(no subject)

[proximoception]

Thinking about Lear again: I may have never had that dislike for Lear ruin the play after all, but instead remembered the state of disliking him that all of us are always in as we start the play, roughly: "You j-j-jerk, Lear, she's just being t-t-truthful man! Jesus fuck almighty, powerful entitled old men just totally suck! This guy needs to burn!" The most blatant effect in the play is how Shakespeare makes us as livid as possible to then make us awed that we forgive him, to the point of shame at our violent wishes toward him, which after all come true - an effect well-imitated in Sabbath's Theater (for some of us) and several of the vignettes in Steinbeck's Wayward Bus. Must have been attempted elsewhere, too. That lawyer in Tale of Two Cities? That blond guy in the Last of the Mohicans movie, that one was memorable. But no, those latter examples ruin themselves because we forgive because of redemptive acts, not understood shared humanity.

I imagine this kind of forgiveness, at least in Shakespeare and Roth, is supposed to get us to realize how immoral it is to use their morality as a standard of the value of others' feelings or lives - since doing that only would make for a nasty feedback loop of saviors saving only saviors (for the sake of future saving of saviors etc.). In Shakespeare we're given the further provocation of whether to extend forgiveness to the bad sisters, the rage engine Cornwall, and sociopath Edmund. Albany refuses to, as I recall - basically dismisses their suffering, at least relative to that of the good people. But even they sometimes love, are loved, mean to do some good.

Maybe a trivial, if foundational, point from a humanistic perspective, but dramatically really something (and of course a chastisement of something we constantly get wrong even when we know better). A dramatic strategy original to Shakespeare? He demonstrates awe at audience/mob bloodthirstiness in pretty much every tragedy.

The play dances around notions of causes of goodness and badness in people (e.g. astral influences, laughed down by Edmund), presumably because the concept of cause isn't really important - if it were the action of another person, e.g. Gloucester's sending Edmund away from him for years at a time, we'd just be tempted to then transfer blame back a peg, anyway. But that blameworthiness too would have been caused, by cause logic. We want to isolate the mystery to human hearts, then smoosh a toothpick flag into each, labeled "Bad Heart." But bad hearts feel too - do not pricked pricks bleed? To not see that is itself our most common prick move.

Comments

[thelican.livejournal.com]

Great post.

I especially love how you say it here: those latter examples ruin themselves because we forgive because of redemptive acts, not understood shared humanity.

Such an important thing to remember. A classmate of mine in grad school had the perverse procrastinating hobby of noting how, on amazon.com customer reviews, the balance between a "good" and "bad" work of literature always swayed according to the observable level of redemption. I love how, here, you've effectively indicted all those moralizing reviewers.

What I've always thought

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

And then some. Quite some.