TRACT: A NOVEL WRITTEN WITHIN THE CRACKS OF KING LEAR
Lead Research Organisation:
Lancaster University
Department Name: English and Creative Writing
Abstract
'Tract' -
- a major passage in the body - e.g. respiratory tract.
- an indefinite stretch of land, or kind of plot.
- a piece of writing, to be given away.
Research Context
There have been several recent re-framings of Shakespeare's King Lear. The most notable include: Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991) where the land takes centre stage; Edward St. Aubyn's Dunbar (2017) where Lear's folly is set against the backdrop of a media empire; Preti Taneja's We That Are Young (2017) which relocates the play to modern India; and JR Thorp's Learwife (2021) which takes the form of a monologue by one 'unwritten' by Shakespeare - namely Lear's wife.
Equally unwritten is the Fool's mysterious temporary absence from Lear's court following the banishment of Cordelia. When Lear remarks of the Fool that 'I have not seen him these two days' (1.iv.41) we learn only that the Fool has 'much pin'd away' (1.iv.72). We have no idea where he has gone or why. This is a trapdoor in the play, a ticking clock, forty-eight hours of unauthorised absence. However, save for the mention of pining, the Fool's absence has been passed over by both writers and scholars. It is as if Lear's interjection 'No more of that, I have noted it well' (1.iv.73) has, until now, put paid to any further speculation.
Contribution to the field
My own speculation will take the form of Tract, an experimental hybrid novel driven by its reading of the Fool's not-being-at-court as analogous to Cordelia's not-speaking-at-court. They are bound together by negation, and indeed the idea of 'nothing' - Cordelia's 'Nothing, my Lord' (1.i.87) is mirrored by the Fool's 'Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?' (1.iv.129). Many scholars have attended to the idea of 'nothing' in King Lear (e.g. Brian Sheerin, 'Making Use of Nothing,' Studies in Philology (2013)) but what Tract will add is a novelistic exploration of how, in the conjoined disappearances of both the Fool and Cordelia, we have not one nothing but two nothings, even perhaps a marriage of nothings.
T. S. Eliot famously writes that 'I can connect/Nothing with nothing' (The Waste Land (1922), and Tract shall pursue what happens when two nothings do connect or meet. Is it simply a case of 'an O without a figure' (1.iv.158) plus an O without a figure - a simple arithmetical doubling of emptied, kenotic selves? Or is there some kind of encounter? Is there an 'I' and a 'You'? If so, who are they? And what happens? Resonant here, for me, is the final sentence from Paul Celan's poem 'Vast, glowing vault': 'The world is gone, I must carry you' (Selected Poems, tr. Michael Hamburger (Penguin 1990), 275).
To put this another way, Tract will read and write beyond a vision of one consistent world of nothing and towards a vision of the meeting or colliding of two nothings.
- a major passage in the body - e.g. respiratory tract.
- an indefinite stretch of land, or kind of plot.
- a piece of writing, to be given away.
Research Context
There have been several recent re-framings of Shakespeare's King Lear. The most notable include: Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991) where the land takes centre stage; Edward St. Aubyn's Dunbar (2017) where Lear's folly is set against the backdrop of a media empire; Preti Taneja's We That Are Young (2017) which relocates the play to modern India; and JR Thorp's Learwife (2021) which takes the form of a monologue by one 'unwritten' by Shakespeare - namely Lear's wife.
Equally unwritten is the Fool's mysterious temporary absence from Lear's court following the banishment of Cordelia. When Lear remarks of the Fool that 'I have not seen him these two days' (1.iv.41) we learn only that the Fool has 'much pin'd away' (1.iv.72). We have no idea where he has gone or why. This is a trapdoor in the play, a ticking clock, forty-eight hours of unauthorised absence. However, save for the mention of pining, the Fool's absence has been passed over by both writers and scholars. It is as if Lear's interjection 'No more of that, I have noted it well' (1.iv.73) has, until now, put paid to any further speculation.
Contribution to the field
My own speculation will take the form of Tract, an experimental hybrid novel driven by its reading of the Fool's not-being-at-court as analogous to Cordelia's not-speaking-at-court. They are bound together by negation, and indeed the idea of 'nothing' - Cordelia's 'Nothing, my Lord' (1.i.87) is mirrored by the Fool's 'Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?' (1.iv.129). Many scholars have attended to the idea of 'nothing' in King Lear (e.g. Brian Sheerin, 'Making Use of Nothing,' Studies in Philology (2013)) but what Tract will add is a novelistic exploration of how, in the conjoined disappearances of both the Fool and Cordelia, we have not one nothing but two nothings, even perhaps a marriage of nothings.
T. S. Eliot famously writes that 'I can connect/Nothing with nothing' (The Waste Land (1922), and Tract shall pursue what happens when two nothings do connect or meet. Is it simply a case of 'an O without a figure' (1.iv.158) plus an O without a figure - a simple arithmetical doubling of emptied, kenotic selves? Or is there some kind of encounter? Is there an 'I' and a 'You'? If so, who are they? And what happens? Resonant here, for me, is the final sentence from Paul Celan's poem 'Vast, glowing vault': 'The world is gone, I must carry you' (Selected Poems, tr. Michael Hamburger (Penguin 1990), 275).
To put this another way, Tract will read and write beyond a vision of one consistent world of nothing and towards a vision of the meeting or colliding of two nothings.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| John Stephen Schad (Primary Supervisor) | |
| Rupert Smith (Student) |