Avoidance as love : Evading Cavell on Dover Cliff

[Extract] This essay raises a ghostly counterpoint to Stanley Cavell’s influential reading of King Lear (ca. 1605) in the form of the discontinuous, fragmentary, at times almost inhuman character of Edgar.1 Cavell’s achievement in “The Avoidance of Love” is to show how cruelty in the play is bound up with a shame-filled desire “to avoid being recognized.”2 What Lear avoids is not just the “other” in all its inherent uncertainty—its eyes, its desire, its love—but also himself, or at least the vulnerable, open self that is capable of love. Cavell sees Edgar as an inveterate avoider.