Much Ado About `Nothing'

I stayed up too late Thursday night rereading King Lear, which for some of us possesses the readerly pull of a thriller, but I was rewarded Friday morning by the essay “Diagnosing Lear,” by Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple), in the June issue of The New Criterion. Since I started Anecdotal Evidence 16 months ago my intention has been to fashion “A blog about the intersection of books and life,” with a balanced emphasis on both words, both worlds. My ongoing conviction is that books and life are irreparably meshed. Deny one and wound the other. Reading to live is the happy discovery we make when, as children, we begin to live to read.

When Daniels/Dalrymple writes about literature, it’s not as a social critic, physician or poetaster. He reads and writes as a human being engaged with life, and assumes that worthy authors share the intensity of his engagement. As a retired physician, a psychiatrist and prison doctor, his knowledge of human suffering and depravity is intimate and profound, and he understands our bottomless capacity for self-deception. He is compassionate, not gullible; deeply learned, not academic; skeptical, not nihilistic. In short, like his literary forbears Montaigne and Samuel Johnson, he remains a model for Anecdotal Evidence, and his essay on Lear is a characteristic hybridization of the personal, the literary and what we might call the philosophical or moral. Daniels dismisses the perennial efforts of doctors and critics to diagnose the medical conditions of fictional characters; in this case, Lear. He goes a step further and anatomizes the laughable puniness of the therapeutic sensibility:

“…the medicalization of Lear’s behavior deprives it of moral significance. If only Lear had taken the right pills, everything would have been all right, and Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia would have been like the Andrews Sisters. The only question Lear raises for the modern mind is how to get him, or anyone like him, to the right doctor on time, before it is too late; presumably absolute monarchs carry adequate health insurance….Of course, where the Earl of Gloucester blames eclipses and the like, we blame social circumstances or, if we are really up to date, neurotransmitters, for everything wrong that people do.”

No wonder young people complain about the dreary impossibility of reading Shakespeare. It’s not only his language that confounds them; it’s Shakespeare’s notion of the human condition, its mingled tragedy and comedy and, as Yeats puts it, “Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.” Lear would have been immune to Prozac and the ministrations of Dr. Phil. After King cuts off Cordelia, his plain-speaking daughter, and the Duke of Kent, who warns Lear against his misguided impulsiveness, Kent says:

“Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least, Nor are those empty-hearted, whose low sounds Reverb no hollowness.”

For Daniels, this is precisely where book and life intersect:

“This is a message that we, who live in an age of emotional and self-expressive extravagance, now find very uncongenial. We favor the explicit, not the implicit, and the spoken rather than the unspoken, to the point where what is not said cannot have been meant. We favor incontinence over retention; we take vehemence for sincerity and depth of feeling. The signs of it are everywhere, and are visible even in very small things: tennis players, for example, grimace, mutter, exclaim, and punch the air as if no tennis players before them had ever truly wanted to win a match. Joy and screams of exultation are taken to be co-terminous, while tears and above all sobs are the sine qua non of sorrow. It is as if we took seriously the theory of the emotions according to which bodily changes precede, and then determine, what we feel. We find a joke funny because we laugh at it; we do not laugh at it because it is funny.”

Great works of literature, even those written 400 years ago, are aids to understanding who we are and where we have gone wrong, if only we listen. Consider that Shakespeare deploys “nothing” 34 times in King Lear, starting in Act I, Scene 1:

“Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.

“King Lear: Nothing?

“Cordelia: Nothing.

“King Lear: Nothing can come of nothing. Speak again.”

This laconic exchange, like dialogue in a Western, expressed entirely in simple English, signals the opening of a metaphysical void in the play, an abyss of meaning that swallows everything, including Lear and his daughter. The Book of Job hints at such cosmic nullity. So do Sophocles and Beckett. Only in Lear does it come from the mouths of a pig-headed parent and his clear-eyed child, not unlike those we have known. Of Gloucester’s rueful lines, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,/They kill us for their sport,” Daniels writes, “…we know that this is not the expression of exhibitionist angst, but despair that human suffering, so intense, is pointless.”