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Slouching Towards Bethlehem in W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”: Part 2 Sep 28, 2020

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Wes and Erin continue their discussion of W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” In Part 1, they analyzed the first stanza of the poem, in particular Yeats’ use of “gyre”; the meaning of the phrases “things fall apart” and “the center cannot hold”; and the conflict between aristocratic and revolutionary values. In Part 2, they discuss — with a little help from Nietzsche — the anti-redemption of the second stanza, and the meaning of Yeats’ vision of a “rough beast” slouching towards Bethlehem. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode. Transcript 0:08 Erin: You're listening to Subtext, and today we'll be continuing our discussion of W.B. yeats, the Second Coming. In part one of this discussion, we covered the first stanza of the poem. And now for the second coming of our discussion. We'll be covering the second stanza of the poem and try to explain Yeats's dark vision of a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. 0:43 Wes: And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself. All right, so here we are on the second stanza. The poem takes a real. Doesn't quite take its final turn yet. Right. So it evokes the possibility of a Christian second coming and something hopeful, and then it will take its dark turn towards his strange vision of a sphinx. There's a kind of a quality of satire or parody here. It's a send up of the very idea of a second coming, which in some ways might not be surprising if we reflect on the poem. So we've seen hints. Even though he's talking about things falling apart and what's not going to be called for is a revolution. Right. In a way, the falling apart is what he's reacting to in the first stanza is all the revolutionary fervor and the chaos and disorder that it's created. So if we think of a second coming or the hope for a second coming as a variation on the revolutionary spirit, then we might not be so surprised that he's going to end up rejecting it. That's what he dangles before us as bait at the very beginning of the second stanza. 1:59 Erin: Yeah, and I like that idea of satire because as we said frequently in the previous episode, he's working a lot in Christian imagery. And the devil is often called the ape of Christ. It's a mimic of Christ, but it's sort of backwards turning things upside down. And so in this idea of the second coming, of course, we think of the book of Revelation, the second coming of Christ. The content here is actually going to be kind of an aping of that or a turning upside down or a satire, as you say. But before we get into it, I just want to talk a little bit about the form of the poem, since I don't think we talked about that very much last time. So in the previous episode, we covered the first eight lines which make up the first stanza. And now the second part is actually a sonnet. It's kind of a sonnet. It's 14 lines long. So the whole poem together is sort of a sonnet plus an addendum, in a way. And so this sonnet form, which, you know, traditionally a sonnet has eight lines of one idea, and then a volta, a turn, and six lines of a competing idea. And that's sort of what's going on here. So there's a bit of a sonnet feel to it, in addition to the fact that it's 14 lines long. And then also there is sort of an iambic pentameter going on here. It's so loose that it almost is an iambic pentameter. And there are some rhymes, some slant rhymes, but they almost seem to be accidental, and they don't really occur in any kind of pattern. So that we have hold and world, falconer and everywhere, or gyre and everywhere. So there's a suggestion of a line, a ghost of a rhyme, but doesn't seem to have any particular pattern, which I think sort of fits with the whole theme in which he's working, of this mere anarchy. Kind of has one foot in the world of form and one foot in free verse, and it's sort of spanning the breach between the two. Yeah. So he starts with, surely some revelation is at hand. He's seen all of this chaos and anarchy happening in the first stanza, and now he's saying, okay, there's going to be some revelation that's coming. Surely the second coming is at hand. So I think here he's referring to the ideas in the Book of Revelation, which is, of course, the final book of the New Testament, written by St. John of Patmos. And there's a struggle between good and evil that happens in Revelation, and it reaches a fever pitch. The evil is growing stronger and stronger, stronger. And there's this climax in which God finally comes down to earth to intervene. He destroys evil, performs the last judgment, and then basically establishes heaven on earth in which there is no more death and the world kind of returns to a prelapsarian state. So Yeats is assuming that with all of this anarchy, destruction and chaos, that there is going to be this restorative coming, this revelation, this second coming of Christ. And then there's kind of a turn that happens in line three. 4:46 Wes: I love this twist. You know, as I've said before, before I like a poem with a good twist, and I love the way it goes sideways here. Although, no, it's not such a nice vision that he's having. It's really powerful. So hardly are those words out when a vast image out of spiritus mundi troubles my sight. So we get this idea here that something out of the collective unconscious has actually inserted itself into his imagination. So what's going on is he's describing his own inspiration to us as a poet, but it's described as a kind of mystical vision that comes from this. Again, I think the best way to phrase it is collective unconscious. Although the use of the phrase spiritus mundi seems like an opposition to me to the idea of the Holy Spirit. And I think of the role of the Holy Spirit in Mary's conception of Christ. And here he is having his own conception. 5:47 Erin: As a side note, I just want to say that I love the fact that you have the proper classical pronunciation of spiritus mundi. And I'm saying spiritus mundi, which is bringing out my ecclesiastical Latin background. So we're kind of the personifications of the Greco Roman and the Judeo Christian traditions. Just in our pronunciation of that term. 6:05 Wes: I keep my pronunciation very Roman. 6:09 Erin: Yes, you're very good. 6:11 Wes: As Marcus Aurelius put it, one ought to strive to be a real Roman. So I do that every day, as with Yeats. I like those aristocratic Roman values, you 6:22 Erin: know, There you go. 6:23 Wes: You get to run around in togas and sandals, a very kind of leisurely outfit. And yet you're conquering the world at the same time. It's great. 6:31 Erin: I prefer, like, very heavy robes, ridiculous hats, sticks that you could beat people with if you want. 6:37 Wes: No, that's another form of power. So it just depends on which kind of power you want. 6:43 Erin: I'm into this whole sword and sandal thing, too. But so this image comes out of this collective unconscious, this world soul or whatever, from which we get all these archetypes and everything. And he has this vision of the sands of the desert in which this shape with a lion body and the head of a man is moving. And this is obviously supposed to be reminiscent of the Sphinx, and I think, in particular. 7:08 Wes: Right. Of the Great Sphinx of Giza, that actual monument that was discovered at the end of the 19th century. 7:16 Erin: Yeah, because there's an implication here that it's been awoken from a stony sleep. So we know that this is a stone sphinx, so we can assume that it's the Great Sphinx, perhaps. And this is a time in which 7:25 Wes: I Mean, maybe I'm wrong about that. That's just the way I've always thought of it. 7:28 Erin: Yeah, that kind of makes the most sense. Ignoring stony sleep, I was thinking that this was an animal that's sort of been Benjamin Buttoning or something like. It resurrects and then it's kind of living its life backwards because at the end of the poem, we have it slouching towards Bethlehem to be. But which makes one wonder what constitutes a birth. If by waking up and moving around for the first time in 20 centuries, it's not being born, it has to go elsewhere to do so. 7:53 Wes: So thinking of the Sphinx as a statue, essentially, that becomes animated and gets up, which is a great image, moving its slow thighs. Although I think because it's a cat, essentially, I think of it as maybe stretching before it starts moving on. That's, of course, not what really happens. But as many critics point out, there seems to be an evocation, Shelley's Ozymandias here. Right. So the idea of a great monument sitting in the sand and being a symbol of power but having been ruined and defeated by time. But here the twist is that instead of being a symbol of the way power is subjected to time, the power comes alive and reinserts itself into the. Into the world. 8:41 Erin: Yeah. And that's where we get this idea that perhaps this power. First of all, we know that the image is troubling his sight, which is an interesting term. So we know that this can't exactly be a benevolent force. Perhaps it's a malevolent one. And in the connection to Ozymandias, too, you know, Ozymandias has the pedestal beneath him on which is written, look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. So we get this idea that this guy is, you know, he has this wrinkled lip and a sneer of cold command. And so we have this idea that Ozymandias was kind of a dictator, you know, like, not a particular nice dude. So the same sort of idea is evoked when we have the Sphinx coming to life. That it has a gaze that is blank and pitiless as the sun. There's something of that coldness and perhaps that evil and malevolence that's being brought about here with this animal's resurrection. 9:30 Wes: And the other part of that, I think of that as a byproduct of something's being a statue. So I think of ancient Greek and Roman statuary where often there's a blankness to the eyes. And the same thing goes, I think, for this Giza statue. And the blankness just is a product of the fact that I think the eyes were often painted on. Right. There might have been good reasons for not trying to sculpt the eyes, I'm not sure. But I don't know if it was technically too difficult or what other reason. Maybe it would have looked creepy. That may have some influence over our relationship to the ancients. The way in which these statues seem ethereal or otherworldly, there's a kind of power to that. It enhances the timelessness. These sculptures have survived over time. 10:19 Erin: There's a strange sort of revival of Egyptian culture that's happening at this moment in time that Yeats is writing. I mean, it really starts in the earlier part of the 19th century, but Egyptian revival architecture continues to thrive up until the late 30s, maybe especially because of this renewed interest in Egypt with the search for King Tut's tomb. And I think it's actually found in 1922, maybe. A lot of Egyptian symbols I think are being evoked at this time. Like for instance, I looked up if there was a connection because I sensed that there was between Masonry and the Sphinx, because I know that with the societies in which, like specifically the golden dawn, that secret society that we talked about in the previous episode that Yeats was a member of, of the founders of that society were actually Masons and they used a lot of Masonic imagery and symbols. And one of them was the Sphinx. And the Sphinx was actually seen as a symbol of mystery and also a symbol of initiation. It was always placed at the entrance to various Masonic temples. So I think that's kind of important here. The idea too that this is an amalgam creature is really interesting. I think first of all, we get this creature in flashes. Basically we see that it's a shape with a lion body and the head of a man. It has this blank and pitiless gaze. It has these slow thighs. But we don't really get this long view. We get like flashes of individual cut up parts, which is kind of like nightmarish. You know, it's dreamlike in that sense. But because of that, there's this real emphasis on the idea that this is an amalgam animal. It's not a shape of the Sphinx. It's a shape with lion body and the head of the mountain man. And I was thinking about this in terms of. I looked up again the book of Revelation. There's of course the great beast in Revelation. Well, there are actually two beasts. So there's the sea beast, which has this amalgam quality. To it as well. So in chapter 13 of Revelation, the beast which rises up out of the sea has seven heads, ten horns, and on its horns ten crowns. The beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear and his mouth as the mouth of a leper lion. So he also has this like cut up kind of quality to it. There's a second beast as well, which we could talk about in a minute. But this is a sort of hint that we're getting that this is maybe supposed to be like the Antichrist. Not really sure, but it's something that is reminiscent of this evil creature that comes out of the book of Revelation. So it's not Christ which is coming, but it's this evil, malevolent force. 13:00 Wes: Yeah, I think we're meant to wonder that from the very beginning, the way the poem will end. It'll become a question, I think, of what we're supposed to think of it. Is it evil? Is it good? Does it transcend good and evil? Maybe, but yes, the first side of it that we get is really frightening. And I think you're right, it's sinister, malevolent. 13:20 Erin: And then we have the most interesting part to me, besides the slow thighs moving, which is just a great. I mean, I just love that line and that image. Then we have these shadows of the indignant desert birds that are reeling around it. This is one of the frustrations of the poem for me, actually, because just like we get these flashes of different body parts of the sphinx creature, but not the whole thing together, we also don't get the actual indignant desert birds, whatever those may be. We just get their shadows that are moving around it, which is really strange. And we can imagine that these desert birds are perhaps vultures or something that eats carrion ants. They are indignant. And maybe we could talk for a second about why that word is used. Indignant. 14:02 Wes: Yeah. It's really interesting that we get the reeling shadows. So we're put in the position of looking down towards the ground, right. Instead of up at the birds, we're looking down and maybe we're in the position of the birds at that point. Because, you know, if this were a movie, right, the camera shot would be looking down and we'd be seeing the shadows around the sphinx and not the birds themselves. And we might be as high up as the birds. 14:25 Erin: That's really good point. 14:26 Wes: When I read this poem, I wonder, well, what are they indignant about? My first association is to the possibility that they were actually sitting on the statue so…

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Things Fall Apart in W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”: Part 1 Sep 21, 2020

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In 1919, the world seemed to have descended into anarchy. World War I had killed millions and profoundly altered the international order. Four empires, along with their aristocracies, had disintegrated. Russia was in a state of civil war, and Ireland was on the verge of its own. It’s these events that helped inspire William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” which famously tells us that “things fall apart,” that “the center cannot hold,” and that a new historical epoch is upon us. Just what rough beast is it that slouches, as Yeats has it, toward Bethlehem? Wes & Erin give their analysis of the first stanza of the poem. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode. Transcript 0:09 Wes: In 1919, the world seemed to have descended into anarchy. World War I had killed millions and profoundly altered the international order. Four empires, along with their aristocracies, had disintegrated. Russia was in a state of civil war, and Ireland was on the verge of its own. It's these events that helped inspire William Butler Yeats poem the Second Coming, which famously tells us that things fall apart, that the center cannot hold, and that a new historical epoch is upon us. Just what rough beast is it that slouches, as Yeats has it, towards Bethlehem? That's the subject for today's discussion. This is Wes Alwan. 0:46 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. 0:58 Wes: And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself. So, Erin, I have a confession to make. 1:17 Erin: Oh, gosh, do I want to know what this is? 1:21 Wes: The confession is that I associate this poem with a. I was going to say a stupid movie, but actually, I think it's a great movie. Maybe it's both stupid and great, but. Ghostbusters? 1:30 Erin: Yeah, sure. You mean in the sense of a disaster of biblical proportions coming on the city, fire and brimstone, dogs and cats living together, that sort of thing. 1:41 Wes: Right, Exactly. I'm thinking of two things. One of them is the end of the movie where there's a Sumerian God that appears, Gozer the Gozerian. And Gozer is there to destroy the world. And then the second part of that is just after an initial showdown with Gozer, I think the Ghostbusters have a small Pyrrhic victory for a while. But then Gozer says she will come back by taking the form of whatever one of the Ghostbusters thinks of first. And so the form she ends up taking is the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. And Stay Puft. The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. And I can't think of an apocalypse without thinking of that figure marching through New York. Yeah. 2:25 Erin: Moving its slow thighs down Fifth Avenue or whatever street that was. Yeah. 2:29 Wes: I'm reminded of that also by the fact that the second part of this poem takes such a turn, and Yeats says that he has a kind of vision and in a way the vision seems to intrude upon the poem so that it's not just that he's imagining a second coming or conjuring it up himself. It's a prophecy, and it's prophetic in the sense that it somehow comes from outside of him, is given to him. 2:57 Erin: I was trying to describe this poem to someone when I was talking about the discussion that we were going to have today and they were asking me, well, what is this poem about? And it's rather difficult to say. I mean, I really. I could barely even come up with a summary. I think I finally came up with one. But it's a strange poem. It's an abstract poem. It's kind of in the ether. It doesn't really seem to have a foot in real life because it's so ritualistic in its language. Maybe we could try to give a summary of it once I read it and we give a little background. 3:27 Wes: Yeah, sure. 3:28 Erin: Okay. Because I feel like that would be useful because it is so unwieldy in a lot of ways, the subject matter. 3:33 Wes: It is. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Why don't you give it a reading? 3:36 Erin: Okay. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood dim tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the second coming is at hand. The second coming. Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of spiritus mundi troubles my sight. Somewhere in sands of the desert a shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again. But now I know that 20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. 4:36 Wes: Very nice. 4:38 Erin: I feel like I should have a 4:39 Wes: deeper voice, at least during the second part. It should be raspy and satanic. Possession. The possession part. 4:48 Erin: So yeats was born June 13, 1865. He died January 28, 1939, at the age of 73. And this poem was written in 1919. It was originally published in a journal called the dial in 1920. And then it was included in his 1921 book, Michael Robartes and the Dancer. And as you said in the intro written, 1919 is obviously on the heels of World War I, the Russian Revolution and unrest in Ireland. And I think it's important to know that Yeats, though he has Irish sympathies, was actually a member of the Protestant ascendancy. His family was very pro nationalist, but they were, you know, sort of originally English at some point, and he spent 5:29 Wes: a good amount of his childhood in England. 5:32 Erin: Yeah. I think his father was descended from a Williamite soldier. So English by heritage, perhaps, which is sort of interesting. It's something that maybe I want to talk about in a bit with the Falcon and the Falconer. 5:42 Wes: There are apolitical tendencies to his work, at least early on, and that I think he resisted, but they come to the fore later on. So he had nationalist sympathies, but he was also. So, for instance, he fell in love with Maud, this woman, Maud Gonne, who was sort of an outspoken Irish revolutionary, but he did not sympathize with her politics. He was much more conservative in a way. You'll see some of that conservatism in this poem. But he was deeply affected by the 1916 uprising in Ireland. And a lot of people he knew were actually executed after that. They led the uprising and ended up being executed. And one of them actually was Maud Gonne. So Maud Gonne had rejected Yeats and married someone else, and her husband was one of the people executed. And Yeats actually ended up proposing to her. After that, it happened. Getting rejected and then proposing to her daughter and getting rejected. 6:43 Erin: But anyway, I was going to say something really mean. I was going to say, like, a dead husband is better than Yeats. But he was. He was really unattractive to her for some reason. 6:52 Wes: Yeah. I don't know the full story of what their relationship, but it's not infatuation. So that's some of the background. So the Easter Uprising in Ireland in 1916. He wrote a really beautiful poem about that called Easter 1916. And it has this beautiful refrain, all changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. This is a poem where he famously gets political. And anyway, he ends up becoming a senator. Right. 7:19 Erin: Did he really? I. Yeah. 7:21 Wes: So he ends up becoming a senator of the Irish Free State. 7:24 Erin: Wow, I did not know that piece. That's really interesting. 7:28 Wes: Yeah. 7:28 Erin: And I think it's important to say that even though he doesn't have the violent nationalistic fervor of Maud Gonne, he is very proud to be Irish. And he was very interested as a poet in shaping a cultural identity for Ireland as independent from any English artistic heritage. For instance, he went around the Irish countryside and gathered fairy tales and folklore from Irish peasants that he later published in this book called the Celtic Twilight. I think that was in the late 1800s. And so a lot of his literary interests were directed towards this strong Irish nationalism and independent heritage. And a lot of this had to do with the kind of the pre Christian Ireland mythology which ultimately developed his interest in mysticism and the occult. And all of these sort of interesting crazy things that he's going to get involved with, which are going to figure into this poem somewhat. And figure into a lot of his later work seances. 8:25 Wes: And his wife later on, the woman he marries, is a medium and does all this automatic writing. Just inspires his poetry. 8:32 Erin: And you don't really need to know his. He has a vast system of thought that he's developed from all of this interest in the occult and the secret society that he's in called the golden dawn, which practices these magic rituals. And they literally have capes and wands. I mean, it's very. As Auden says in his great elegy for Yeats, he calls Yeats silly. He says a lot of the stuff he's interested in is silly. 8:57 Wes: So this is actually another embarrassing association for me, which is to Arrested Development and the. What is it called? 9:05 Erin: The alliance of Magicians. 9:07 Wes: So Arrested Development and the alliance of Magicians and their motto, we demand to be taken seriously. And then Gob's refrain, illusions. Not tricks, dad. Illusions. 9:22 Erin: Illusions. You don't take my illusions seriously. Yeah. You know, there are a lot of similarities, I think, personality wise, between Gob and Yeats that we can get into. Like, if Yeats took one of those buzzfeed quizzes about, like, what, which Arrested Development character are you? He would definitely be Gob. But. 9:40 Wes: But I think it's important because I don't take the magic seriously or the mysticism seriously. And that, I think might be a deal breaker for some people with Yeats, or at least for some of the poems. But I think he does really transcend that. So even in a poem like this, which, as we'll see, seems to depend upon some of his elaborate mystical system, I think it stands on its own. And it's a great poem regardless. 10:05 Erin: I mean, certainly this provides his ideas, which he elucidated in this book from 1926 called A Vision, was published a few years after the Second Coming. And certainly the Second Coming is operating within this scaffolding that he's talking about in a vision. But it's not necessary. I mean, he uses the word gyre, which could just be a spiral or a circle. You don't necessarily have to know, like you said, that there's all of this scaffolding of symbols and imagery and all of his ideas about these world historical movements. Like the word gyre is, you know, it's in the poem, but it could just mean what it traditionally means, which is just a circle or a spiral. You don't necessarily have to know that he had all of these ideas about gyres that these cones, these spirals, like a tornado, basically, one on top of each other, facing each other, so that the vertices are. How do I put this? 11:00 Wes: They're interlocked. Think of two cones, the vertice of one touching the base of the other, and they're being interlocked and having these movements in relation to each other. I think the most important part of it is just that even though you don't have to know it, it does help to know that he thinks of these gyres as having something to do with historical cycles. So what the second coming is prophesying is a new epoch. So the previous cycle starts with the birth of Christ and goes 2000 years. And that's what seems to be coming to an end. 11:37 Erin: Yeah, and he also believed that the full life cycle of a gyre, he thought was 2,000 years and that there were these smaller and smaller portions that were govern by. For instance, he thought the lunar cycle was very important and the full moon. He thought there were cycles that took place within people's individual lifespans. And then he thought that Also within this 2000 year gyre there were high points at 500 year intervals in which the greatest achievements of civilizations tended to happen around the 500 year mark. So the slices of the pie were successively smaller or Greater within that 2000 year span. 12:12 Wes: Yeah, I think it's actually helpful. The book you mentioned, a vision from 1926, explains some of this, so I'll just read a little bit. He says at the present moment the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ, which was narrowing and has almost reached its greatest expansion. The revelation which approaches will however, take its character from a contrary movement of the interior gyre. All our scientific, democratic fact accumulating. Heterogeneous civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself, but the revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in one place and will for a time be constantly repeated of the civilization that must slowly take its place. 12:55 Erin: Yeah, that's good, that's really helpful. 12:57 Wes: Elsewhere he puts it after an age of necessity, truth, goodness, mechanism, science, democracy, abstraction, peace. Comes an age of freedom, fiction, evil, kindred, art, aristocracy, particularity, war. 13:14 Erin: That's really good and helpful. 13:16 Wes: So I think that sets up. The first stanza of this poem describes some of the impetus to this type of prophecy. It almost sounds like the world is. Well, as he puts it, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Right. So things are falling apart, everything's going to hell in a handbasket. That's the first part of the poem. And then the second is he imagines at first the possibility of Second Coming, one that's evocative of Christianity. Right. But then things take a left turn and you get what sounds like a vision of a sort of Antichrist figure awakening and ultimately heading to Bethlehem to be born. So a very shocking turn in the second part of the poem. 13:57 Erin: That's such a great summary. I labored under trying to figure out how to summarize this poem for so long. 14:03 Wes: Well, yeah, give me yours. I know, because you said early on that you had one. What's your. 14:07 Erin: No, it's just. I mean, you said it far more elegantly than I did. I just wrote the first stanza. He's describing the current state of the world, its upheaval and violence through metaphor and abstraction. Then in the second, he predicts or assumes that a Second Coming must be on its way to reckon with this state of chaos and disorder. And the implication is that the Second Coming will be hopeful, restorative, what have you. But then he gets this vision of a creature emerging from a troubled sleep, comes out of the desert and slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. So what awaits the future generations, the recipients of this new order that the Sphinx represents is. It's unknown, but it seems to be sort of sinister, but it's hard to tell. 14:45 Wes: Right. We can talk a little more about that as we go on, but I guess we should start by hitting some of these very fa…

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Filial Ingratitude in in Shakespeare’s “King Lear” Sep 14, 2020

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Do we owe parents our gratitude for our upbringing? What if they haven’t done such a great job? And anyway, perhaps we inevitably resent all the forces that have shaped the characters that confine and limit us. If so, the quest for filial gratitude is ultimately hopeless. It could even be a kind of madness: a foolish attempt to transcend the same formative forces that we resent in our parents, to be “unaccommodated,” free of the “plague of custom.” Wes and Erin give an analysis of William Shakespeare’s King Lear. The conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. Get this and other bonus content at by subscribing at Patreon. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode. Transcript 0:08 Wes: Do we owe parents our gratitude for our upbringing? What if they haven't done such a great job? And anyway, perhaps we inevitably resent all the forces that have shaped the characters that confine and limit us. If so, the quest for filial gratitude is ultimately hopeless. It could even be a kind of madness. Today we'll be discussing Shakespeare's King Lear. This is Wes Alwan, and this is 0:34 Erin: Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. 0:44 Wes: And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself. All right, so let's start with a little bit of a synopsis. 1:03 Erin: So, King Lear is a play that takes place in pre Roman England, so in Celtic times. And King Lear is a man who, in the first scene, he's a very powerful king, but he wants to abdicate his throne. So he gathers everyone around and he asks his three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia, to profess their love for him and thereby win a third of his kingdom. And and so Goneril and Regan make very fawning statements about how much they love him. But Cordelia, even though she's his favorite and she actually loves him the most, really can't bring herself to make this kind of public declaration. And Lear sees it as a lack of love and a betrayal. And so he casts her out and instead divides his kingdom in half and giving half to Goneril and half to Regan. Basically, what he discovers is that Goneril and Regan do not love him and just continually downgrade his retinue and insult him. And ultimately they cast him out into a storm on a terrible night and don't give him shelter in either of their homes. This leads to his madness, to Cordelia coming back to save him, and ultimately in both of their deaths, tragically. And meanwhile, a secondary plot. The Duke of Gloucester, who's a nobleman of course, has two sons, one of whom is legitimate Edgar and one is illegitimate Edmund. And he also has some problems with his children. So Edgar really does love Gloucester. Edmund does not, because of his illegitimacy, he feels as though he's constantly being ridiculed for his lesser state. And so he plots against his father and brother, resulting in his father's blinding and Edmund's own death. And at the end of the play, it's presumed that Edgar takes over the kingdom because everyone else is dead. 2:52 Wes: Everyone ends up dead. That's how, you know, one of Shakespeare's tragedies has come to an end. So I thought I'd give a little of some of the background because I looked into this a little bit, some of the source material that Shakespeare uses for this. So there is a play that was registered in 1594 and published in 1605 called the True Chronicle History of King Lear. King Lear spelled L E I R. So that play was written anonymously and I read a lot of that play as well. And it's really amazing to read. You can see some of the things that Shakespeare is incorporated. Although the play is way more basic, it's really. There's a dramatic difference in the level of sophistication between the two plays. But this story goes back a long way. So of course it's, you know, it's pseudo historical, it's a legend, sort of in the same category as King Arthur, but it's told in Raphael Holinshed's the Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, which is where Shakespeare got a lot of his source material. But it goes back to a book called History of the Kings of Britain, written in about 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. There's also a. Around the same time, a little bit before, around 1574, something called mirror for Magistrates by I guess by John Higgins. But it's a bunch of different authors, I think, with a lot of different legends and their poems, basically. And one of them is called Queen Cordilla. There are various ways in which her name is put, but it's written in first person and in the original tale it's actually sort of a happy ending. So Lear is restored to the throne and rules for two years and then dies. But then there's more antics with Goneril and Regan and Cordelia is put in prison where she ends up committing suicide. I recommend that people go look at some of that and the play written around the same time, just before I think. So here's Cordelia at a critical scene in the anonymous play. I cannot paint my duty forth in words. I hope my deeds shall make report for me. But look what love the child doth owe the father the same to you I bear, my gracious lord. One of the reasons I bring that up is just I was thinking a lot about the motivations for what happens in the first scene, which is it's a really Weird scene. And I've always, always thought that. And then getting more into this, it seems like, you know, it's something that's much discussed critically because Cordelia is King Lear's favorite. But he's very quick to basically completely disown her. And she's somewhat obstinate in refusing to allay his concerns. And, you know, he feels slighted by her failure to declare her love for him. It seems almost like a little bit of a contrived conflict or exaggerated. And actually, in the source texts, it really is. It's less. The conflict isn't quite so dramatic, and nor is anything that happens. So the madness of King Lear in this play, for instance, isn't nearly so intense in any of the source material. Shakespeare does lots of interesting and sophisticated things. And the other thing for people who do any comparisons, is that you'll see that the language that Shakespeare is using is not ordinary, or at least by comparison. You can read the other King Lear play from start to finish without ever looking up a word or being confused about something that's going on syntactically, which is, for me, not the case with Shakespeare. You know, it's interesting to compare those sources when thinking about the motivations, because it's clear that Shakespeare is doing something very deliberate. And the unlikeliness, maybe, or the very dramatic quality of this conflict is deliberate. And there's lots of hints. 6:47 Erin: It's kind of odd to me, too, the structure of it, I guess, because we don't get any indication of who Lear is as a man or who any of his daughters are. We have to see it play out. So except for these 30 on line 35 of the first scene, Lear comes in and this all begins. So there's this very brief conversation between Gloucester, Kent and Edmund, where we set up the one family, Gloucester and his relationship with his two sons. But very briefly, only 34 lines worth. And then Lear comes in, and the whole thing starts. The whole ceremony starts, and that's it. We don't get any context in order to understand these people. 7:24 Wes: And. Yeah, and that's something that we badly need because we want to understand how it is that Lear could put such trust in Goneril and Regan because they don't seem like such nice people. And we want to know how they came out so bad and how Cordelia came out so good. And we want to know why he would be so quick to cut off the daughter who is his favorite. We want to know more about what motivates this guy to do something so risky. And Strange. Which is to give up his kingdom and become completely dependent on his daughters and not reserve any power for himself and do something so drastic. Yeah. So as you pointed out, we don't really get any of that. And what we do get very quickly thrown into the conflict. The other thing we want to know is why he, someone who seems so rash, has such fierce loyalty from his. From Kent and from Cordelia herself and Gloucester and the fool and ultimately Edgar. Yeah. So he's obviously admired. He's done something to be admirable. We just don't know what it is because he doesn't act that way in the play. 8:37 Erin: That's exactly what I was going to say. The strange thing for me, reading this. So I hadn't read this in a really long time, and then I read it sort of more or less three times. And the first time I kind of was like, wow, this Lear guy is really. I don't remember him being kind of the villain of this. Like, he's so. He's so terrible. And then the second time I was like, oh, okay, you know, maybe he's just like a flawed guy. And then finally, the third time, I felt as though I got to, you know, maybe the reading I'm supposed to have where he's so put upon. But it's only from, I think those three times of experience with Lear, the character. It's weird. It's almost like read those three times, gave me three times as much background knowledge on which to judge the play itself or just kind of get used to the way that Lear is and to see him for his complexity. But if we look at this opening scene where he makes this request, and I watched one adaptation of this. I listened to one with John Gielgud radio adaptation on YouTube, which I really recommend. But then I watched the Olivier adaptation of this, and Olivier, it's pretty good. John Hurt is the fool, which is kind of cool, and Diana Rigg is Regan. But Olivier plays this scene with a real twinkle that Gielgud does not have. So Gielgud plays it very straightforward, like, okay, I'm going to ask you all to say how much you love me. And that's a reasonable request. Whereas Olivier is like, hmm, maybe you all can say how much you love me and it'll be fun for me. You know, like that kind of thing. And so he's kind of amused, and he's sort of playing this game with them. And then when Cordelia doesn't play the game, he gets mad as a result of that. But it was in. Interesting choice. But the only real section where he. He makes this request, he says, this is on line 50, act one, scene one. Tell me, my daughters, since now we will divest us both of rule, interest of territory, cares of state, which of you shall we say doth love us most? That we our largest bounty may extend where nature doth with merit challenge. This is him setting up the stake. So I think this is the first mention of nature in the play. And that word nature appears a ton, a ton of times. So here I believe he's referring to nature as regards to just relationships. So the natural relationship of a father to a daughter. And so I think what he's saying is that this is going to be pitted against whoever has the greatest merit. So whoever is the best speaker. So that merit is presumably determined by who will speak the best of their father. But for two out of the three daughters, that means whoever is the greatest liar. So whoever actually has the least merit. But why, if he has these three grown daughters, two of them already married, one of them being courted, does he not already know who has the greatest merit? We know that Cordelia is already his favorite. 11:27 Wes: What we also know is that the territories are. It's already mapped out and divided. And that's the way the entire scene begins. So Shakespeare is very clever with this. 11:36 Erin: Right. 11:37 Wes: So the very first line is. I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall. Albany is married to Goneril and Cornwall is married to Regan. And then Gloucester says, it did always seem so to us, but now in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most for qualities so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either as moiety, which is to say the way that kingdoms are divided. Whether we're left to guess a little bit, but I think it's meant to be in every part possible way, whether in any way. You might think about the differences between the way he's dividing things up, whether it's the amount of land or whether it's the quality of the land or anything like that. It's so equal that you can't detect any preference for any of the daughters. Could also be the case that Goneril and Regan get exactly the same amount, but he's reserved a larger portion for Cordelia. I like to think of it as he's engaged in this act of pseudo magnanimity where he's just evenly. He's already evenly divided things for the daughters for one of the published editions. So this is a collation of. Or conflation, as they call it, of various different versions of King Lear. There are some differences. And one of them, instead of saying for qualities are so weighed, it says for equalities are so weighed. And I think people had trouble making sense of that, but it makes sense of it as if Shakespeare is being clever, right, about this whole concept of everything being equal. The upshot is the whole thing is a farce. He's not really figuring out how to allot his kingdom based on what they say to him. He's doing something else. And not only is it a farce, but it's openly such. It's not like everyone else doesn't know that things are already divided up. So that's actually something very strange about the first scene. 13:26 Erin: He's maybe trying to entertain himself, or he's trying, you know, because his court is all in attendance. He thinks of this as some kind of a show or the formal ceremony where he gives this land. And he wants to maybe make other people not think that they're earning it, because you're right, they already know. But maybe just to show off how much his children love him or to make a show of giving them a big present that everyone already knows they're getting. But, yeah, I liked the way Olivier played it because he made it seem like it was a joke that then Cordelia didn't buy into. And the jokey kind of nature of it not only shows Lear's sort of good humor. I mean, good humor that's easily punctured, but it shows that everyone else is in on the joke as well, that he's. He's already divided it. 14:11 Wes: This question of his motivation is really important. It's hard to pin down. And that's one of the reasons I talked about the source material, because that's what kind of what I was looking for was some information on his motivations. And it's something that Shakespeare has consciously avoided. In one of the versions, it differs, but in one of them, it's just that Cordelia doesn't want to get married. So Lear wants to pin her down by getting her thinking about how much she loves him. She'll profess how much she loves him, and then he'll say, okay, if you really love me that much, then you have to get married to this guy. That's the motivation here. It's much more. Shakespeare's made the dramatic choice, and a very good one, to make us wonder about what the motivation could possibly be, what the motivation for retiring in this way is. You know, he talks of Wanting to give up business and crawl towards death. And, you know, we'll find out in the play, it seems like what he really wants to do is party, get drunk with his men and harass his. Or be rude to his daught…

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