As a man, Iago is a house of mirrors. At bottom, his desire, if it can be called that, is to be at the center, to be powerful even if his exercise of that power is hidden. Even his final lines force the other characters to bend their attention toward him, permanently: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know./ From this time forth I never will speak word.” He refuses to explain why he has done what he has done. We can imagine that even after he is jailed, tortured, and executed, everyone who witnessed that final scene, “the tragic loading of [that] bed,” will wonder what drove him. If Iago embodies evil, then this is a fitting last line for him—to explain his actions would give us a misleading etiology. To leave us without an explanation is to reflect the remainder of mystery, confusion, doubt, and wonder, that abides in the human mind, even when one subscribes to a complete mythology that accounts for evil, good, and how the world came to be.
We can only imagine what Othello might have felt had he time to reflect on the length of his friendship with Iago. How many times had Iago, “honest Iago,” misled him, manipulated him, construed his oft-cited honesty out of conspiracies and plots? Is this the first innocent Othello has killed or attacked on Iago’s word? If, in his misdirected rage at Cassio for allegedly cuckolding him, he said “Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge had stomach for them all,” what wrath would have welled up inside him toward Iago, who led him to murder his wife? Or would Othello have been so broken, so without the will to live, that revenge would have lost its satisfaction. This is more likely, for when Iago refuses to give the explanation Othello seeks and thus denies Othello the ability to make some sense of tragedy, he chooses a self-inflicted death. Perhaps this is Iago’s ultimate motivation, though he himself might not be conscious of it—to spread the emptiness inside himself, to reproduce, in a tragic inversion of evolutionary instinct, the unconnection within him.
There is no true Iago that then deceives Emilia, now Othello, now Roderigo. To say he deceives himself even misses the mark, for which self is Iago? It is tempting to hear his asides as revelations, but all they reveal are his plans, his calculation. With one character, he dismisses the importance of reputation, and in the company of another, says one’s name is all one truly has. One minute, he reassures Othello that Desdemona is faithful and in the next feeds his general all the ammunition a jealous mind requires to excite itself into murderous rage. By the time Othello engages in a somewhat independent investigation and questions Emilia, it is too late. He has already decided, or his emotions have decided for him, that Desdemona is guilty of a mortal offense, and so all the information he gleans from the world is sifted through the sieve of his anger. No matter what Emilia says, it merely becomes more evidence against Desdemona.
In The Evidence of Things Not Seen, his book on the “Atlanta child murders,” James Baldwin describes how suspicion taints all one sees, hears, thinks in relation to the accused. Being Baldwin, he said this as well as it can be said in prose, so I quote him at length: “Once under suspicion, and so dreadful a suspicion, everything the person does is intolerably suspect—beginning, perhaps, with his intolerable assumption that he has any right to be born. It is much, much simpler, after all, and more considerate, for the accused to agree, at once, to be guilty. With this agreement, we are released form the ordeal of imposing or suspending judgment. This creature, trapped, at bay, looks toward us as his only hope—and we are his only hope.
“Beneath the microscope of the inquisition, everything this creature does—smiling or not smiling, calm or panic-stricken, belching or not belching, sweating or not sweating, smoking or not smoking, shouting or not shouting—is suspect. This is because he is suspect…”
Such is the condition of Desdemona, as well as Cassio, in the eyes of Othello, a condition engineered by Iago. Again, my mind wanders to the life of Othello in war, and how that experience, shared by Iago, might have bound him to his ancient and blinded him to his true traits, his true traits being the play of manipulations on the surface of a hollow man, or a seemingly hollow man–there must have been something incalculably hard at the center of him, like the dead star at the core of a black hole. A few days ago, dumbfounded scientists discovered a black hole that is at least thirty times larger than their theories previously allowed, thirty times larger than they thought possible. Such astonishment is akin to what Othello must have felt, except rather than looking at the vacuous mass of lightlessness and swirling gas through a telescope two billion light-years away, he must have felt as if he’d stepped over the event horizon, and fallen toward it’s impossibly dense center, a place where, depending on which physicist you talk to, things either cease to exist entirely, or persist forever, crushed, trapped.