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Professor Mulready
March 20, 2013
Sarah Wheeler
Alterity as Antidote to Indifference: Un-Knowing and Showing Ourselves
A Response to Stanley Cavell’s “The Avoidance of Love”
It seems an act of modesty for Stanley Cavell to call “The Avoidance of Love”
a reading of Shakespeare’s King Lear, considering the breadth of his analysis
encompasses everything from the fundamental crises of ordinary human experience
as well as the purpose of tragedy as a genre and its particular relevance to the
national identity of late 1960s America. As a result, Cavell’s writing is hard to pin
down to one discipline, as it blends literary study with philosophical inquiry. It may
be his recommendation that we confront the characters of these dramas as people
that most distinguishes his brand of criticism from familiar critical approaches.
Without pointing to any of Shakespeare’s specific philosophical influences as NewHistoricist Russ McDonald does when he mentions the Bard’s reading of Montaigne
(Bedford Companion 156), Cavell nevertheless underscores how important
skepticism is to Shakespeare’s tragedies, and it is his focus on knowing (or not
knowing) the Self and the Other that most affected my reading of King Lear.
In the sobering light of our incapacity to know anything for certain, we do
our best to wear shades, hide behind conventions such as language. The acceptance
of our epistemological limits is a terrifying burden, one that forces us to realize in
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Cavell’s words, that the “presentness of other minds is not to be known, but
acknowledged” (324). Lear’s test at the start of the tragedy can be seen as an
example of a foolish attempt to make others reveal themselves to him. He wants to
know their hearts. But, as Cavell argues, so much tragedy could be avoided if he and
other characters had been able instead to acknowledge others, which requires at
once the revelation of self and the awareness of our separateness from other selves.
But all that is unbearable for Lear, so his questions to his daughters “how much do
you love me?” and “what can you say to show your love?” really disguise the more
prickly “who am I?” and “who are we to each other?” questions.
Cordelia’s response is a more honest recognition of language’s limits, its
insufficiency to express what we can never know ourselves. She scoffs at Lear’s
question and says she “cannot heave her heart into her mouth,” a line that points to
the absurdity of locating love in a certain spot in the body and then yanking it out
and putting it on display (1.1.76,91). The “avoidance of love” is the desire to get
away without displaying our hearts to all, to escape without being acknowledged
and seen, since any exposure of that kind involves the revelation of our shame, the
most primitive of human feelings. Cavell locates this shame in the body, providing
an origin for that all-too-human desire to make language and thought transcend the
mortal coil. His writing focuses heavily on how recognition-adverse Lear and
Gloucester are and how their inability to recognize others causes tragedy, but it
seems ironic that Cordelia’s honesty, her brave revelation of self in the test, is a nod
to the fact that there is, as she says, “nothing” there, “no-thing” concrete we can
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point to and call “the self who loves.” It is easier to say I am a daughter, a wife, one
who uses the words “I love” to mean I play a role as social conventions demand. In
one sense, as Cavell mentions, Cordelia conceals the most in order to protect her
father and their love; she seems to understand the unknowableness of the human
heart and its need to stay hidden.
An expression of the kind of acknowledgement Cavell describes could only
come from one who had the capacity to reveal herself, allow herself to be seen. But
because Cordelia’s space in the play is so limited, her speech so brief, we hardly get
to “see” any kind of self-revelation on her part, as if that were even possible to see
per se. Instead, we observe examples of the opposite in abundance: the disguise of
self and feelings of shame on the part of Lear, his deceitful daughters, Gloucester,
Edmund, Edgar, and Kent. Without a doubt, the tragedy stems from these
concealments and failures to recognize each other. If anything, Cordelia’s lack of
flattering speech, her silence during Lear’s test, is her unique act of
acknowledgement because it allows space for the existence of the other; it is the
basis for compassion and love. “Love, and be silent,” as she says herself (1.1.60).
Lear could have saved her if he had done “what every love requires,” Cavell argues,
that is “put himself aside long enough to see through to her, and be seen through”
(301).
So why can’t he accomplish this? Why can’t any of us? At their reconciliation,
when Cordelia assures Lear that there is no reason for her to resent him, she says
“No cause. No cause.” (4.7.77). Nothing in nature causes the tragedy, it is just the
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human heart, the human condition that “one’s love becomes incompatible with one’s
life and kills the thing it loves,” according to Cavell (340). He writes, “The cause is
the heart itself, the having of a heart in a world made heartless. Lear is the cause.
Murderers, traitors all.” (302). This is where things get really bleak. We are only
unified by our separateness; we are helpless in the face of others’ sufferings (even
implicated in them); and any attempt to love requires a kind of erasure of self.
Worst of all is not the fact that we can only learn through suffering, but that there
might not be anything to learn from it, as Cavell suggests, since “not even death can
overcome our difference” (340). Accepting that alterity becomes the only basis for
compassion and must coincide with a kind of abjection of self, an acceptance of our
own shame and embodied finitude. Cavell posits that if in our lives we sit as an
audience to a tragedy does, hiding in the dark, we then reduce others’ lives to mere
fiction. Turning the lights on, allowing ourselves to be seen (albeit not known) as
we acknowledge others, might prevent at least one cruelty, that of indifference.
Recognizing that difference might be the only way to create compassion out of our
“no-thing.”
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Works Cited
Cavell, Stanley. “The Avoidance of Love, a Reading of King Lear.” Must We Mean
What We Say? New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1969. Print.
Shakespeare, William. “King Lear.” The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Eds. Greenblatt,
Stephen, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York:
Norton, 2008. Print.