Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (38 page)

He is not alone in being rash and intemperate. Gloucester falls into Edmund’s trap with such consummate ease that we have to wonder about his wits as well. Yes, Edmund is a clever boy, silver-tongued, and knows how to fake letters and put on a show to incriminate his brother, but how quickly it all goes, how absolute the father’s indictment of the older son is after just a few cunning tricks: “Abhorred villain, unnatural, detested, brutish villain—worse than brutish! Go, sirrah, seek him: I’ll apprehend him. Abominable villain, where is he?” Here we are, midway in scene 2 of the first act, and two fathers have made disastrous mistakes about their children, have misread the signs, have started the terrible machinery of internecine familial slaughter that is beginning to hum and go into action. One is shocked by the speed of it all—that truth should be extinguished so easily; that old men might go tragically wrong and off course, with so little prodding, in so short a compass. Of course we readers know that Shakespeare has much in store for these two fellows, but we are nonetheless lessoned about the gullibility and foibles of the old, what fools they can be, how easily they are taken in. “Ripeness is all” will eventually be the key to this dark play’s wisdom, but we can already see that achieving ripeness can take considerable time, that getting old has little to do with getting wise, that much suffering is going to be brought in for the pedagogy.

The old should command respect. Lear’s and Gloucester’s double station—as king and earl, as fathers—figures a seemingly natural hierarchical ranking. We see this perhaps most profoundly in the symbolic acts of defiance and subversion required by the plot, namely the mishandling of Kent (the king’s man) by putting him into the stocks and indeed the blinding of Gloucester by Albany and Regan, a vicious and sadistic act all the more terrible because the old man is their host, entitled to their homage. We are not far from the sacrilegious in these scenes of violence and disrespect, putting us on notice that the old contracts no longer bind. Shakespeare wants us to see that a systemic undoing of cosmic proportions takes place when the old are savaged. Gloucester waxes oracular on just this topic:

As we know, this indictment of the world order is immediately followed by Edmund’s brilliant mockery of such schemas, as if to say that the old take refuge in referencing the grand design, thereby freeing themselves from all responsibility:

As so often in the great tragedies, one sees the clashing of two worlds here: the traditional order is being rent asunder, but the interpretations are as different as night and day. The old man sees in such upheaval a fissuring of the divine plan and refers the anarchic violence of the moment to an older paradigm of order. Discord between parents and children is but another face of cosmic disarray, to be found in eclipses, espied most particularly in social and political unrest, in the joint failures of love of and respect toward one’s fellows, family, and masters. Yet the son seems to announce a new regime altogether, a regime of biological and libidinal currents that knows nothing of morality or hierarchy. Edmund sounds the modern note as he blasts the old order, terming it a haven for blind cowards who cannot accept the consequences of their own natures, who cloak themselves in symbolic robes, cling to alibis, point their fingers always outward, never inward. One feels that an old world—not merely a moral order but also an interpretive order—is going under and that a brazen, naked, un-echoing new universe is coming into view, closer to Machiavelli and Hobbes than to the ancients. (Iago philosophizes along these same fierce lines in
Othello
, gleefully casting the old verities of honor and loyalty and friendship and virtue as just so much idiocy, indeed as a “fig.”)

The old way of seeing things is in trouble. The old people themselves see things awry: Lear misreads all three daughters, taking counterfeit coins for real, discrediting the real as nothing; Gloucester raises Edmund and expels Edgar, for he is taken in by the show of the one and cannot perceive the truth of the other. Vision and interpretation are having a bad day. The Fool spells this out for his master: “Thou canst tell why one’s nose stands i’ th’ middle on ’s face?” The answer is “Why, to keep one’s eyes on either side ’s nose, that what a man cannot smell out, he may spy into.” But Lear and Gloucester smelled nothing, saw nothing that needed spying into. The Fool’s conclusion is not long in coming: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” There you have it: old age makes you old, but it is no guarantee of wisdom.
Till thou hadst been wise
. What does it take to become wise? What are you if, old, you are not wise?

Goneril put it clearly: “Idle old man, / That still would manage those authorities / That he hath given away!—Now, by my life / Old fools are babes again.” But the Fool puts more zest into it as he intones the same message to his master, alleging that the father has reversed nature’s order, “e’er since thou mad’st thy daughters thy mothers.” The family is turned inside out, and the once-all-powerful father is now helpless, infantilized, literally spankable:

How did this happen? Why, we see it from the beginning: the old man gave away his power. Lear asks, “Dost thou call me fool, boy?” and the reply is “All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou was born with.” An old man turned babe: there is a geriatric note here that gets our attention even today, with or without the Fool.

Behind all this banter about wits and loss of wits lies a simple but profound practical, material issue: do not give away your estate. This is the play’s payload: your authority as king, as father, lies in your continued possession of your estate, your kingdom, your money, and your goods. Once they are gone, good-bye, allegiance and respect. Listen again to the Fool: “Fathers that wear rags / Do make their children blind, / But fathers that bear bags / Shall see their children kind.” Sweetly cued to the trope of vision, recalling nature’s plan in placing eyes on each side of our nose, this passage nonetheless advertises the promiscuity and fallibility of seeing—indeed, the charade of seeing, the theater of appearances. Give away your money and dress in rags, and lo and behold, your children are blind; i.e., blind to you as a worthy parent; hold on to your goodies, and you will note the respect and loyalty of your children. It could not be put more simply: hunger and greed set the stage—for it is only a stage set—and the comedy of filial devotion lasts only as long as the old hold on to their power. (And do not forget: Lear held on pretty long; “I gave you all,” he tells Regan, and she replies, “And in good time you gave it,” telling us something about the different clocks of age and youth, shedding light on the waiting of youth.) Is this not the “naturalist” code that Edmund subscribes to? Obedience, reverence: only appearances, only theater. Appetite rules. The young want their due.

(The young want their due. Imagine, for a moment, Edmund or Goneril or Regan as the major protagonist of this story, and you’d not be far from the literary fare of Part I. Lazarillo, Des Grieux, Rastignac, Jane Eyre, Heathcliff, the Invisible Man, Celie, even little Marjane: they wanted their due. But how different it looks from the other side, from the angle of those holding on.)

The Fool offers, in keeping with the language of optics, the play’s corrective lens. In his inimitable fashion, he becomes the philosopher of the piece. The Fool’s wisdom would seem to be that it could have been avoided. You should have recognized the true daughter, sniffed out the false ones, kept your titles, and things might have been okay. Yet the greatness of Shakespeare’s play is that it wreaks havoc on all forms of advance knowledge, that it blows sky-high any corrective vision, even any retrospective fix on things. In short, the unfurling spectacle of Lear writes large for us the irremediable law of time: we do go backward, we do regress, we become children in our dotage. No amount of seeing or smelling trouble helps: we are fated to be undone. Dividing your kingdom is redundant and unnecessary; you lose your power no matter what. That is the play’s bad news.

How does an old man become a child? Lear does not lower his breeches, but he weeps, and he is shamed by his weakness: “I am ashamed / That thou [Goneril] hast power to shake my manhood thus, / That these hot tears, which break from me perforce, / Should make thee worth them.” Later, he collapses yet again into tears and again registers this onslaught as ignoble, as an undoing of stature, power, and manhood. At this juncture, we realize that old age and tears are locked in a dance, that tears themselves—of rage, suffering, impotence—announce the coming of something new and frightening, bidding to cancel out all that we were, against which we have no resources:

In a play larded with suffering, this speech has for me a special pathos. Lear seems to recognize a tyranny in grief—the tears he cannot quash—that matches any so-called power he exercised as king. He calls upon the gods to free him from this servitude, but the gods have little to do with the punishment he is suffering. Shakespeare gives us the very language of impotence as Lear gestures toward revenge—I will do such things, though what they are I know not yet—and comes up empty, can only posture, look for all the world like a hollow charade. Power, station, control, dignity: so many empty postures, destined for undoing. Hence tears close the passage they opened. The old man thinks tears are women’s weapons, but the play tells us otherwise: tears are the natural language of our species when it collides with reality: “When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools.”

The reality I speak of is the core issue of the play, the reality of parents and children, of growing old and growing up. Here is the lesson Lear never stops learning. Here is why the drama of ungrateful children usurps everything else in the play, serving as the hideous compass of Lear’s new life, the madness that would be the alternative to tears. Seeing Edgar (as poor Tom), Lear predictably asks, “What, have his daughters brought him to this pass? / Could’st thou save nothing? Wouldst thou give ’em all?” There is but one Ur-betrayal, coercing Lear’s vision, as echoing as the Crucifixion, and it is lodged in the bond between parents and children. This is why Lear transposes a wild heath into a decorous court of law, so that he can serially enlist poor Tom as noble philosopher, as learned Theban, as good Athenian, to get himself justice at last, to indict once and for all these monstrous offspring. If there is any law, if the old standards have any validity, these two daughters must be found guilty; but the actual law coming into visibility has a grisly truth of a different cast. For here is the pit he has indeed fallen into, even though he never saw or smelled it in advance: that your children kill you. One cannot overstate this: your children kill you, and it has precious little to do, I think, with whether they’re evil or not. Lear has encountered Shakespeare’s ground zero: nature’s plan is warfare between child and parent, nature’s plan is homicidal.

And Edmund is its spokesman, its vessel: “Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound.” That law cares nothing for custom or legitimacy or the station of fathers or kings. “I grow; I prosper; / Now, gods, stand up for bastards!” But the play does not require the gods to stand up; the children themselves will do that, must do that. They stand up, they grow, they prosper, and it is no more nor less ethical than photosynthesis. Hence, Edmund has no compunction about telling Cornwall of Gloucester’s efforts to aid Lear, even while knowing that it will spell doom for his father: “This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me / That which my father loses: no less than all. / The younger rises when the old doth fall.” Loss/gain, falling/rising: these roles, apportioned to the old and the young, would seem implanted in us, scheduled to happen, virtually genetic in character. Even the beautiful, hallucinatory scene in which Edgar, disguised as poor Tom, escorts his blind father to “Dover” so that the old man can end his life is, when seen right, a parable of the child leading the father to his death; Edgar fabulates to Gloucester that it was a fiend who thus led him, and we are meant to ponder the relevance of the term; at play’s end, Edgar discloses his true identity to his father, which leads straightaway to his death.