While keeping in mind that backstage Edmund is busy accumulating power and leaving destruction in his wake, I turn now to Lear’s main plot. Jessica Barksdale Inclan has already written brilliantly on its significance: “Children are not here to love us. . . . We are here to love them. Love goes backward, down, toward them.”

http://www.redroom.com/blog/jessica-barksdale-inclan/there-so-much-i-do-...

Jessica is reacting to Lear’s disavowal of Cordelia, the good daughter, who when asked to speak of her love for Lear answers his demand with the words “Nothing my lord.” I agree with Jessica that this (missed) parental lesson is essential to this play.

But this is not what grabs my attention. What does is the word “nothing.” Consider Shakespeare’s use of it at the end of Sonnet 20 :

And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

In his punning on the words thing and no-thing, the older man, the speaker of the poem, is lamenting the fact that his young beloved is male. Shakespeare plays again on this bawdy sense with his title Much Ado About Nothing. It also helps to know that Shakespeare appears to have pronounced the word nothing so that it also sounded like "noting"--and thus in this title he is also alluding to two other key features of that play: noting (as in writing down) and noting as in overhearing. I often think about how the word nothing evokes the female sex, listening and writing all at once in Shakespeare.

And in Lear, I can’t help but feel that Lear’s problem resonates so deeply because in its gendering it couldn’t be more primal.

Lear is making a demand for a thing—for words, for a display of love where their can be no love, not that kind of love, not between a father and a daughter. A sane Lear would accept these limits. He would hear the love in nothing, the love in (feminine) silence. But Lear is not sane.

Consider his division of the Kingdom scheme. He has three daughters and by the time he has gotten to Cordelia, he has already divided the kingdom in three because he has already allotted land to Regen and to Goneril. So Cordelia’s already gotten her land (it is the remaining third). Yet on Lear goes with his game as if there is always more of his kingdom to parcel out. So he announces to Cordelia: What can you say that will get you a share fairer than what I gave your sisters. This is a man without fixed boundaries, this is behavior Freud labeled “splitting.”

Yet no one points this out. Well, Kent does: He says “Lear is mad.” And Kent is right. Lear doesn’t slide into madness. Lear arrives on stage a psychotic (without the most basic boundaries--me/not me). The question, as Belle noted, is a simple one: does Lear come to his senses? Does he gain enlightenment at the play’s end? (And, Belle, I have changed the stress in your formulation: For me, the question is not is thank you enough, the question is does Lear even know what he is saying when he says “thank you”?) The great Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas said in response to the question of forgiveness, and specifically, about the question of forgiving the Nazi for what he has done that the real question is--can you forgive someone whose guilt remains only at the level of his unconscious. (Levinas was speaking of his teacher Heidegger.)

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Before taking up that question, I want to blog on the Gloucester plot and the cliffs of Dover (via Beckett). PS to Belle Yang: It is interesting to think about the differences in Lear and the version you recount of this tale where the good daughter says something—“I love you as fresh meat loves salt.” There the meaning is hidden and is then revealed, actually it is enacted. . . PPS: Before my father opened his motorcycle shop, he ran his father's butcher shop. He would have understood the message. Salt to him remains a wonderous thing.