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Article Excerpt
Before the descent into King Lear, let me focus the direction which this paper will take: after dwelling upon the play as "an image of that horror" (5.3.264), I want to consider the idea of witnessing the unthinkable in Lear and in poetry that responds to the apocalyptic dimensions of the twentieth century; despite a separation of centuries, the worlds of the play and of the poems imagine late hours; imagine worlds in which suffering occurs but does not bring redemption. Forced to meet the abyss head on, these texts implicitly stress the idea of witness as (perhaps) the only response to suffering: witness, compassion, and otherworldly wisdom--otherworldly because it comes only at great cost--after the Orphic descent into the underworld and back into light--"Had I your tongues and eyes I'd use them so / That heaven's vault should crack"--that will never again look the same (5.3.257-58).
Apocalyse can be defined as an image of human dealings in their extremity: an "image of that horror." In Lear, we are asked to imagine the state to which humanity can reduce itself. Lear unfolds a world in which natural behavior is exposed as something predatory, bestial: "Human beings ... behave not as rickety civility requires, but naturally; that is, they ... prey upon themselves like animals, having lost the protection of social restraint, now shown to be fragile" (Kermode 184). At stake in Lear, then, is something beyond tragedy. For tragedy, as Stanley Cavell reminds us in "The Avoidance of Love," is about "a particular death, or set of deaths, and specifically about a death which is neither natural or accidental. The death is inflicted ... and it [serves as] a punishment or an expiation" (111; emphasis original). Neither Lear's death nor Cordelia's can be read in this light, for punishment is inadequate when speaking about the play's wreckage. As for expiation: what is purged?--what the reward? Of all the characters, consider the flawless goodness of Cordelia who recognizes, from the play's originating moments, the limitations of language to body forth feeling; Cordelia, who speaks only what she feels, cries: "O thou good Kent, how shall I live and work / To match thy goodness? My life will be too short / and every measure fail me" (4.7.1-3).
In the world of the play, the hour is very late indeed. By the time the action begins, Lear has already divided up his kingdom. The opening scene witnesses the parceling out of lands to daughters whom this king and father expects to speak their love and so claim their portions. Lear, in the originating moments, is revealed as an old man who does not know himself, an old man who acts with poor judgment. In his compelling, "Lateness in King Lear," Lyell Asher argues that the questions the play asks--voiced by a very old man--inevitably stress the irrevocability of what has come before; irrevocability without the promise of the future. Lear poses the question: "Who is it who can tell me who I am?" (12.4.227). Given Lear's age, the question must and inevitably translates into: "Who have I been all of these years?" The play takes Lear to the extreme limit of his existence and, once there, it exposes him to "total loss--a loss that stretches not only forward, devastating his future, but backward devastating his past" (Asher 23; emphasis original).
In the midst of so much devastation, what trebles the agony and the mystery of Lear is the fact that the play entirely disavows a redemptive vision of suffering. In this way, Shakespeare makes old stories, specifically the Book of Job, something radically new. Job's patient endurance is ultimately made right when he is restored to his position. There is no such restoration in Lear. Instead, suffering is represented as a condition of the world as we inherit it or make it for ourselves. It is the result of evil inflicted upon the good by the bad, and "it can reduce humanity to a bestial condition, under an apparently indifferent [or I would add--powerless] heaven" (Kermode 184).
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Searching for redemption in Lear we reach in vain. Yes--in his diminished circumstances the broken king does learn compassion, but this knowledge comes too late. With the loss of Cordelia, Lear...
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