Originally written as part of Dr Ramsey Fowler’s Liberal Arts course at St Edward’s University, October 2009. Some liberties have been taken with revision and paragraph breakage to more reflect blog formatting.
Othello, the namesake and great fallen hero of Shakespeare’s tragic play, is given an opportunity. Instead, he sees offense.
Man’s Search for Meaning‘s Viktor Frankl is given the same opportunity and handles it completely differently.
The once controlled, noble, and powerful soldier allows the diabolical Iago to twist his mind so irrevocably that he actually believes that the love of his life Desdemona is being unfaithful. Othello requires no concrete evidence of Iago’s good faith, vesting his trust in him to an absurd degree. The effect is an incurable distrust of his wife, who in reality has done nothing wrong. This doubt in his only love paralyzes Othello’s joy and is the harbinger of his downfall. Perhaps Iago is often considered Shakespeare’s most sinister villain because he so indulges in Othello’s suffering. He is a most insidious sadist in the line of Scarecrow in the film Batman Begins (2005).
Perhaps too we readers can see in Iago an eerily similar voice, a diabolical whisper that craftily baits us through temptation and into sin in our own lives. In the end, although Othello’s destruction involves an extreme murder-suicide to which readers may never resort, we do know that the destruction is a familiar one if we but ponder how often feelings of offense can consume us with resentment.
Conversely, concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl got it right. Suffering happens. It’s simple. There is no way around it. No pill to eliminate it. No microwave to move it along faster. Suffering is suffering and it will afflict everyone often in their lives. In his story Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl shares with the world not every detail of his physical suffering, though some sense of it is certainly given, but instead the process by which he learned to turn his suffering into “a human achievement” (162). One could argue that of anyone who has ever suffered in the twentieth century, a man like Frankl who survived the camps could be excused for any feelings of bitterness, resentment, even hatred. He transcends the norm. He surpasses excuses. He does in real life what Othello cannot do in the play. Frankl clearly embraces the emotional and psychological wounds inflicted on him. He “acknowledge[s] the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe.” He knows that “[n]o one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place.” He tells the reader, his fellow-sufferer, that “[h]is unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden” ( ).
For Othello, such words are no more real than the unfaithfulness he assumes in his wife.
Othello is the perfect type for the man opposite Frankl: the pseudo-man who not only handles his suffering in the wrong way, but more tragically brings the suffering on himself unnecessarily in the first place. John Bevere, author of The Bait of Satan, asserts that “those who believe they have been treated unjustly […also] believe with all their hearts that they have been wronged. Often their conclusions are drawn from inaccurate information…. They judge by assumption, appearance, and hearsay” (7). Frankl, on the other hand, knows he has been wronged and so have many others in the concentration camps. But his conclusions are positive: “In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible” (172). Othello’s answer to the question placed before him is to murder the woman he loves. His blind faith in Iago’s accusations is based on nothing except his egocentric concern for his own reputation and honor, definitely not the responsible response to which Frankl alludes.
Another difference between Frankl and Othello is the resolute choice the former makes, the way he bears his suffering. Frankl chooses not to be offended, whereas Othello chooses to be offended. According to Bevere, “[T]he Greek word for ‘offend’ [in the Gospel] comes from the word skandalon,” a word that “originally referred to the part of the trap to which the bait was attached” (7). Hence the word in Scripture actually means laying a trap in someone’s path, a deceit Iago carries out with satanic malice. Frankl, however, is not baited into despair. Whatever “Iagos” have been in Frankl’s head, and there are sure to have been many, have been purged by the man’s commitment to the right choice. Othello, minus any legitimate evidence, not only believes his tempter, but seems to lift Iago to a heroic plane. He says, “O, thou art wise! ‘Tis certain” (86). Only if the offended is trapped in the snare of the enemy can such a brazen liar be recognized as “wise.”
Frankl and Othello’s respective choices are also influenced by the elapse of time. In Man’s Search, Frankl witnesses some of the men around him experiencing a debilitating form of delirium, what may be a tempting escape from the horrors of the concentration camp. But Frankl, not looking for an excuse to lose hope, writes the following:
To avoid these attacks of delirium, I tried…to keep awake for most of the night. For hours I composed speeches in my mind. Eventually I began to reconstruct the manuscript which I had lost in the disinfection chamber of Auschwitz. (55)
Sleep would be sweet escape for Frankl and his suffering, but he uses the time he has to keep his mind positive. Othello, on the other hand, is not strong enough to make this choice. Whereas Frankl’s frayed mind is still strong enough to take time as an opportunity to be constructive, Othello, in Act 4, tells Iago, “I will be found most cunning in my patience” (86). Here, time simply serves as more opportunity for Othello to execute his revenge on his alleged offender. It is eerie to compare these, Othello’s words, to Iago’s at the end of Act 1, when the villain says to the audience, “After some time, to abuse Othello’s ears/That [Cassio] is too familiar with his wife” (28). By Act 4 Othello has not only become a pawn of Iago, but perhaps also a doppelganger of the villain; his pleasure with the thought of how perfect time will make his revenge as deranged and diabolical as his diabolical counterpart.
A third point of comparison between Frankl and Othello is their respective views toward means and ends. While suffering is a means to an end for Frankl, it is the end in itself for Othello. Frankl says, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how” (164). Frankl is able to rise above his suffering because he believes that his “task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it” (172). It is the hows of life and the opportunities on the journey that give meaning and value to Frankl’s life. Contrastingly, Othello’s narcissistic obsession with saving face closes him off from this truth. The possibility that the why of his life is to love Desdemona cannot supplant his perceived how, which is to love her in spite of his doubts and the tickling words of Iago. His pathetic and weak constitution simply prohibits him from doing this.
Of course, the crux of Shakespeare’s play is the fact that Othello’s love for his wife loses to the greater power of his suspicion of her. Although Frankl’s story is primarily about suffering, it is also a story about love. In the most touching scene in the book, a thought transfixes Frankl:
The truth […is] that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. …I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. (58-59)
It is a love Othello is well-acquainted with in the beginning of the play before his suspicion begins:
It gives me wonder great as my content
To see you here before me. O my soul’s joy!
If after every tempest come such calms,
May the winds blow till they have wakened death. (36)
Ironically, it is Othello himself who wakens death when the tempest of suspicion storms his mind. His health of mind and hope of spirit speedily deteriorate the further he falls away from Desdemona; yet the distance between Frankl and his wife only serves as proof of the legitimacy of his love for her. At one point in the story, he reflects on his love for his wife in relation to her absence:
I knew only one thing—which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being….I did not know whether my wife was alive, …but at that moment it ceased to matter….[N]othing could touch the strength of my love….” Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.” (60-61)
This clean optimism is a stark contrast to Othello, whose vulgarity toward Desdemona explodes when he screams, “I will chop her into messes!,” calls her a devil three times and strikes her, and then of course kills her near the end of the play (90, 92, 119). Love being as strong as death takes on a far more literal and sinister meaning, and one could argue that, in light of Frankl’s inspiring reflection, Othello’s love is not love at all.
For Frankl, suffering becomes a cleanser that clears the dross, leaving only love in its place; for Othello, self-inflicted suffering only serves to pollute an already tenuous devotion to his wife. While Frankl transforms the offense against him into an opportunity to love even more, Othello abuses the love given him and turns it into an offense great enough to destroy the very thing he held most dear. Both men can be seen in the other, for both have the gift of choice in their lives and the reader knows that there is something at stake. The difference is that Frankl finds strength in transcending the self while Othello loses it in his succumbing to offense.
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Works Cited
Bevere, John. The Bait of Satan. Florida, Charisma House, 2004.
Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. New York, Pocket Books, 1974.
Shakespeare, William. Othello. New York, Penguin Group, 1998.
