by Iris Murdoch
‘I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.’
We can to some extent understand how it is that Macbeth approaches the tragic ‘ideal’. But what about King Lear?
Lear really does distress us in a sense in which Othello, say, does not. It may be felt to be almost too painful, inspiring a quite uncomfortable fear, possibly even aversion, or an uneasy awe as at a mysterious ambiguous mystical object. Part of the weirdness of the play belongs to the curiously hard unresponsive semi-symbolic nature of the character of Cordelia. Though doomed, she is not an easily comprehensible ‘tragic character’. She has not made herself at home in the work, she is not at home anywhere, from the point of view of the natural illusory whole she might even be said to be a flaw, leading some down-to-earth critics to say that the tiresome self-important girl has caused a great deal of trouble for which she has shown no sign of being sorry. A companion piece, as it were in a diptych, is the portrayal of Lear’s illusions at the end when a less great conception might have placed him beyond illusion. There is illusion behind illusion.
‘Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage,
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.’
This is, if one wants to use the phrase, the highest conceivable tragic irony. For one who knows the play this visionary speech is perhaps its most frightful moment, the essence of its frightfulness, which is also so piercingly beautiful: perhaps near the point where ‘the misery of the world is beautiful’. Lear envisages a continuation of life, its renewal over many years, in prison and in suffering, a purgatory of pure sanctifying love. But it is not so easy to take upon oneself the mystery of things. Perhaps there is no mystery and no God, only pain and utter loss and helpless senseless death. ‘Come, let’s away to prison’ must often have been the cry of defeated people who suddenly saw a holy vision of peace inside pain, of forgiving and being forgiven, of redemptive suffering. One can imagine how this might come about and how someone who had sinned and suffered, or struggled angrily and in vain for some cause, could become a sort of calm wise anchorite in the end, triumphing over suffering and bitterness, transmuting it all into a kind of religious vision. (A wise and also witty anchorite, for ‘we’ll talk with them too’.) It seems indeed a profound religious idea, like the triumph of Christ upon the cross, whose redemptive suffering actually overcomes death; and behind the dying Christ we see God and the angels and the risen Christ in majesty. Death is transformed into visionary pain and then into the living peace of a renewed being. It is the absolute cancellation of this idea which constitutes the tragic climax of Lear, the final turn of the screw, and of which the peculiarly chill and odd, one might say charmless, quality of Cordelia is the image and essence. This role of Cordelia in the play must surely overcome the sensible reaction of those who see her simply as a proud opinionated prig. Cordelia both as symbol and as sufferer is an essential part of the tragic matrix. Perhaps indeed suitably understood and transmuted, the harsh judgment upon her can stand too. Those who refuse to compromise reasonably with what they see as evil may well destroy themselves and their innocent friends and achieve nothing — except perhaps to leave an example behind. (Antigone, too, brought about the death of the innocent.) The play has a double ending, a soft tragic end in ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’, followed by another end in screams and howling. It could be called, from a traditional point of view, an unChristian play, raising to the highest level of intensity Shakespeare’s reticent attitude to Christianity. Of course this reticence might have obvious motives in his religious (Catholic) attachments; but I think one may also see in it Shakespeare’s (true) tragic understanding that religion, especially and essentially, must not be consolation (magic). He, an inventor of myths, did not want to touch the soft magical aspects of the Christian story, any more than he would touch the Arthurian legends. Prospero’s magisterial sacrifice (his surrender of magic power) must be continually renewed.
That loss of promised redemption and wise gentle stoical peace is something which speaks especially to our, Hitler and after, age when warfare and tyranny have achieved an intensity of cruelty which previous generations might have consigned to the barbaric past. In some ages or some contexts the ingenious and persistent wickedness of Goneril and Regan might seem absurdly unnatural; not so now. It has in this century been the fate of so many to be confronted with totally ruthless unshakeable evil and to have to choose between degrees of compromise and an absolute opposition which will tear mind and body to tatters, ruin the lives of friends and family, and perhaps never even be heard of or known of to be an example to others. Such situations break hearts, breed weary cynicism, weaken the sense of absolute; and also of course reveal a small number of the hero-saints of our time. Many, no doubt, have gone unrevealed.
To return to Schopenhauer’s idea, which fits Macbeth, of ‘characters of ordinary morality under circumstances which often occur’ knowingly doing each other the greatest injury; does this idea fit or enlighten Lear? Again we can see something prophetic in the play if we think of quite ordinary people who worked as guards in concentration camps: evil as a job to be carried on, we may as well continue and finish it, evil as duty. Lear could have satisfied the tragic canon by dying peacefully, full of wise words, at the end of the play; without that prophetic glimpse of the huge power and triumph of evil, and the destruction of his vision of redemptive peace. As it is, one might go further and ask would it not be an even better tragedy if Lear were left alive at the end, if we were left with the sense of his consciousness, bearing this terrible knowledge, continuing to be. (We are not to be consoled by the idea that he is mad, he is not mad, he knows and sees it all.) Death is peace. The play almost breaks the art form, and a surviving Lear would break it altogether. (As his crying continues on and on.) The metaphor of the broken circle, the cracked object, occurs to us especially I think here, where the satisfying calming completeness of art is internally contradicted by absolute contingency and humiliating death. To die sword in hand is quite another thing. Lear could be imagined living on as an image of death which would be more awful than the merciful end conventionally required. A clever cinema director could perhaps end a version of the play by continued shots of Lear, still alive, remembering, always growing older and older and always thinking those terrible torturing thoughts. Lear, as it is, continues to point beyond the conventions, it is a religious object bearing the arcane message that redemptive suffering does not overcome death. Pas à la souffrance ... Socrates said that philosophers must practise dying. It is the living who can do that, the dead are at peace. Lear obeys the tragic convention and dies in the end and stops suffering and stops knowing what he briefly knew, and which was too much for him. He is not a typical tragic hero achieving a violent death in some gesture of wild courage and thus in some aesthetic manner atoning for his sins. Lear dies a helpless victim, as so many people do on this planet, prisoners who are quietly shot in the back of the head on some unrecorded morning. After witnessing the superb deaths of Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet, we leave the theatre excited, exalted, invigorated, perhaps even persuading ourselves that our pity and fear have been purged. After Lear we go away uneasy, chilled by a cold wind from another region. Something of this unconsoling coldness is found in Greek literature. Our ‘pessimism’ can be accompanied by a gloomy relish. The Greeks are devoid of our ubiqu
itous (romantic) sado-masochism. Shakespeare’s sado-masochism, so elegantly on display in the sonnets, so rarely visible elsewhere, is blown about and largely blown away by the fresh gales of his genius. I wonder if he was conscious of it as a secret.
What does accompany us from a performance of Lear as the nearest thing to a consolation is the figure of Cordelia as a pale statuesque monument, as an image of truth as death. The ending is agonising and senseless, yet leaving the unconsoling and indeed helpless truth somehow intact as a sort of dead and stony emblem. Cordelia’s innocence is unlike that of Desdemona and Ophelia, with whom Schopenhauer links her. Cordelia is a touchstone, an absolute, and although a victim, not quite human. Her essential nature (function) is to be completely pure, but not as Ophelia and Desdemona are pure. Ophelia is a helpless innocent, Desdemona is a great sexual princess; whereas the idea of sex cannot come near Cordelia, any more than it can come near real death. The Othello-style death which is identical with sexual love is a fake death. Cordelia’s purity is unromantic, unresponsive, un-thou, she is not an ordinary vital force, she is symbolic, demythologised, charmless (yet portrayed by a charming actress!): a paradoxical, theatrically scarcely intelligible, character. She is like a Platonic Form, she is ‘immobile’ to use Simone Weil’s word, which seems in place here. Plato’s separate eternal unresponsive Forms are magnetic objects of love, but they are also symbols of death which are only truly grasped as such by a purified Eros. (We have no reward.) A positive (‘practising’, to use Socrates’s word) acceptance or integration of death into life can be a vital moral force only at a high level, which Lear himself is far from reaching.
It appears then that the concept of tragedy, if considered strictly, is paradoxical. One seems to have in mind some sort of ideal tragic below which actual tragedies usually, or always, fall. Perhaps the concept of tragedy founders (to use a Kierkegaardian image) upon the nature of art itself. Art cannot help changing what it professes to display into something different. It magically charms reality, nature, into a formal semblance. Hell itself it turns to favour and to prettiness. This imperative of transformation is, as I said earlier, challenged (now) by artists who want to dissolve the barrier between art and life. Let the ‘illusion’ of art be exposed, theatre is merely happenings, a tale merely a text and not a vision into another world. The ‘work’ of art should be exhibited as part of the continuum of life, to be taken over by the client. Natural objects or commercial artefacts are placed in art galleries to startle us out of traditional assumptions and thereby to sharpen our vision. However, in this contest, as the Surrealists found out, art may win, and anti-art mediate new and hitherto unimagined forms of art. Incoherent gestures and deliberate confusions of ‘art’ with ‘life’ are often popular because they are easier to produce than finished aesthetic statements, and are sometimes useful as political tools. They can be symbols of ‘protest’. However the instincts of the artist can (we hope) return again to reflectiveness and to the work of the individual imagination in its search for truth. The endlessly various formal separateness of art makes spaces for reflection. To resume: art cannot help, whatever its subject, beautifying and consoling. Goya’s ‘horrors of war’ are terrifying but beautiful. Great art is beautiful, this is a place where the (unfashionable) concept of beauty is at home, and is preeminently tested and clarified. Whereas the evils and miseries of human life are not beautiful or attractive or formally complete. How can such a terrible planet dare to have art at all? (‘Who can write poetry after Auschwitz?’ Adorno.) (An answer, Paul Celan.) Politics yes, art no. Great tragedy then has to be some sort of contradiction, destroying itself as art while maintaining itself as art. Metaphysics too, and theology, are, to say the least of it, touched by art.
Plato’s reaction against art was that of a religious man. When he speaks in the Republic of the ‘old quarrel between philosophy and poetry’ (607B), he places the tragic poet, with other mimetic artists, at three removes from reality, as a copyist of appearance (597). How does the concept of the tragic relate to that of the religious? Fear of the aesthetic haunts many religious people. Questions and concepts have their places, where, under pressure, they become clearer (as the concept of beauty does in the context of the tragic) and this is a place (among others) where one might attempt a definition of religion. Gloom and despair and recognition of human misery and wickedness in art and (usually) in philosophy and (one might venture to say) in theology are not genuine whole-hearted gloom and despair and recognition of human misery and wickedness. Leaving aside the artists, who obviously enjoy themselves, consider the zest and relish with which Schopenhauer and Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre declare their realistic clear-eyed pessimism. People call Schopenhauer pessimistic. Not at all. He is as cheerful as Hume whom he admires and in some ways resembles. Is one then to be, for fear of lying, silent about such deep matters, as Wittgenstein sometimes recommended? Such silence is contrary to respectable human instincts, we must talk, it keeps things going, and out of traditions of ordinary talk great geniuses arise who make the impossible possible. With the achievement of Lear we might compare the calm lucid sunny light which shines in the dialogues of Plato and is quite unlike the gloomy relish of lesser thinkers. We might recall too that Plato lived, and lived dangerously, as an active participant through one of the beastliest and most violent periods of recorded human history. His philosophical imagination, though much concerned with politics, does not focus on these historical details, the rare references to which (for instance at Symposium 220 — 21 and Theaetetus 142) are in effect aesthetic.
Art is connected with happiness and religion is traditionally connected with bliss, whether as something to be attained hereafter or, by the elect, enjoyed in this life. Religious bliss is, however, agreed to be something of a mystery, difficult and obscure, quite unlike ordinary happiness which depends on the satisfaction of selfish desires which would ex hypothesi not attend a beatified state. Plato says that higher realities appear at lower levels as images or shadows. Perhaps we see a shadow or image of religious joy in some mystical writings and in some (few) philosophical writings, and then one is tempted to say in some art. But the shadow is not the reality and the reality is unimaginably different, its nature cannot be guessed from its shadow. The ‘mode of projection’ cannot be understood from below. About the reality most of us know no more than the prisoners in the Cave knew of the things that cast the shadows. Of course religion can console at any level, but also contains a self-transcending imperative, a continuous iconoclastic urge to move beyond false consolation, suggesting a magnetic end-point where there is no more illusion, only truth, where consolation and explanation vanish.
We may remind ourselves here of Kierkegaard’s distinction in Fear and Trembling between the Tragic Hero and the Knight of Faith. This contrast, like many of Kierkegaard’s distinctions, is Hegelian in style, involving the triad which he often makes use of: the aesthetic individual, the moral universal, the religious individual. The first and the third are private and obscure, belonging in the secrecy of the individual soul, the second, being clearly and rationally explicable, can represent a public model. This picture exhibits the possibility, so present to Plato, of the aesthetic being confused with the spiritual. Opponents of religion may argue that it is always a disguised aesthetic, affording escape from the moral burden of explanation and accountability. Within religion too, ‘personal spirituality’ is sometimes contrasted (favourably or not) with a more ‘politicised’ socially responsible and public exercise of religion. (After all, ‘love thy neighbour’ is fundamental.) In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard first presents his Knight through the figure of Abraham, obeying God’s command to sacrifice his son: a command which cannot be publicly justified in universal moral terms and which condemns Abraham to isolation and silence. At the beginning of the book he tells the story of Abraham four times over. I insert here the notes upon these four versions which I made in 1943 in my copy of the book: (1) Abraham sacrifices Isaac’s respect to dri
ve Isaac to God. (2) Abraham cannot forgive God. (3) Abraham guiltily suspects his own heart. (4) Isaac’s faith is destroyed. Underneath this I had written: SK, like LW, wants to see what happens if the story is taken as true. All later existentialism is within SK. [SK is Kierkegaard, LW is Wittgenstein.] I now resume. For the Tragic Hero ‘it is a glorious thing to be understood by every noble mind’. He ‘renounces himself in order to express the universal; the Knight of Faith renounces the universal to express the Individual’. ‘As soon as I speak I express the universal, and when I remain silent no one can understand me.’ ‘The tragic hero is great through his moral virtue, Abraham is great through his purely personal virtue.’ A paradox of which Kierkegaard is of course not unaware is that by celebrating Abraham in beautiful heart-felt prose he is trying to make Abraham comprehensible, and is thus in danger of turning him into a universal tragic character. Christ too may be seen as a universal tragic character. Othello is a universal tragic character. Shakespeare’s highest art attempts to ensure that we cannot see Lear or Cordelia in this light. (They are unattractive.) We are here close to the metaphysical enigma of tragic art, and indeed, by extension, of all art and all discourse. As soon as you talk about it you lose the object. Better to stay quietly with what is manifested without words.
Kierkegaard attempts by further talking to remove any misapprehension and cure any tendency in his reader to idealise (universalise) the Knight of Faith. What is this person really like?
