After Abu Ghraib: Gloucester's Blinding Reconsidered

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What does it mean to be a citizen of a country that tortures prisoners? How are we to respond when evidence of this torture appears? Can a scene from Shakespeare that shows graphic torture help us to understand our relationship to such things? My aim is to examine the blinding scene in King Lear from a number of different perspectives. My concern is how many interpretive strategies, as expected, avoid the disturbing power of Gloucester's blinding. Indeed, like Gloucester's "vile jelly," King Lear presents us with a series of "horrible object(s)" (2.3.17) that cannot be digested into scholarly comment or approached without feeling a significant gulf between Shakespeare's play and our attempts at interpretation. Similarly, this essay will consider the ways in which an audience in the theater might be engaged or detached from the torture that takes place, a moment that, one could suggest, threatens the boundary between the audience and the stage. I will argue the blinding in particular can help us think about how interpretation can be an evasion or retreat from "the thing itself," from the most painful aspects of King Lear. I will also suggest how the violence of the play might, if confronted more directly, shape us to be more active and ethical citizens in a world where the torture that took place at Abu Ghraib and similar acts are regular occurrences. Using a passage from James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and also works by the painter Francis Bacon, I will suggest how one might approach a scene that forces us to question our relationship to torture in both the theater and in the world outside the theater.

Stream: Art in Communities

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

My areas of study are Shakespeare, the performance of Shakespeare, the novel, and African American Fiction. I've published essays that concern Shakespeare's plays, pedagogy, and contemporary African American writers. Currently, I chair the department of English at John Carroll University, where I have taught for eighteen years.