theatrical spectacle; however, it’s also theatre about theatre. And, in my view, it’s theatre about how things get turned into theatre for manipulative effect. The fictionalised character of the Duke of Guise plans his own miniature play-like violent spectacles, directs his own performances, and eventually plays the part of ‘victim’ in a spectacle directed by another. Much like the real Duke did. If you’re thinking of the ‘mousetrap’ play (The Murder of Gonzago) in Hamlet, you’re on the money. Well, except you’re not quite there. I’m making a bigger claim.

Even in less ‘metatheatrical’ theatre—a normal play, without a ‘mousetrap’ murder—there’s already tension. As a medium, the theatre requires that audiences ‘play along’ with a fragile representational metaphysics. Real objects—bodies, props, spaces between—stand in for illusory ones in the fictional world. A prop knife substitutes for a real weapon, though the prop is itself ‘real’. And on the Elizabethan stage, a bladder of pig’s blood (once burst) stands in for human blood at the site of a wound. “Such substitutes for human blood,” writes Maik Goth, “were vital for creating the theatrical semblance of a genuine piercing of the characters’ skin” (142). True enough, but risky. Furnished with performed pomp and manufactured circumstance, an on-stage chair must stand for an imagined throne. The felt reality of an actor’s body must act as proxy for the fictional body of the character represented. And as theatre-goers and performers, we’re always flirting with the failure. If the actor ‘playing dead’ lies insufficiently still, the map-territory lacuna rears its ugly head. More dangerously, perhaps, if the actors perform their royalty with too much camp, well, oops, now we’ve manufactured a different mirror on the world: all thrones are just chairs + people pretending. Right?

In the metatheatrical, the ‘playing along’ is layered. In real time, real-world audiences are shown how to play along: actors, playing characters, playing audiences, watching actors play characters play actors play characters. Without that play-within-a-play, we’re just watching actors ‘represent’ characters. Once the play-within gets going, and those characters sit down to watch, we see a model of what audiences are meant to do when they see spectacles. It’s fun, but it’s a mindfuck.

What I’m saying, really, is that the mindfuck is the point. As Jake Orthwein says, in another context:

As we struggle to tease reality apart from fantasy, the emotional reality of the spectacle begins to take hold. Eventually, it’s no longer clear where kayfabe stops and the real world begins.

In Marlowe’s Massacre, it is precisely the layering of the theatrical—staged violent spectacle within staged violent spectacle—that makes the psychology of group violence possible. If the murderers who kill the Duke of Guise weren’t ‘acting’, it wouldn’t be a show. And if the Duke of Guise kept the violence personal, no widespread massacre of Huguenots could be effected. It is the signalling of roles, of generic structure, that makes men into soldiers. As we see the reactions to the violent spectacle spread beyond the intentions of its self-styled director—as we do in the end of Scene 19—we also see, I think, a deeper truth. While at first nobody believes the masks they’re holding up are ‘real’, the moral injury inflicted by the things they’ve been complicit in has made removing masks impossible. All they can do is switch from role to role. What seemed at first to be a temporary ‘play’ becomes embodied as The Real for its players. One is motivated, now, to redefine identity and being for oneself. One redefines belief. One naturalises masks. And, as a matter of psychological survival, one is motivated to continue that re-definition until everything is theatre. It’s a one-way street.

In 2015, when ISIS took Palmyra, they executed 25 men on the stage in the ruins of the Roman amphitheatre there. Later, only once the spectacle was done, did they destroy it.