Poor Tom by Simon Palfrey;

Author:Simon Palfrey; [Palfrey, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

19

INTERLUDE

The Binding

A story stirs in the background of the son and father’s passage toward Dover, one famous in all three Semitic religions and a staple of medieval theatre: the Binding (Genesis 22) in which God commands Abraham to slaughter his son Isaac atop Mount Moriah. Abraham obeys the injunction, travels to the top of the mountain, and binds his son to the altar. He is about to deliver the fatal cut when an angel of God intervenes. Abraham is released from the task and a ram is sacrificed instead.

The basic story is consistent throughout its numerous retellings; the main difference is the amount of knowledge or acquiescence granted Isaac. The issues at stake are in many ways the same as in the Book of Job: the goodness or cruelty, alertness or absence, of God; the suffering of obedience, and its moral dubiety; the astonishment of mind and heart that faith demands; the scandal of an essentially unilateral contract, persisting amid functional blindness, in which you walk to the edge of a precipice with nothing to hold you back or keep you going other than whatever moves in your so-lonely mind—barring the intervention, providential or capricious, of some utterly unexpected agent of release.

Kierkegaard gives the ancient tale its most memorable gloss: the ethical response (to refuse God’s demand to murder innocence, to stay faithful to the most primal duty of care) is the temptation, a fatal error that Abraham resists through his silent faith in the absurd. By the absurd, Kierkegaard means faith in the absolute: and what is more, faith that his particular individual case is exempt from ethical account—that it can suspend universal law and defy the state and society. As Kierkegaard puts it, with beautiful simplicity: “What if he had made a mistake, this lonely man who climbs Mount Moriah?”1 The ethical is teleologically suspended, and Abraham enters a space of hallowed abeyance, where anything is possible, anything is permitted. This scene really does resemble the shocking liberties of Lear’s cliff -not-cliff.

And yet Kierkegaard wonders why Shakespeare never engaged with this particular terror: “Thanks to you, great Shakespeare, you who can say everything, everything, everything just as it is—and yet, why did you never articulate this torment?”2 As he clarifies in his notebooks:

He [Abraham] destroys his happiness in the world in order to have his happiness with God—and now if he has misunderstood God—where shall he turn?

A eulogy on Shakespeare, regretting that he has never depicted this final torment.3

Now consider Edgar, the formal hero, who (like Abraham) will never elicit a tear. Does he not begin as a terrified escapee from becoming-Isaac and end up as a failed or abandoned Abraham? He does not take his father to the cliff -edge; he appeals falsely to divine intervention to explain the fact of release. He disobeys his father’s injunction because he believes in no redeeming interruption. Recall Kierkegaard’s closing words (or those of his pseudonymic Johannes de Silentio): “the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute,” or he “is lost.

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