A Few Reflections on "King Lear"
What exactly is Cordelia refusing to say when she refuses to “heave her heart into her mouth” and articulate her love for her father? All who watch the play understand that she is the daughter who genuinely loves her father; Regan and Goneril, in their verbiage, are but elaborating upon their own deceit. So quite simply, Cordelia refrains from speaking the truth, from speaking of the love she actually feels for her father. What is the wisdom in this demurral?
Her motives can be construed variously – a frank, plain-spoken young woman, who refuses to indulge in the customary flattery of court culture; a reverent child unwilling to beguile her father. Perhaps my interpretation is slightly cynical, but I have always detected a real loathing on Cordelia’s part towards her sisters, and so see her silence in this opening scene as an expression of disdain for their false characters, and an unwillingness to resemble them in the least.
But at the heart of that silence is a deep perception that eludes all the other figures in the scene, a recognition that to express true love is inevitably to risk sacrilege. “One word is too often profaned for me to profane it,” wrote Shelley in one of his brief lyrics, basing his refusal to express his love on a reluctance to desecrate the word. In fact, it is the word that desecrates the reality, the assay of language that intrinsically misrepresents what it seeks to represent. It was for this reason that the ancient Jews left the name of God unpronounceable, perceiving that any name assigned to the full and final presence of truth would be bound to omit some aspect of that truth – hence, not entirely truthful. But the case is the same in all the forms of experience through which that presence manifests itself in human life; to love another is to simply to stand disposed to them in the light of God’s aboriginal love for them, and so that disposition too cannot be named – cannot be articulated – without omitting something essential to it, and thus asserting to be true what is not entirely true.
What I am suggesting then is that there is an inevitable tendency of language to profane human experience, and that true culture has always sought to guard against this tendency. Thus the pride of place accorded to poetry among all civilized peoples. For what gives rise to all the formal apparatus of the art is a ritual-like reverence for human experience; an impetus to demarcate what is holy and eternal in experience from all that threatens to desecrate it. The poet constructs the walls of a sanctuary around every encounter or thought in which the presence of God is revealed, and makes from the tracery of his diction and tropes a barrier against the besetting intrusions of falsehood. Only in this way can human beings say what most needs to be said, and so poetry can rightly be regarded as the paradigm of all human speech.
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But is it true that Cordelia says nothing in reply to her father’s injunction? Not quite. What she says is, “I love you according to my bond.” In saying this, perhaps she has said something; perhaps she has said everything.
In the most basic terms, she is saying that she loves her father exactly as a daughter ought to love a father – “You have begot me, bred me, loved me. / I return those duties back as are right fit: / Obey you, love you, and most honor you.” What is assumed in this reply is that there is in the relationship itself – in the bond itself – a duty to honor and to love. The status of daughter bears with it in its proper description an account of all the obligations and forms of gratitude inherent in that status. Childhood in human experience is not merely a biological phenomenon, but a moral one. The whole modern prejudice about the distinction between facts and values is belied by a modicum of reflection upon the nature of human relationship.
The Confucian philosophy made much of this intrinsically moral nature of human bonds in the so-called “five relationships,” the bonds obtaining between ruler and subject, father and child, husband and wife, elder sibling and younger sibling, and friend and friend. The conviction was that simply to exist as party to one of these relationships was to exist in a state of obligation. Crucially, that obligation was never construed as a derivation of human will; it was never thought that men choose the duties by which they will be bound. To the contrary, those duties were recognized to obtain prior to all forms of choice a person might engage in. The totality of piety and humaneness inhered in recognizing the true nature of the relationships that give shape to our existence, and in conforming our will to their demands.
Henry Maine, in his Ancient Law, propounded the notion that legal and political thought in the ancient world was governed by a conception of status, rooted in an acknowledgment of our prior obligations, but that in the modern world this conception had been replaced by a notion of contract, which regarded all duties as the entailment of agreements entered into willingly by those upon whom those duties are incumbent. In truth, the shift from status to contract has encompassed the whole moral and spiritual range of Western civilization; the notion that we are only bound where we choose to be bound is endemic to the way we think about art or religion, as much as about government. A blindness to the authentic parameters of the relationships which determine our very existence reveals itself in the antipathy to history and tradition that is such a common theme of our day and age.
A reclamation of Western culture means a return to status. It means a whole-hearted rejection of the fallacy that we choose our duties, and a renewed awareness of the duties entailed upon us by the relationships into which we are born, prior to any exercise of our own volition. There is a powerfully relevant passage in Edmund Burke’s Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs which summarizes the issue. Refuting the claims of the French Revolutionists that men are at liberty to abrogate their duties towards society whenever they will to do so, Burke writes, “I cannot too often recommend it to the serious consideration of all men, who think civil society to be within the province of moral jurisdiction, that if we owe to it any duty, it is not subject to our will. Duties are not voluntary. Duty and will are even contradictory terms.” The very shape of civil society, the relationships it encompasses, and the benefits we accrue through those relationships obligate us by our very status within their framework: “Look through the whole of life and the whole system of duties. Much the strongest moral obligations are such as were never the results of our option… We have obligations to mankind at large, which are not in consequence of any special voluntary pact. They arise from the relation of man to man, and the relations of man to God, which relations are not matter of choice.” A child is bound in obedience to her parents because a proper understanding of her relationship to them demands it: “Children are not consenting to their relation, but their relation, without their actual consent, binds them to its duties; or rather it implies their consent, because the presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the predisposed order of things.”
Crucially, Burke maintains that the obligatory force emanating from these fundamental relationships results in some manner from the way they reflect a transcendent order: “I allow, that if no supreme ruler exists, wise to form, and potent to enforce, the moral law, there is no sanction to any contract, virtual or even actual, against the will of prevalent power. On that hypothesis, let any set of men be strong enough to set their duties at defiance, and they cease to be duties any longer.” The meaningfulness of human bonds is ultimately dependent upon the meaningfulness of reality itself; the gratitude we properly display towards parents and siblings is a vestige of the primal gratitude we owe towards the source of being itself. To love “according to one’s bonds,” then, is to acknowledge the divine dignity in the presence of the other whom we honor, to stand disposed towards them as God Himself would have us stand. It is to say everything that must be said of those whose existence defines the contours of our own existence.
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“Nothing will come from nothing,” roars Lear in response to Cordelia’s demurral, articulating the theme governing the progress of the play’s action, as the old king steadily divests himself of all the “lendings” of civilized society and converts into a “bare, forked animal” – without relation, without law, without reason itself. From the nullity of such a creature, what significant thing can be expected to originate?
The paradox of the play lies in the fact that as Lear dispatches with the lineaments of reason and sanity in his fit of madness he does not fulfill his nature, but surrenders it. Similarly, when Edgar dons the disguise of a madman, devoid of even the trappings of civility, the appearance represents not a revelation but a deprivation of the true man. The loss of civilization’s decorum and lawfulness does not liberate the natural self from alien strictures, but stymies in the self the forms of development most congenial and necessary to it. The play is effectively one long meditation upon Burke’s dictum that “art is man’s nature.” What is withheld from Lear in the failed loyalty (real and apparent) of his daughters is not a mere formality or convention, but something essential to his earthly flourishing. Thus Goneril and Regan are excoriated as “unnatural hags;” their cruelty stems not from conformity to social pressure, but from a deficit of instinctual affection. If we were to be so reckless as to propose one overriding theme to the entirety of Shakespeare’s corpus, what we would most likely want to say is that the playwright was overwhelmingly concerned with the intrinsically moral orientation of human nature. In the person of Macbeth, of Richard III, of Prince Hal, as well as in the person of Lear, it is the natural law, as an aspect of lived experience, with which he is preoccupied.
Yet theologically speaking, Lear’s statement is a mistake. According to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, something does come from nothing – everything comes from nothing. The primordial act of generation in which our frame of being has its origin is construed as a triumph over nothingness, over the abyss of nullity. The impetus of this act is not – cannot – be found in a response to any prior being, since it is the act from which being itself emerges. Rather, it is an overflowing or outpouring of divine love, a purely gratuitous expression of a love emanating from the heart of Being, that can have no other end but in the generation and flourishing of other beings. Everything that is can be traced back to this aboriginal act of pure love.
In the play, it is Cordelia who reenacts that love in the midst of the nothingness her sisters have enacted. Regan and Goneril are the very embodiments of negation – the negation of obedience, of duty, of affection. Their cruel ingratitude towards their father severs him from his own identity – as king, and then as man. Lear’s descent into madness is a descent into the negation of human nature itself. In that state of destitution, the nothingness, the fundamental insubstantiality, of human existence discloses itself: a condition of things in which all semblances of order, justice, or authority are delusions (“there thou might’st behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office”), and which is marked from beginning to end by random, meritless suffering (“thou know’st the first time that we smell the air we wail and cry”). The sources of generation themselves appear repugnant (“there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit”), and the soul revolts against being itself.
In the throes of this spiritual annihilation, the grace Cordelia bestows upon her distracted father – a grace that, given Lear’s own injustice towards her, cannot be the result of gratitude -– restores the old man to sanity, to kingship, and ultimately to himself. He is re-made out of the love his wronged daughter sheds upon his bewildered mind. The scene in which they are re-united, and in which Lear emerges out of his maddened stupor, is poignant for reasons having to do with much more than a reconciliation between father and daughter. The tears Cordelia sheds upon Lear at his waking are like baptismal waters, re-generating the voided soul of her father in their filial compassion. He is returned to himself – once more, he is “my royal lord…your majesty,” at the greeting of Cordelia. The order and meaningfulness of being is restored at her ministrations, and the primordial miracle of creation brought to life once more through a love that has no reason, “no cause.”