2: Lear’s “Darker Purpose”
Evil is nothing.
—Boethius1
Let us imagine all beings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness.
—Levinas (EE 57)
History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: “I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.” The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: “Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.”
—Jorge Luis Borges2
KENT: Is this the promis’d end?
EDGAR: Or image of that horror?
ALBANY: Fall, and cease!
—Shakespeare (KL 5.3.263-265)
Shakespeare
In Loneliness as a Way of Life, Thomas Dumm draws our attention to the devastating losses that he takes to be at the heart of Shakespeare’s King Lear.
What may be most important about this play has everything to do with an as yet—always as yet—unarticulated feeling of loss. This tragedy is a story of losses—nothing but. A kingdom is riven, a king goes mad, a family is destroyed, a good man is blinded, many die, and the very idea of love itself is made to appear as folly.3
His claim is hard to gainsay. King Lear appears to be about abject disaster from one end to the other. Lear’s oldest daughter, Goneril, dies, poisoned by her sister, Regan, who subsequently dies herself by her own hand. Lear’s youngest daughter, Cordelia, dies, hanged before the eyes of her father, in accord with the instructions from the son of her father’s closest friend. Lear himself dies in grief over her death—the death of his favored daughter—shortly afterward. Lear’s friend, Gloucester, dies, having first been blinded by Lear’s son-in-law, Regan’s husband, the Lord of Cornwall, an individual who, after blinding Gloucester, is wounded himself in the subsequent fray, and dies. And Gloucester’s son Edmund, who would destroy his father, is killed by his “legitimate” son, Edgar. Even the “poor Fool” who accompanied Lear to the heath at night in the storm is “hanged”—if we are to believe Lear, who is still partially in the throes of his madness, and accept that the reference is not simply to his daughter Cordelia.
And with the Duke of Albany departing, the kingdom is about to be left in the hands of Edgar and Kent, neither of whom—however good and innocent and just they appear to be—seem especially promising as rulers of this devastated kingdom. The mere recitation of the plot would seem entirely sufficient to confirm the remark attributed to Dr. Johnson that having once read Shakespeare’s play for purposes of revising it, he might never choose to read it again voluntarily.
What impels these horrific conclusions? Major characters die throughout Shakespeare’s plays without the attendant sense of utter ruin. In Richard II, Hamlet, and Othello, among others written before Lear, deaths litter the stage. But the devastations here seem somehow different. The king’s death in Richard II is occasioned by forces largely beyond his control, although he has certainly collaborated in generating the conditions in which they occur. Imprisoned in Pomfret Castle by the newly crowned Bolingbroke (to whom he has freely relinquished the throne), Richard is murdered by Exton who allegedly thinks he is doing the new king’s bidding. The protagonist in Hamlet returns from school to find his father murdered, his mother remarried, and his uncle seated on the throne (in surprisingly short order) and he determines—on the basis of a ghost alleged to be wandering the city’s ramparts crying “revenge my most foul and unnatural murder”—that it has fallen to him to “set it right” amidst a sea of soldiers, villains, players, counselors, ex-girlfriends, and spies, all with competing claims for the attention of the powers that be and of the queen. And if he himself dies in Act 5, he does so at the hand of a fellow courtier, who has conspired with the king against him and is grieving over the suicide of his sister.
And in Othello, a foreign warrior that the Venetian state has contracted to lead its forces against the Turkish infidels would appear to be driven to murder his wife either by the machinations and insinuations of a deceptive ensign, or by the promptings of his own egoistic collaboration with the demands and vicissitudes of a military “occupation.” In all these instances, we move from a relatively bad situation to a really bad one. And in each case we have the feeling that the ending of the play exposes a problem compounding that initial difficulty: a self-deposition that has in fact accompanied a monarchical usurpation, something already “rotten” throughout “the state of Denmark,” a flair for self-dramatizing that has infected nearly everyone of consequence in the Venetian community.
But in King Lear, one has the feeling that things did not have to end this way, that this disastrous conclusion has come about—and in such an especially explosive and devastating manner—more gratuitously than it needed to be, more at Lear’s initiative than at the whimsy of a bevy of cruel gods who, “as flies to wanton boys,” murder human beings “for their sport” (as Gloucester notes at one point (4.1.32)), and that such a conclusion could have been avoided.
Moreover, even a superficial glance at the source materials that scholars have accumulated readily confirms that negative impression. Shakespeare’s treatment of the story is unique and notoriously cynical. The ancient sources all end happily. An earlier version of the play circulating in the Elizabethan theater seems to have ended on a positive note.4 And in the wake of acknowledging Shakespeare’s anomalous treatment, a number of later productions of the play seem to have felt compelled to rewrite the ending to align it with more felicitous outcomes. But in Shakespeare’s version, Cordelia dies and Lear dies despite the demise of all their enemies and the triumph of their supporting forces. A relatively innocuous decision on the part of the royal monarch—the decision to retire—has issued, it would seem, in utter ruin.
What is the route from that decision to such consequences? Stephen Greenblatt considers the question historically and sees it as part of a “strategic opacity” that the writer has learned in Hamlet and that he continues in the “great tragedies.”5 A king decides to call it quits. Why might Shakespeare find this idea appealing? For numerous reasons, apparently. Politics, for one. By the summer of 1603, Elizabeth is gone and James, the son of Mary Queen of Scots (executed by Elizabeth), has replaced her on the English throne to the consummate anxiety of all concerned (including the monarch).
Or, perhaps, professionally, for another reason. Shakespeare has, after all, quit his chosen profession at least once before in his career—more than ten years earlier in 1592, when first the riots and then later the plague closed the London theaters—and he accomplished himself as a poet in an aristocratic house with which he was associated—although his extra poetical relations may not have gone as well.6 There is, moreover, a “widely discussed lawsuit” afoot in London at the moment (late 1603) that may speak to Shakespeare’s sensibility. A father, Sir Brian Annesley, is besieged by two daughters who would declare him mad to gain control of his estate while his youngest daughter would defend him against them. The name of the youngest daughter is Cordell.7
Or Shakespeare could be thinking about his own eldest daughter, Susanna, and the difficulties he may face if and when he returns to Stratford on a permanent basis. Ten years later when he does in fact turn over his worldly estate to her and her husband, John Hall, the transition proves a relatively smooth one, Greenblatt intimates, but here in 1603, when Shakespeare is thought to have written Lear, he may have anticipated difficulties.
In the case of the monarch of England, of course, retirement is considerably more complicated than it is for a British commoner. How precisely do you go about it? If he were in some other line of work, a day laborer of some kind, he might simply quit his job and walk away relatively unscathed. But he is the king. Quitting his job in his case is more tricky. He has to “un-invest” (or “divest”) himself of the “king’s two bodies,” the legal fiction famously described by Ernest Kantorowicz and others.8 He needs to undress, take off his monarchical clothing or vestments, discard the “body politic,” render himself “naked” before the polity, become the “body natural,” “unaccommodated man,” as he is called (3.4.104), no longer the host of two legal bodies—one of a man and one of the state.
Earlier in his career, just after the theaters re-opened sometime in 1594, Shakespeare already surmised the difficulties of such a gesture. “When I consider … That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows,” the poet wrote to his beloved in Sonnet 15, “Then the conceit of this inconstant stay / Sets you most rich in youth before my sight, / Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay, / To change your day of youth to sullied night.” Or within one of the history plays, in Richard II, which may have been contemporary with that poem, the king notices a certain problem in continuing to play his assigned role.
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented. Sometimes am I king;
Then treason makes me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am. Then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king.
Then am I kinged again, and by and by
Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing. (5.5.31-38)
Divestiture renders reality itself somewhat theatrical, and Borges is right to point (in the essay from which the headnote citation is drawn) to a certain resident theatricality in the man. A certain surreal quality has already permeated the earlier play to that point, although Richard’s commentary on it at this moment is novel. Like John of Gaunt before him, the king has suddenly become clearheaded in his final moments and recounts his history with astonishing acumen. One moment he is king and then he is haunted by the “treasons” he may have committed, and so he allows others to make their move and assume his position. But then he rebels against his new circumstances and its “penury” and regaining his confidence straightaway regains his royal capacity. Now he blames Bolingbroke (who he thinks “unkinged” him) for his former travail, but that blame carries its own appropriative appeal (which he secretly endorses) and in doing so, he is undone once again and becomes “nothing.” The word “nothing” in line eight of this passage means the opposite of “king,” something cognate with a “beggar” or non-royal “subject,” a little nothing or nobody, as we might say today colloquially, un petit rien.
But such histrionics also lead him to consider another problem. “[W]hate’er I be, / Nor I nor any man that but man is, / With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased / With being nothing” (5.5.38-41). One result of this theatricality, this lack of distinction between the world and the stage, this sense that all the world’s a stage but that it shouldn’t be, is that we should be able to tell the difference between the stage and the world. Or to put the matter another way, that as a result of this lack of contentment, or content, or continence, his condition shall be rendered permanent. There may be no going back. Whoever is only a man shall never be pleased with anything, until he or she be dead, until he or she literally becomes “nothing,” lying within a grave, when of course it will no longer matter. “Ask for me tomorrow,” Mercutio says in Romeo and Juliet, in a final burst of bravado, once it is clear he has been slain, “and you shall find me a grave man” (3.1.100).
The word also has other meanings. “With nothing shall be pleased” can mean not being pleased with anything, or it can mean learning to be pleased not only with being nothing at the end of life but with being nothing at its center, the emptiness at its core. From retirement comes divestiture, and from divestiture (or undressing) the problem of the nothingness beneath or within: the empty theatricality of roles and theater on the stage and in life (“airy nothing given local habitation and a name”), in death at the end of life (“being nothing”), the dissatisfaction or death in the middle of life.
If this predicament is unsettling in Richard II or in Hamlet or in Othello, it is no less problematic in Lear. In Lear himself, we could say, the primary problem is reading—as illustrated in the Gloucester subplot. Lear’s madness, his self undoing, his “de-lir-ium,” so to speak, is in part at least, a matter of not knowing how to read his daughters. And what is his response to the discovery of nothing beneath the divestiture? Dis-ownership. Like Brabantio, who disowns Desdemona, Lear disowns one of his daughters, and the other two in turn disown him. Like father like daughters. As Cordelia refuses to give him what he wants, as she gives him nothing in place of the something he desires, he dismantles the difference between performance and description. “Nothing will come from nothing,” her father tells her. Nothing generative will take place. Nothing, evil (in its medieval rendering) or death (of one kind or another), will follow as a real existential consequence of your performativity, your saying and doing “nothing.”
Thus, in part, it could well appear that from dis-ownership or dispossession spring the losses we have noticed. Lear disowns Cordelia as a strange expression of his love. Goneril and Regan, in imitation of his gesture, disown him as an expression of theirs, mimetically appropriating his behavior toward their sister. The daughters revert to childhood strategies every bit as much as Lear does: imitation of their father and rivalrous competition with each other. Lear turns “unaccommodated man.” And the precarious nature of their mutual ego defenses gives way to catastrophic loss in the face of naturalistic, social, and/or political accident: poisoning, suicide, misguided heroism, the misreading of a letter, and “unreason”—reason out-of-doors, so to speak, the madness of Lear. It is as if we are watching someone (or some ones) commit suicide right before us.9
But is that, then, the entire story? Didn’t Lear know they would respond this way? That his two elder daughters would play the game he has demanded of them, and that his younger daughter, whose egoism is most like his own, would, precisely, not do so (which is after all only her version of the game)? And if so, hasn’t he therefore to some extent set them up to respond in just such a fashion? And why would he do that unless the need for that response from them was for some reason overwhelming for him? It is as if he places all bets on a fairy-tale rescue, a happy ending, the support for which he has effectively annihilated psychologically and politically.
The same might also be said, of course, for them. Didn’t they know their father would respond the way he does? Like Othello, Lear is a self-dramatizer. “Come not between the dragon and his wrath” (1.1.122 ), he tells Kent at one point in the opening scene. They know their father at least as well as he knows his daughters. Why would they respond this way unless they too derived some benefit from it? The benefit to Goneril and Regan is clear: a portion of the kingdom and its attendant power. And so they respond as he expected them to, with all the self-conscious flattery and bravado they can muster. But there must be some benefit as well to Cordelia in not giving Lear what he asks. Is proving herself to be the living image she has constructed of herself more important to her than gaining the capacity to assist her father and enact that image in the real world? Later in the play, when she finds him on the heath, old and weak and hardly able to talk, she seems as forgiving and unflappable emotionally as we would like her to be initially. She is as much an egoistic self-dramatizer at this earlier moment in the play as he is, it would appear.
So what, then, we need to ask, is Lear’s “darker purpose”? “Meantime we shall express our darker purpose” (1.1.36), he informs one of his aides. Thomas Dumm suggests we attribute the loss the play dramatizes to the absence of the maternal in Lear’s life and the lives of his children, a motive that was clearly instrumental in Dumm’s own project on it. Dumm suggests Lear loves them, and that they love him, but feels he must prepare them for the loss they have experienced in the death of his wife and their mother.
As sovereign, Lear is above all other mortals in this kingdom, but from the moment of abdication he will fall to a place where he will have nothing—no power, no assurance of recognition, not even a shelter from the storm.… Why does he do it? It has a lot to do with the fact that he loves his daughters.… Out of Lear’s love for his daughters grows a profound sorrow, a recognition that they have suffered something awful already in their lives, a suffering which he cannot repair, but which deepens his desire to give them something, everything he can give, as a compensation for their loss.10
The idea is far from aberrant, and many critics have seized upon it. Dumm traces his own reading to Stanley Cavell, whose essay on “The Avoidance of Love” has inspired a great many readers of this play, and more recently, Janet Adelman has elaborated some of its implications.11 At one point, upon the discovery of the treachery of his daughters, Lear remarks that “the swelling up” of the maternal, the “mother,” hysterica passio, is choking him. “O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! / Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, / Thy element’s below! Where is this daughter?” (2.4.54-56). Hysterica passio was of course widely regarded in the Renaissance as a disease.12 And the idea that the “mother” is somehow at play in this conflict surfaces later in his discussions with the Fool. “When were you wont to be so full of songs?” Lear inquires. And the fool replies: “I have used it, nuncle, ever since thou madest thy daughters thy mothers.” He explains: “for when thou gavest them the rod, and put’st down thine own breeches,” singing, “Then they for sudden joy did weep, / And I for sorrow sung, / That such a king should play bo-peep, And go the fools among” (1.4.149-155). Sometime later, as if remembering these very words, Lear greets Cordelia on the field with the famous observation “I am a very foolish fond old man” (4.7.61).
What is hysterica passio? Greenblatt notes that “hysterica passio (a Latin expression originating in the Greek steiros, ‘suffering in the womb’) was an inflammation of the senses. In Renaissance medicine, vapors from the abdomen were thought to rise up through the body, and in women, the uterus itself to wander around.”13 “The hysteria of the mother,” Dumm remarks, “plays a crucial role in the madness of Lear, linking his bodily condition to the deepest metaphorical powers available to him.”14
What if we put aside for the moment the motivation for which Lear stages this calamity (whatever that is) and simply follow the contours of the calamity itself? Then the play would appear a kind of experiment, a prophetic reading in extremis of what happens if Lear pulls out all the stops and discovers the real and historical status of happy endings in his life—namely, its emptiness. “No rescue? What, a prisoner?” he exclaims upon waking at one point in the night after having fallen asleep (4.6.184). And when the two indisputably good characters witness Lear bearing in his arms the deceased body of his daughter Cordelia, they confirm life’s futility. “Is this the promis’d end?” (5.3.262) Kent observes to Edgar, and Edgar answers in a way that to some extent highlights and repeats the problem, “Or image of that horror?” (5.3.263).
For has not “imaging” been the problem all along? And is not imagination, or “image-ination,” image-building, our capacity to build images, in some sense a part of the difficulty? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for Shakespeare, the Christian outcome is also somehow implicated in that general discrediting. The play may be set in pre-Christian England, but the performance of it is not. The final comment of the Duke of Albany (who began, we recall, as husband and advocate of one of the two evil sisters) in this context, namely, “Fall, and cease!” (5.3.263), would seem to confirm the darker Christian apocalyptic overtones of the situation. “As flies to wonton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport,” Gloucester observes (4.1.32), in the bleak remark that founded a generation of existentialist readings of the play.15 Is there a way of giving voice to the absence of the maternal in the lives of all these characters without assigning it in advance either a dominating psychological, religious, historical, or philosophic motivation?
Emmanuel Levinas, I would like to suggest, may offer us such an approach.
Levinas on Shakespeare
Let me say at the outset that I am indebted to much of the wonderful recent work on King Lear and in particular on the relation of Levinas to Lear and to Shakespeare more generally.16 This work demonstrates above all, and quite beyond the differences between their various perspectives and my own, the efficacy of introducing Levinas’s phenomenological analyses to Shakespeare studies. In what follows, I will argue that Levinas articulates what is missing in King Lear, namely, an acknowledgement of my infinite responsibility for the other individual, moreover, one in Levinas’s case that derives precisely from his understanding of the maternal. The work of Levinas at large functions we may say as a kind of midrash to Shakespeare’s drama, a clarification in highly developed philosophic language of what is absent from Shakespeare’s work in this instance and perhaps from Shakespeare more generally. In that way, Levinas may help us to mirror what is taking place in Shakespeare, just as Shakespeare’s work may offer us by way of prophetic extension a reading of Levinas’s own phenomenological project.
It turns out, of course, that Levinas’s direct remarks on Shakespeare and King Lear are relatively few. I count in fact some twenty references to Shakespeare’s name in all of Levinas’s twenty-eight books, although references to the plays or lines, apart from the name, supplement that number.17 The few that do exist are more or less clumped together in his early writing. There are some in Existence and Existents and Time and the Other, the studies, conference papers, and lecture notes he assembled just after the war, and two in the early essay “Reality and Its Shadow.”18 There is one reference in “The Other in Proust.”19 And there are scattered remarks in some of the later major philosophic texts: in Totality and Infinity, Ethics and Infinity, Otherwise than Being, God, Death, and Time, and Unforeseen History.20 There are a couple of references in his texts on Jewish writing—in Beyond the Verse and In the Time of the Nations—21and there is a headnote quote from Shakespeare, from King Lear in fact, in Humanism of the Other, but no further reference to it in the book.22 Moreover, the plays of Shakespeare that Levinas considers are relatively few: primarily, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet. And the substantive content of his few remarks repeat a limited number of key ideas.
Nonetheless, as is the case with Levinas’s citations of Dostoyevsky, the references are profoundly linked to the deepest strata of his understanding of the ethical and of responsibility. For example, a good many of Levinas’s references to the English bard simply group Shakespeare with others Levinas identifies as the great writers of the Western European tradition: the Rabbinic compositors of the Hebrew Bible, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Molière, Proust, Tolstoy, and especially the modern lesser-known Russian writers: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, and Chekhov.
And if we examine in detail the references to Macbeth and Hamlet (which are by far the greatest in number), we find them linked to intricate philosophic discussions of night, nothingness, death, horror, and the concept of the il y a which Levinas was engaged in articulating in these early works.
But if we shift gears and look at these same references in context of Levinas’s larger phenomenological project, the picture changes significantly. Two of Levinas’s insights jump off the page at us: namely, that all of philosophy is a meditation within Shakespeare, and that Shakespeare has already identified the il y a which forms the basis for all of Levinas’s thought.
What can that mean? Richard Cohen has demonstrated the extent to which Shakespeare, for Levinas, challenges the aesthetic tradition.23 Levinas regards Shakespeare and the way he practices the literary as critical commentary of the most fundamental sort, as “inviting exegesis” insofar as it constitutes itself a species of such exegesis. All of philosophy, in Levinas’s mind, is but an extension of what is already at work in Shakespeare’s writing, in this formulation. Levinas understands Shakespeare as the kind of “sacrificing commentary” (to invoke my own term) that I suggested all “great” literary writing in our culture necessarily embodies.24 “It sometimes seems to me,” he writes, “that the whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare” (TO 72). Not “on” Shakespeare, Cohen emphasizes, but “of” Shakespeare, belonging to Shakespeare, as if philosophy itself is always only an explication taking place within Shakespeare’s writing. If Levinas appears to reject the literary in “Reality and Its Shadow,” it is the tradition developed in the wake of Plato, the Platonic representational tradition, the belletristic aesthetic tradition in which art is fundamentally an adornment or third order-removed mimetic echo of the ideal original, which he rejects. The literary in Shakespeare’s hands is something akin to Biblical scripture as understood by the rabbis and the Church fathers, a form of scriptural commentary not entirely separable from scripture itself.
The second consideration concerns the il y a. Discussions in Existence and Existents and Time and the Other may offer us primary examples of Levinas’s interest in Shakespeare. Levinas derives this idea from a problem he finds in Heidegger’s discussion of something and nothing, or, more precisely, of the appearance of something as the appearance of nothing.
Let us imagine all beings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness. One cannot put this return to nothingness outside of all events. But what of this nothingness itself? Something would happen, if only night and the silence of nothingness. The indeterminateness of this “something is happening” is not the indeterminateness of a subject and does not refer to a substantive. Like the third person pronoun in the impersonal form of a verb, it designates not the uncertainly known author of the action, but the characteristic of this action itself which somehow has no author. This impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable “consummation” of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself we shall designate by the term there is. The there is, inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is “being in general.” …
We could say that the night is the very experience of the there is, if the term experience were not inapplicable to a situation which involves the total exclusion of light. (EE 51-52)
This night that Levinas describes is immediate. It is presence, certainly, as all that shows up in conscious life is presence, but a species of presence that is unavoidable, invasive.
When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of the night, which is neither an object nor the quality of an object, invades like a presence. In the night, where we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not “something.” But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence. It is not the dialectical counterpart of absence, and we do not grasp it through a thought. It is immediately there. There is no discourse. Nothing responds to us, but this silence; the voice of this silence is understood and frightens like the silence of those infinite spaces Pascal speaks of. There is, in general, without it mattering what there is, without our being able to fix a substantive to this term. There is is an impersonal form, like in it rains, or it is warm. Its anonymity is essential. The mind does not find itself faced with an apprehended exterior. The exterior—if one insists on this term—remains uncorrelated with an interior. It is no longer given. It is no longer a world. What we call the I is itself submerged by the night, invaded, depersonalized, stifled by it. The disappearance of all things and of the I leaves what cannot disappear, the sheer fact of being in which one participates, whether one wants to or not, without having taken the initiative, anonymously. Being remains, like a field of forces, like a heavy atmosphere belonging to no one, universal, returning in the midst of the negation which put it aside, and in all the powers to which that negation may be multiplied. (EE 52-53)
It is hard to divorce Levinas’s account of this night from the night that Lear spends on the heath in Shakespeare’s play. Anonymous, impersonal, invasive, the “there is” in Levinas’s view is therefore a nocturnal space.
But it is not an empty space. It has a content, so to speak, namely, darkness.
There is a nocturnal space, but it is no longer empty space, the transparency which both separates us from things and gives us access to them, by which they are given. Darkness fills it like a content; it is full, but full of the nothingness of everything. Can one speak of its continuity? It is surely uninterrupted. But the points of nocturnal space do not refer to each other as in illuminated space; there is no perspective, they are not situated. There is a swarming of points. (EE 53)
But if it is not empty, neither is this nocturnal space the absence of light. It is not in opposition to light but before the opposition of the two since the paired opposition of light to dark or day to night (as in the opening of Genesis) has not yet been created. It is precisely “insecurity.”
[T]his analysis does not simply illustrate … that night is the absence of day. The absence of perspective is not something purely negative. It becomes an insecurity. Not because things covered by darkness elude our foresight and that it becomes impossible to measure their approach in advance. For the insecurity does not come from the things of the day world which the night conceals; it is due just to the fact that nothing approaches, nothing comes, nothing threatens; this silence, this tranquility, this void of sensations constitutes a mute, absolutely indeterminate menace. The indeterminateness constitutes its acuteness. There is no determined being, anything can count for anything else. In this ambiguity the menace of pure and simple presence, of the there is, takes form. Before this obscure invasion it is impossible to take shelter in oneself, to withdraw into one’s shell. One is exposed. The whole is open upon us. Instead of serving as our means of access to being, nocturnal space delivers us over to being. (EE 53-54)
Again, the image of Lear on the heath seeking shelter after having been thrown out of (or ejecting them and himself from) his familial dwellings comes to mind. What it is, what this invasive darkness-filled, shelterless night constitutes, in other words, for Levinas, is horror.
Horror, he says, is our intimation of the rustling of the “there is.”
The things of the day world then do not in the night become the source of the “horror of darkness” because our look cannot catch them in their “unforeseeable plots”; on the contrary, they get their fantastic character from this horror. Darkness does not only modify their contours for vision; it reduces them to undetermined, anonymous being, which sweats in them.… The rustling of the there is … is horror.
And this horror of darkness turns the subject, which is to say, the subjectivity of the subject, inside out.
To be conscious is to be torn away from the there is, since the existence of a consciousness constitutes a subjectivity, a subject of existence, that is, to some extent a master of being, already a name in the anonymity of the night. Horror is somehow a movement which will strip consciousness of its very “subjectivity.” Not in lulling it into unconsciousness, but in throwing it into an impersonal vigilance, a participation, in the sense that [anthropologist] Levy-Bruhl gives to the term. (EE 54-55)
And as a consequence, there is no way out of being.
Horror is nowise an anxiety about death.… In horror a subject is stripped of his subjectivity, of his power to have private existence. The subject is depersonalized.… horror turns the subjectivity of the subject, his particularity qua entity, inside out. It is a participation in the there is, in the there is which returns in the heart of every negation, in the there is that has “no exits.” It is, if we may say so, the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation. (EE 56)
In Heidegger, as Levinas read him, being fills us with anxiety, an anxiety that issues from the possibility of my death, from “the possibility of impossibility” as Heidegger will say later. But here horror is not about anxiety regarding death as we might expect but its opposite. Horror turns us inside out. Before the il y a, the outside turns out to be indistinguishable from the inside. It is thus that we may speak about “the impossibility of death,” which is to say, the impossibility of an escape from being.
For example, in the commission of a crime, a discussion that will lead Levinas to introduce the works of Shakespeare.
To kill, like to die, is to seek an escape from being, to go where freedom and negation operate. Horror is the event of being which returns in the heart of this negation, as though nothing had happened. “And that,” says Macbeth, “is more strange than the crime itself.” In the nothingness which a crime creates a being is condensed to the point of suffocation, and draws consciousness out of its “retreat.” A corpse is horrible; it already bears in itself its own phantom, it presages its return. The haunting spectre, the phantom, constitutes the very element of horror.
And that condensation of consciousness confers upon things around us special powers.
The night gives a spectral allure to the objects that occupy it still. It is the “hour of crime”, the “hour of vice”, which also bear the mark of a supernatural reality. Evildoers are disturbing to themselves like phantoms. This return of presence in negation, this impossibility of escaping from an anonymous and uncorruptible existence constitutes the final depths of Shakespearean tragedy. The fatality of the tragedy of antiquity becomes the fatality of irremissible being. (EE 56-57)
Crime introduces nothingness into presence, one effect of which is “suffocation,” the inability to breathe (recall the hysterica passio). Shakespeare, in Levinas’s view, explores this potential in his tragedies where fatality, which we often regard as the earmark of ancient drama, shows up as this impossibility of escape from being.
Thus, for example, Levinas reads Hamlet, or Macbeth.
Spectors, ghosts, sorceresses are not only a tribute Shakespeare pays to his time, or vestiges of the original material he composed with; they allow him to move constantly toward this limit between being and nothingness where being insinuates itself even in nothingness, like bubbles of the earth (“the Earth hath bubbles”). Hamlet recoils before the “not to be” because he has a foreboding of the return of being (“to dye, to sleepe, perchance to Dreame”). In Macbeth, the apparition of Banquo’s ghost is also a decisive experience of the “no exit” from existence, its phantom return through the fissures through which one has driven it.… It is the shadow of being that horrifies Macbeth, the profile of being takes form in nothingness. (EE 57)
The devices Shakespeare uses—witches, ghosts, apparitions, and the like—are not leftovers, remainders from another time and place. Hamlet recoils before the irremissibility of being. Macbeth becomes aware with Banquo that the dead are not dead but more present than ever. Being insinuates itself inside nothingness like bubbles. This sense of the insidedness of the being of the other individual to me will show up later when Levinas comes to define responsibility as the gestation of the other in the same.25
Something other than mortal danger is then revealed.
The horror of the night, as an experience of the there is, does not then reveal to us a danger of death, nor even a danger of pain. That is what is essential in this analysis. The pure nothingness revealed by anxiety in Heidegger’s analysis does not constitute the there is. There is horror of being and not anxiety over nothingness, fear of being and not fear for being; there is being prey to, delivered over to something that is not a “something.” When night is dissipated with the first rays of the sun, the horror of the night is no longer definable. The “something” appears to be “nothing.” Horror carries out the condemnation to perpetual reality, to existence with “no exits.” (EE 57-58)
The horror of the night, as an experience of the there is, the ground zero of being, so to speak, does not reveal death or nothingness to be a danger since death is impossible, and absolute nothingness not possible at all (except as death). Heidegger’s analysis of being unto death as anxiety before nothingness cannot be sustained for Levinas. To the contrary, “existing without existents, which I call the there is, is the place where hypostasis will be produced” (TO 50).
Being is evil not because it is finite but because it is without limits. Anxiety, according to Heidegger, is the experience of the nothingness. Is it not, on the contrary—if by death one means nothingness—the fact that it is impossible to die? … Consciousness is a rupture of the anonymous vigilance of the there is; it is already hypostasis; it refers to a situation where an existent is put in touch with its existing. (TO 51)
Being turns out to be evil in Levinas’s account not because it is nothing (as medieval philosophy might have identified it following Boethius), but, to the contrary, because it cannot be nothing, because it is impossible to die. Consciousness is the breaking up of my access to the there is. Shakespeare’s writing gives Levinas access, in other words, to all of these ideas—nothingness, anxiety, being, death, and horror—four centuries before Heidegger discovers them. And if Heidegger (with his “fundamental ontology”) serves for the French phenomenologist to give access to all of philosophy, then we understand one of the ways in which for Levinas all of philosophy is a meditation of Shakespeare.
To understand more fully the place of these ideas in the context of Levinas’s work, let us turn to the larger dimensions of his project.
Rakhamim [Hebrew for mercy] is the relation of the uterus to the other, whose gestation takes place within it. Rakhamim is maternity itself. God as merciful is God defined by maternity.
—Levinas (NT 183)
Levinas’s general project is the formulation of a new foundation for subjectivity. His project is not a revision of our understanding of consciousness with a new and expanded role now reserved for the ethical, even a predominant role—as many scholars, even those long familiar with Levinas, sometimes suppose. His project is a reconstitution of our understanding of consciousness as ethical from the outset. The ethical is not an add-on to consciousness in Levinas’s view, even an important one, even the most important one. Consciousness is itself already thoroughly ethical, ethical through and though.
And if we have denied that fact, and imagined for the past two hundred years or so (since Kant, Hegel, and perhaps others) a subjectivity that is independent of consciousness for which ethical considerations may be freely appended (or abandoned), we have done so to our own detriment. The DP camps in which the survivors of the Nazi atrocities gathered after the war may be a good starting point for reflections on the dangers of such independent subjectivity. Ethics in Levinas is not a consequence of politics, logical categories, societal structures, juridical ideas, universal principles or any other third party considerations. Ethics is not a prescription for Levinas but a description, not an instrumentalization of any other structure but itself the premise for all such structures. Ethics, he says, in a definition that is cited repeatedly in Levinas studies, is an optics. It is a way of seeing. And his discussion of the ethical is not intended to promote the making of better people but rather to describe the structure of obligations that make up whatever people we turn out to be, and whether we acknowledge those infinite ethical obligations to other individuals or not.
As such, Levinas’s project appears to fit our discussion of kingship and divestiture in King Lear perfectly since both kingship and the divestiture of kingship will require of the aging monarch precisely a new subjectivity. Moreover, Levinas’s project is built around his understanding of the il y a. Hence, it is not unimportant that the most complete references to the il y a or “there is” show up in his earliest post-war writings, where that new subjectivity is specifically being developed. He names that subjectivity the hypostasis.
There is no place here to develop in full the mapping of the project that Levinas builds in his two most important books. Totality and Infinity will tell of the trip out to the other. But it is only in Otherwise than Being that the full scope of this view becomes clear. Levinas is speaking about a sensibility which is customarily defined as a going out to the other and coming back to a zero point of departure. But in fact on the return trip in Levinas’s reading the “self-same” (which is the name he attaches to the agency on its way to selfhood) overshoots the mark and discovers something unexpected on its hither side. What looks like a round-trip journey turns out in fact to be one-way.
Here is a schematic presentation of the two component legs of the journey (on page 59).
What is the significance of the distinction between this round trip journey and the one-way trip? All of Levinas’s philosophic writing, we have said, is about the reconstitution of human subjectivity. Levinas inherits a conception of subjectivity or self-construction from Kant, Hegel, and the nineteenth century German idealist philosophers that is consciousness-based. I am the subject of consciousness before objects of knowledge, the mantra goes. The project is ego driven; I operate in complete freedom. I pursue my goal—as philosophers since Plato have done—through reason and decision-making. The result is knowledge, identity, self, and the truth of being and discourse. I thematize myself, objects or things around me, and others as so many subjects (or objects) of my inquiry. Moreover, I do so within a conception of time or temporality understood as Aristotle understood it: with rigidly distinguishable boundaries among its component parts designating a discrete past, present, and future.
But then Levinas encounters Buber, Rosenzweig, Marcel, and others and this account of subjectivity is rendered partial. Why? Primarily, because it obscures the ethical. Kant’s moralizing, Hegel’s totalizing, Heidegger’s ontologizing—these are all problematic projects in Levinas’s view. Kant’s moralizing always goes by way of the universal, the category, what “everyone should do”—in short, the third party. But the ethical, Levinas asserts, is dyadic, two-party, and precedes all triadic or third party considerations—the political, the juridical, the social, the cultural, or the religious (in addition, of course, to the categorical and the universal). Hegel’s totalizing is similarly categorical but in addition excludes the infinite that in Kant at least remains in place. Hegel’s Phenomenology tells the story of the absolute spirit as a young Geist (we may say somewhat irreverently) and so embeds the Absolute within the narrative of human history.
Courtesy of Michigan State University Press.
Similarly, Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology,” for all its initial excitement (following fast chronologically as it did upon Husserl’s research), and all the advances in idealist philosophy it promises, finally reduces the “all” to being no less. The ontological adventure, whether described by Hegel or Heidegger, is no less “round-trip” than any of the others—not much of an adventure, really, since it always returns to the same, to the point from which the agency, the freely roaming “ipseity,” set out. To the extent that the trip by which the self is formed constitutes an adventure, it is more like the journey of Homer’s Odysseus in Levinas’s view than it is like the one-way trip of the Biblical Abraham, who, in his obedience to the lech lechah of Genesis 12 (“get gone, and I mean you!”), leaves home never to return.
In other words, Kant’s implicit bracketing of the ethical by transcendentalizing it, Hegel’s explicit exclusion of the ethical by secularizing it within an historical narrative, Heidegger’s reduction of the ethical by the substitution of the ontological for it as “first philosophy”—these three traditional ways of handling “the ethical” are equally inadequate from Levinas’s perspective. Levinas will opt instead for Buber’s distinguishing of the I-Thou from the I-it and Rosenzweig’s critique of “the all” in Hegel and the history of philosophy. The ethical precedes the ontological as “first philosophy,” for Levinas. It is not to be excluded implicitly as a mystical category or as the secondary and derived result of more primary human interactions or excluded explicitly in favor of more highly touted and warring totalitarian powers.
In its place, he will articulate a new subjectivity he would develop in three distinct stages. For example, in De l’existence aux existents (1946), which as we noted above was published shortly after the Second World War and which still bears the traces of his wartime prison experience, he develops the notions of the il y a or there is, of night as nocturnal space, of darkness as a content, and of horror as a response to nothing. In the face of this il y a or “there is,” he envisions subjectivity as a going and coming that he names a “hypostasis,” by which he means literally the positing or positioning of oneself outside of oneself and the return to oneself from that outside (he will later characterize this movement as a losing and finding—as an anamnesis). Hypostasis is an “under-standing” in which the ontological is “girded” by a modality of responsibility at each stage. Although the discussion of the il y a remains the centerpiece of this early book (and he will never again give it the kind of extended treatment he gives it here), it remains fundamentally unchanged for him. Responsibility as a critique of ontology, as “dis-inter-estedness,” continues responding to the il y a.
But it is in Totality and Infinity (1961) and later Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence (1972) that he takes full stock of that hypostatic structure. In the earlier book, Totality and Infinity, he describes the “going out.” The ego agent, the ipseity, the self-same, the oneself, or simply the self, proceeds out through the elemental, through dwelling and labor, through enjoyment and signification, and finally approaches the other individual: a relation with the other being encountered through the other’s face (le visage). The face, in this context, is vulnerability, utter defenselessness, nudity or nakedness, exposure, a freestanding, independent, signifying unit that says “Thou shalt not kill.”
And this encounter with alterity, after the prior encounter in being with the material world, shelter and provision, self-indulgence, and perception, opens that agency beyond totality to the infinite. What is “the infinite?” A term Levinas finds in Descartes, he uses it to express the more within the less, the container within the contained. The face in this context is the “infinite within the finite,” a gateway or opening or entry point to the beyond of being, to radical exteriority or externality, to radical otherness, an otherness that escapes the “allergy” to alterity that the projective economy of the freely roaming ego would establish. One discovers, for example, in the erotic the potential that may issue in an ethical relation—in fecundity, for example—although the erotic remains distinct from the ethical per se. And, in fact, in the earlier book, the ethical obtains only insofar as one takes stock of what Levinas calls “radical alterity”—the other individual doing the same thing I am doing, a being glimpsed through a face that is not an object of vision.
In the later book, Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond Being, Levinas describes what could be characterized as the “return trip.” One proceeds from the other individual back toward the same, a trip that could well appear simply a reversal of what the self-same has already experienced. But unexpectedly, the traveler overshoots the mark. Intending to return home, he finds him—or herself on the “hither side of home,” beyond the starting point. And there he finds himself lodged within an unexpected obligation: infinite or unlimited responsibility for the other individual; a responsibility even greater than that since it is in effect three responsibilities in one, as Levinas will later tell us: responsibility for the other, responsibility for the other’s responsibility, and responsibility for the other’s death. The responsibility of the subject in this context can only be compared in its depth and scope, Levinas argues, to the psychic dimensions of maternity and gestation, the other in the same.
Tracing the encounter with the other in retrograde fashion in this later book, he now unearths, in a manner not unlike an archeologist, several distinct steps or strata. Responsibility for him, as a critique of the ontological (manifest as the ego, the elementary, dwelling and work, enjoyment, sensibility, the face, and so forth) is described as “dis-inter-ested,” a dis-interring or “unburying” that coincides with the undoing of the earlier condition of being mixed up in being (“inter-ested”). Now he will describe in turn each of seven prior conditions that have shaped that encounter, each corresponding to the regions he has already traversed.
He begins with the face which is now understood as pure “signi-fyingness,” freestanding auto-signification, presentation rather than representation. The face is saying (or the “to say”) rather than the said, the dire rather than the dit. Such saying turns out to be rooted secondly in proximity, the nearness of the other individual doing the speaking, contact, touch, or caress with that individual (as opposed to palpitation). Such proximity is in turn rooted thirdly in obsession, the impossibility of putting something by, the impossibility of stopping or evading, a constancy or ceaselessness that we may say is more constant than the opposite of interruptive. That obsession in its own turn will show up to be rooted fourthly in passivity, a passivity or bearing or suffering, Levinas describes, as more passive than the opposite of active, a radical abiding or unassumability that stands before the opposition of active to passive.
And that passivity in Levinas’s phenomenology is itself rooted fifthly in “an-archy.” An-archy is used here in the Greek sense of being without qualities, or “quality-less-ness,” an anarchē or unruli-ness or “principle-less-ness” that precedes the opposition of rule or principle to chaos. Such anarchy will turn out in its own context to be rooted sixthly in substitution, in a one-for-the-other, or a gestation of the other in the same, the veritable psyche, or subjectivity itself. And such substitution is encountered finally in Levinas’s analysis in persecution, which is to say, in accusation, assignation, wound, trauma, the status of being a hostage, the condition of an I that is in the accusative before being in the nominative.
The chart we have attached to this writing (on page 59) registers these seven steps that we have taken. The first leg of the journey, the passage of the “self-same” agency through seven ontological encounters will be paralleled by the passage of the same agency in retrograde direction through seven corresponding and correlated stages in which the potential for encountering responsibility is disclosed. The journey out from the self-same to the other is described in Levinas’s first book Totality and Infinity and entails movements through the development of an ego, the encounter with the elemental universe, the labor and construction of a dwelling, the engagement with leisure time and pleasure, the perception of others, the encounter with the human face, and finally the encounter with the projected object.
And the journey back correlates with the journey out. The encounter with the human face is paralleled at the level of responsibility with saying. Perception is paralleled by proximity and contact. Pleasure and self-indulgence is paralleled at the level of responsibility with the incessant or ceaseless or obsession. The building of a dwelling is paralleled with radical abiding. The elemental universe is paralleled by unruliness. The construction of an ego defense is paralleled by substitution. And at the innermost level, the starting place turns out to be concealing a place of persecution, where I am a hostage of the other individual, traumatized, living with wound, in the accusative rather than the nominative, in assignation.
And all of these seven enabling conditions for Levinas are versions of responsibility, a responsibility that under-stands or conditions the ontological relationships that Levinas has described in earlier works—for example, in Totality and Infinity. Saying is responsibility as the “thou shalt not kill.” Proximity is responsibility as “alongsided-ness” or accompaniment, the “I will-be-there-with-you” of Biblical fame (in the discussion of the name of God in Exodus 3:12-14), as “dis-inter-estedness” proper. Obsession is responsibility as “the unstoppable,” ceaselessness, an incessant answerability. Passivity is responsibility as radical abiding or suffering. Anarchy is responsibility as non-indifference. Substitution is responsibility as the one for the other. Persecution is responsibility as the status of a hostage.
And all seven correlate, in clockwise direction in Levinas’s schema, with the journey out. Saying correlates with the face, proximity with sensibility, obsession with enjoyment, passivity with work and dwelling, anarchy with the elemental, substitution with the ego, and persecution with home or the starting point.
What exactly does all of this mean? The several conditions from which unlimited or infinite responsibility for the other individual issue in effect construct for Levinas a heteronomy in place of an autonomy, a subjectivity based upon relationship and responsibility rather than one based upon the freedom of the ego, of willfulness, and of consciousness and representation.
On what is that responsibility itself based? How does it come about? If we accept that all of these founding conditions—saying, proximity, obsession, passivity, an-archy, substitution, persecution—remain versions of responsibility, where does responsibility itself originate? It responds, of course, we know, in Levinas’s understanding, to the il y a, the ground zero of being, the site of the disaster or horror, what Levinas describes as the anonymous rustling of being in general. But what makes responsibility an adequate response to the il y a rather than, say, something else? Why is responsibility better, for example, than radical egoism?
The key to answering this last question—what is the origin of responsibility?—may reside, I suggest, in the last two terms of this series: namely, substitution and persecution. The answer is a substitution founded in particular upon a persecution; a responsibility, that is to say, founded upon a substitution founded in turn upon a persecution. It is in uncovering the origin of that persecution that we shall perceive for Levinas the origins of responsibility.
And the idea of maternity is linked to both of them. Let us recall the following passage from Otherwise than Being.
On the hither side of the zero point which marks the absence of protection and cover, sensibility is being affected by a non-phenomenon, a being put in question by the alterity of the other, before the intervention of a cause, before the appearing of the other. It is a pre-original not resting on oneself, the restlessness of someone persecuted—Where to be? How to be? It is a writhing in the tight dimensions of pain, the unsuspected dimensions of the hither side. It is being torn up from oneself, being less than nothing, a rejection into the negative, behind nothingness; it is maternity, gestation of the other in the same. Is not the restlessness of someone persecuted but a modification of maternity, the groaning of the wounded entrails by those it will bear or has borne? In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substitution for others and suffering both from the effect of persecution and from the persecuting itself in which the persecutor sinks. Maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor.
Rather than a nature, earlier than nature, immediacy is this vulnerability, this maternity, this pre-birth or pre-nature in which the sensibility belongs. (OB 75-76)
Maternity, Levinas says, is the gestation of the other within the same, our capacity at that moment just before birth (or just before we return to birth) to encounter the capacity for the other individual to be the other individual. It is the experience of persecution, of the groaning of the wound of the other individual. Levinas names this experience of the bearing of the other individual within the same as responsibility. And he asserts that this bearing or suffering of the other within the same extends even to the point of substitution. “In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substitution for others and suffering both from the effect of persecution and from the persecuting itself in which the persecutor sinks. Maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor” (OB 75).
As a result, rather than a return to the natural universe or to Nature, what constitutes this unmediated condition in this pre-birth state is vulnerability, utter nakedness or defenselessness, the ability to be wounded, and it is in this context in which sensibility finds belonging.
Here is one more passage on maternity in which the same themes are taken up although from a slightly different angle.
The evocation of maternity … suggests to us the proper sense of the oneself. The oneself cannot form itself; it is already formed with absolute passivity. In this sense it is the victim of a persecution that paralyzes any assumption that could awaken in it, so that it would posit itself for itself. This passivity is that of an attachment that has already been made, as something irreversibly past, prior to all memory and all recall. It was made in an irrecuperable time which the present, represented in recall, does not equal, in a time of birth or creation, of which nature or creation retains a trace, unconvertible into a memory. Recurrence is more past than any rememberable past, any past convertible into a present. The oneself is a creature, but an orphan by birth or an atheist no doubt ignorant of its Creator, for if it knew it it would again be taking up its commencement. The recurrence of the oneself refers to the hither side of the present in which every identity identified in the said is constituted. It is already constituted when the act of constitution first originates. (OB 104-105)
To understand “the oneself,” the formation of the oneself (which is, after all, what this phenomenological enterprise has been about for Levinas), we approach its conditions. And we come to understand that the oneself cannot in fact form itself but rather it is formed by the other individual, within an absolute passivity in which it comes to suffer or abide with the other individual. In this sense, it is a victim and its sensibility will be founded upon this victimary status. It is the victim precisely of a persecution that freezes in place any assumption that it could make for itself about itself. The attachment by which it is held in place precedes any event in which the budding oneself would engage. It is the product of a past that is non-retrievable although traces of it remain. And it has no knowledge of this experience, so for all it knows it remains an orphan, believing its creator to have abandoned him or indeed never to have existed at all.
A passage of the proto-self from a free and autonomous ego, through the elemental, through the labor of dwelling and self-indulgence, through the development of sensibility and perception regarding the world of other people in their vulnerable and naked faces, and through other modalities of being (until one bumps up against the objects of cultural construction and the real other individuals behind them), and then back again through the multiple and variegated modalities of responsibility—saying, proximity, obsession, passivity, anarchy, substitution, and persecution (wherein one discovers one’s permanent status as a hostage in an ongoing heteronomous subjectivity)—does this account of the pre-original encounter of the self with maternity (as a hypostatic response to the horror of being, darkness, and nothing from which there is no exit) not begin to sound suspiciously like the plot of Shakespeare’s King Lear?
Shakespeare on Lear, Mothers, Delirium, and Levinas
How does this account of maternity help us to understand Shakespeare’s play? Lear’s treatment of all of his children is profoundly conditional, and their behavior at least in the first scene confirms and reflects back or echoes that conditionality. He cannot, for whatever reason, assume the role of a parent, the role, that is to say, of one who would offer unconditional love, who would speak from a condition of responsibility which is determined by a condition of maternity, a condition of unlimited or infinite responsibility for the other individual. And that disability may finally be the meaning of the “rising up” or swelling up of “the mother” throughout what he experiences as the worst moments of the play. “The mother” may name the rebellion of the entrails, the wound or vulnerability or persecution or accusation that he would deny or suppress in order to view the world through the ego, which is to say, through a cover or protection that is constituted as a set of conditions through which love may pass.
In other words, he has been fighting off the maternal—the “swelling up” of the mother within him and the responsibility to which it would lead—all his life. The “filial ingratitude” of his daughters, the devastation experienced at the hands of “a thankless child”—whether by Cordelia initially or by Goneril and Regan subsequently—very nearly undoes him. It could in theory lead to any of three results. It could lead to his ownership of that assigned parental role. It could alternatively lead to his buckling entirely under its weight. Or it could finally lead to his resumption of the earlier position in which he alternatively assumes the role of victimizer and victim, villain and sufferer of the villainy of others.
He chooses, of course, the third path. The most he can acknowledge is what the Fool tells him: that he has made his daughters his mother rather than owning his relation to them as his daughters and his own condition as their parent. Far from bearing responsibility for their persecuting, he continues to see himself as victimized throughout, “more sinn’d against than sinning” (3.2.1736-1737). “She’s gone forever!” he says at the play’s end, bearing the dead Cordelia in his arms. “I know when one is dead, and when one lives; / She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass; / If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, / Why, then she lives” (5.3.261-264)
But the tragedy of Lear is that he does not know “when one is dead, and when one lives.” When she was alive at the beginning of the play, and he might readily have treated her well, awarded her the portion of the kingdom he said was her due (as in fact he did with her sisters, and as everyone—including his other daughters—expected him to do with her), he effectively disabled her, sabotaged her entire worldly estate. You only really hurt the one you really love, it would indeed appear. And the play has proceeded in a fairly unmitigated fashion from that initial dismantling to this horrific conclusion. Hence, his death—still trying to distinguish the two. Or, put in other terms, he holds out as a victim for rescue to the last moment. “No rescue? What, a prisoner?” he says incredulously when approached by a nameless gentleman at one point on the empty field (4.6.184).
Shakespeare’s play is indeed, then, about loss as critics have long suspected. He wishes to retire and for a king that means divestiture. And divestiture means undressing, nakedness before all others, revealing the wounds already there in addition to the wounds inflicted by the loss of the kingship. “I am guilty of everything, before everyone, and me more than anyone,” the hero of Dostoyevsky’s famous novel proclaims, and Levinas cites those words repeatedly as a formulation of the possibility of owning the ethical and its obligations.
But Lear already knows that that’s how Cordelia behaves. And his children already know that—and remark as much to each other when Lear is out of earshot. And trusted members of his kingdom know it—Kent and Gloucester, for example. So why does he do it? Why does he force the issue? Either he is already mad when the play opens—in which case it is not accurate to say that he “goes mad” in the course of the play; or he does it purposefully in order to demonstrate something to someone—in which case he is not really mad at all, or, at least, not in the sense that we feel that madness is loss of control since there is a design attached. But what design? What could he want to demonstrate? And to whom would he wish to demonstrate it?
Levinas helps us to address these questions. Levinas introduces the idea of the maternal and the responsibility issuing from it. But the maternal in Levinas comes about as a staving off of the “there is,” the “no escape” or “no exit” from being, the irremissibility of that fatality that Levinas identifies with Shakespearean tragedy (as Richard Cohen notes). Levinas would seem the perfect commentator here rather than the random one he has so often been made out to be. Levinas shows everything that is missing in Lear just as Lear shows us someone who does not accept what Levinas demonstrates and its devastating consequences. What Lear wants is the mother. But what in particular is it about the mother that he wants?
The answer, I suggest, is rescue. None of those around him can mother him, and he is unable to mother himself. No matter how good Cordelia is, she is not an effective mother for him. She is only capable of mothering Lear when Lear is severely wounded or incapacitated as he is later in the play, when she meets him on the field and he thinks upon waking that he is dead, and she can play the role of the good sister against the other malign sisters. When she is, in fact, in real competition with them (as she is in the beginning of the play), she can say nothing, even at the cost of her own share in the legacy and consequently of her life. Or more precisely, she can say nothing that Lear would hear as loving.
For in fact she says plenty. The first words out of her mouth in the play reflect a rivalry with her sisters. Goneril offers her wonted flattery, and Cordelia can’t help but speak, if only to herself: “What shall Cordelia do? Love and be silent” (1.1.62). Regan offers her customary and expected outdoing of Goneril. And again Cordelia cannot refrain from getting into the act, from dramatizing herself and comparing herself to her sister: “Then poor Cordelia! And yet not so, since I am sure my love’s more ponderous than my tongue” (1.1.77). She is, in fact, it would appear, never not in competition with them. And when she does get a chance to speak within Lear’s hearing, she does no less. “What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?” he asks (1.1.85-86). And Cordelia, suddenly abandoning the strategy of loving and remaining silent, or the strategy of constructing an image of “poor Cordelia,” jumps at the opportunity to speak and provoke. She will spend her moment comparing herself to her sisters, articulating why she cannot be like them and how differently she would conduct her own life if she were them. To be sure, some words of filial piety are uttered, but they are secondary to her primary intent which is to distinguish herself dramatically from her siblings.
On the field, in other words, when she is far removed from them and Lear is, at that point, the most unlike her, she can take a different approach. But at the beginning of the play, to the contrary, she constructs herself in direct contrast with them. She is the most like Lear in that regard, who also lacks the capacity to mother and who also is in competition with those around him (“stand not between the dragon and his wrath” he tells Kent (1.1.122)) and in that context cannot play the parental role that others expect him to play any more than she can. And they of course (the sisters) are not mothers either, or they are the self-dramatizing aspect of mothering. For Shakespeare, your mother is the one who rescues you, who affirms that you are who you think you are or who you say you are. That is why we fall in love with women who remind us of our mothers, Freud tells us. They affirm us as our mothers affirm us. Lear is looking for someone to affirm him at the play’s opening. But Cordelia cannot do it because she is doing that as well; she is looking for the same affirmation.26
Richard Cohen notes that Levinas perceived substitution in the quote from Lear about pity that opens Humanism and the Other, and that observation is salient. The responsibility that staves off the “there is” is not just one thing but a whole series of things. It is the entire undergirding, the grounding, of what is above it, the “hypostasis,” as Levinas calls it (borrowing a term from Christian theology), consciousness, the subject, the structure that lies below the appearances (in the case of humans), the person.27 The construction of self is also the construction of loneliness (as Thomas Dumm understands), the construction, if successful, of an isolated fortification. It was Freud who taught us that the ego is a defense, a fortification. So that there is an irony attached. If we have no ego to defend us against the reality-principle in one direction and the “seething cauldron of unsatisfied libidinal desires” that for Freud makes up the id in another, then we may be crushed by their inevitable mutual pressure. But if we are too effective in creating a defense, then we are isolated and feel lonely and abandoned. Perhaps these are the modalities of the self even more so than the Margaret Mahlerian construction which attributes the emotions of fear and loneliness to invasion or abandonment of the mother in the so-called “magic leash” theory. We already arrive that way, in their view, from biology. The self in the modern world is simply a defense and as a result confers upon us those emotions.
But a defense against what? Freud calls it the “reality principle” and the “id.” But is there another way of describing it? Levinas tells us that it is persecution, that we are the victims of persecution from the outset, as the foundation for the construction of self, and not as subsequent to that construction, not as part of our “experience,” properly speaking, which is always after self-construction. “A prisoner?” follows immediately upon “What, no rescue?” in Lear’s case. We are always already in the accusative, Levinas tells us, in assignation, not in the position of the nominative, the one who nominates, like Lear. And one of the strategies against the foundational persecution is substitution. So that when Lear says “I would die even” for witness of “the pity of it,” he is saying that witnessing the behavior of the other could cause me to die. Recall what Othello, who is thinking about Desdemona and what she has allegedly done to him, says (to Iago), “Ah, the pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!” (O 4.1.150).
Why? Why would Lear rather die for “the pity” of it? Or rather, how? Dying in this way is of course also a strategy. Why would Lear employ such a strategy of substitution?
Because substitution is a defense of last resort against the onslaught of the other individual, and the self is at root already a response to persecution, a response to the status of being a victim, of being accused by the others (in the plural), which is to say by the crowd. Why persecution? Here is where Girardian thinking may assist us.28 It is persecution because the self and its subjectivity is a response to scapegoating or victimizing or sacrificial exclusionary behavior of the group and its traumas upon the individual and we cling to the mother as a protection against it and feel abandoned when she walks away from us (and invaded and angry when she get too close). It is not just the breast and biology and its needs, as the Winnicottians would claim, that is at the root of self-construction—at least as Levinas would configure it for us. Yes, the baby learns the value of the breast as life support and feels deprived without it and when away from it. That is not challenged here. But the self-construction at stake in full subjectivity here does not come about until later, until the child is “four” as is commonly said, until the child has learned to smile (which the child learns within the first year or so), and that smiling leads the child into trouble with others, with individuals other than the mother. The “mirror-stage” which occurs within the first eighteen months of a child’s life, according to Lacan, enables the child to gain the equipment for the construction of the self as a defense when that need arises, but not the self per se, which does not occur until later, until persecution sets in and in response to it.
So Lear has forced the issue (and Shakespeare has forced the issue) in order to show just how bad things really are in our situation, the fact that they will lead Lear to be forced out into the heath in the night in a storm, the perfect conjunction, that is to say, of the three obstacles—the personal (being forced out by his daughters), the elemental (the storm), and the quotidian temporal (the night as opposed to the day)—three dimensions against which human beings have constructed defenses. Lear has (more or less) designed it this way to demonstrate to his audience just how useless his self-construction and his kingly subjectivity really is. And to a certain extent this play is really a continuation of the discoveries Shakespeare made in Richard II and Othello. In Brabantio, and his relation to his daughter, we have the first sketch of Lear in relation to Cordelia. And in Richard’s suspicion that the vaunted self is really a bit of theater we have the beginning of Lear’s relation to the elemental and quotidian temporality.
But why has Lear done so and to whom is he speaking? He is speaking to his mother (or absent mother), and he is doing so we may say because no matter how much success he has had up until this point in his life, that success has not enabled him to do that. They really are all against me, he is saying to her in effect. Don’t you see what they are doing to me? Don’t you see? Even my daughters! My own flesh and blood! Even my most beloved daughter, my Cordelia, my very heart. I am able to set the stage so that even she, the wonderful Cordelia, whom everyone admires (myself included), whom everyone knows (even her sisters) to be the epitome of graciousness, kindness, goodness, innocence, and justice, will become cruel and unfeeling—un-mothering, un-motherly, un-mother-like. Lear is demonstrating the scandalous truth he has discovered in the course of his later years: that there is no rescue—against the elements, against the persons around him, against the time of the day—should they decide to turn against you. He is demonstrating as much to the mother who in his mind has promised him rescue and now provides none. And in that demonstration, we have to surmise (although we have no way of proving it), Shakespeare undoubtedly examines as well his own situation.
We are thus confirming and reading beyond Greenblatt’s position. Let us concede that there is a “strategic opacity” operative in these plays. That is certainly true dramatistically. But perhaps more can be said than that. Levinas names what Lear is lacking. In Levinas, we find articulated the perspective that in Shakespeare we find only in glimpses or not at all. In Lear in particular that perspective involves the relation between a parent and a child and that perpsective is one of unconditional love. Whatever else one can say of Lear in the opening scene, we can say that he does not offer any of his daughters—not Goneril and Regan, and not Cordelia—unconditional love. For each there is a set of conditions to be fulfilled and when they fulfill or do not fulfill those conditions, he responds accordingly.
In a sense, everything that follows does so from this insight. Only on the battlefield do we see two instances of what could called unconditional love: when Edgar observes his father “fall from the heights” and there is in fact nothing there (because he is blind and has in fact been led to an empty field); and when Cordelia greets Lear upon his waking and he confesses that he has wronged her and she affirms in effect that she has forgiven him. “If you have poison for me, I will drink it,” he says to her. “I know you do not love me; for your sisters / Have, as I do remember, done me wrong: / You have some cause, they have not” (4.7.71-74). And she replies, “No cause, no cause” (4.7.75). In contrast to Othello, whose play is written shortly before Lear, and who, as he is about to kill Desdemona, intones, “It is the cause; it is the cause; let me not name it to you, you chaste stars” (O 5.2.1-2), Cordelia rejects any such concern with a causal origin. And, of course, what Othello means is I am doing this, I am killing you, for “the cause,” which is to say, the military cultural cause, “else you will betray more men” (cf. O 5.2.6)
Levinas in this context offers us the perspective against which these interactions may be measured. Levinas’s work is itself midrashic to Shakespeare’s scripture. Maternity in Levinas, as we learn from the passage in Otherwise Than Being, functions as unconditional love. That is what Lear is missing. Cordelia attains it for a minute, so to speak, and Edgar does as well. But at the outset of the play, Lear’s love is entirely conditional; that conditionality for him never changes even if it does so momentarily for Cordelia. When he meets Cordelia before Edmund after they are taken prisoner, and Cordelia suggests that they wait to see their sisters (is she still thinking primarily of them? we may wonder), Lear says “no, no, no, no” and it is his departure with her for the prison that in fact occasions her (and, subsequently, his own) death—as C. L. Barber pointed out some years ago.29 Lear reassumes the childhood position he has adopted with her all along. The Fool said to him earlier that he has made his daughters his mother, and now in effect he does no less. He recasts the actors, but the structure, the script, remains identical; he has made his youngest daughter his mother. He is no less a child than he was before, no less refusing of the responsibility that comes with parenting. In either position, as authoritarian father or innocent child, he abdicates his role as parent.
But we have still not come to the end of our argument. Levinas offers us the measure by which we may see what Lear lacks: a sense of the unconditional, of the unlimited or infinite responsibility for the other individual to which a parent is committed. And we have noted what he does in its place, the forms that his conditional responses assume: namely, self-dramatizations—initially as the dragon, then as a prisoner, finally as a child. But how does Lear’s self-dramatizing differ from the self-dramatizing of Othello, for example? Lear, we want to say, is self-sabotaging from the first. And that, I think, may be the key to what is new in Lear as compared to plays like Othello or Macbeth or even Hamlet, where that behavior is revealed more gradually—as a matter of the good gone wrong.
Something has changed in Lear that is beyond Othello, something that he will continue in Timon of Athens, and that will be taken up again in Cymbeline and Winter’s Tale and even The Tempest. The consequences come more quickly in Lear. In Othello, the actions of the protagonist that bring about his destruction take the entire play to show up. But in Lear the bad consequences of his actions in the first scene show up in scene 3, which is in effect scene 2 since the intervening scene has been about Gloucester and his two sons. What is the meaning of that difference in the writing? Shakespeare is no longer interested in simply showing that Othello is a self-dramatizer and its consequences—that he will kill Desdemona in defense of his “occupation” (O 3.3.367). The fact that there is a popular case afoot in 1603 regarding one Brian Annesley and his daughters, who are suing him for custody of all his property, means that the audience is sensitive to the dangers of retirement as Stephen Greenblatt points out. In a sense, Lear is Shakespeare’s commentary on that case. When Goneril puts Lear out and says, “go to my sister,” she is doing to him only as he has done to her sister. She is directing him to rely on forces she has no power to control just as he did to Cordelia and just as he did to her in dividing the kingdom in the first place. When Richard banishes Mowbray in Richard II, he is doing more than destroying his support. Since Mowbray is banished he will have no control over what Mowbray does hence forth, and when Richard says, in effect, “I forbid you to act against the kingdom in your banishment,” he sounds silly since he has destroyed the possibility of controlling that behavior. Lear not only undermines himself, but he does so to his daughters as well.
Therefore, to some extent, Goneril, as nasty as her behavior is toward Lear, is giving Lear back only what he gave her, and her behavior significantly doubles his in this regard. But the rapidity with which the change occurs in Shakespeare’s presentation is striking. It is in effect in the very next scene—not at the end of a long dramatic development. The horror that Shakespeare has discovered is that Lear is fundamentally self-sabotaging. In the opening scene, a catastrophe occurs and Lear has no one to blame for it but himself. The critics would like to blame the daughters. They would like to say Goneril is ungrateful or that Regan is nasty and that because of her childish egotism Cordelia has disempowered herself (that she is, in that regard, as self-sabotaging as Lear is). Others (Gloucester, for example) would like to say that it is the fault of the gods who have turned against the human realm. All of that is true. But Shakespeare shows us it is above all Lear himself who has significantly engineered his own ruin. When Lear says to Kent, “Come not between the dragon and his wrath” (1.1.122), he is acknowledging a certain self-dramatizing nature to his own make-up. But the “dragon” will prove more dragon-like than even Lear imagines. And that is the substance of Kent’s final question: “Is this the promised end?” (5.3.262). Are we all simply destined to end up destroying ourselves and those we most love around us? Is that what it all comes to—Lear carrying the body of the dead Cordelia in his arms? That is what, it seems to me, Shakespeare is exploring, and the answer may not be, in his view, a pretty one.
Greenblatt, in other words, is right to say that there is a “strategic opacity” regarding motivation here as in other of Shakespeare’s most important (and well-known) plays. The play is all about the consequences. A monstrous and strange act occurs at the outset. And the world of the play is left to deal with what results from it. It is a play about “filial gratitude,” about a “thankless child” (in fact, two of them in the eyes of two different fathers), and we may understand how from Greenblatt’s point of view what can be gleaned from this play (among other thigs) is a collection of historical facts of popular lawsuits, a sense of the popular public mythology about the history of England, popular poetry of the time, and a sense of the experience of Shakespeare the man vis-à-vis in 1603 his own two children back in Stratford, and their mother with whom he has had, as far as we can tell, no especially close connection.
What can be said, then, about the strange and monstrous opening act that gets it all rolling (in relation to Levinas) is that it is conditional love. This can be said in contrast with Levinas’s notion of maternity as limitless or boundless responsibility, as unconditional love, as mercy or rachamim in the Jewish tradition from which Levinas comes. But it can also be said in context of the play in contrast with the behavior later of Cordelia when she greets Lear upon his awakening and acts as a good mother. “I know you do not love me,” he says. “You have some cause. Your sisters have not.” “No cause, no cause,” is her response (although it is also interesting that she does not answer the first charge and still remains prompted to speak only when he compares her with her sisters). Levinas in this way serves as a measure of the dimensions of Lear’s behavior. And it is also clear that Lear’s behavior never changes. It is not that he owns his behavior or sees anything fundamentally wrong about his method of deciding as he has done. He still thinks at the very end that he has been “abused,” not that he is abusing others or at least an equal participant in their behavior, that he is “more sinned against than sinning” (3.2.59-60). He dies saying, “look there, look there” (5.3.312), still on the lookout for the visible proof and outward signs rather than relying on his intimate command of the situation. He regards “the mother” as nothing less than a “disease” welling up in him, a condition of illness brought on by a “wandering womb,” a version of hysterica passio, rather than as unconditional love, rather than as maternity, rather than as rachamim.
But there is a third point to be made here, something more to be said about Lear’s positive behavior, and his concern about what in Othello may be called the “ocular proof.” It is not only about aging and the possible dangers of the “dotage” that sometimes accompanies aging, and the possibility that good and innocent servants, fools, and children (like Kent, the Fool, Cordelia, and Edgar) may be caught up rather inextricably and fatally in it. Nor is it even (or only) that the gods are absent from the discussion, that the gods exist either locally as minor demonic spirits and superstitions, or more globally as malevolent interveners who “kill us for their sport” as “flies to wanton boys.” The absence of the maternal (as Levinas would describe it) shows up in Lear as the conditionality of everything that is done. But what is it that he is doing in place of acting unconditionally?
Like his counterpart in Othello, or for that matter in Hamlet, Lear is a self-dramatizer. “Come not between the dragon and his wrath,” he tells Kent quite directly when Kent tries to alter his view. But it is more than that. Lear dramatizes himself in less heavy-handed ways. If we look for discussions of the politics of the kingdom, of the kind we find in Hamlet or Othello, there is very little of it, if any. The play would seem fairly exclusively about Lear personally rather than about the kingdom. The first scene and all that follows is about Lear, not any of his daughters or their well-being, unless it be about their change of mind regarding him. This play is not about the revelation of his self-dramatizing as it is in the earlier plays. There it was a question of demonstrating that self-dramatizing, of revealing it to be operative where we thought something else was operative. Here it is a question, rather, of showing what is at stake at the heart of that self-dramatizing, of why it is that it comes into play, what its strategies are, and where it is leading: namely, self-sabotage.
And we may be able to see that most clearly in context of disability: Lear’s age and Gloucester’s blindness. In the condition of disability we see what would be hidden normally since in normal conditions it is working and here it is failing. Gloucester in his blindness would kill himself, would throw himself from the “white cliffs” of Dover. And Lear in his dotage would destroy his own royal identity, the identity of a king, and the identities of those around him. In that regard, Lear is like the redoing of Richard II just as A Winter’s Tale later will be a redoing of Othello and this the first of what might be termed Shakespeare’s “auto-critical” plays. The nature of kingship and its theatricalization is re-examined here as the nature of jealousy is re-examined later. It is an examination, we may say, of what it means to take on the self-image of a dragon, namely, to die by the fire of the words he himself has released into the world. Disability studies may seem at the outset an unexpected destination in which we are finally to consider this play. But in that regard as well Shakespeare may have been ahead of us.
If I were called upon to say, then, why Lear treats Cordelia so badly, I would say that it is based upon a bad miscalculation. Her bad treatment initially by Lear (and his allegedly good treatment of the sisters) is for his own part at least a set-up. He knows fully how she will respond (and she knows that he knows), and he knows fully how they will respond (and they know as well). And yet he does it and they do it anyway because of, and in fact based fully upon, that set of expectations. His calculation is that his youngest daughter will enact the story of King Leir of ancient English legend, and that she will return in triumph over her two sisters when they turn against their father, and that she will rescue him and the kingdom from its current resident evils, reestablishing him and her to their rightful places at the kingdom’s helm.
But this is reality, not legend, and he has miscalculated just how thoroughly he has disempowered her, and just how thoroughly he has empowered her sisters. And so, when Cordelia does return and briefly triumphs, she quickly loses, is taken prisoner, and is murdered before her father’s eyes. His daughters murder each other and then themselves. Lear’s best friend is tortured and dies (while his sons fight each other to the death). Lear himself dies in grief over all that has just occurred, and the kingdom is sent into a kind of chaos. Betting his kingdom on a fairy-tale he has lost everything.
And the play as a whole for Shakespeare becomes little more than a registry of the nihilistic dangers of projecting private, unresolved fantasies and conflicts in his condition onto the public stage, and the devastation and sorrow it can cause for all concerned. The setting of disability—Lear’s age for example—allows us sharpened access to Lear’s self-dramatizing and the self-sabotaging at its heart in his progressively failing hands, and subtracts from the play the need for finding such strategy on Lear’s part a matter of conscious and deliberate intention or design (which we sought in earlier plays like Othello, or Hamlet, or Richard II). The strategic miscalculation occurs, and Lear does what he does because of who he is, a process that is operative for him at a fairly unconscious, psychic level that is more or less beyond his control, and a feature of his aging disability and disabling condition that he has resolutely failed to take into account, and that Kent, Edgar, and Albany, alone among Shakespeare’s creations in this play, are able to register.
And the overwhelming sense of sorrow that so many readers feel about this play—and to which we referred at the outset of this essay—returns at its conclusion in our renewed awareness of the needlessness of the loss that has occurred, that what has gone so terribly awry in this instance is an attempt to produce in the world a happy ending from a fairy tale of rescue born in a child’s nursery in the company of an imagined adoring mother whose unconditional love and affection is so sorely missed.
“Nothing Comes From Nothing”
In the film version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical “The Sound of Music,” Julie Andrews sings the following lyrics, declaring her faith-filled love for the significantly older patriarchal widower of the von Trapp family for whom she formerly worked: “Nothing comes from nothing / Nothing ever could / So somewhere in my youth or childhood / I must have done something good.”30
The song reflects among other things the sheltered universe in which her character, Sister Maria von Trapp, grew up in a convent in pre-war Austria, a universe in which, provided one acts in a morally appropriate manner, all is well and one is assured of experiencing only happy endings, even in the most dire of circumstances. The film makes good on her conviction. As bad as things get, there is always a solution. The Nazis invade Austria and the von Trapp family, facing the prospect of imminent danger and potential annihilation, effectively escape. They can simply “walk away” from the trouble, crossing the Austrian mountains to neighboring countries and ultimately arriving in America. The film is itself a tribute to the childlike perspective Maria von Trapp is teaching. Standing in the Austrian gazebo and singing to the considerably older Christopher Plummer, or fleeing across the Alps and rescuing her children and family from the crazed and violent fanatics of the times, Julie Andrews has become in effect a latter day Cordelia, Cordelia in later life, so to speak, now becoming a mother of her own, who remembers in her childhood something important about the words “nothing comes from nothing,” but whose faith in goodness, innocence, and the inevitable triumph of justice remains unshakable. Four hundred years later, in a filmed version of an American stage musical, Julie Andrews has become the reassuring and unconditionally loving mother Lear never had.
Written for the popular stage shortly after the war for an America still traumatized by what its soldiers discovered in Europe, the musical and subsequent film served as a kind of cultural palliative. Shakespeare’s King Lear tells a different story, one somewhat closer to that of the Jewish victims in the concentration camps. In Shakespeare’s play there are no guarantees of happy endings no matter what one does.31 More like the biblical Job (who argues for the profound injustice of his experience) than the character of his three friends (who assume he must have done something to bring about this crisis), Shakespeare’s protagonist resolutely rejects the idea of his collaboration in his own demise: “I am a man more sinn’d against than sinning” he has said (3.2.59-60). He maintains the idea of himself as a victim, that he has been “abused.”
But we have seen Lear collaborate in his own undoing throughout the play before us. Is disowning Cordelia, the gesture that started his calamitous ending moving along and that leaves his favored daughter penniless and parentless in a hostile world, to be construed in his mind as an instance of “more sinn’d against than sinning”? Is Cordelia’s adolescent response to his demand for yet more flattery with words that reflect her continued rivalry with her two manipulative sisters—words that nonetheless still manage to affirm her love for him and dutiful honoring of him—an example of such “abuse”?
Lear’s blindness, in other words, unlike that of Gloucester, I suggest, remains intact from beginning to end—not unlike that of Oedipus, who blinds himself in the final moments of Sophocles’s tragedy, less out of ironic insight, than ironically in a reconstruction of the single—minded oracular perspective that has guided him throughout. And in the vocabulary of our own moment, Levinas gives voice to the maternal perspective absent from Lear, whatever Shakespeare’s personal motivation for putting it aside.32 If it takes a critical philosophic reader like Levinas (four centuries later) to articulate the full dimensions of that ownership of responsibility in the wake of a disaster of considerably more apocalyptic parameters than those facing the aging monarch (and the same ones, in fact, as those at stake in the popular American musical), then it is perhaps a tribute to the depth of Shakespeare’s “prophetic soul” (not unlike Hamlet’s) and its biblical dimensions to have forecast such a response and such a disaster for an audience and subsequent interpretative tradition so ready to praise his “infinite variety” and yet so little able to follow (for good reasons or bad) that literary imagination to the end, and to own the implications of Shakespeare’s own admittedly devastating critical insights.
Notes
1 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, ed. Douglas Langston (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).
2 Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, trans. James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1962), 248-249.
3 Thomas Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 2.
4 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 327-328.
5 Ibid., 133, 358-361, 369, 374.
6 Ibid., 236.
7 Ibid., 359.
8 See Ernest Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
9 An episode of the 1950s television show “Twilight Zone” depicts precisely such an event.
10 Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life, 1-2.
11 See Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 267-353; and Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992).
12 See The Norton Shakespeare (2008), 2521.
13 Ibid.
14 Loneliness as a Way of Life, 6. See also Mark S. Shearer, “The Cry of Birth: King Lear’s Hysterica Passio,” Postscript 1 (1983): 60-66; and, more recently, Kaara L. Peterson, “Hysterica Passio: Early Modern Medicine, King Lear, and Editorial Practice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 57 (2006): 1-22.
15 See Jan Kott’s famous essay, “Lear as Endgame,” in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1974), 127-168.
16 See Ann Astell, “‘According to my bond’: Girard and Levinas as Readers of King Lear,” paper presented at the “Du Sacré au Saint” conference in Paris, France on Nov. 6, 2012; William Johnsen, “‘That Future Strife Be Prevented Now’: Shakespeare’s Lear,” paper presented at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France on Nov. 4, 2012; Sean Lawrence, Forgiving the Gift: The Philosophy of Generosity in Shakespeare and Marlowe (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012); Kent R. Lehnhof, “Relation and Responsibility: A Levinasian Reading of King Lear,” Modern Philology 111 (2014): 485-509; and Steven Shankman, “From Solitude to Maternity: Levinas and Shakespeare,” Levinas Studies 8 (2013): 67-79.
17 The recently published Prison Notebooks of course add to that collection.
18 See EE 33, 56-57; TO 50, 72-73, 78; and LR 86, 91.
19 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Other in Proust,” Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 99-105. See especially 100.
20 See Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 173, 277; Levinas, Unforeseen History, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 67; TI 92, 146, 231, 263; EI 22; and OB 3, 117, 192.
21 See Levinas, In the Time of the Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 168; and BV xi.
22 “LEAR: I should e’en die with pity to see another thus” (4.7.53). See HLH 7 / HO 3.
23 See Richard A. Cohen, “Some Reflections on Levinas and Shakespeare,” in Levinasian Meditations. Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), 150-168, and “A Meditation,” above (15-37).
24 See Sandor Goodhart, Sacrificing Commentary: Reading the End of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
25 See TO 72.
26 The Russian writers seem to have learned a lot from Shakespeare in this regard. Think of Chekhov’s dramas in which grumpy old men soften the moment they are mothered by the elder women in the house.
27 I thank Thomas Ryba for his discussion with me of this concept in Christian theology.
28 See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
29 Barber’s remark occurs in a lecture given at the State University of New York Buffalo on Lear from a book he was writing on Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. See C.L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
30 Here are the full lyrics before their repetition. “MARIA: Perhaps I had a wicked childhood / Perhaps I had a miserable youth / But somewhere in my wicked, miserable past / There must have been a moment of truth / For here you are, standing there, loving me / Whether or not you should / But somewhere in my youth or childhood / I must have done something good / Nothing comes from nothing / Nothing ever could / So somewhere in my youth or childhood / I must have done something good.” Interestingly enough, the song did not appear in the stage musical where Maria and the Captain declare their love for each other in “An Ordinary Couple.” The music and lyrics for “Something Good” were added by Richard Rodgers for the film version of the play, Oscar Hammerstein having died in the interval.
31 Shakespeare’s undoing of any happy ending stands in significant contrast with all the fictional source materials from which the story appears to have come, and seems to have inspired in its audience their own rewriting of it.
32 If it is missing from this drama, it is not missing from his poetic writing. In sonnet 143, Shakespeare famously writes: “Lo, as a careful housewife runs to catch / One of her feathered creatures broke away, / Sets down her babe and makes all swift dispatch / In pursuit of the thing she would have stay—/ Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase, / Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent / To follow that which flies before her face, / Not prizing her poor infant’s discontent; / So run’st thou after that which flies from thee, / Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind; / But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me, /And play the mother’s part, kiss me, be kind. / So will I pray that thou mayst have thy will, / If thou turn back, and my loud crying still.” Stephen Booth, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 123.