Shakespeare Filler Lear

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Entropy and outrage. Bloom hits on these themes masterfully. He sees the "universal outrage of all those acutely conscious of their own mortality" (510). Entropy

Then is the sand in the hourglass, running down, leading, inevitably, toward death. Lear is not Becketts cyclical, continuous, pointless existence of Waiting for Godot, but Pynchons outrage, studied outrage, of Gravitys Rainbow. As Bloom so rightly notes, "all you can place against mortalityis love, whether familial or erotic" (510). Norman Brown investigated this in Life Against Death, even utilizing Shakepeares "ripeness is all" as his rallying cry for nihilistic hedonism. Pynchons "dragging himself up the ratchets teeth one by one he does need to pause in human touch for a bit" (Gravitys Rainbow 547). But fighting against entropy through love only leads to a more poignant death, just as fighting against gravity only leads to murdermechanized though it may be. "It is only entropy, human and natural, that is formalized" (Bloom 505). In the end all someone like Bloom can say is, "love redeems nothingbut the powerful representation of love askew, thwarted, misunderstood, or turned to hatred or icy indifferencecan become an uncanny aesthetic value" (506). Is he right? As always, yes and no. Yes, aesthetic value is found in the méconnaissance of love. But there is something deeper here, and love redeems, but not all love. Though "beauty is truth, and truth beauty," it is not a one-to-one relationship, but overlapping categories. The overlap is then Davids "beauty of holiness" within which we worship.

Copyright (c) 2004 Jason Helms.
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