In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

330 In this essay on King Lear I am responding in part to the recent, widely held notion that, even in the face of skepticism, ethical values continually emerge in the narrative of a community. Among philosophers this idea has been made prominent by Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty, in the late writings of Jacques Derrida, and in the much earlier writings of Iris Murdoch.1 I show that in King Lear a narrative of community and an ethical language are, in fact, made central by enlarging the focus of awareness from the tragic hero to a group of tragic protagonists.2 My larger contentions are (1) that in King Lear the collective narrative from which ethical values emerge takes the form of a kind of tragedy in which humiliation and blessing are of central, transformative importance; and (2) that the efficacy of this form depends on structures of representation that are inherited from religious narrative, yet in King Lear these structures are secular, which is to say that they do not require religious belief to achieve what Cordelia terms “benediction” (4.6.55).3 To be more specific, the transformative form of this kind of tragedy is constituted by effectively endless repetition of the narrative unit that represents the protagonists’ sufferings and, especially, their repeated humiliation . Humiliation of this order is the impact on the ego of giant affliction— the effect of being humbled without limit, crushed, and mortified. A narrative of such endlessly repeated humiliation finally works against narrative in that it tends to obliterate the time and place coordinates of narrative and even momentarily suspends consciousness in the protagonists who try to recount, or play out, the narrative. It is at the point of negation in this narrative process that the possibility of transformation and of blessSanford Budick Shakespeare’s Secular Benediction The Language of Tragic Community in King Lear 13 Shakespeare’s Secular Benediction 331 ing opens up. I refer to this process in King Lear as the zero narrative because of these negating features but also because Shakespeare coordinates this process with a transformative language of the “nothing.” I show how the collective zero narrative and the language of the nothing enable the emergence, in self-transformation, of human moral capacity.4 Kenneth Burke famously suggested that literature is indispensable “equipment for living.”5 I propose that in King Lear Shakespeare uses—and shows us how to use—a collective zero narrative and a language of the nothing as equipment for disclosing the human.6 Perhaps more than any other work in the Western tradition except for Oedipus at Colonus, King Lear shows why at any moment, at any age, humanity is defined by the possibility of this individual rebirth in concert with others. In King Lear this rebirth of the human, within the tragic community, expresses itself in a secular benediction. In my view the most telling fact about King Lear is that it concludes with a fulfillment of the design that first sets the tragedy in motion, namely, the division of the kingdom. It may be objected that it is not the design of dividing the kingdom but rather the so-called love test that catapults the protagonists into tragedy. The love test, however, is in my view only one expression of a larger impulsion, and a larger emergence, that this play represents. These are the impulsion toward and the emergence of a shared kingdom of moral being. From the beginning this impulsion is Cordelia’s as much as it is Lear’s. This is not to deny that Lear’s initial desire for division of the kingdom is defective. Certainly the scheme that he has devised to divide the kingdom must produce flattery and inequality. Yet Lear will later show that he is also motivated by a need for a genuinely shared kingdom . This need will also be disclosed in Gloucester, Edgar, Kent, Albany, and the Fool. One reason that King Lear forces us to seek a collective narrative is that its victim-protagonists are continually crushed together. Parallels and mirrorings of scenes of misfortune make this pressure of agglomeration clear throughout the play. This effect is represented paradigmatically in the collective suffering of the storm scene. A second reason that we attend to these characters as a group who play out a single story is the way in which they trade places across lines of social caste. This...

Share