I revisited Stanley Cavell’s essay “The Avoidance of Love” today. I found a profound spiritual insight in its reading of King Lear.
Cavell argues that we can answer the play’s nagging questions with an easy solution. Why does Lear act as he does in Act 1? Or Cordelia? Or Gloucester in response to Edmund’s claims? Or Edgar in reaction to his father’s woes? Why does Cordelia die?
Cavell answers: to avoid “recognition, exposure, and self-revelation.” The tragedy is that these characters go out of their way to avoid knowing themselves. Most of all, these characters avoid love, which involves recognition and self-revelation.
Cavell wonders why critics have missed this obvious explanation. G. Wilson Knight, for instance, argues that love animates the entire play: “in the ravenous slaughter of the wood or ocean, love rules creation.” Cavell might agree, but he would say that Knight misses the point if he can’t see that characters keep trying to escape love’s dominion.
The problem with critics, Cavell argues, is the problem in the play: “It is the difficulty of seeing the obvious.”
Cavell has just dismissed the Christian reading of the play because “King Lear is not illustrated theology.” Fair enough, but he strains to avoid the word “salvation” in his conclusion. “What we need is not rebirth, or salvation, but the courage, or the plain prudence, to see and to stop. To abdicate. But what do we need in order to do that? It would be salvation” (my emphasis). We both need and do not need salvation.
Romans 1 makes the same point.
For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
People know God but don’t want to acknowledge Him as God. We know we need salvation, but we exchange the One who grants it for others who need it.
If King Lear is about avoiding love, it’s about avoiding the one who gives love. If Lear’s conclusions about divine justice and a providential future are skeptical, it is not because he can’t see.
Experiments in Criticism 