Very Thought of Herbert Blau by Clark Lunberry & Joseph Roach

Author:Clark Lunberry & Joseph Roach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

The fishermen that walk upon the beach

Appear like mice, and yon tall anchoring barque

Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy

Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge

That on th’unnumbered idle pebble chafes,

Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more,

Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight

Topple down headlong. (4.6.17–24)

Gloucester is thereby moved to “th’extreme verge” (4.6.26) by the very idea of a turned brain with inadequate eyes. Within the affective illusion, that which is supposedly there (th’unnumbered idle pebbles) cannot be fully accounted for, and the murmuring surge is made real by its absence of sound. What is absent, though hatched in the brain, convinces enough, by desperate need or hallucination, or both. The nothing has been doubled. (Nothing, all too actual, comes of nothing.) And from that comes the blind father’s last imperative, the words that confirm the reality of Edgar’s creation: “Set me where you stand” (4.6.24, emphasis added). The exiled son, suffering with the knowledge of life’s “strange mutations”—itself a fitting definition of history—places and positions the father on that imagined verge of the abyss. The father dives, which is a mere fall forward. When Gloucester rises after his meager collapse, Edgar tells him, “You stand. / . . . impossibilities have preserved thee” (4.6.65).

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