Politicizing King Lear

In his ‘Preface’ to Lear, Bond sets out his conception of the way in which modern society has developed:

[W]e live in what is more and more becoming a technosphere. We do not fit into it very well and so it activates our biological defences, one of which is aggression [...] What ought we to do? Live justly. But what is justice? Justice is allowing people to live in the way for which they evolved […] That is the essential thing I want to say because it means that in fact our society and its morality, which deny this, and its technology which more and more prevents it, all the time whispers in your ear “You have no right to live”. That is what lies under the splendour of the modern world.473

471

Quoted in Dramatic Strategies in the Plays of Edward Bond, p 91; Edward Bond, Selections from the

Notebooks of Edward Bond: Volume One 1959-1980, ed. Ian Stuart (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 218.

472 _{Quoted in Adapting King Lear for the Stage, p. 124.} 473

182

The rhetoric Bond uses is telling – where he refers to ‘our society’, with ‘its morality’, ‘its technology’ – as it implies that both morality and technology have become independent, divorced from the human(e) ends of ‘our society’. The autonomous metaprocesses of modernity ‘whisper’ menacingly, insisting on the unreality, the total contingency, of the individual human being. Under the conditions of modern society, the subject is dispensable: ‘You have no right to live’. Hubert Zapf writes that, for Bond, ‘the “subject” of the historical process may not be humanity any more but the social constructions which it has created’.474 The forces of history have become autotelic, turning the subject into an object of

impersonal laws.

This vision of history is typified in Lear by the representation of the Wall. The

construction of the Wall is symptomatic of history-turned-autonomous – or reification. Lear states that he is building the Wall in order to protect – and emancipate – his people: ‘My wall will make you free’ (I.i.3). But in a moment of obvious irony, his opening action is to shoot a worker (I.i.6) for an accident that delays the building-works, so that the (impossible) completion of the Wall takes precedence over the very lives it is supposed to protect and enfranchise. Bodice purposes to have the – as she tellingly calls it – ‘absurd’ (I.i.5) Wall torn down. But after taking power, Bodice comes to realize that her new-found position, far from freeing her from patriarchal authority, has turned her into a puppet of an absurdly self- perpetuating process of ‘War’ and ‘Power’ (II.v.48). ‘I started to pull the Wall down, and had to stop that’, reflects Bodice, ‘the men are needed’: ‘I am trapped’ (II.v.48-49). Cordelia also ultimately fails to tear the Wall down, seeing it as a way of instituting a better life for the people: ‘The government is creating that new life’ (III.iii.83). ‘Nothing has changed! A

474 _{Hubert Zapf, ‘Two Concepts of Society in Drama: Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan and Edward}

183

revolution must at least reform!’, states Lear, with Cordelia replying: ‘Everything else has changed’ (III.iii.84).

The impersonal quality of the ‘technosphere’ in Lear also bleeds into personal relationships, so that an invisible ‘wall’ of cold disinterest grows between human beings, alienating people from each other and from reality.475 There is, as Lear begins to realize, ‘a Wall everywhere!’ (III.ii.80) as the edifice begins to determine every aspect of human life and interaction. The notion of ‘a Wall everywhere!’ was powerfully realized in the original production of the play, where, in a self-reflexive coup-de-theatre, the Wall itself was not seen onstage until Act Three, when Lear attempts to dig it up. Up until that critical point, the actors referred to the Wall as if it occupied the same off-stage space as the audience.476 This self-reflexive gesture (which obviously draws on Brecht) worked to break down the

distanced, ‘aesthetic’ space of the stage and the ‘social’ space of the audience, reinforcing the sense of the Wall being ‘everywhere’ as an obstacle to more humane social relations and the underlying cause of social violence, for Bond symbolic of a wider ‘cultural

malaise’.477

It is the cold disinterest – the failure of imaginative, empathetic engagement and the petrifaction of human relations – which drives the arbitrary and yet compulsive acts of violence found in Lear, most obviously the horrific blinding of Lear in Act Two. This act is undertaken by an administrative official using a ‘scientific device’: ‘This is not an instrument of torture but a scientific device’ (II.vi.63). The process – in which Lear has his eyes

mechanically ‘sucked out’ (II.vi.63) into a container filled with formaldehyde – represents

475

So alienating is the Wall that Lear even thinks of himself as being ‘buried alive’: ‘I am buried alive in a Wall!’ (III.ii.80).

476 _{See William Gaskill, A Sense of Direction: Life at the Royal Court (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) p. 122.} 477

184

the reification of the subject by the scientific rationality supposed to enable freedom. Even the actions of the servants who bring ‘egg whites’ and ‘flax’ to relieve Gloucester in King

Lear (III.vii.112) are transformed into the far more perfunctory spraying of a healing

‘aerosol’ to encourage the ‘formation of scabs’ and to ‘discourage flies’ (II.vi.63). The whole deportment and detached language of the functionary (who is, ironically, another prisoner) recalls Arendt and her conception of the ‘banality of evil’. Arendt famously makes the case thatthe Final Solution was undertaken by seemingly unremarkable administrators who were able to free themselves from personal culpability by deferring to the wider demands of the Nazi hierarchical machine – an irrational psychopathology that, in the words of King

Lear, ‘Allows itself to anything’ (III.vii.111).478 Adolf Eichmann, as observed and understood by Arendt, was motivated more by the banal prospect of promotion than by a commitment to racist ideology.479 ‘This’, as the operator of the ‘device’ in Lear states, ‘is a chance to bring myself to notice’.480

The Wall is – of course – most obviously related to the Berlin Wall and the retrogression of the Soviet revolution, with Bond stating that the specific historical phenomenon informing the play was Stalinism.481 But the authorial discourse around the play, as I have shown, also comprises the Nazi concentration camps and Auschwitz, which occupies an increasingly central place in the way Bond conceptualizes modernity and his own dramaturgy. In his powerful article ‘The First Word’, Bond reflects on his critical discourse:

478 _{Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 2006).} 479

Ibid, p. 63.

480 _{William Gaskill recalls that, in a production of Lear in Germany, the blinding of Lear proved ‘too reminiscent}

of Dachau’ for traumatized audiences to bear, leading to walkouts. See A Sense of Direction, p. 120.

481

185

I use Auschwitz as a generic name for the various horrors of the 20th Century because it most clearly used the apparatus of modernity. It had the efficiency and expedition of a Ford production line. The raw materials received at one end were human beings, the finished product at the other end was ash. There is an easy

Brueghel image for it – the locations of the human mouth and anus reversed. But the deformity is more extreme than that. Auschwitz used the scientific technology that should emancipate us […] Auschwitz is not a cancer that destroys, it is not even a disease that poses as a cure – it has infiltrated and taken over the processes of life and made them death.482

These remarks have – of course – much in common with Adorno and his conception of the deathly process of the dialectic of Enlightenment (though Bond only ever refers directly to Adorno in relation to his dictum about the barbarity of poetry ‘after’ Auschwitz).483

Auschwitz, for Bond as for Adorno, becomes a metonym for the catastrophes of the twentieth century and the reifying legacy of modernity. It is a critique Bond also relates to late capitalist culture: in a distinctly Adornian observation, Bond remarks that ‘When you enter a supermarket you enter the logic of Auschwitz’ – by which Bond means the ‘logic’ of mass, reified society.484

Bond insists that – post-Auschwitz – social and political action is both possible and necessary. Lear may have his eyes surgically removed, but his blindness is, as Bond puts it, ‘a metaphor for insight’.485 The play charts the moral and social progress of Lear from an ideologically driven despot in Act One, through to insight (as in King Lear, through blindness) in Act Two and finally (and unlike ‘King’ Lear) to committed political engagement in Act Three. This culminates in his attempt to dig up the Wall, an act of intervention against the ‘technosphere’ and a re-appropriation of alienated human labour that undoes the

482 _{Edward Bond, ‘The First Word’, Edward Bond. Accessed 3 May 2018.}

http://www.edwardbond.org/Comment/comment.html

483 _{See Plays: 3 and the ‘Preface’ to The Fool, p. 79.} 484 _{‘The First Word’.}

485

186

deadening ‘coldness’ which deforms life in the reified world: ‘Work soon warms you up’ (III.iv.87).

Peter Billingham contends that the image of Lear digging up the Wall remains ‘one of the most iconic in post-war British theatre and even twentieth century British drama’, offering an image of ‘revolutionary intent and potential’ in a ‘radical humanist re-write of

King Lear’. 486 It should be observed, however, that from its opening performance the final image has been as apt to cause confusion as it has the type of eulogies proffered by Billingham. The case might be made that the final image of Lear digging ‘up’ the Wall is as Sisyphean a struggle as anything Beckett or Camus might imagine and hardly shaped to inspire the type of moral and political engagement Bond sees as being vital after the Holocaust.

Bond seemed aware of the criticisms that might be made against his play. In his Programme Note for the 1975 revival of Lear at the Liverpool Everyman theatre (‘Saving Our Necks’) Bond defends his play against the idea that the final stand Lear takes is – ultimately – absurd:

My Lear makes a gesture in which he accepts responsibility for his life and commits himself to action [...] [But that] gesture must not be seen as final. That would make the play a part of the theatre of the absurd and that, like perverted science, is a reflection of no-culture. The human condition is not absurd; it is only our society which is absurd. Lear is very old and has to die anyway. He makes his gesture only to those who are learning to live.487

Bond insists that the closing act of defiance should be understood as constituting more of a gesture made on behalf of its witnesses as opposed to an action that is in any way complete

486 _{Edward Bond, p. 52.} 487

187

in itself, which would ultimately reduce the play to the theatre of the absurd – a decadent ‘reflection of no-culture’. This is reflected in the telling stage-direction in which, as Lear digs up the Wall and leaves his shovel stuck ‘upright in the earth’ (III.iii.88), a worker ‘looks back’ (III.iii.88) – before being hurried along offstage by a foreman to continue building the Wall. The gesture Lear makes against the Wall is intended to shape the consciousness of its witnesses. This – of course – includes the audience itself: the final image is intended to convince the audience of the necessity of engaged moral and political action, as opposed to the apathy of absurdism or the disengagement Bond believes to result from the Brechtian

Verfremdungseffekt.

This reflects the divergent understandings of tragedy and the subject in Brecht and Bond. I have shown that tragedy, as far as Brecht understands it, is too preoccupied with a single tragic ‘hero’, whose inability to overcome society transforms his/her demise into ‘fate’. The sympathy tragedy engenders for the fate of the individual inhibits the type of detached, collective consciousness needed to bring about a more critical understanding of society and history.488 Bond is similarly suspicious of the significance of individual action – as the final and seemingly ‘meaningless’ death of Lear shows. But he does see tragedy as amenable to a properly dialectical understanding of human history, where defiant action negates the inhumanity of a reified society. Bond demands from the audience a response which is at once sympathetically engaged in the individual fate of Lear and yet sufficiently detached to allow an objective grasp of the political necessity of collectivity. The final action of Lear is intended to address the audience as a collective entity capable of radical political action.

488 _{For more on Brecht and tragedy, see Chapter One, pp. 91-92. Brecht (or rather, his ‘Philosopher’ figure)}

states that King Lear should be staged so that ‘the audience doesn’t feel completely identified with this king’. Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 56.

188

There is, however, another criticism that might be made of the play aside from the possible absurdity of its final image of Lear on the Wall – that Bond ultimately fails to challenge the Christian-humanist problematic that informs the pre-Kott understanding of

King Lear and, as a result, equally fails to challenge the Enlightenment narrative of rational

human ‘progress’ which had been so severely disabused by the war and the Holocaust. Lear displays an underlying faith in the forces of historical progress and the eventual control of an enlightened and ‘redeemed’ humanity over the abstract social-political system that it has itself created and which now destroys it. This, in itself, is not necessarily problematic. What is problematic, however, is the way that narrative overdetermines subjectivity. The result of the rational and humanistic view of historical progress Bond relies on is that Lear ultimately re-inscribes the subject into an overarching historical process – once again turning the subject into an object as it fulfils the teleological destiny toward a ‘rational’ and ‘just’ society.

I now turn to the contradiction between the critique Bond has formed of

Auschwitz/the dialectic of Enlightenment and his continuing dependence on Enlightenment precepts of human reason and progress, which undergirds his idea of social and political engagement.