Ep. 242: Stanley Cavell on Tragedy via King Lear (Part One)

0:00 Wes: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who were once set on doing philosophy for a living and then thought better of it. Our question for episode 242 is something like, can money buy you love? Or another way of putting the same question, what is tragedy? And we'll be discussing Stanley Cavell's essay, the Avoidance of Love, a reading of King Lear, published in his 1969 collection of essays, Must We Mean What We Say? For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Wes Alwan, a bare forked animal in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:34 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, acknowledging the world in Austin, Texas.

0:39 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, speaking from the center of the storm in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:44 Erin: This is Erin Olonik, whose love is more ponderous than her tongue in Hampton, Connecticut.

0:50 Wes: Does this mean you're gonna be. You're gonna be silent in order to show your life?

0:54 Erin: Exactly. That's how I'm gonna sell this.

0:59 Wes: So before you become silent, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? We have been working on Subtext, our new podcast on literature and film, and we've done a few episodes. We haven't published anything yet, but that'll be coming soon, including an episode focused on King Lear itself. But why don't you say a little more about what you do?

1:20 Erin: And sure, I'm grossly underqualified to be doing this. I am a high school. I'm a high school English teacher. I live in Brookline, Massachusetts, but right now I'm staying with my grandmother during coronavirus. I'm a poet also, or I'm a person who writes poetry and it is occasionally published.

1:41 Seth: That makes you a poet.

1:42 Erin: And that's it. I struggle to say that.

1:44 Wes: Leave the other stuff out and just say you're a poet.

1:48 Erin: Oh, and I was also a jazz singer, but I don't think that's terribly relevant anymore. I usually don't mention that.

1:53 Wes: Well, there's quite a bit about music in this, too.

1:56 Erin: That's true.

1:57 Wes: So what do we all think about Cavell? How did we end up choosing this?

2:02 Seth: Great question.

2:03 Dylan: We said we wanted to do Lear, and then that we ought to have a essay to go along with it, maybe to spice things up. And I think, Seth, you said, isn't Cavell great about this kind of thing? And then we got the essay. I don't think I'd ever heard of Cavell. This is like a lot of podcasts recently. We're reading people that I've never heard of before, but I Liked it, but I found it really dense and very long. And I was very interested in the combination of his interpretation of Lear along with his interpretation of tragedy, which I'll be interested to see, which we get more mileage out of.

2:42 Wes: So we're leaving out one part, which is that this is the first episode that Mark's been absent from. Right. Ever.

2:48 Seth: Ever.

2:49 Wes: Mark has never missed a partially Examined life episode until now. And so he wanted us to do something that he wouldn't miss that much that he didn't really want to do. And you guys do one of your literature things or something like that. So I forget exactly how we thought of Cavell. I didn't think we were focusing on Lear specifically. I just remember that. No, we had Cavell on a list. It's someone we had been wanting to read. And I've always wanted to read him. He's an interesting guy because he's a. He did a lot with Wittgenstein and English and Ordinary Language Philosophy, and yet he writes a lot about Shakespeare and aesthetics.

3:29 Dylan: Reading about him made me want to read more of him, though. Reading this essay made me question that there were times where I was like, wow.

3:40 Wes: The second half, more than the. The reading at Lear, I think, is pretty brilliant and straightforward. And then later on, it gets very. He writes in a way that's. It's not elusive, although there is a lot of elusiveness in here. He's speaking at such a high general level that it's not always clear what he's saying.

4:01 Dylan: It's thick and hard to hold onto, but interesting at the same time, which makes it a lot of work to go through.

4:07 Seth: That's fair. Cavell was on our list, but kind of in the realm of aesthetics. So even though we did Danto a long time ago, he's one of those figures that I think is on the margins of the standard Anglo American curriculum. But he was a name that constantly recurred when I was in graduate school and actually afterwards, not so much because it was somebody that I came in contact with, but friends that I had who were in graduate school and other disciplines like English or law or whatever. He was one of the names that came up along with, like, Stanley Fish, for example.

These are, like, typical characters that I never studied but were on the outsides of my awareness during these things. So I've kind of always wanted to read some Cavell and work him in along with some of the others, like Scruton and, you know, some of the other famous aesthetics people. And it just kind of dovetailed that Wes's love of literature, Mark's absenteeism and the desire to somehow weave it all. It all kind of came together that way.

5:09 Erin: What you describe with English graduate students being interested in Cavell is exactly my experience. I was in graduate school for poetry, and there were a bunch of us who were all film geeks, and we took a philosophy and film class where the professor was just obsessed with Cavell. And we learned a lot about, or sort of learned a lot about ordinary language philosophy by way of these film essays that Cavell was writing. And I learned that he loved screwball comedies as much as I did. So I got into his book Pursuits of Happiness, which is now my favorite book on that subject.

I also love his book the World Viewed. But I read some extracts from Must We Mean what We Say? And that was basically it. So I was interested in Cavell as far as his interest in my interests went. I'm interested in Shakespeare, of course, but I'd never read this essay before. And I also found it to be incredibly dense, though my favorite section of it was in Part two, when he's describing the yokel attacking Othello on the stage, and then sort of uses it as a jumping off point for figuring out what the role of the performer is and the audience member to the performer.

But I think it's interesting that he uses Othello as that jumping off point. It just marks to me how far afield he goes from Lear in the second half. And it seems as though it's not always related, or perhaps I can't see the connections.

6:31 Wes: It's very hard to say what connects all the parts of this essay, which is almost 90 pages. So there are some signature ordinary language philosophy tics in here that immediately, because I'm not a fan of ordinary language philosophy, start to irritate me. Although that was very. That was actually quite rare, because once you get into his reading of Lear, it's absolutely brilliant. His writing and thinking is so exquisite. But the way it begins is also a little dense. He begins with a sort of justification of paying attention to character and psychology as against, I guess, critical trends, including the New Critics, which we could describe a little bit, but critical trends which go against that and say, are sort of ashamed, shame, something we'll talk more about, but sort of ashamed of the idea of getting into the motivations of characters as opposed to thinking, for instance, about symbolism in literature and so on.

7:35 Dylan: That's who the new Critics were.

7:36 Wes: Aaron can speak to this probably better than I can, but the New Critics were focused on close readings of texts, but they were also. They were focused on structure and symbolism. And. Aaron, do you want to say more?

7:52 Erin: Yeah. Just that it might be accurate to say they conceived of each work as being somehow a whole kingdom, or you might say, unto itself. And that there was this overarching structure to each work that all the component parts of it sort of added up to and affirmed. So they were interested in systems of symbols. The systemization, I guess you might say, of a work which Cavell argues, I think kind of precludes a close attention to the psychology of characters or to idiosyncrasies in characters personalities or what makes them human or unique people.

8:32 Dylan: And part of it is this notion of a play as being a manifestation of particular circumstance. So I would say 269. There's two places that comes to mind. One is that he just asked the question about characters criticism and verbal analysis. He says, how could any serious critic ever have forgotten that to care about a specific character is to care about the utterly specific words he says when and as he says them. Or that we care about the utterly specific words of a play because certain men and women are having voice to them. And then on 270 in the middle, he says, whatever words are said and meant are said and meant by particular men.

And that to understand what they the words mean, you must understand what they whoever is using them, mean. That sometimes men do not see what they mean. They usually cannot say what they mean for the various reasons they do not. They may not know what they mean. And that when they are forced to recognize this, they feel that they do not and perhaps cannot mean anything. And they are struck dumb. That part of it, to me, means that one of the things that he's particularly interested in trying to apply philosophical thinking to a play, and one of the modes in which he does that to get the richness that he finds in Lear is by understanding that there are particular things being said by particular people.

And that is what is being made in the play. And so in that way, there's context that you have to get. And that context isn't necessarily the context of the time as much as the context of what's going on in the play by the particular people.

10:13 Wes: Yeah, to get at what they mean, we have to think about their motivation and their psychology. We can't avoid that.

10:21 Dylan: And at a great play, that stuff holds together. That's the consistency we should be striving to understand. There's at some point he kind of formulates, I think Even formulates it this way as a kind of conditions question. What are the conditions such that Lear would be doing what he does in the first scene in his abdication scene?

10:41 Wes: That's how he ends this little introduction, with just the sorts of questions that he's justified asking now. So how are we to understand Lear's motivation in his opening scene? Is Gloucester's blinding dramatically justified? And so much of his essay will focus on that reading of Lear. And then we will move on to broader considerations.

11:03 Erin: Having just reread Lear in preparation for this and in preparation for reading this essay, I felt particularly sort of called out by Cavell saying, why do people think that this opening scene is fantastical? Or basically, critics sort of finding fault with how Shakespeare put it together. Or what Shakespeare's motivations were for including certain scenes? Well, there must have been some kind of lapse on Shakespeare's part. And that's exactly what I experienced in reading it. The scene. I had forgotten how bizarre it is. And so I thought, you know, these are the conditions of reading the rest of the play, and I have to accept them in order to.

To make sense of what happened. The words this happened, beginning. And what the play is really concerned with is sort of the fallout from that fantastical premise and not the fact that that quote, unquote, fantastical premise is important in and of itself and has justification within the text. He uses very similar terms as I did when I was sort of thinking to myself, okay, well, I'm just going to accept this, and then I'm. I'm gonna move on. And he says, no, you can't do that. You have to understand that, in fact, Shakespeare might have meant all of this and that it's not fantastical at all.

And I felt particularly chastised by that.

12:15 Seth: What is it particularly that you feel like you have to accept? What is it about the situation in the opening scene that we feel like is fantastical? There's a tendency to just accept it as the required premise to kick off the entire sequence of events. You know, he says at one point, as if Lear did not know his daughters, Right? You can imagine we're starting from scratch. And Lear would have no idea that Regan and Goneril were disingenuous and unfaithful children. That's just ridiculous to even assume that, as that seems to be what the scene is asking you to do.

12:49 Wes: But also it's asking you to believe that Lear would banish Cordelia and become so upset with her at a moment's notice and just sever that relationship completely. There's also the kind of implausibility to Cordelia's reactions, right. So that she would say the sorts of things she says to him without explaining herself in a way that would assuage his temper, and then that Lear would not relent, even as other people are trying to. Is Kent trying to disabuse him of his. You know, or it's trying to calm him down and say, look, you know, this is the wrong thing to do?

And then Kent is banished as well. So it all seems like there's this sort of psychological unrealism to it until you actually examine the scene closely and see how it's constructed. And as Cavell says, it's actually all perfectly natural. Here's Lear trying to buy love from his daughters, a very typical parental move. And if you focus on the psychological plausibility of that, you can see how everything follows from it. Or if you think about the way pride works and how injured pride works. When people's pride is injured, they do all sorts of things which otherwise would actually be behaviorally implausible, but they become plausible at the point where there are certain psychological preconditions, including what he's going to talk about as Lear's avoidance of love and his shame in his relationship to his daughter and so on.

14:24 Dylan: Do we need to hit the high points of that scene or anything about the play itself, or do we just figure that everybody has heard it, or.

14:34 Seth: I don't know. If you want a summary of King Lear, there's about a billion out there. That's my opinion. I don't think we need to recap a summary of the play.

14:43 Dylan: If you have never heard Lear or read Lear, you should go to Wikipedia and read the plot summary. You'll get enough out of it.

14:51 Wes: Aaron, did you want to say anything more about what's implausible or what's fantastical about that opening scene prior to the

14:58 Erin: things that you think are fantastical? It makes sense, because after reading Cavell, it now makes sense to me that he would essentially just be bribing his children. I guess the grand scale of it, the fact that the whole opening scene is just a verbal test as a way to divide his kingdom. I suppose that would be a way for a king with all of his powers and his land and everything, to be able to extract some kind of devotion from his children, or at least the public display of it. But that scale maybe is what made the whole opener seem fantastic to me. Once Cavell sort of reduced it and said, well, this is just a father trying to extract love from his children. It made sense, but the idea of the test as a way to inherit a third of an abdicated kingdom seemed to me the fairy tale element that he talks about.

15:50 Wes: And this is something that Shakespeare actually emphasizes as a kind of running joke within the first scene, which is that supposedly they're in a competition. They're going to openly profess their love for their father, and whoever does it best wins the biggest third. But actually he's already divided up the kingdom. It's already on the map. In fact, the way the very first thing that's said into play is that, wow, you can't really tell that he has any sort of favorite the way things are so evenly divided. So the whole thing is a sham. It's not like anyone can actually win a greater part of the kingdom than another.

And those sorts of contradictions are repeatedly emphasized in an obviously comical way through the whole scene. What seems so psychologically implausible is that someone would completely abdicate power while alive and completely become dependent on his daughters, especially given his character and what he must know about Regan and Goneril at the very least.

16:52 Dylan: So it also feels like with his having divided it up so evenly ahead of time, it makes me feel like the initial part is him only sort of half serious, maybe even intending to be playful with the proposition to his daughters, where he's basically fishing for compliments, he's fishing for praise, he wants to abdicate, but also, as we learn, I think later, is that he has just a gross lack of self understanding or misunderstanding of expectation that I think that he thinks that he's really just going to be taken care of as a king and it's going to be just fine with that in the sense that he will maintain something like real power and autonomy and respect without actually having to do any of the things that a king actually does and doesn't really even demonstrate any understanding of that bargain till later.

And I don't know how much he really understands his different daughters because that beginning scene to me reveals somebody that is so sort of self absorbed, I want to use the word narcissistic. He doesn't have a lot of self knowledge, he just wants praise. But then it becomes kind of deadly serious, right, that all three daughters interpret his question deeply, seriously, the first two falling over themselves and jockeying for position to flatter him. And then his third daughter also taking him deeply seriously and not understanding it as playful at all, which I think he reacts to that so negatively because maybe he realizes how serious it was that he was doing the question that he was asking, the task he was asking him to give.

18:38 Erin: I think Regan and Goneril know Lear much better than he knows himself. In fact, they say so. Right. He but slenderly knows himself right after the abdication scene. I think maybe they do partake in that kind of joking aspect because they must be familiar with the idea of performing for his pleasure.

19:00 Dylan: Do you agree that, at least initially, there's a way in which he's sort of the goofy grandpa who is, you know, kind of joking around?

19:10 Erin: It almost suggests to me maybe that Cordelia has never been called upon to participate in this kind of ritual. But Regan and Goneril, being older, used to it.

19:20 Mark: Yeah.

19:21 Erin: They're frequently maybe dragged in front of the court and made to tell how much they love their father or how wonderful he is and Cordelia doesn't, being younger and presumably from a second wife. I don't know if that's in the text, but sort of being raised, having been raised, one might say, by a kind of a different father, has never been dragged publicly in front of everyone. But that this contest and this abdication has given her occasion to have to make this kind of a public statement.

19:47 Seth: She's the youngest. It's also the case that Regan and Goneril both are married to English nobles Albany and Cornwall. But Cordelia's about to be betrothed to France. Am I getting that right?

20:04 Erin: There are two men.

20:05 Seth: Yeah. There's the prince and a king. But the point is, if you look at the political motivations for Lear behind this, he's dividing the kingdom into three. He's giving 2/3 to English nobles and 1 1/3 to France. So I think there's a layer that informs what Aaron just said about the two older daughters being more accustomed to the court and to politics. And I think we can understand Cordelia as being relatively sheltered but also being the most favored. I certainly have never seen a dramatization of the play where the suggestion was that Lear was being playful in the sense that I think you're.

You're suggesting. But I think that's part of the bizarreness and that I think Cavell gets at later, later, later, later, later in his essay. The ambiguity of just having to be present and acknowledging the situation without being able to use your reason. Is it a political thing? Is it a desire for love? Is it a playful thing that goes completely wrong? All we can do is be present with these characters in this moment and we try to understand their motivations and we reason, but it Fails us. And there's no many potential interpretations, all of which ultimately are unsatisfactory if we don't just accept it, sorry, acknowledge it.

21:22 Wes: The way Cavell is going to explain all this is in terms of shame. So on page 286 is where he starts discussing the lyre, that opening scene specifically. But maybe we should back up and discuss the first part of the essay where he's setting up that explanation. He's discussing a critic, Alpers, who's also sort of rejecting the attempt to simply see the play as a matter of symbolism. But I think Cavell thinks he goes too far. So Alpers wants to, for instance, explain the pattern in the play, the sight pattern, the pattern in the play of talking about eyes and seeing and blindness and all the stuff that happens around that as symbolizing a problem of insight.

And he wants to take it more literally. So one of those literal readings, for instance, is that why is it that Gloucester is blinded? Well, it's because removing someone's eyes is one of the most cruel things you could possibly do to a person. What Cavell is going to insist on is that this question of insight is important, even if you're not looking at the play purely in terms of symbolism. Once you get into the motivations, you recover this concept of insight in a

22:42 Dylan: different way, and that's tied to shame in particular.

22:46 Wes: Yeah, you know, he'll say early on that Lear's dominating motive is to avoid being recognized. So, you know, while Alpers is right that the taking of eyes being the most cruel thing you could do, eyes also are the best representative of our capacity for cruelty. Because the whole point of shame is to avoid recognition. It's to avoid the sight of others. And really, ultimately, it's to avoid self recognition by way of avoiding the recognition of others. That avoidance leads necessarily to cruelty.

23:21 Dylan: This is at the bottom of 277, the top of 278, where he's been talking about shame, and he's referring to Gloucester in particular, and he says, if the failure to recognize others is a failure to let others recognize you, a fear of what is revealed to them, and avoidance of their eyes, that then it is exactly shame which is the cause of his withholding of recognition, that is, Gloucester's withholding recognition of his son, it is not simply his legal treatment that Edmund is railing against. For shame is the specific discomfort produced by the sense of being looked at. The avoidance of the sight of others is the reflex it produces. Guilt is different there. The reflex is to avoid discovery and that difference plays a big role for Cavell and its role in recognition that in shame you are avoiding being recognized or avoiding recognizing yourself as opposed to hiding.

24:18 Erin: I find his explanation for Gloucester's shame to be really satisfying. And I like the fact that he says that shame often attaches itself to the wrong thing. So Gloucester thinks he should be a shame of the mere fact of having a bastard son. And so by joking about it, he brazens himself to it. He brings it out in the open. But what he should be ashamed about is this sort of emotional rejection of his son. That I understand, but. But I suppose a big sticking point for me is understanding the source of Lear's shame. You could argue over the course of the play that that source of that shame might change, or perhaps that Lear doesn't even have a reason, or not a reason. But maybe Lear isn't even capable of feeling shame and that that's part of his problem. And that maybe when he's about to go into shame, he then does that retreat into madness.

25:11 Wes: But I think the shame comes before everything else in the play. So he gets at some of this towards the end of his, you know, this discussion of Lear where he talks about. Basically, Lear is ashamed of his love for Cordelia. And you can talk about his being ashamed of loving her in several different ways. One of them is just the shame that goes along with the vulnerability of loving in that way and the dependency and the possibility of humiliation. And. And then there's the idea that the way Cavell puts it on 299 is that it's too far from plain love of father for daughter.

So it's one that's incompatible with the idea of her having any other lover, for instance, so that one can see him as. This is an unconscious act of sabotage from the very beginning. The most important thing that's actually happening is that he's about to give away Cordelia. That's really the inciting incident for the whole play. He has to give her to either Burgundy or France instead of doing it, that he's going to blow everything up.

26:18 Erin: I don't know if any of you have had the same difficulty of locating the source of the shame. Maybe this is just my failure to read it correctly. But this intimacy that he's afraid of with Cordelia. I mean, putting aside the fact that the nature of their love is perhaps a bit weird. But this idea of not wanting to open oneself up to intimacy is one that I understand. But at the same time, he's assuming that Cordelia is going to take care of him in his old age and that he is going to be physically dependent upon her, so that the source of his shame would perhaps then suggest that he's shameful at having to. At dealing with old age, at having to give up his power and having to be dependent upon Cordelia, and that that is the origin of this retreat from intimacy with her, not any injustice that he visited upon her.

27:07 Wes: I think there's some contradictory wishes going on at the very beginning, right? There's something very grandiose about saying there's this abdication of power. I'm going to give up power entirely and depend on others. But it's unrealistic, of course, and it's grandiose in the sense that there's a fantasy there that he can just by virtue now of any, not any real worldly authority, but by virtue of whatever trust he's built up with his daughters, he can wield power that way, that he can somehow wield power in his dependency. So there's a wish there to love Cordelia in the fullest way, in the way that, you know, with all the implications that love has, which includes powerlessness.

Powerlessness goes along with it, but he twists it, right? So he's on the right track in some weird way. But then he perverts it. He's on the track of saying, okay, yeah, I need to love, I need to be dependent, I need to accept powerlessness. But then he turns it into this big external production that is inherently self defeating and which will turn the powerlessness involved in intimacy into something much more external and catastrophic and something that's essentially just going to get everyone killed. Sometimes everyone dying is better than vulnerability and intimacy.

But does that make sense? The two sort of competing warring impulses there, to be dependent and vulnerable, but also to not do that at all, to do what Cavell says he is doing, which is to try to buy fake love by trading power for it.

28:50 Erin: Yeah, that makes sense. I think power and love for him are maybe so intermingled as to be indistinguishable from each other. And maybe that's why he's presenting this sort of ceremony of intimacy at the outset. He's sort of expressing his power, sort of flexing his muscle by having his daughters declare their love for him.

29:08 Wes: I think the question you're asking, though, is important. I mean, we should address it, which is. It's one thing to say it, but we should explore it, which is, you know, what is it about Cavell's ideas that being recognized by Others is something difficult or inherently shaming. And why is that? What is it that we fear? In the whole point of this essay is titled Avoidance of Love is that, you know, we. We avoid it because we don't want to be recognized. But what. What is it exactly we're afraid of?

29:34 Erin: Yeah, that's something he takes as a matter of course. I don't know if he ever explicitly talks about it, though he does say that we're. I like what he says about family and how family is going to be a source of this extreme recognition, which is why we may run from family and people we don't know as well, can't recognize us as well, can't see us as well. It seems true to me in terms of experience, but it doesn't seem to be something that I can express any better than Cavell as to why that is true.

30:02 Dylan: So Cavell gets into this part of what Lear's shame is. In the section that starts at the bottom of 285 through 286 up to 90, he says, I think Wes already said this, that Lear is ashamed or afraid of being ashamed by a revelation. So he doesn't want to be seen. He's afraid of what might get revealed. He later on to 89, says the problem for Lear is that he's ashamed about not being lovable. And he quotes the scene in Act 4 where Gloucester says, let me kiss that hand when Lear finds him. And Lear says, let me wipe it first. It smells of mortality.

And Cavell says, mortality, the hand without rings of power on it cannot be lovable. He feels unworthy of love when the reality of lost power comes over him. And that is what his plan was to have avoided by exchanging his fortune for his love in one swap. He cannot bear love when he has no reason to be loved, perhaps because of the helplessness, the passiveness which that implies, which some take for impotence. And he wards it off for the reason which people do ward off being loved, because it presents itself to them as a demand. So Cavell is hypothesizing that Lear had a grand bargain in mind, that he has power, and because of that power, he's understanding that power as making him lovable, that he's mistaken in that, but that's the way he's understanding it.

And then he's going to abdicate and maintain that love by exchanging it for the love of his children, as Wes characterized. He's going to buy love and therefore maintain that. I'll call it appearance of love. But really, in the end, he's afraid of, ashamed of the likelihood that he is actually unlovable. And that that is what's going to be recognized when he no longer either has power or has his children.

32:04 Wes: Loving him feels unlovable. Because it's a weird sort of paradox in that to be loved is actually to be unlovable. Because to be truly loved, or let's put it this way, to be loving is to be unlovable. Because to be loving is to be vulnerable is to be capable of rejection and injury and loss. And therefore is itself an abdication of power. But if you are, and I think Dylan used the term narcissist up front. This is the narcissist strategy. The idea that you simply can replace intimacy with admiration. So it's a kind of one way street. Or you barter your power, you barter your wonderful qualities.

Whether it's being a king or being a great this or being a great that, being beautiful. You try to barter those sorts of powers for love. Of course, they can only get you to pseudo love. The sorts of public declarations that Regan has and Goneril give. But yeah, the inherent paradox is that if you hold on to this idea that to be powerless is to be actually unlovable, then you can't love because you can't give up power. So the shame.

33:16 Dylan: You in fact are unlovable because of your unwillingness to be vulnerable.

33:20 Wes: So the shame. It doesn't have to be that. Lear thinks, oh yeah, I'm not good looking or I'm a bad person. I'm ashamed of myself, therefore I'm unlovable. It's not specific to anything self evaluation, except in the most general sense that anyone who gives up power is unlovable. In the earlier part of the essay is a really interesting explanation of Gloucester's blinding. I don't know if we fully got at that.

33:47 Dylan: I mean, it's called King Lear, right? But there's this sort of amazing and horrible parallel story. I mean, two horrible stories going on at the same time, right? Gloucester and Lear both involve powerful men. And the relationship between their. With their progenies. The denial of the love of one and the misunderstanding of the hatred of the other.

34:09 Wes: Yeah. So towards the bottom of 275, again, he's trying to get beyond Alpers' idea that the blinding occurs simply as an expression of cruelty. So here's what he'll say. But Cornwall himself twice gives the immediate cause of this deed. Once for each eye to prevent Gloucester from seeing. And in particular to prevent him from seeing him. That this scene embodies the most open expression of cruelty is true enough, and true that it suggests the limitlessness of cruelty once it has given its way. This is Alper's view, once it has given its way, that it will find its way to the most precious objects.

It is also true that the scene is symbolic. Then here is where Cavell wants to amend this view. But what it symbolizes is a function of what it means. The physical cruelty symbolizes or instances the psychic cruelty which pervades the play. But what this particular act of cruelty means is that cruelty cannot bear to be seen. It literalizes evil's ancient love of darkness. The cruelty of it turns out to be apt. It turns out that Gloucester has actually done the same sort of thing in not acknowledging Edmund in the sense at the very beginning of the play, he nominally acknowledges him in a joking way.

Yep, I have a bastard son. Ha ha ha. But of course, he doesn't acknowledge the fact that Edmund feels himself such shame over this, or he doesn't acknowledge Edmund as a human being with feelings, and with feelings about that fact in particular, especially his feelings of being cast out. Basically, Gloucester ends up suffering the same punishment that he inflicts, which is that the reason he's not recognizing Edmund is that he himself is hiding from recognition. The shame that goes along with Edmund being a bastard kind of accrues to him, and he wants to avoid it.

36:05 Dylan: This is what Aaron was pointing to earlier, right at the end of the paragraph on 276. He recognizes the moral claim upon himself, as he says twice to acknowledge his bastard. But all this means to him is that he acknowledged that he has a bastard for a son. He does not acknowledge him as a son or a person with his feelings of illegitimacy in being cast out. That is something Gloucester ought to be ashamed of. His shame is itself more shameful than his one piece of licentiousness. This is one of the inconveniences of shame, that it generally is inaccurate and attaches to the wrong thing.

36:40 Erin: And even Cavell supposing that Gloucester understands the fact that the blinding is a retribution because Cavell says he wouldn't be able to accept it as quickly as he does if he doesn't think, well, okay, this is what I deserve. But he's still positioning it as a retribution for the fact that he has a bastard son, as though that would make sense, that everyone who has a bastard son should be blinded, and that that would be a just retribution.

37:05 Wes: Or it's a Just retribution for the failure of acknowledgement and the attempt to withhold recognition. Something done with the eyes, right?

37:13 Erin: But that's the difference between Gloucester's own view of his situation and ours or Cavell's.

37:20 Dylan: So let me just rephrase it. So if Gloucester understands his blinding to be just in that it's a consequence of the shame he ought to have for having a bastard son. But the real way in which it's apt is that he fails to recognize his son for himself and his own illegitimacy. So there's a way in which it's properly apt, even though Gloucester doesn't understand it that way.

37:49 Erin: We can almost argue that Gloucester's feelings about this kind of coincide with critics who say Shakespeare is a person of his day, right? Maybe Shakespeare is in fact playing with that, with the idea that Gloucester feels himself rightly ashamed of his bastard because of the time in which he lives, in which that in itself would be a shameful. Would be a shameful idea. And therefore critics are reading it that way as being a product of its time. But Shakespeare, as being godlike and almost outside of his own time, is making the argument that, no, the acknowledgment of the bastard son as a person is the work that actually needs to be

38:26 Dylan: done, it makes me want to then think about how that works in the parallel story with Cordelia's death and Lear at the end. That there must be a kind of parallel there regarding Lear's own shame and his self understanding and Cordelia's death the way Lear understands it himself and what it really means.

38:48 Seth: I'm having a hard time with the shame interpretation with respect to Gloucester.

38:53 Dylan: There's surely clearly a parallel working of shame between Gloucester and. There's just too many cases of their seeing and not seeing and recognition and not recognition and their own recognition of each other that's going on. That even if it's not exactly the same, there's something parallel going on. And so for Lear it has to do with Cordelia, just like for Gloucester it has to do with Edmund Cavell

39:19 Seth: brings up this doubling, this notion of the doubling of the themes or the doubling of the plots and how that works as a mechanism for him. So I grant the parallels that exist between Lear and Gloucester. But I'm having a really hard time accepting the shame interpretation as it relates to Gloucester. Because let's step back from new criticism. Let's take Cavell at his word. Gloucester is completely out of the blue, apprehended, if you will, or pinned down by Cornwall's servants and Cornwall and Reagan pluck out his eyes for some perceived offense.

And in the context of what's happening with him, if he didn't know beforehand that if he had no recognition or so no knowledge of what he was causing Edmund to feel in this context, how could he understand Cornwall as being, you know, the fate or the fury that is visiting vengeance for that particular offense on him, when he's actively trying to support Lear, who he knows has been rejected by Regan and Cornwall? I'm just struggling to understand and see that interpretation of Gloucester's behavior as much as I see it maybe with respect to Lear.

40:32 Dylan: So the first point you're making is that Gloucester, approximately, is being blinded because of his loyalty to Lear straight up, and that it's a cruel act, it's a political act at the very least. Among the things that it means is just the depravity of Reagan and Cornwall. And it may be the case that Gloucester feels it in the end as a kind of apt punishment for himself because of his mistake that he makes with respect to his son. But that is a kind of interpretation of the fates for himself that he may consider apt, but it's not causal in some way.

41:09 Seth: Yeah, I think that's exactly what I'm trying to say, what Cavell does in this essay, and we spoke at the beginning about how dense it was and how difficult and whether it seems thematically to hold together between the interpretation of King Lear and his second half discussion around epistemology. But I think there is a strong thematic structure to this essay, and a part of it is shame. For him, it's epistemologically implicated. I don't know the right term, but that's the one I'm going to use. He talks about the difference between shame and guilt. Where guilt is, it's about knowledge that is not public, or it's about a self knowledge about something which is not public. And shame is self knowledge about something that is public.

41:55 Wes: Well, it's also a difference between deed and oneself. So guilt is focused on deeds, and they're things that might be hidden. They're things that might be atoned for and confessed. But shame has to do with one's very being, and that's why being seen is so important to it, just one's mere existence.

42:13 Seth: I just think that shame as a mechanism, as Cavell is describing it, for Lear, it's epistemological and it's what he's going to get to when he. The essay is called the Avoidance of Love. I almost said abandonment, but the avoidance of love. But Cavell talks frequently in the essay about the avoidance of a certain kind of self knowledge. And shame would be an example of an appropriate reaction to a certain kind of self knowledge. And the lack of shame is the avoidance of that very self knowledge, which I think is what he tries to carry through the entire essay is using Lear as a reading to talk about how the implications of the avoidance of self knowledge. And he cashes out in terms of relationships, of love later on in the essay.