[In the essay below, Burnham applies his theories on the nature of narrative to King Lear in order to explain the reason for Cordelia's death.]

A JOKE

On his first day of prison, a man joins a group of long-term prisoners talking in the mess. One of them says, ‘tell us a joke, somebody’. There is silence for a second, and then another prisoner says, ‘17!’. All of the long-term prisoners instantly burst out laughing. The new prisoner is confused by this, but pretends to laugh anyway. Suddenly, another prisoner calls out ‘29!’. This is greeted by floods of laughter.

The new prisoner turns to a short man in spectacles standing next to him and, discretely, asks why everyone is laughing at mere numbers. ‘Well’, is the reply, ‘we've all been here so long that we have given numbers to all the jokes we know. Now we only have to call out the number.’

‘Oh’, says the new prisoner. When the laughter has quieted a little, he blurts out ‘21!’ picking a number at random. The whole cafeteria is dead silent, not even a chuckle. The short man in spectacles turns to him woefully and says, ‘Sorry, mate, but it's how you tell them’.

The ‘how you tell them’ signals the irreducibly temporal aspect of joke-telling or, more generally, of any affective speech. A comedian has ‘good timing’, or is not a comedian. The joke never coincides with the punch line, or with a summary of whatever logical twists it ‘consists’ of, and certainly not with a numerical marker. Analogous, then, to Levinas's famous distinction between the saying and the said is, perhaps, telling and told. This is still more the case in that most obviously temporal of discourses, narrative. (And of course many jokes, like the one above, are miniature narratives.)

I wish to investigate the experience of narrative with respect to the specific question of its relation to some form or other of understanding. My thesis is that such experience necessarily (although most often obscurely) reveals an openness which is genuinely transcendent with respect to understanding. The various sections of this paper will break down into three parts: first, a critical discussion of the phenomenon of narration as a type of understanding; the second part, relating the problem of narration to the ethical idea of ‘virtue’, including a discussion of the revealing notion of ‘surprise’; finally, a corresponding reading of Shakespeare's King Lear.

NARRATIVE AS UNDERSTANDING

At minimum, a narrative is a sequence of events which forms a ‘figure’, or at least an abstract pattern. This figure has at least three varieties. First, the narrative as a whole can provide a concept of a type or genre of character or adventure. The story can be a detective story, a bitter-sweet romance, a tragedy, a bawdy comedy, and so on, and the character can be a heroine, a rogue, a tempter, a sacrifice-maker, and so on. In such cases, the type of figure dominates the narrative. In the second variety, the narrative figure (again, as a whole) has no sense on its own, but refers to something beyond itself which is its proper meaning: the moral of the fable, the real in realism. This meaning, however, is transportable. The moral fable, or the realistic fiction, does not need this particular narrative to explicate its ultimate referents. For these two, as each event is narrated, a fuller and fuller picture of, say, a character and of that character's world is revealed. The more details we have, the more we can anticipate with confidence what will happen next. The narrative thus functions as a device for understanding, for describing the unity of a multiplicity.

In the third variety, the narrative provides a unity to events simply by their being a part of that narrative. This happens even if (perhaps especially if) it breaks down genres and character patterns in some new way, or contains deep thematic or moral ambiguities. Such a narrative simply brings things together as things which ipso facto belong together. The figure itself, and such as it is, dominates, and for the first time is unique, rather than being one of many possible instances of a type, or one of many possible vehicles of a meaning.

However, all these ways of experiencing narrative are external, and stand back and treat the narrative as a whole. Of course, the internal experience of narrative may be one of being on the way towards one of these three: for example, we may sense a moral tale unfolding, and are on the look-out for narrative details which will reinforce this sense, and fill in details of the referent. However, there is a fourth way of experiencing narratives which belongs ‘natively’ to narrative but, I claim, is uniquely internal and thus no longer strictly speaking a mode of understanding. Here, we experience nothing other than the eventhood of the event. Such an event does not however present itself as random or simply without place. It demands (but does not offer: indeed, it refuses) its own significance within the narrative. This event may, perhaps, belong to a narrative figure of one of the above types; but we learn this, or even construct it as an interpretation, only afterwards.

In the first two cases at least, and perhaps the third, narrative belongs under the more general heading of understanding. It is a particularly temporal kind of understanding, to be sure, a way of grasping as a unity a multiplicity of events laid out across time. It is a way of grasping a particular event as something, part of a story.¹ The third is interesting for the notion of uniqueness; the fourth for the notion of event. The question is, do we actually encounter these latter two forms in some (or perhaps all) narratives, and if so, what is their relation to the more obvious function of narrative as a form of understanding? This very question may be explored by way of a discussion of ethics.

NARRATIVE AND VIRTUE

Up until the present century, narratives, whether biblical stories, folk tales, fairy tales, or heroic literature, were almost universally conceived, justified, praised, or arraigned as in some way edifying, as part of an education in virtue, spirituality, morality. In this century, however, the production of narratives is conceived as an aesthetic phenomenon, or as entertainment, as the impersonal transmission of ideology, or even as ethically subversive. It is at least worth asking in what way, previously, narratives were supposed to have this value. If narratives were seen simply as dramatizations of already existing moral norms, or well-known models of behaviour, then the question is no great problem, and similarly, for so-called ‘problem plays’ or the equivalents in other genres. The question is interesting only if we take the edifying function as belonging to the internal experience of the narrative. What would this mean?

Here, Aristotle is most relevant. Virtue, he argues, is not a precise science. Being virtuous does not mean knowing universal conceptual laws about what is good and what is evil. Rather, being virtuous is above all a type of wisdom in evaluating particular situations. How does one acquire this wisdom? An important element involves what we might call the absorption of role models. ‘How does one act virtuously?’ Aristotle asks, and the answer is: by acting with the wise man; and to the question how does even the wise man act? the answer is again, by acting with the wise man.² For Aristotle, my response to the ethical other proceeds laterally, through my education in virtue. But virtue remains a property of my ethos or character: thus, even in deliberation virtue is not strictly speaking mediated through necessary, particular examples, discussions, or rules. Virtue, then, is unmediated, but not uncultured.³ Again, the movement from exemplar to application cannot be inductive, proceeding through a mediating generalization about wisdom or virtue, for the rule must be known in order to pick out instances for induction. Nor, I claim, is this movement even representative, that such-and-such virtuous or wise action stands in for or imitates some other action; that is, I see this (present) situation as that (remembered) situation. The ecstatic imagination which Aristotle describes in the Poetics is not a presentation of images, the copy of an original: rather, an ‘as if’, not the copying of real or imagined events, but the construction or projection of a fictional world.⁴

Accordingly, the Poetics is not just an isolated account of the nature of comedy, epic, and above all tragedy. Rather, it is a central inquiry into the functioning of an important tool for the education of virtuous citizens. Through catharsis, tragedy teaches us how to feel and act properly. Tragic narrative is particularly useful as opposed to other types of narratives, such as history, because it is universal. But what does this mean? The plot and characters are presented as particulars, to be sure, but are structured universally, Aristotle says, making them (we can surmise) ideal as role models or anti-role models of virtuous lives (as opposed to virtuous incidents). But this cannot be the whole story: again, virtue is not imitation, even if it were the case that tragic heroes were unambiguously virtuous. And we already know that it cannot be universal in the sense of a code or law that is separable from the concrete models. This universality is rather that which is, so to speak, contextually mobile: a singular instance, but one which reverberates, claiming me, developing and culturing me and my life as virtuous, here and now.⁵ The poetic narrative must be genuinely dislocative in this way for there to be poeisis as a making, and for there to be catharsis. Catharsis is not just emotional response, but affective attunement: an affection together with a demand that the affection be taken up as ethically proper. The key property of such ethical narratives is that the demand upon me, and the content of that demand, are simultaneous and inseparable (unlike a categorical imperative, which demands without content, or a moral rule, which has content without any self-legitimization). This will henceforth be termed a ‘narrative argument’.

The Poetics is primarily a taxonomically organized set of observations on the best ways of constructing plots. The ‘best’ comes from Aristotle's primary insight: that tragedy has a purpose in producing catharsis. That is best which tends to (this is not a law) serve this purpose. So plot as narrative cannot, despite appearances, be understood as principally a form of understanding in either the first or second senses above. Certainly, narrative elements are ‘parts’, and their connections are comprehensible (if at all) only through their ends. Consequently, they are comprehensible only from the point of view of the whole plot and the whole movement of the plot. But this wholeness is not of the order of either generic structure or meaningfulness, but is in the service of the internal function. Similarly, it follows that the logic of probability or necessity in the way events follow on from one another is quite different from formal logic. Aristotle, who might be said to have invented both the idea of literary genre and (in the Topics) something like semiotics, also realized that genre in itself or a mere reduction to codes was never the point; but neither is a separable meaning or theme. In catharsis, tragic narrative transcends its particularity in the direction of its audience, and yet also remains immanent to that particularity.

The point here is that even the conventionally educative or formative narrative is to be understood as an argument, but of a completely different type: an argument about how we ought or ought not to run our lives and give them meaning. Or (particularly in the case of tragedy) it is an argument about how humans can and ought to deal with the unspeakable, with what lies beyond the limit of their comprehension and their conventions.

SURPRISE AND NARRATING

One way of grasping this claim is through the notion of surprise. Narratives are rarely orderly. Aristotle, for example, makes much of the importance of reversals, recognitions, and other unexpected events. The narrative, he is claiming, must be both predictable and unpredictable at the same time: the predictability is at best retrospective. The question asked above was about the internal experience of narrative, whether it is always oriented towards the final figure. Here, though, is a new phenomenon, which belongs uniquely to narrative: the events are not random, but with each new stage of the narrative, the figure changes. Shakespeare is particularly masterful in this: now a political and now a domestic or romantic drama; now a tragedy, now a comedy. This can be called epistemological terror, which is distinct from epistemological confusion, and therefore must be the trace of something else. My argument here is that this ‘something else’ will turn out to be an openness residing at the heart of the being of narrating. If this is correct, then the fourth way of experiencing narratives—the eventhood of internally experienced events—turns out to be irreducibly central. It can be said that surprise (or at least the possibility or expectation of surprise) is precisely the condition of possibility of narratives. Without surprise, the temporality seems to drop away, just as in the joke with which I began. What this means is that there must be an inner link between surprise and cathartic, or ethical, function.

The end of the narrative is reached when the figure stops changing, and surprising events stop happening. The end does not encompass the whole, it only marks an infinitesimal point from which the whole has been experienced, and is now past (and even that may be uncertain). The end does not control throughout: only afterwards, when there is at least the possibility of forgetting. This new external view corresponds only to the third way of experiencing narratives, and is still on the border of understanding.

In order to make my case more plausible, I will dwell a little on the notion of ‘the end’. This can have several meanings, such as, simply, the halting of the narration, as in a rambling picaresque narrative; that point at which all the motivating engines of plot have been resolved or neutralized, as in the mystery genre, when the mystery is solved; the point at which the meaning of the story becomes clear; end in the sense of purpose or function, as in catharsis. For a given narrative, end might mean several of these at once (certainly, always the first).⁶

One might argue against my reading of surprise and epistemological terror by claiming that all narratives have ends in the second sense. Even the picaresque tale will have at least subordinated ends. Thus, it might seem all events are part of the narrative by virtue of their orientation towards-the-end which functions as the horizon throughout, and which thereby makes the narrative a narrative at all. In my previous classification, this is a claim that all internal experiences of narrative are essentially oriented towards one of the three (and especially the first two) types of external experiences. By virtue of this horizon, narrative is thus a form of understanding, and has no ‘heterogeneous heart’.

However, because of surprise, the horizon for events is an end, not the end, and this difference is important. Being oriented toward an end, and being at the end, are radically different narrative experiences. In fact, the end in the second sense above as resolution of plot often comes as itself a disappointment, notwithstanding the quality of the whole. This is because the richness of possibility within the fictional world has been closed down. Similarly, one's favourite story is reread not just to get to the end again. One reads again, at the very least, for the miracle that is the end, and that is only possible if the end is the end of a narrative which was never entirely towards-an-end. There is also the omnipresent experience of hope or dread that (miraculous possibility) this time, the end will not be the same. The end, however right it feels, falsifies. The end tells us that, for the end, the narrating did not matter, did not have to pass. The end forgets the happening. Experiencing the narrative means not forgetting the embeddedness of the end, and that an end is only an end because of a movement, a passing of time, a sequence of delays, rhythms, rushes, energized stillnesses, surprises. Conceiving the end in this way, however, does not entail that it must appear random, as if the rest of the story had been torn from the binding. But its non-randomness is not a function of the thematic survey that it affords, nor of the last event itself; rather, it is a gift of the passing experience which has just passed. That is, here is a towards-an-end which is not organized by, and can never be surveyed from, the end.⁷

However, does not even this provisional horizon which is orientation towards an end still imply that narrative is a function of understanding, of bringing unity and order to original multiplicity? In the progression of the narrative, every new event appears as a confirmation, or more-or-less dramatic modification, or suspenseful delay of confirmation or modification, of the contour of the horizon. Only thus can there be disorientation, or a sense of complacency, or of fate, or even, speaking more broadly, any notion of genre. Otherwise narrative is simply a random sequence of events. However, this contour, even at its most definite (in the closing pages of a Greek tragedy, for example), must remain open in ambiguity, open to a sudden twisting of the contour. Without this, after the reversal or recognition, we would not be able to say ‘now I see’: that is, grasp the new contour as both completely different and entirely continuous. Every narrative, though perhaps at a particular contour, is also towards its dis-figuration. Surprise, therefore, is not just a super-added feature of narrative moments. What is the nature of this ambiguity, then?

Certainly, it appears to be epistemological in character. One is simply not in possession of all the facts which are subsequently narrated, especially the surprising fact which will catalytically reshuffle the others into a new contour. But this very metaphor of a catalyst reveals that this is a strange epistemology, just as epistemological terror was not mere confusion. It will be helpful to look at the problem transcendentally.⁸ What if the ambiguity were not a result of a deficiency in the contour, but the opposite: what if it were the condition of possibility for any contour's taking form? This may be understood by considering two very brief arguments.

Consider first of all that a particularly ideal reader is assumed above in talking of the horizon-contour. There is a methodological plausibility about this notion, but in fact and of necessity, there is the one reader, me. The multiplicity of readers is a horizonal ambiguity intrinsic to the text. The narrative's construction of horizons has to account for this: it has to guide the reader, place her on its ‘orient’ (to use a favourite phrase of Ricoeur's) again and again. This requires an over-provision of clues to this orient. But such a surplus of message is always responding to noise on the line, where the line and its noise are prior to the message.⁹ The very figure of the message presupposes the necessity of that which originally dis-figures.

Secondly, the narrative passes. I have been treating the horizon as belonging to discrete moments or events of the narrative. Rather, there must be a continuous change, of blending, of re-reinforcing or dis-figuring. This constant motion is part of the experience of narrative. Without it, the horizonal contour would not be that of a narrative. Functionally, this passing is equivalent to ambiguity: that is, it is the possibility of the figure disfiguring. But, just as the passing is at least as primordial to the narrative as the existence of an identifiable moment within the narrative, so the ambiguity (and with it, surprise) must be as primordial as the static contour. Indeed, one can go one step further: the contour cannot do without the distinction between past configuration and future expectation. Except from the false position of the end, the contour of the narrative has to be fundamentally and radically temporal. The temporal passing of a narrative is prior to its logic; that is, its ambiguity (the passing itself) is its condition of possibility. As I have shown, the experience of narrative is not primarily oriented towards a definite end, but at best only towards the expectations which it creates by first differentiating, in ambiguity, between what has happened and what is to come. That is, the orientation towards an end is also secondary to the disruption that is temporal differentiation.

This is not a claim simply about time in general. Rather, it is specific to narrative, because the specific ambiguity which allows contours to form, deform, and pass is of the order of what Ricoeur calls the ‘as if’. This is the meaning of the notion of ‘ecstasy’ or ‘dislocation’ mentioned above, which was discovered as the condition of possibility of the educative or formative function of traditional narrative. Narrative demands ecstasy not only epistemologically (in terms of a present dislocation toward future possibilities) but ontologically (in terms of worldliness). Thus occurs the epistemological terror, which is a terror striking not at this or that entity, but at one's world itself and in its entirety, and which is made possible by ambiguity and surprise.

It would seem plausible to suppose that narrative is a way of making sense of time: of giving (or finding in) temporal events meaning, identity, purpose, direction, morality; of forming patterns that have been, or can be, or ought to be repeated. Behind narrative, if that were possible, time would be experienced as not only meaningless but even chaotic and continually heterogeneous to itself. But the above arguments demonstrate that if narrative can be a form of understanding, it is not because narrating rescues meaning from chaos, but rather because it constructs the latter into the former.

CORDELIA AND THE ECONOMY OF TRAGEDY

King Lear is an ideal example of what I have been discussing. Certain key features of it do not make sense either as a narrative illustration of an idea, nor as a idea which could be made plausible in some way outside and other than the narrative. To understand the play, I claim, requires adopting the above notion of a narrative argument.

Ultimately, the issue is what imaginative literature can do that logical, expository prose cannot do. It is to be expected that one sign of narrative's doing its proper work is where there is a contradiction, when the plot and its images are viewed logically or in view of realism. Consider Oedipus the King. What is extraordinary about the end of that play is the combination of humility and nobility that Oedipus achieves. He is fully conscious of being the helpless, utterly broken target of the most horrible destiny, and yet he is still at moments heroic, insisting upon his immediate exile (i.e. the carrying out of his highest obligations against himself), though at the same time without defiance. These are contradictory impulses: humility and transcendence. One might think it impossible for Oedipus to respond in this way without being insane (and there is no suggestion of this). Such philosophical and moral points can hardly be stated without self-contradiction, and certainly not made worthy of belief. The drama functions as a demonstration of a uniquely narrative truth.¹⁰

Similarly, the death of Cordelia has worried commentators, actors, and writers for centuries. In a nutshell, the problem is that her death does not make sense in terms either of the conventions of tragedy or of morality. It just seems senseless, and yet any imagined or real re-working of the end of the play is still more manifestly absurd. How can this be? The plot of King Lear, viewed as a conventional tragedy, is in many ways the most improbable of plots. Lear, for his stubborn foolishness, and for the political and cosmic injustice of giving away the kingdom, must be punished. The moral balance of tragedy demands it, and Gloucester, similarly, must be punished. But Cordelia, one feels, did not deserve her death: it cannot be understood as somehow a punishment, either on the human level, nor upon the divine level. Where there is punishment without crime, as in Cordelia's death, it indicates a moral world out of kilter on both the human and the divine levels. Lear's lines ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life / And thou no breath at all?’ (v. 3. 308-09)¹¹ show a deep understanding of this senselessness, from someone able to see sense in preferring prison to a palace. But the lines immediately preceding this last speech of Lear's are Albany's overly optimistic, but stock-tragic ones:

All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings.

(v. 3. 304)

The close conjunction points up the futility of Albany's neat and tidy summing up. The play thus presumes to jest with the very sense of justice upon which high tragedy is premised. King Lear is philosophically and logically self-contradictory, and morally unrealistic. One can perhaps say, structurally, how the incident of Cordelia's death fits in, how it fulfils certain dramatic requirements. But that is not yet an answer: it would only mean that Shakespeare was not much of a playwright, to have backed himself into a corner such that dramatic demands were in irreconcilable conflict with other, no less important, imperatives.

Cordelia's death is wrong from the point of view of a moral world-view; this could mean that King Lear is attempting to show something about that world-view. The plot of the play is organized around the failed expectation of justice. There is, therefore, a vacuum of proper justice in the play, even at the end. For example, Edmund attempts to redeem himself, but is not allowed to learn that he has failed, he is carried off just as Lear enters with Cordelia. That is to say, the play does not allow him to be punished. Moreover, the play itself conceives of its action in terms of justice: the just deserts of king, father, brother, sister. No one ever fully merits their tragedy: in the economy of tragedy, one always pays too much, but not for nothing. Tragedy is a world of the run-away inflation of suffering, but conventionally never of infinite inflation. Cordelia's death is not right in the sense of violating the closure, the sense of ending. The moral world of King Lear does not make sense. The eventual triumph of Edgar and Kent goes some way towards filling this void. But how does this triumph come about? Kent is a passenger in the play; and Edgar's transformation from being on the run for four Acts to a man of action, countering Edmund's letter with one of his own and issuing an anonymous challenge, is sudden and rather easy to say the least. Whatever reservations one may have about the last scenes, however, Tate's infamous rewriting of Lear is judged less ‘right’ still.

Cordelia's death is only senseless if we add up the incidents in the play and ask where the justice is in that. Of course it could be that Shakespeare's vision of the moral world, both human and cosmic, is that desire and chance govern all, not exchange, justice, or fairness. But this just sounds like the ravings of a misanthropic old cynic. And even if true, this is only half an explanation, because it fails to make such a moral vision assert itself, fails to demonstrate its validity. King Lear is thus a play with no redeeming features, nothing to teach us.

My claim is that this senselessness is recuperated by the ‘narrative argument’ of the play. Perhaps the play is not pessimistic at all. Cordelia says,

We are not the first
Who with best meaning have incurred the worst.
For thee, oppressèd King, I am cast down;
Myself could else out-frown false fortune's frown.

(v. 3. 3)

This parallels almost exactly her earlier lines:

It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness,
No unchaste action or dishonoured step,
That hath deprived me of your grace and favour;
But even for want of that for which I am richer,
A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue
That I am glad I have not, though not to have it
Hath lost me in your liking.

(I. 1. 229)

Cordelia affirms her actions, would do it all again, though she and Lear have been defeated, and there is no reason to believe she would falter knowing death awaited her, for her character has shown no lack of moral courage thus far. Lear tells her ‘Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, / The Gods themselves throw incense.’ (v. 3. 20-21). Indeed, if her character has a flaw, it is precisely in a surplus of such courage, but in none of the conventional ways does the play acknowledge the fact. Indeed, the last lines, in their echo of the action of the opening scene, affirm the contrary. Cordelia's words:

If for I want that glib and oily art
To speak and purpose not, since what I well intend
I'll do't before I speak.

(I. 1. 226)

find echo in Edgar's:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

(v. 3. 326)

It is necessary that Cordelia die, so that what she affirms is not just another truism, not just a moral rule of thumb or code of feminine virtue. This is a play about affirmation, about huge lives of mythic status that are worth the living regardless of the return on investment, about heroic endurance in the face of irredeemable pain. What other meaning can the last lines have, spoken by Edgar, immediately after those just quoted:

The oldest have borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

(v. 3. 328)

Virtue leads forthrightly to destruction, and yet is demanded of us morally, is goodness itself.

That, of course, is foolishness. No logic can demonstrate the value of absolute loss; no moral philosophy face me with a plausible demand for virtue unto destruction. However plausible the above may be as a reading of the necessity of the death of Cordelia, as an interpretation and moral insight which is separable from the play, it will never move or inspire anyone, or make them think ‘how true’, when separated from the play. There must be the dramatized narrative, irreducible to the structural or semiotic moments which make it up, which does not simply work to hold paradoxes together in a kind of meaningless if exciting tension, but transforms and transcends them.

If the play could be read unambiguously as ‘false fortune’ or, in more modern terms, as a moral tale, then its orientation towards its end must indeed be a mode of understanding. In addition to the death of Cordelia, which I have already treated, consider the profound ambiguity of fate in this play. Fate or Fortune is a common enough stand-in for a higher hand guiding events into intelligible patterns. Certainly, the final scenes are rich with allusion to fate, fortune, the gods, and so forth. One might be forgiven for taking all this at face value. However, the fool's topsy-turvy ‘prophecy’ of Albion's ‘confusion’ at the end of III. 2 sets the tone for a set of games Shakespeare plays with his audience. The fool's speech is not a prophecy, both because part is already true, and because part will never be true (if cutpurses do not cut purses then they would not be cutpurses), and the evocation of Merlin is similarly paradoxical. The point seems to be that it is madness and true confusion to try to see grand patterns of progress or decay in events.

Gloucester's evocation of eclipses as evil portents works similarly:

These late eclipses of the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus, yet Nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects.

(I. 2. 112)

That an eclipse should be reasoned ‘thus and thus’ (that is, predicted and explained by astronomers) and yet should also ‘portend’ is not strictly speaking impossible. But it at least changes the nature of such signs, and certainly makes Edmund's subsequent claim that it is ‘excellent foppery’ highly plausible. There were no mention of eclipses at the beginning of the play. Portents are seen when the portended is already present.

In addition, consider Edmund's point in the ‘excellent foppery’ speech:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were villains on necessity.

(I. 2. 128)

He goes on to assert that his ‘rough and lecherous’ nature (his fixed disposition) should be what it is ‘had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardising’. Interestingly, true to his ‘psychological’ analysis of fate, Edmund indeed credits fortune with any real significance only at the precise moment when events blow against him: ‘The wheel is come full circle’ (v. 3. 176). Similarly, he subsequently even reaffirms that he has a ‘nature’, but in exactly the same moment as acting ‘despite’ it, to try to save Cordelia:

I pant for life: some good I mean to do,
Despite of mine own nature.

(v. 3. 245)

Finally, as we have already seen, there is a patent ludicrousness about the neat balancing of justice in Albany's summing up speeches. Thus, the play refuses to allow its reader or audience to settle down to an interpretation of its basic cosmology. King Lear is continually surprising us at a more radical level that any mere plot twist. That both Lear (on a literal reading of the text) and Gloucester, who lived through the most terrible sorrows, should die both in and (at least in one case) of joy is a final perverse irony. It is an almost grotesque parody of the conventional ritual of the cosmically decreed dispensation of justice in the final scenes of tragedy.

However, all this makes sense if we read the play as a cathartic, singular affirmation of and by Cordelia. For were there an unambiguous pattern of fate, then that affirmation would be pointless,¹² and the reverse: if the language of fate were entirely discredited, then Cordelia's actions and end would present no problems at all. The play as a whole would be easily assimilable to those interpretations which would like to take away from it a straight-forward dramatization of and commentary on political or social issues. The deaths of Lear and Gloucester can finally be seen as powerful symbols of the play's cathartic and redemptive power. This is very explicit in the language at v. 3. 200-04 and 314, where the Aristotelian language of pity is evoked precisely with respect to that apparently cruelly ironic joy.

If the analysis of King Lear is convincing—if its very integrity appears logically as non-sense, then the orientation-towards-an-end exhibited by this tragedy is available only internally. Such a drama is providing something like a philosophical ‘argument’ in narrative form, an argument which, for the above reasons, can only be provided in this form. We can just about understand the result of the argument separately from the narrative, but not feel its force, not be convinced by it. That is, it is possible for there to be what we have called a ‘narrative argument’ if and only if the traditional interpretation of the teleology and internal structure of narrative is shown to have as its condition of possibility a certain disruption of teleology and structure, which we have discussed here using concepts such as ‘event’, ‘surprise’, and ‘original ambiguity’. In this way literature can be uniquely philosophical.

Notes

1. This is apparently how Emmanuel Levinas is using the idea of narrative at the beginning of ‘Language and Proximity’, in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993).

2. Nichomachean Ethics, 1105b 5-10.

3. Compare Kant's discussion of ‘culturing’ in Critique of Judgement, §50, which similarly does not deny immediacy (trans. by J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 183).

4. This ‘as’ which is not mere similitude is a constant theme in Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. by Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). Ricoeur develops his thesis, as I do here, through a phenomenology of reading in Time and Narrative, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); see III, Chapter 7.

5. An historically minded philosopher such as MacIntyre would claim that such a universality is possible within the Greek world because of an already shared sense of the virtues, rooted in communal life. Thus, there is no claim on me as a member of the audience, because I am already claimed, already, that is, convinced. Thus my reading of Aristotle is, at best, anachronistic. But at least in Oedipus the King, I claim, something quite different is happening. There, Sophocles seems to be writing about the new virtues of what was for him a fairly recent Greek humanism. In that play, the goal cannot be merely to fine tune an audience's virtue, but to create it.

6. Even this claim is complicated by, for example, Burroughs or Cortazar as novelists, and Lynch (in Lost Highway) as a film-maker.

7. Most clearly now, the third concept of narrative is influenced by Kant's Endlichkeit ohne Ende in the Critique of Judgement, (see in particular, §10-11). See my papers discussing these points: ‘The Buck Stops Here: Deconstruction and the Regression of Authorisation’, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy (Summer 1997), 96-110; and ‘Aura and Sublimity in Kant’, Art, Criticism and Theory, forthcoming.

8. Here, this paper is most clearly and unapologetically neo-Kantian, although its results could not be less Kantian.

9. Obviously, one ought to think here of Plato's Phaedrus and the dissemination of the text among readers for whom it was never intended, and for whom it was always impossible for it to be intended. Speech too might be overheard, or passed on. This is not defect of language, rather its condition and purpose.

10. Christ's Passion is a similar narrative, involving similar paradoxes and analogous moral truths.

11. King Lear, Arden Shakespeare, third series, ed. by R. A. Foakes (Walton-on-Thames: Nelson 1997).

12. Although see my ‘Time as Chaos: Nietzsche and Mann in the Mountains’, in Proteus, or Metamorphosis (Leicester: Scolar Press, forthcoming in 2000) for a Nietzschean reading of the conjunction of necessity, affirmation, and chance.