Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (39 page)

Shakespeare digs ever deeper into this morass as the plot moves into ever-escalating forms of warfare. The very first exchange of the play delves into child making and presents it as cavalier, as the prerogative of lusty fathers: Kent, confused as to Edmund’s station, tells Gloucester, “I cannot conceive you,” only to hear the riposte “Sir, this young fellow’s mother could.” And the men have their little joke. But the joke is on them, for these are no laughing matters. Cordelia and Edgar know something firsthand about parental injury, and Edgar—witnessing Lear’s madness and pain—expresses in one compact phrase the awful symmetry of the play: “He childed as I fathered.” This is not bad luck or even evil, it is the bedrock of things as they are. “Childed” and “fathered” are the names Shakespeare gives to human destiny, for they limn and bound individual life, constitute its unfurling, time-fueled contours, contain at once its limits, horizons, blessings, and horrors.

Nietzsche said of Oedipus that he had invaded nature’s secrets via his twin transgressions of incest and parricide: “
ein Verbrechen an der Natur.
” Shakespeare’s Edgar penetrates no less deeply, late in the play, when he avows his identity to Edmund at the onset of their duel: “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us. / The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes.” It is a remarkable utterance, and it covers much ground in the great distance between titillating “pleasant vices,” on the one hand—siring illegitimate children may bring you trouble, old sinner—and that more forbidding other “dark and vicious place,” now seen as a double site: woman’s genitals but also, somehow, where one’s eyes are put out, where one pays nature’s “cost.” No one is laughing about manufacturing children anymore. You are seeding your own death, you are courting blindness. Death marks copulation: the sexual itch that draws both Goneril and Regan to Edmund finds its rightful conclusion in the man’s death: “I was contracted to them both; all three / Now marry in an instant.”

We increase the species via fornication, but the balance is kept when our children cannibalize us. Growing up and growing old are not two distinct life phases in
King Lear:
they are a lethal dialectic, for the one flourishes by vanquishing the other. Sex is central here. Sex is the creature’s entry into the game, the entry into the creation, the triggering of one’s own eventual demise, since one seeds one’s end. That is why the play may seem so violently, insanely misogynistic in its assault on female sexuality. Consider Lear’s crazed diatribe against Goneril:

The last two lines about filial ingratitude are known the world over, but one needs to link them to the manic indictment that precedes them, an indictment of reproduction itself, a feverish effort to hit this woman where it hurts: in her genitals, in her capacity to give birth and make life. “He childed as I fathered,” said Edgar; Lear wants to lay just this curse on his daughter, let her know what it feels like. A bit later, he returns to the charge: “You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames / Into her scornful eyes! Infect her beauty, / You fen-sucked fogs, drawn by the powerful sun / To fall and blister.” Starting with her eyes, he then moves to her face, seeking to deform her altogether. Sexed, constituted for conception, she and her sister are the very embodiments of libido in its many guises: not only do they both lust after Edmund, but they outdo each other in cruelties, never more visible than in Regan’s treatment of both Kent and Gloucester: she lengthens, for sheer pleasure, Kent’s time in the stocks, and she does still worse to Gloucester: first plucking his beard, then urging that his second eye be gouged out as well. I see sexual warfare writ large here, as the women torture or symbolically castrate the old men, as they act out their lusts. And it is against this backdrop that we see the nasty but clear logic of Lear’s wildest ravings, as in this outburst on the heath:

Let me repeat: this is more than an attack on false
pudeur
and hypocrisy, more even than an indictment of female desire: it is a delirious assault on that very “dark place” where the work of appetite and insemination is carried out, where nature’s laboratory for making children is located. This is what cannot be borne, what must belong to the fiend, what catapults Lear into a frenzy of somatic disgust and terror.

As we all know, that mad speech takes place on the storm-buffeted heath, the time and the place where Lear’s initiation into truth and madness is enacted in all its horror. “Madness” is a term I tend to shy away from, inasmuch as it frequently closes the door on analysis and understanding, but one cannot get free of it in this play, since Lear himself is so prescient and insistent about these matters, recognizes early on that madness is threatening, that it may take over entirely. Madness alters you from yourself. Lear’s education in self-altering began when Goneril sets about reducing the scale of his retinue: “Does any here know me? This is not Lear: / Does Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes? / … Who is it that can tell me who I am?” On the heath, however, the stakes are considerably higher. Now the elements themselves have come to full voice and full pitch: cataracts, hurricanes, fires, thunderbolts, all “singe [Lear’s] white head,” demonstrating once and for all the mirage of kingship. Yet this brutal warfare is anonymous—“I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness. / I never gave you kingdom, called you children”—whereas the betrayal of flesh and blood cuts to our very core. Kingdom, children: so many things one thought one’s own, the very props and uprights of identity and power; they mutiny, and you are undone.

Madness opens the door to vision, and what we will see unveiled is the hubris and blindness that characterized his earlier life and beliefs, now smashed to nothing, now heralding a chastened, rawer view of our common condition, shown in Lear’s recognition that poor Tom figures us all: “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.” No one has prerogatives or rights. In such a scheme, any view of station or privilege would be a fantasy. The man who began this play claiming he would crawl unburdened toward death has learned a good deal about crawling, but the trip toward death is itself a weighty affair, a burden we cannot shrug off or divide among our heirs, for it is the price we pay for our very flesh, our white hair and fragile wits that are no match for either the tempest’s unabating fury, always ready to strike, or our children’s muscular hatred, coiled in them since inception. Lear has come to understand the dynamics of power: the young rise, the old fall, the elements press, death is at the door. He wages a futile war against sexuality, for it is the engendering principle that dooms him, that fuels the systemic warfare of the play, that decrees the waxing of the young and the waning of the old. He is slated to lose everything, including the one true daughter whose murder Edmund arranges as a final testimony to natural unkindness.

Yet he does win vision. The price paid for it is madness—he becomes unreturnably other unto himself—but at the peak of his suffering, he
sees
. Maybe this is what Shakespeare is telling us: that old people are scheduled for undoing, for draining the cup, but they may make wisdom out of their calvary. Lear’s wisdom is perforce about the nature of power, about what he has so drastically misconstrued during his life. The fury on the heath carries echoes of the Last Judgment, that moment when posturing is over and truth shows: “undivulged crimes” are on show, the seemingly pious are seen through as incestuous, “pent-up guilts” break through concealment. Theatrically speaking, the curtain is going up. Lear, become horribly knowing about his own mortality, his private agony, now opens his register, begins to realize that his kingdom is filled with “unaccommodated” subjects, all of them “more sinned against than sinning”:

Take physic, pomp:
that is indeed one take on this play. Your privileges are illusory, your power a fantasy, but physic is required to learn this hard lesson, and when you do learn it, you are initiated into a broader community of sufferers. The larger family—a constellation beyond daughters and sons-in-law—is coming into view. And Lear now sees the vile but ubiquitous logic that is customarily hidden from our eyes: the strong victimize the weak, the wolf devours the lamb. What is happening at home goes on throughout the kingdom. I am undone; all are undone. Many lessons for an old man: the old are programmed for impotence, “bare, forked animals” are the norm, but nonetheless vice and cruelty and all our so-called order have their corrupt card to play, so that the kaleidoscopic world goes through its prancing and abusive power antics wherever you look. In his hallucinatory courtroom on the heath, Lear pronounces judgment on the whole charade: the beggar runs from the farmer’s dog, the (lusting) beadle lashes the whore, the usurer hangs the cozener. The Fool told him that parents’ rags make children blind but parents’ bags make them kind; this lesson is now transmuted into a searing panoptic vision of culture: “Through tattered clothes great vices do appear: / Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, / And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; / Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it. / None does offend, none, I say none.”

The stately arrangements at the beginning—a powerful king dividing his kingdom among his children—have yielded to something close to a horror show. Abuse and victimization—propped up and thus hidden by pretense—are culture’s master plan, the mirage of order that is exposed as systemic abuse. Lear’s fate is Gloucester’s fate is business as usual in every corner of the realm. Must one be a betrayed father and abused king to learn this lesson? Must one grow old? Perhaps. It is hard to imagine the young moving into such a dark wisdom, no matter how acute their vision is. Old, you inhabit the very position of authority—you have spent your life acquiring and asserting it—only to find that it is a charade, a prop, and you find this out by being turned inside out: from father to fool, from old king to forked animal. A tragic lesson plan.

As always in Shakespeare, the visionary and the theatrical are inseparable. Lear was blind, Gloucester is blinded, so now the age-old game of hypocritical crime and punishment is trotted out for us all to see. It is all tinsel, all spectacle, and morality is the toy of cunning appearances: corrupt, rigged, a play within a play. Robes and gowns are the arbiter of truth. Only a man who has lost all robes and gowns comes to such knowledge. To get that far, he has been “bound / Upon a wheel of fire,” suggesting that we must burn through to truth. Such incandescence illuminates for us in unforgettable fashion what growing old might entail. There is something vital, tonic, and beautiful about the widening nature of Lear’s chastened vision, as it becomes systemwide in its purview and depth. He learns to see. “Nothing will come of nothing,” he angrily told Cordelia at play’s beginning. But he now knows what it feels like to become nothing, to be treated as nothing, to be expelled from the game altogether, to experience for five acts a banishment worse than anything he could inflict: nature’s exit command. He was old when the curtain rose. He has come far since then. This is not nothing.

How to say something upbeat about this merciless play? No one has ever felt that much order was restored at its close, and the death of Cordelia seems grotesquely unnecessary. Yet I feel that both Lear and Gloucester suffer into wisdom. In Lear’s case it entails an unbearable lifting of the curtain, so that he sees the endless machinations of the strong devouring the weak all across his kingdom, all in the name of custom and propriety, parading as virtue, stinking to Heaven. Gloucester’s range is less, but his blinding and subsequent pilgrimage to “Dover” with poor Tom have a pathos that we are not likely to forget. There is no reward in sight for either of these old men, but I persist in believing they have become sighted at the end of their lives, sighted into awareness of how the universe works. Blindness is an obvious motif in the play, just as it was for Sophocles, but at the close of
Lear
we are talking about the blindness that comes from looking directly at the sun or looking directly at the white blast of nuclear holocaust: you will be consumed by what you see. The ferocity of this play cashiers the polite terms of my argument: growing old sounds like an avuncular pastime when contrasted with the apocalyptic force of these events. Yet, survivable or not, theirs is a trajectory toward truth. That is something.