TARDINESS IN KING LEAR. Tammy, Vanessa, Khairul, Samuel, Nicolette

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1 TARDINESS IN KING LEAR Tammy, Vanessa, Khairul, Samuel, Nicolette

2 Thesis In play where the transgressions of an individual only become apparent in retrospect, tardiness is ultimately not a question of morality but an intrinsic characteristic of human nature.

3 Outline 1. Timeliness and Narratives of Self 1. Endurance, Longevity and the Disrupted Self-Narrative 1. Belated Spectators 1. Edgar s Prospective Imagination

4 Tardiness and Rashness Existential Tardiness or Epistemological Tardiness To be tardy, in this scheme, is not just to delay a pressing deed but literally to be late in becoming what one ought to have become. (Unger, 134) Cordelia: A tardiness in nature (Act 1, Scene 1, Line 240)

5 Tardiness and Rashness In addition to tardiness, the play also ponders a contrary nightmare of a mode of action that is speedy because indiscriminate, and efficient because morally vacuous (Unger, 136) SELF-PERCEPTION / CONSISTENCY Albany to Goneril: I fear your disposition: / That nature which contemns its origin / Cannot be bordered certain in itself (Act 4, Scene 2, Line 32-34) Cordelia: To speak and purpose not, since what I well intend / I ll do t before I speak (Act 1, Scene 1, Line )

6 From Timeliness to Narratives of Self... the injunction to develop the proper orientation to timely action is beset on all sides by competing risks: hot-blooded rashness, cold-hearted quiescence, the risk of ceding the reins to one s passions and the risk of not seeing feelingly enough, and thus of being abstracted, tardy, as Cordelia (Unger )

7 (Unger 138) Untimeliness and Narrative Progression... a claim that one is at fault for untimeliness cannot be reduced to a moral claim: it is also a claim about how an action fails to sit well within the narrative progress of that person s life... Timeliness might involve the chronology, the symmetry, the narrative logic, the sensibility expressed across a person s multiple arcs the language of timeliness is especially tailored to a form of judgment that is occupied primarily with the expression of personal identity over the course of a life

8 Harmony of timelines(s)... marry what is right according to external exigencies with what is right according to the self s inner exigencies: the time of the world to the time of the self (Unger 139)

9 Endurance, Longevity, and the Disrupted Self-Narrative Section summary: Drawing from the previous section, the importance of self-narratives seems to be what comes into conflict with timeliness/tardiness. This idea of self-narrative ties in with the individual s need for selfmaking Unger describes this process of self-making as an act of learning Patience & Endurance. Yet, this cannot coexist with Lear s existential tardiness that is deeply affected by age. He then concludes that Patience and Endurance cannot be acted out without the occurrence of tragedy, from the learning of one s own shortcomings/errors.

10 Endurance, Longevity, and the Disrupted Self-Narrative Old Age & the Realisation of Death: Ecclesiastes, writes Kirsch, treats human life almost exclusively in terms of the immanence of its ending. / "Ecclesiastes Vanitas matches the horrifying vapidity of Lear s Nothing. So also does Ecclesiastes predict Lear in his admonitions against any olde and foolish king who fails to know himself, to see things as they are. (143) Like the philosophy of Ecclesiastes, Lear learns from the vanity of vanities and the emptiness of seeking out affirmation throughout his life, resulting in a bleak perspective. Behold, all is Vanity & Striving after the wind - Ecclesiastes 1

11 Endurance, Longevity, and the Disrupted Self-Narrative The Need to Let the Tragedy Happen Patience and humility, if hard to master, will at last come naturally to the subject who has been hurt by his own wrongdoing. The mode of learning is inefficient but dependable, and excess is naturally met with its own censure. Patience, in this model, involves a form of self-correction, which will dot the play following the storm-scene as Lear comes to his dozen or so epiphanies, all with an air of illumination and self-reproof (145) To wilful men,/ The injuries that they themselves procure/ Must be their schoolmasters (Act 2.4)

12 Endurance, Longevity, and the Disrupted Self-Narrative The Other Way to Truth? The Fool s teachings his syncretic gospel of the Machivellian, the burlesque, and the Juvenalian may give us the best hint of an alternate learning to be gleaned through tragic experience. He posits a refinement of our sensibility to the vulnerability that comes from our status as social creatures, to our dependence even in positions of power, to the cynical relation that is entangled even with the intimate and kindly, and to the short-sightedness and inherent limitation of any one angle of sight (146)

13 Belated Spectators/Spectatorship To outlast the great ones rather than outdo them In the face of the elusiveness of a greater knowledge...the notion arises that a keener understanding of and gratitude for survival might be its own reward (Unger on Asher 147) Late, long life a life in whose attributes we share as the play s belated spectators trumps the suffering life of the play s own victims (Unger on Asher 147) Pray you, undo this button (Act 5, Scene 3)

14 Belated Spectators/Spectatorship Reenactment of the experiences within the play the play is asserting one form or another of tardiness in the constitution of our own identities as witnesses (Unger on Asher 148) when the psycho-logical and intellectual experiences of living in a traumatic hereafter, of being marked by a tardiness in nature (Act I, Scene 1), is our shared condition (and shared not only formally, but by reference to a state of lost innocence in beliefs about society and self) (Unger 148)

15 Belated Spectators/Spectatorship if tardiness involves in the first instance a failure to realize an act on time, it becomes as it were, flattened out into a longer terminal condition that is rich with realizations. (Unger 148) timeliness as precipitous tragic tardiness and ironic belated-ness converge in our own position of viewership. We are left puzzling over what it might mean to come after the drama that already portrays essential belatedness and the scruples of an existential tardiness. (Unger 149)

16 Edgar s Prospective Imagination Edgar s actions constitute, perhaps, the play s only moment of significant imagination, the only attempt to reestablish a vision, with its own imaginative intensity, over the destructions caused by pitiless nature and discordant society. (Unger 149) it is also a claim about how an action fails to sit well within the narrative progress of that person s life. (Unger 138) For Kent in his new role, these higher truths are those of a natural hierarchy based not on arbitrary power but on Tardiness in legitimate right (the Authority he claims to see in Lear s countenance). Edgar s platform of higher truths is even more ambitious in its aims. (Unger )

17 Two-Fold Subversion The loss of autonomy, in Edgar s scheme, is not fundamentally a loss insofar as dependency existed all along (Unger 150) The possibility of his father s rebirth relies on his own achievement of forgiveness and devotion in advance. (Unger 150) overcome the cumbersome tardiness that marks selves who seem to have missed the chance at averting disaster, and who seem to be trapped in paths of decay. (Unger 151)

18 Trappings of Time "Only in retrospect can we weave together narratives that give us sustaining fictions of dramatic self-mastery, and that let us know who we were. But even these elucidations of identity are artificial and already belong to the past. Our propensity to tardiness expresses our irrepressible uncertainty about who we are in a context not yet well defined or delimited." (Unger 151) "Problems of timeliness in Lear relate to the pathos of selves for whom certain knowledge will always involve a rational reconstruction of past experience, a reconstruction that can do little to aid us in the intellectual frenzy of present life." (Unger 151)

19 Reclaiming Autonomy Tardiness in the play has had a stake in the notion that thinking can hardly be distinguished from wishing and willing, that our sight is contaminated with forces extraneous to the work of pure reason. (Unger 152) We can be too late for scientific knowledge, suggests Edgar, while remaining timely in our invention of salubrious fictions that catch a hold on reality as it occurs, and not a moment too late. (Unger 152)

20 Critical Question 1. To what extent can an individual s moral decisions and ethical reasoning be justified by the excuse of tardiness as being innate and inherent? Would this excuse Goneril and Regan s actions due to a lack of selfawareness? 2. What is the dramatic function in the introduction of the Harbingers of Truth? (e.g. the Old Man in Dr Faustus and The Spanish Tragedy and the Fool in King Lear)

21 Works Cited Shakespeare, William. The History of King Lear: The Oxford Shakespeare The History of King Lear. Oxford University Press, Unger, Francisco. Things I Should Have Known: Tardiness in King Lear. pp , renaissanceliterature.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/tardiness-in-lear.pdf. Accessed 10 Oct

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