question for April 17th

Posted on April 16, 2007

We'll be starting King Lear. The syllabus I handed out would (for April 12th) have told you to read up through Act 3 scene 3 (III.iii) of the play. But in the edition I ordered (the Oxford edition), the editor has dispensed with that typical way of organizing the plays (by Act and scene) and has just provided a chronological organization of scenes, from 1 through 24. In that ordering, III.iii is scene 10 (so read through scene 10 if you have the Oxford edition). I will finish up a couple of things from Girard's Violence and the Sacred before we get into Lear. For Thursday, you will be finishing King Lear and reading the section on the play in Stephen Booth's King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy.

So, the question.

Lear himself doesn't necessarily seem like much of a tragic hero. He certainly commits an "error in judgment" (the plot's hamartia) in banishing Cordelia, but that is hardly something he needs to come to learn through the play's "anagnorisis" (discovery): after all, the Fool reminds him about it constantly. Also, although Lear says he is "more sinned against than sinning," at least in the first part of the play we might find ourselves agreeing with Gonoril and Regan's view of the situation (they might become monsters later on, but they don't seem so unreasonable in the first part of the play and Lear seems very unreasonable). So it may be that we need to look elsewhere for tragedy.

One thing that is immediately obvious in King Lear, though, is that the conflict (at first pyschological and only later physical violence) is within families (that is, "intra-familial"): Lear with his daughters (and sons-in-law a bit) and Gloucester with his two sons (although, later, he does get into it with Cornwall and Regan). Obviously an intra-familial struggle is part of Hamlet as well (though not of Macbeth), and there is explicit violence or other sorts of violations within families in most of Greek tragedy: Oedipus kills his father and sleeps with mother (in Angel Heart, Johnny Favorite in a sense sleeps with his daughter Epiphany, and Noah Cross rapes his daughter). Addressing this topic in the Poetics, Aristotle makes this comment: "Let us determine which kinds of happening are felt by the spectator to be fearful, and which pitiable. Now such acts are necessarily the work of persons who are near and dear (close blood kin) to one another, or enemies, or neither. But when an enemy attacks an enemy there is nothing pathetic [that is, inspiring pity / sympathy] about either the intention or the deed, except in the actual pain suffered by the victim; nor when the act is done by 'neutrals'; but when the tragic acts come within the limits of close blood relationship, as when a brother kills or intends to kill a brother or do something else of that kind to him, or son to father or mother to son or son to mother--those are the situations one should look for."

Gerald Else's starts his commentary on this passage with the following: "Murders or intended murders involving close blood kin evoke the tragic emotions most powerfully. There is something faintly ghoulish about the calm with which Aristotle identifies these situations as the ones 'one should look for.'" But ghoulish or not, there is some truth in the notion that violations of "blood relationships" are indeed what tragic writers are interested in (even in Star Wars, it's more interesting that Darth Vader is Luke's father). But why? and what does this have to do with whatever we think tragedy is (fully recognizing that not all tragedies insist on the blood ties between key characters)? and, finally, is this relevant in some special way to King Lear?