I noticed a bizarre feeling once, when perusing the bookshelves of a bookstore that I frequent: Joyce’s Ulysses was there, and I instinctively reached out to grab it, even though I already owned more copies of it than any reasonable person would ever need. It was as if I wanted to hide it from the rest of the world, that the prospect of someone else seeing it caused me some visceral pain. I was reminded of Stephen Dedalus’ aching desire, that he “wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld” (Joyce 57), but from the opposite perspective: what if someone else, perhaps love of some sort, meets that image of my soul? What if I could be unraveled just by love’s act to flip through some seven hundred pages? Is that thought terrifying to you? It certainly is to me, or else I wouldn’t seek to hide Ulysses, a book that I felt reflected my soul. But why am I so scared, seemingly subconsciously so, of love and recognition? In a brilliant piece of literary analysis, Stanley Cavell showed that the driving emotion in Shakespeare’s King Lear is not so different from my instinctive wish to put my soul out of reach: the avoidance of recognition and the shame of being incapable of accepting sincere love and connection. In seeking both to supplement and critique Cavell’s reading, I will add a Kierkegaardian lens; I make no claims to being the first person to interpret the play through Kierkegaardian despair. My goal instead in analyzing Lear is threefold: to argue that up until now it has been incorrectly interpreted with respect to Kierkegaard, to demonstrate how it uses love and sacrifice as a means to achieve selfhood, and to understand the aching pain in myself.
According to Kierkegaard, the sickness unto death, which is despair, arises from one’s inability to relate to oneself, in the sense of the unity of the temporal and the infinite, the possible and the necessary (Kierkegaard 269). Géza Kállay is undoubtedly right that Lear is “sick unto death” in this conception: he is in despair that he does not know that he is a self, a synthesis of opposites. She is also correct when she points out that Lear “wishes to ‘outlive himself’ by ‘dying in a special sense’, but simultaneously he wishes to witness what may or will happen when he is already in his grave” (Kállay 12). Where we differ is on a crucial point: that Lear “can die only after he has become aware of the fact that he has killed love, irrevocably. And this is far worse a death than physical death, the latter being, for him, redemption” (Kállay 13). To start, there is no indication that Lear views physical death as redemptive; by the end of the play, his only concerns are instinctual and palliative, trying to justify his suffering through the possibility of Cordelia’s survival and opting for the visceral wish that “heaven’s vault should crack” (Shakespeare 5.3.310). Moreover, this view conflicts with Kierkegaard’s despair, which constitutes in part “not being able to die”, something that Kállay herself mentions (Kierkegaard 277). As such, if we choose to interpret Lear through despair, it can only be if Lear rids himself of despair in the end. Lear’s inability to die due to his despair, his alienation from his self, is emphasized in the play. Even before he “simulates” his own death, his self is unknown to him: “yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself,” (Shakespeare 1.1.339-340) remarks Regan. This is perfectly in line with the chronological account of the types of despair that Kierkegaard outlines in Sickness, the first an unconscious despair, an ignorance of the self. The second stage, the conscious “despair at not willing to be oneself”, defines the crux of the play. Lear, precisely because he feels that he is reaching his physical death and still cannot bear to be a self, seeks a counterfeit-reconciliation of his soul through public validation: “while we / Unburdened crawl toward death” (Shakespeare 1.1.43). His burden is the burden of despair, of not wanting to be a self. The image, interestingly, is of a child crawling. Lear has come to the Kierkegaardian conclusion that to be human is not a fact but a task that must be continuously repeated, “a self, every instant it exists, is in the process of becoming, for the self does not actually exist, it is only that which it is to become. In so far as the self does not become itself, it is not its own self, but not to be one’s own self is despair” (Kierkegaard 296).
I would not stake my pursuit on this lens if it weren’t so emphasized by the two major relationships in this play, in the way they are presented, and in the way that they converge: the first is that of Gloucester and his sons, the second of Lear and his daughters. Our introduction to this play is an introduction to Gloucester, not Lear. As such, my analysis will be Gloucester first, and Lear second. Gloucester, as Cavell showed, is Lear’s double in shame: to this I will add that he is his double in sickness. Gloucester’s complexity comes from his hypocrisy: “who yet is no dearer in my account” (Shakespeare 1.1.20), he says, “the whoreson must be acknowledged” (Shakespeare 1.1.24), he says, but what acknowledgement is this? That he is his beloved son, Edmund? No. To Gloucester, he is a whoreson and a knave before he ever calls him Edmund. Gloucester’s love of Edmund, perhaps of Edgar too, is entirely transactional. Edmund tries so, so hard to extract any sort of sympathy from him: “Father, father! / Stop, stop! No help?” (Shakespeare 2.1.39-40) he says after cutting his arm, and even then Gloucester’s love and sympathy are transactional: “But where is he?” “Look sir, I bleed” “Where is the villain, Edmund?” (Shakespeare 2.1.46-49). It is only after the transaction has been made, the bribery of Edmund’s flattery taken – “‘Gainst parricides did all the thunder bend” (Shakespeare 2.1.55) – that Gloucester can now acknowledge him as his “loyal and natural boy” (Shakespeare 2.1.98). Gloucester’s invocations of nature and natural throughout the play betray his shame at not knowing himself, his sickness unto death. This is what separates Edmund from Gloucester. The latter’s invocations of nature are his reprieve from confronting his own faults: that maybe, just maybe, he did not treat his son right, and this is what now causes his misfortune. The former’s invocation of nature is, perhaps delusionally, empowering to him. He accepts the self that is a bastard so thoroughly that it is a source of liberation for him. After Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out, his immediate response is, once again, to invoke nature: “enkindle all sparks of nature to quit this horrid act!” (Shakespeare 3.7.105-106) , he says, but Edmund does invoke the nature that he believes in, the Machiavellian will to put his self-interest above all. Thus, Gloucester’s sickness unto death transitions from in despair not willing to be oneself – when he invokes nature to hide from himself – to in despair willing to be oneself – when he wishes for reconciliation with Edgar. “I have no way and therefore want no eyes / I stumbled when I saw… O dear son Edgar, / The food of thy abusèd father’s wrath, / Might I but live to see thee in my touch / I’d say I had eyes again” (Shakespeare 4.1.19-25). He stumbled when he saw by refusing to be seen, by cowering behind nature in shame. He sees that the only way for him to rid himself of this despair – this darkness at not knowing himself – is to love his son, truly and kindly. His hopelessness at the apparent impossibility of this reconciliation leads him to wish for death, going as far as to attempt suicide, but he cannot die. “So to be sick unto death is, not to be able to die – yet not as though there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness in this case is that even the last hope, death, is not available. When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life; but when one becomes acquainted with an even more dreadful danger, one hopes for death. So when the danger is so great that death has become one’s hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die” (Kierkegaard 277).
When Gloucester asks in agony, “is wretchedness deprived that benefit / To end itself by death?” (Shakespeare 4.6.75-76) the answer is apparently yes, for wretchedness cannot end itself until wretchedness has truly recognized that it is wretchedness – that is, to recognize that it is a self – and that it still loves. On this last point, we have to clarify what Kierkegaard’s formula is for overcoming despair, “by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it" (Kierkegaard 271). For Kierkegaard, the cure to despair does not lie within each person. The self must be grounded in an external force, God or faith, in order to be rid of despair. But this presents us with a grave question: where is God in King Lear? I posit, like Johannes di silentio before me, that “God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity” (Kierkegaard 72). Is this connection tenuous? I think not. Yes, the pseudonymous authors of Sickness and Fear and Trembling are different people, Anti-Climacus and Johannes di silentio (lit. John of Silence). However, Kierkegaard’s fascination with Cordelia, “that remarkable girl who did not wear her heart on her lips, whose lips were silent while her heart beat warmly”, is well-documented. His Diary of a Seducer immortalizes his love of Regine Olsen in the form of Cordelia (Ruoff 3). Moreover, in Stanley Stewart’s analysis of Lear through Kierkegaard (Stewart 289), he brings up an excellent passage where Kierkegaard equates the silent with the holy: “From the very start, everything that is good in a person is silent, and just as it is essentially God’s nature to live in secret, so also the good in a person lives in secret. Every resolution that is fundamentally good is silent, because it has God as its confidant and went to him in private; every holy feeling that is fundamentally good is silent… every emotion of the heart is silent, since the lips are sealed and only the heart is expanded” (Kierkegaard 390). For Kierkegaard, Cordelia’s love is silence, and I venture to say that that silence is what makes love the God of Lear. It is only when Edgar reveals himself to Gloucester, in that moment of sincerest love, that his heart “‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / Burst smilingly” (Shakespeare 5.3.234-235). Gloucester’s death is as defined by grief, suffering, and pain as it is by love, joy, and smiling. Most importantly, though, he is silent. There are no last words from father to son. That is why God is love in King Lear, not the transactional love of Regan and Goneril, of Edmund and the past Gloucester, but the silent love of that remarkable girl.
We have now found a formula for curing the sickness unto death in Lear, love. With our panacea in hand, we can finally tackle Lear himself. It’s important to note that Lear is surrounded by love throughout the play, but that he, like Gloucester, maintains love only as transactional, and rejects sincere love. One of the most significant examples of this comes in the form of Kent, whose very existence in the play is a beacon of hope because of his unabashed plainness and commitment to love: when he is introduced to the bastard Edmund, he shows him love without expecting anything in return, “I must love you and sue to know you better” (Shakespeare 1.1.30). Moreover, when the king lashes out at Cordelia out of shame, it is Kent who refuses to stay silent. Cordelia’s silent love, as Cavell showed, is a result of her trying to protect the king from his own shame, as she knows she cannot bring him to face himself. Kent’s love manifests itself in sacrifice, as when he tells Lear to “see better, and let [him] still remain / The true blank of thine eye” (Shakespeare 1.1.180-181). Kent is willing to be the target of Lear’s wrath, sacrificing himself in order to make Lear see who he is: “Let it fall rather, through the fork invade / The region of my heart… What wouldst thou do, old man?” (Shakespeare 1.1.161-163). Not king, but old man; in stoking Lear’s wrath, Kent is trying to make him see that he is more than just king. Lear’s kingship is similar to Gloucester’s invocations of nature, both are the façades, the diseases they need to be rid of before they can love, and Kent knows this. “Kill thy physician, and thy fee bestow / Upon foul disease … I’ll tell thee thou dost evil” (Shakespeare 1.1.187-190). The poetic coincidence here, that Kent characterizes Lear’s avoidance of himself as a disease, only enhances the lyrical validity of our formulae. After Lear exiles him, Kent remains in service of the king as Caius, his silent love now manifesting itself in him not asking for anything in return. Even though the king has made him into nothing, literally stripping him of his identity, Kent does not care because he loves kindly, warmly, and expects nothing in return. On the other hand, Lear’s love remains transactional, as when he tells Caius: “Thou serv’st me, and I’ll love thee” (1.4.88-89). As in the division of his kingdom, Lear refuses to see love as anything but that which is earned by bribery, reward, servitude, etc. Perhaps the greatest service that Kent paid to Lear, however, was telling him that he does evil, because after that, I postulate, Lear spent the rest of the play ruminating on the concept of evil, and in so doing, he found – more accurately, made – God.
To say that Lear finds God may seem preposterous to some, but the notion that King Lear is Godless, while agreeable, is reductive. The injustices done against and by Lear haunt him, especially as his identity as king, his shield from shame, begins to be taken away from him: astonished at the way he is being treated, he asks, “Does any here know me? / This is not Lear… Where are his eyes? / Either his notion weakens, his discernings / Are lethargied – Ha! Waking? ‘Tis not so. / Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (Shakespeare 1.4.231-240). ‘What am I if not king? What do I see if not my kingdom?’, he wonders. When the Fool responds, “Lear’s shadow” (Shakespeare 1.4.237), Lear mistakenly continues to cling onto kingship, “...by the marks of sovereignty… I should be false persuaded / I had daughters” (Shakespeare 1.4.238-241). The transaction, he thinks, was fraudulent. He wants the security of clinging onto his identity as king back, “Thou shalt find / That I’ll resume the shape which thou dost think / I have cast off forever” (Shakespeare 1.4.325-327). When he tells Regan he will never hate her, it is because “Thy half o’ th’ kingdom hast thou not forgot, / Wherein I thee endowed” (2.4.204-205). Lear is trying to answer that question, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”, and his supposed answer is that he can tell himself that he is the king. As the play goes on, that delusion of kingship begins to slip, and that is when he turns to God and the heavens: “You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need! / You see me here, you gods, a poor old man / As full of grief as age, wretched in both.” (Shakespeare 2.4.313-315). Now, he is no longer the king, but a poor old man beseeching God, his wretchedness strengthening his connection with Gloucester. Claims that Lear becomes or is senile are utterly preposterous to me: if anything, he becomes much more lucid as he becomes mad, and his complexity comes from the aforementioned conscious despair at not willing to be oneself, as he constantly dances between kingship and foolishness, delusion and selfhood, terrified of what he will find in his self. We see the first signs of lucidity when he admits to the fool that “[he] did [Cordelia] wrong” (Shakespeare 1.5.24). He starts to identify as a father rather than a king, “so kind a father!” (Shakespeare 1.5.32). In response to this lucidity, the Fool tells him “Thou wouldst make a good Fool.” (Shakespeare 1.5.43-44). Lear swings again to kingship, “to take ’t again perforce—,” he says of his crown. The Fool, disappointed in this swing back to delusion, tells Lear that “[he] shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise”, that perhaps his lucidity has come too late, for now he is far too entrenched in his shield of security.
It’s important at this point to define what a fool is in the context of King Lear. In King Lear, every character that loves warmly and sincerely, expecting nothing in return, is a fool. The way their love manifests is different, but the epithet remains constant. To illustrate that this definition holds, we look at one of the most significant moments of recognition in the play: the Fool declares his love for Lear when he sings, “the Fool will stay. / And let the wise man fly. / The knave turns fool that runs away; / The Fool no knave, perdie” (Shakespeare 2.4.89-92). The Fool, recognizing as we do that Kent bears this same type of love for Lear, that love that will remain even in ruinous circumstances where all wisemen would tarry, tells him “Not i’ th’ stocks, fool” (Shakespeare 2.4.94). Thus, Lear’s transition is recontextualized as a journey to foolishness: from ashamed, delusional kingship to loving, mad, foolish selfhood. His despair makes him hesitant to undergo this transition immediately. To go back to the conversation with the Fool, his response is to beg the heavens to keep him from going mad; he cannot bear it just yet, but he starts to try: “No, I will be the pattern of all patience. / I will say nothing” (Shakespeare 3.2.39-40). He tries to be like Cordelia, to bear his suffering in silence, but moments later he fails and reaches for the Gods again, “Let the great gods / That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads / Find out their enemies now… I am a man / More sinned against than sinning” (Shakespeare 3.2.52-63). In seeking cosmic justice, he is still refusing to recognize himself, but is pointing to all the other sinners in the world, as if telling the Gods to look at them instead, not Lear. He starts to unravel his delusion of kingship more and more in the storm, as he asks “Is man no more than this?”(Shakespeare 3.4.109-110) and takes his clothes off, literally stripping himself of his royal countenance. Now that he has no shield, as he’s taken in by Kent into the hovel, he must ask, “Wilt break my heart?” (Shakespeare 3.4.6). Kent, our reference-point for sacrificial love, fittingly responds: “I had rather break mine own” (Shakespeare 3.4.7). That Lear strips himself of his kingship is both literal and figurative, as his response tells us that the real storm is the “tempest in [his] mind” (Shakespeare 3.4.15), a storm where his shame and alienation rage against the foolish, loving selfhood inside him, with his kingship nowhere to protect him. “No, I will weep no more” (Shakespeare 3.4.20), he says. His refusal to cry is crucial to the play, but we are not ready to examine it just yet because Lear himself is not ready to examine it, to go on the path of foolishness, for when he starts to think of himself as the “old kind father whose frank heart gave all” he is, he realizes that “that way madness lies. Let me shun that” (Shakespeare 3.4.23-25). This is the storm in Lear’s mind on full display: he goes back and forth and back and forth. “A king, a king! (Shakespeare 3.6.11), he responds when he is asked who the madman is, as if desperately reassuring himself that he can still have that shield. Kent confirms this oscillation when he says, “Sir, where is the patience now / That you so oft have boasted to retain?” (Shakespeare 3.6.61-62). Later in Act 4, he falls farther into this delusion of kingship as a means to escape from his self, wearing a crown of weeds and exclaiming, “I am the King himself”, (Shakespeare 4.6.102-103) and “Ay, every inch a king” (Shakespeare 4.6.127). When he finally meets Gloucester, his double, he is able to see what he has become, able to see who he is, and after making sure that Gloucester can’t see him back, he lets go of kingship, his claim to safety. Never again will he claim to be king. Now, the unbearable agony of love is more present than ever, like before when he asked Kent if he would break his heart: “I’ll not love”(Shakespeare 4.6.152-153), he reassures himself. The pain of love is too great, too agonizing for him without any sort of shield. He knows what he has to do, but the pain of silent love, the pain of sacrifice, the pain of foolishness, is too great for him to bear: “When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools” (Shakespeare 4.6.200-201). But why ‘are’ and not ‘were’? Why ‘come’ and not ‘came’? Because he still has not been born, has not become the loving fool that Cordelia, Kent, Fool, and Gloucester are. This is where Cavell and I differ: he sees this as Lear’s rebirth, I see it as his acknowledgement that he can’t bear to be born. He sees what he has to become, but he cannot take the leap to become it. This is why he refuses to cry, at least openly. Crying in Lear is a sign of living and loving, as the embodiment of love herself, Cordelia, shows us: “with washed eyes, / Cordelia leaves you” (Shakespeare 1.1.311-312). We are made to see that pain and sorrow can coexist with holy love, that suffering is no insurmountable object to beauty: “There she shook / The holy water from her heavenly eyes, / And clamor moistened. Then away she started, / To deal with grief alone” (Shakespeare 4.3.34-37). Cordelia’s holiness is further emphasized in this moment of silence, loneliness, and weeping. Unlike Lear, Cordelia cries proudly. It is who she is: her love is more ponderous than her tongue, after all. “Spring with my tears” (Shakespeare 4.5.19), she begs the herbs which might aid her father. To spring to life, as if to show that Cordelia’s tears are capable of creating life. Her act of crying is thus at once messianic, brave, and brimming with selfhood. Lear, in contrast, does not have the courage nor the selfhood to do the same, telling Gloucester, “if thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes” (Shakespeare 4.6.194). The sheer cruelty of Lear contrasts with Cordelia’s warmth and kindness: filled with despair as he is, he sees that Gloucester, after the revelations of his wrongdoing to his sons, wishes to see again in order to love kindy, and Lear tells him he can have his eyes, so long as he can carry the unbearable weight of his shame. He wants to cry, wants to love, despairingly he wants to be himself, but this very despair is why he is unable to do either of those: “this agonizing contradiction, this sickness in the self, everlastingly to die, to die and yet not to die, to die the death” (Kierkegaard 277). Even when he admits he is “the natural fool of fortune” (Shakespeare 4.6.210), that he is all alone, he still will not cry. “No seconds? All myself? Why, this would make a man a man of salt, / To use his eyes for garden waterpots,” (Shakespeare 4.6.214-216) and even then he will not cry. Finally, he encounters Cordelia again, the only person that can rid him of despair because she is the only person he loves, but only if he wills it. His inability to die is emphasized again when Cordelia says, “‘Tis wonder that thy life and wits at once / Had not concluded all” (Shakespeare 4.7.47-48). Lear, like us, sees in Cordelia a holy, blissful figure, “thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead” (Shakespeare 4.7.52-54). When Cordelia urges him to look upon her, it is a visceral wish that we the audience share, for Lear to finally recognize his self and to love. Stripped of kingship, stripped of sanity, stripped of everything, he seems to acquiesce to our wish: “I am a very foolish fond old man… For, as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia” (Shakespeare 4.7.69-79). Cordelia weeps again, is her father finally born? Can he finally cry? “Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not. / If you have poison for me, I will drink it. / I know you do not love me” (Shakespeare 4.7.81-85).
This is perhaps the most heart-wrenching moment in this most heart-wrenching play. He still refuses to see what’s directly in front of him. Feeling that he does not deserve, cannot deserve her love, he would rather die than see Cordelia’s tears, the holy tears of love that he cannot reciprocate. Lear still cannot fathom that love is to be accepted, not run away from. Cordelia can do her worst, he’ll not love. Throughout this scene, Cordelia calls him by royal titles, “my royal Lord”, “your Majesty”, “your Highness”, and not a single time does Lear acknowledge these nicknames. Moreover, When Kent tells him that they’re in his kingdom, Lear tells him not to lie to him. He stopped being king when he saw Gloucester, after all. “I am old and foolish,” is what he is, not king, not your highness. Before the finale of the action, Edgar tells Gloucester, as if to tell us, that “men must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither. / Ripeness is all.” Lear cannot choose when he is born, nor can he choose when he dies, and this knowledge is known to us who know he is sick unto death. After all, he still has not even been born. “For thee, oppressèd king, I am cast down” (Shakespeare 5.3.6). And how prophetic is she, for it is her death that is the cause of his birth. Whereas she accepts her fate in holy silence and tears, Lear remains despairingly in denial, “We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage… As if we were God’s spies” (Shakespeare 5.3.10-18). To be hidden away, to observe rather than to be observed, to love only if you cannot be seen is still not sufficient, and Cordelia knows this. That is why she cries. “He that parts us shall bring a band from heaven / And fire us hence like foxes. Wipe thine eyes. / The good years shall devour them, flesh and fell, / Ere they shall make us weep” (Shakespeare 5.3.25-28). That his heaven is to pull himself and Cordelia away only emphasizes her messianic role in his life. Yet it is still not enough, Lear. It is not enough. Even when she’s dying, he is still thinking of justifying his suffering, “If it be so / It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows / That ever I have felt” (Shakespeare 5.3.319-320). It is only when she dies that he has the necessary moment of recognition, “I might have saved her” (Shakespeare 5.3.326). You might have, indeed. If you cried, if you loved, if you were born. And so it is when Albany presents the possibility of being king again, of going back to security and comfort, that King Lear knows what love is. “And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life? / Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never… do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips / Look there, look there!” (Shakespeare 5.3.369-375). The last sight of his life is those lips, those lips of restoration, that embodiment of love that he refused to acknowledge when she kissed him back to life. It was right in front of him the entire time. Now he understands. Now he knows what love is. It is not that he has killed love, as Kállay says, but that he has finally loved which allows him to die. Love manifesting itself in the ultimate failure, the recognition of ruinous inadequacy. Love maintaining itself under betrayal, like Cavell said, the betrayal that caused her death, that started this entire drama. Love showing itself under sacrifice, as she lays in his arms like the figure of Christ, his own version of that foolish messiah that embodies the silent love he could never give. That is why Lear dies. We are forced to recall when Edgar wondered “And yet I know not how conceit may rob / The treasury of life, when life itself / Yields to the theft” (Shakespeare 4.6.53-55), and we now know that the answer is a resounding yes. “The wonder is he hath endured so long. / He but usurped his life” (Shakespeare 5.3.384-385). Indeed, for his death was a miracle that necessitated sacrifice, and “nothing almost sees miracle / But misery” (Shakespeare 2.3.180-181).
It may be said of my analysis that I’ve fallen into the trap of explaining suffering rather than justifying its existence. The suffering in Lear is unjustifiable in a vacuum. It is a viscerally painful play that rejects intellectualization and justification. I say in a vacuum because art never exists in a vacuum. Perhaps Cavell’s most brilliant assertion in his reading was that if Cordelia is Lear’s sacrifice, Lear is ours. We are shown the follies of our love when we see the follies of his. Lear made a God of his love in order to sacrifice it and feel love, and so we are forced to ask, must we make Gods of our love in order to love? Must we then sacrifice those Gods out of our compulsion, our need to avoid? Must we always avoid ourselves, despairingly avoid weeping in front of others? I don’t know. But in just as real a sense, we are Lear’s sacrifice. He needed us in order for the events of his self-knowledge to transpire. When the Fool asserts that “Lear’s shadow” can tell him who he is, it is the shadow of the previous Lear, the Lear who has already performed this play and knows who he is. That still does not justify the suffering that we create every time we watch this play unfold. The tragedy of King Lear is that we perform the same sacrifice, see the same events with our own eyes, but we still do not love. We are like Lear, despairingly not willing to be ourselves even after we have sacrificed everything holy. When Edgar says “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. / The oldest hath borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long” (Shakespeare 5.3.393-395), he acts as the surrogate of the audience: his proclamation that we won’t live so long nor see so much is almost a wish on his behalf to never feel the pain that Lear felt. This is what Edgar feels, that he does not want to be subjected to this torture. He wants to forget, and in a way, we do as well. But why do we keep coming back? What is it about this specific form of suffering that is so tempting to us? It is exactly the same as why I reach for Ulysses; every time I think I can let it be, the pain of recognition comes back. Despairingly, we want to understand ourselves the way that Lear does in the end, but despairingly, we do not want to be subjected to the pain that he is. That is why we keep coming back, in the futile hope that maybe this time we don’t need to take his eyes in order to weep his fortune. Maybe this time I will let the book stay on the damn shelf…
Therein lies the punchline. This is the sickness unto death. Our relationship with literature as readers stokes our despair, whether consciously or unconsciously. Shakespeare has confronted us with our inability to confront ourselves, but necessarily, he has demonstrated that one can confront oneself. How do we do it? Well, I’m doing it right now, aren’t I? This mad rush of words is nothing if not an invitation for you to see me. What I am doing is foolish and academically unacceptable: I am speaking what I feel. Writing, far from being simply an analytic tool, is itself the cure to the sickness unto death. You may call this self-obsessed, narcissistic, what have you, but to write is necessarily to be read. My recognition and my weakness mean nothing if you do not accept its sincerity. When we write, we sacrifice the veil that protects us from recognition in order to sublimate unspeakable pains like this. From a higher perspective, I have made use of the literature of Kierkegaard, Joyce, and Shakespeare in tandem to create my own recognition: this is an ongoing conversation, a process of repeated sublimation that every anguished writer undergoes in order to reach self-knowledge. Indeed, Kierkegaard was doing exactly this when he wrote Sickness: using the voice of Anti-Climacus, he borrows from Richard III (Kierkegaard 357), Macbeth (Kierkegaard 426), Faust (Kierkegaard 343), Aeneid (Kierkegaard 345), and more in order to formulate his definitions of the sickness unto death. Most revealing is when Anti-Climacus talks of love, and, Walter Lowrie thinks (Lowrie 478) and I’m inclined to agree, that this is Kierkegaard speaking from his own personal experience with Regine Olsen, or in our language, he is speaking what he feels, not what he ought to say:
“Oh, but in the joyfulness of love (as love always is joyful, especially when it sacrifices all) there was nevertheless a deep sorrow… Behold, he therefore brought to completion this work of love, he offered the sacrifice, but not without tears. Over this – what shall I call it? – historical painting of inward life there hovered that dark possibility. And yet, if this had not hovered over it, his work would not have been that of true love,” (Kierkegaard 461) says Kierkegaard, revealing himself to us, revealing his tragedy, the tragedy of necessary sacrifice, just like Lear. The man who speaks in misdirection and silence reveals himself from behind the mask of a pseudonym, but we know it is him. We know this is his justification of his suffering. Like Lear, he sacrifices his Cordelia for his religious and literary pursuits. “O my friend, what hast thou maybe attempted to do in life? Tax thy brain, tear off every covering and lay bare the viscera of feeling in thy breast, surmount every barrier which separates thee from him of whom thou readest, and then read Shakespeare – and thou shalt shrink from the collisions” (Kierkegaard 461). The collisions, the suffering, the tempest of the mind. Just like us, Kierkegaard is using Shakespeare in order to make sense of his suffering. Just like us, it seems, his relationship with literature is stoking his despair, and Sickness is his way of ridding himself of that despair. “But Shakespeare himself seems to have shrunk back from the genuinely religious collisions. Perhaps these can only be expressed in the language of the gods. And this language no man can speak; for, as a Greek already has said so beautifully, "From men man learns to speak, from the gods to keep silent"” (Kierkegaard 461, emphasis mine), but if the language of God and love is silence, as we’ve learned, then it can be spoken, but only if one makes use of a particular literary misdirection, of the foolish disposition that we now know so well…
I hope the reader of this piece takes away not merely an academic analysis of two masterpieces. I hope that she takes away something else, something different. At the end of the day, this was written for her, not for myself. It is an invitation to see someone that never wanted to be seen before. It is an invitation to cry, now that you are come to this great stage of loving fools. It is, above all, a work of love. In the end, I will reach for Ulysses as I have always done, but it’ll be different this time. This time, I’ll reach for it in order to give it to you.
“They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured” (Joyce, 57-58).