Rage and the Sadness of Life

It is well known that our literary tradition starts from rage – literally, from the Greek word for rage, menin, with which the invocation of The Iliad begins. The confrontation between Agammemnon and Achilles sounds the first note of wrath in our literature, that will be echoed innumerable times: in the rage of Aeneas catching sight of Pallas’ belt on his enemy Turnus, the rage of Palamon and Arcite as they hack away at one another over love of Emily, the rage of Pere Goriot excoriating his callous daughters on his deathbed. It is simply remarkable how many of the characters that have impressed themselves on the collective memory of the West emerge as modulations of fury. And it is not only in our tradition that rage figures so prominently in the motives of the protagonists; the great Japanese epic, the Tale of the Heike, traces the catastrophic downfall of the Taira dynasty to the restless fury of Taira no Kiyomori, a fury captured in the stupendous image of the emperor burning so intensely in the fever that would carry him off that water poured on his body turns to smoke and flame. It was with great astuteness that Fulke Greville referred to poetry as “the son of rage,” since so great a portion of literary art has been devoted to representing the appearances and the effects of anger. And yet, despite the commonality of this theme, there are really only a few, exceptional works that cast light on the origins of this prevalence of anger in human life.

In these works – some of the best-known masterpieces in the canon – a remarkably similar pattern reveals itself. Anger emerges as the shadow of man’s rationality, and his consequent need for justice to satisfy that rational appetite. Men expect, or go in search of, justice, and when they do not find it, they are enraged. There is a sense in which all anger is indignation, is righteous anger. Even the reflexive annoyance that results from stubbing one’s toe is a kind of momentary reaction against a world that has not gone just as it ought. The imago Dei, the animale rationale – these are the titles by which we denote our inborn capacity to discern the right from the wrong, but what we commonly fail to acknowledge is that this capacity bears with it an invincible shadow, which leaves us constantly prone to anger at the injustice we inevitably encounter in our experience. The “ways of the world” too consistently and evidently fall short of our conceptions of justice, so that our sense of being constantly affronted by the injustice of things provokes a pervasive rage in the mind of men attuned to it. And the reason why that knowledge of the world’s injustice manifests as rage is because otherwise it would manifest as a sorrow that would perfectly overwhelm and debilitate us.

Consider that confrontation at the opening of the Iliad. In Achilles, we can trace the spiraling momentum of anger feeding upon its own delectation, that self-justification that tastes “sweeter than honey,” as he himself will put it later in the poem. Offense at Agammemnon’s claim to Briseis instantly becomes offense at the general’s greed and cowardice, his unworthy appropriation of the honor and largesse properly awarded to men his superior in battle: “you never dare to go out with the host in fight, nor yet with our chosen men in ambuscade. You shun this as you do death itself. You had rather go round and rob his prizes from any man who contradicts you.” Like a stoker shoveling coal into a steam-engine, Achilles loads the fires of his indignation with every nugget of recrimination he can find to hand, in order to exacerbate the sense of his own aggrievement. There is a mania for standing in the right that feeds the perverse pleasure of his anger.

But there is something more, something that only becomes evident later on in Achilles’ story when the embassy arrives to persuade him to relent in his spite towards Agamemnon and return to the conflict. In doing so, Odysseus assures him, that he will win such glory that he will be honored as a god among the other Greeks. It is an incisive appeal, since Achilles has shown himself to be more hungry for kleos, for the glory of an undying name, than any of his peers, knowingly accepting an early death at Troy as the price for gaining such immortal fame. But now that he has isolated himself away from the violence of the battlefield and reflected on its nature, he has come to regard the fame to which it gives rise as a slight, ephemeral thing: “Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard. We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings. A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.” That is to say, there is no justice in the awards that violence dispenses; it is all brute chance. What Achilles realizes is that he has exchanged his life for a mode of preeminence he no longer values; his tragedy ensues when he is nonetheless drawn back onto the battlefield in the wake of Patroclus’ death to wreak the sort of carnage he would have once exulted in, but which now only serves to feed his senseless fury.

Of note is the fact that the prelude to this slaughter is his nearly hysterical lamentation upon receiving the news of his friend’s death, a lamentation poured out to his mother in a scene charged with pathos: “I would die here and now, in that I could not save my comrade. He has fallen far from home, and in his hour of need my hand was not there to help him.” In the course of this outburst, we can observe the unmistakable transmutation of Achilles’ agony for his friend’s death into the rage that will drive him to reenter the battle: “Even Hercules, the best beloved of Jove—even he could not escape the hand of death, but fate and Juno’s fierce anger laid him low, as I too shall lie when I am dead if a like doom awaits me. Till then I will win fame, and will bid Trojan and Dardanian women wring tears from their tender cheeks with both their hands in the grievousness of their great sorrow; thus shall they know that he who has held aloof so long will hold aloof no longer.” The grief of bereavement expresses itself as a lust for revenge, as Achilles wakens to the purposeless brutality of the order that surrounds him, and his deprivation of the only consolations which might mitigate that brutality.

The attack on Hector that constitutes the poem’s climax is, for Achilles, something more than a struggle with another man. Hector embodies or symbolizes the adverse forces that have afflicted him with such a terrible fate. The extravagant rage he expresses towards his Trojan adversary – “would that I could be as sure of being able to cut your flesh into pieces and eat it raw, for the ill you have done me” – is really an expression of his indignation at a frame of things so profoundly out of joint with his sense of justice. He strikes out with his spear against the world, in the person of Hector, lest the world, and its manifold sorrows, overwhelm him.

A similar dynamic reveals itself in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. When Raskolnikov commits the murder of the pawnbroker, the axe which is the instrument of that murder is not directed in the first place at the head of the pawnbroker, but at the whole network of norms, obligations, laws, and duties which he means to extirpate through the fatal blow, and the reason why he thinks those things are legitimately defied is because he has come to regard them as nothing more than a thin façade concealing the fundamental iniquity of human society. At the moment of the murder, and for some period immediately afterwards, he himself understands his crime as a form of philosophical protest, as an attempt to implement his “idea” in the face of the prevailing timidity of customary ethics. This much is revealed in the article that he has written and that Porfiry compels him to read aloud. But as the novel progresses, and Raskolnikov is compelled through a variety of circumstances to reflect more precisely, and less egotistically, upon the motives of his own actions, it becomes clear that his indignation towards the squalor of customary ethics emerges from an insupportable compassion, an acute awareness of the intense suffering resulting from that squalor, and the blindness it induces. So when he lashes out at Dunya’s reproaches, in one last desperate attempt at self-justification before turning himself in to the police, the indignation with which he cites the evils condoned by customary ethics too obviously reveals the heartache agonizing him in the contemplation of those evils. “You really did spill blood,” says Dunya, in protest against her brother’s attempts to mitigate his action. “Which everybody sheds,” cries Raskolnikov in response, “which flows and has always flowed on this earth in torrents, which is poured out like champagne, and for which men are crowned in the Capitol and afterwards called benefactors of mankind.”

We cannot help catching here the echo of the profound verdict that Sonya passes upon the character of Katerina Ivanovna - herself a woman raging endlessly – that she is dignified and self-sacrificing, but “she expects justice.” It is the frustration of that same expectation for justice that wounds Raskolnikov so deeply, and that ultimately drives him to adopt murder as the remedy for the irremediable condition of human life. In the madness of Katerina, who dies in the streets lamenting her misfortunes in a state of delirium, we see the fate threatening to subsume Raskolnikov himself. The perspective that would allow him to transcend both of these destinies, that would enable him to acknowledge the full squalor of the human condition without being overwhelmed by it – a perspective that, as Dostoyevsky makes clear, is only to be gleaned from a nearness to God – evades him, or perhaps more precisely, is the thing that he himself evades. So when the forlorn state of Sonya becomes clear to him, he can only ask her, dumbfounded, “why haven’t you gone mad?” One senses here that Raskolnikov’s all too vivid grasp of human suffering, along with his lack of any transcendent beliefs to ameliorate that knowledge, leaves him with no other choice but to go mad himself, or else lash out against the order of things in the most outrageous fashion he can contrive.

It is probably in Moby Dick where this affective alchemy – this mysterious transmogrification of grief into rage – receives its most perfect expression. Melville’s great novel is the emblem of “all the general rage and hate felt by (the) whole race from Adam down” against the “inscrutable malice” that antagonizes man and stymies his development. It is not primarily his injury that torments Ahab, but the brute insignificance of it; its null, unintended facticity, against which no remonstrance or defiance seems appropriate. Rather than be compelled to construe himself as the victim of such mindless forces, Ahab devises the metaphysical narrative of the hunt, whereby his pursuit of a “brute beast” is transformed into a heroic triumph over all the “malicious agencies” at war with human dignity. The monomaniacal and destructive fury with which he carries out that pursuit – by which he dooms his entire crew, save Ishmael – is born out of his terror, and his refusal to contemplate the terror, that it means nothing at all, and that his unfortunate lot is less tragic than pathetic, he himself a proper subject not of admiration but of pity.

What these works reveal to us is the way that anger and the violence it begets have their affective origins in an unwillingness or inability to contemplate the pathetic contours of human life. The sadness – the overwhelming, soul-deep sadness – that would otherwise be the inevitable emotional response to such a contemplation carries with it an unmistakable implication of passivity; one cannot acknowledge those contours without simultaneously acknowledging the fact that we are subject to their limitations. Something in the soul of man rebels against the prospect of being subject to anything, and would sooner personify the very material forces afflicting him as opponents to be vied with – in the manner of Ahab – rather than accept their hard, dull supremacy over his will. Achilles cannot bear to be subject to the lordship of Agamemnon, but no less can he bear to be subject to the immiserating sovereignty of loss and suffering, and so rather than submit to their intrinsic predominance over human life, he rages against the universe itself in the guise of raging against the Trojans. His battle with the river Scamander is the perfect emblem of his conflict not with Agamemnon, nor with Hector, but with the very frame of things itself. The sorrowfulness planted inextricably within that frame renders man a necessary subject; the anger with which men lash out against that frame by lashing out against particulars embedded within that frame is the assertive, or rather aggressive, expression of his refusal to be any kind of subject.

Kierkegaard took note of this dynamic in his remarkable treatise, The Sickness Unto Death, one of the most incisive works of spiritual psychology ever written. Examining the various stages of despair, with their respective mental characteristics, Kierkegaard proposes that there is an early stage of despair which takes the form of “not wanting to be oneself,” when the self awakens to the awareness of its own weakness, which inflicts an “unbearable” wound upon its own pride. In time, the acuteness of this despair intensifies into the form of “wanting to be oneself,” at which stage despair is expressed as a kind of vague, amorphous defiance: “when the despair heightens, it becomes defiance, and now it becomes evident how much untruth there was in this business of weakness; it becomes evident how dialectically correct it is to say that the initial expression of defiance is precisely despair over one’s weakness.” This defiance Kierkegaard labels the “masculine” expression of despair. “Here despair is conscious of itself as an activity,” he writes, “it comes not from the outside in the form of a passivity in the face of external pressure, but directly from the self.” The self’s conception of its “infinite” expression causes an exasperation with its present finite state, and that exasperation elides into a defiance of whatever forces seem to impinge upon that infinite expression:

It is this (infinite) self the despairer wants to be, severing the self from any relation to the power which has established it…By means of this infinite form, the self wants in despair to rule over himself, or create himself, make this self the self he wants to be, determine what he will have and what he will not have in his concrete self…he wants to first to undertake to refashion the whole thing in order to get out of it a self such as he wants….he does not want to don his own self, does not want to see his task in his given self, he wants, by virtue of being the infinite form, to construct it himself.

The recalcitrance of the universe to his own flourishing “offends him, or rather, he uses it as an excuse to take offense at all existence; he wants to be himself in spite of it, but not in spite of it in the sense of without it…no, he wants to spite or defy all existence and be himself with it, to take it along with him, almost flying in the face of his agony.” At the pitch of its greatest intensity, in a state of mind to which Kierkegaard ascribes both heroic and demonic dimensions, despair expresses itself as a form of cosmic indignation: “he prefers to rage against everything and be the one whom the whole world, all existence, has wronged, the one for whom it is especially important to ensure that he has his agony on hand, so that no one will take it from him – for then he would not be able to convince others and himself that he is right.”

On Kierkegaard’s account, the emergence of rage as a basic stance towards life, towards existence, represents a more advanced stage of consciousness than sorrow, since the despair of “wanting to be oneself” brings into view the “eternal” (specifically, the “eternal self”) by which alone can man be saved. I want to modify this account perhaps by suggesting it is the passivity and subjection inherent in the basic stance of sorrow that a man finds insupportable, and which generates that response, far down in the reaches of the psyche, which emerges as the basic stance of anger. It is revulsion at the idea of defeat that transforms despair assuming the form of sorrow into despair assuming the form of rage.

Pascal’s famous image of the thinking reed is particularly apposite in this regard. Man, so wrote Pascal, is a frail reed, assailed by a thousand forces emanating from a brute, indifferent cosmos, but in his consciousness of his weakness, he gains a spiritual victory over the very forces that crush him, which never attain to any such awareness. Pascal seems to assume that the capacity to think our weakness, to reflect candidly upon our subjection to the cosmos, is more common than in fact it is. To the contrary, I want to suggest that it is precisely because most men find the contemplation of their cosmic subjection, with its attendant sorrow, so insupportable that they reflexively drive such thoughts from their mind with the flail of anger. Rather than accept their reed-like condition, most men will conjure an act of spiritual defiance and imagine the reed turned into a whip, to scourge and lash a frame of things that might otherwise overwhelm them.

Clearly then, the possibility of transcending the despair that turns to rage lies in the cultivation of that intellectual poise that Pascal extols: the capacity to think our own cosmic subjection without resentment. There is a danger, of course, that such repose will degenerate into resignation, an unresisting acceptance of “the way of the world” that enervates all energies of reform, at the level of both the person and the society. There is in fact a mode of defiance towards the aboriginal injustice of human existence that is necessary to sustain, but it is a defiance purged of the corrosive anger which renders it a source of moral distortion, rather than effective moral labor. It is precisely here that the fabled civilizing influence of woman over man becomes relevant, where the gentleness and patience proverbially associated with femininity actually hold the secret to that spiritual forbearance of which man’s soul so desperately stands in need. This is the paradox at the heart of all those centuries of worship directed towards the Mater Dolorosa, that in her mild acceptance of the agonies heaven explicitly assigns to her – in the unresentful “thy will be done” with which she meets God’s burden – inheres the only foundation of strength which can truly bear up against the afflictions of our state, and the outrageous injustice of our suffering them. In the gentleness of the Blessed Mother is revealed the greater hardihood, which realizes itself not in the infliction of pain, but in its endurance.

That gentleness is recapitulated in the character of Sonya, whose patient forbearance under the most radically unjust of fortunes, as we saw, positively stymied Raskolnikov, and compelled him to reevaluate his own response to the world’s brokenness. Of course, there is a tremendous paradox involved in drawing the prostitute as the paragon of heavenly patience, and that is precisely what infuses the story of Sonya with such extraordinary pathos. Sonya feels the injustice of her condition in her very flesh, and yet she refuses to either succumb to the maddening sorrow of her condition – like Katerina – or rage violently against it – like Raskolnikov. Her mild acceptance of her fate represents an emotional response to the “ways of the world,” and yet, as demonstrated by the encounter with Raskolnikov, during which she reads the Gospel passage about the raising of Lazarus, that acceptance only derives from a faith in a transcendent order of things that awaits its final realization in the fullness of time. Raskolnikov’s redemption by the end of the novel – or perhaps more accurately, his hope of redemption – stems directly from his willingness to follow Sonya in this regard, and submit himself to that invisible but placating vision.

The drama of rage and patience nowhere receives expression more powerfully and memorably than in King Lear. In Lear’s response to his daughter’s grotesque ingratitude, we can clearly observe how sorrow metamorphosizes into rage under the impulsion of kingly pride. Dispossessed of his regal state by his nefarious daughters, Lear is obviously overwhelmed with grief at the sting of their ingratitude. “I am ashamed that thou hast power to shake my manhood thus,” screams the old king at Goneril as the he strains to hold back tears. Later, when Regan betrays her connivance with her wicked sister, the intensity of his heartache simply becomes insupportable for a man with his sense of dignity:

You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,

As full of grief as age, wretched in both.

If it be you that stirs these daughters hearts

Against their father, fool me not so much

To bear it taemly. Touch me with noble anger,

And let not women’s weapons, water drops,

Stain my man’s cheeks.

Rather than endure such sorrow, and the subjection it entails, the king’s heart instinctively transmutes that sorrow into a fury which can be released in acts of revenge, or at least in stammering futile threats of acts of revenge:

No, you unnatural hags,

I will have such revenges on you both

That all the world shall – I will do such things –

What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be

The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep.

No, I’ll not weep. I have full cause of weeping,

But this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws

Or ere I’ll weep.

What follows is Lear’s descent into madness, in which state he calls upon the storm to “rage, blow” in sympathy with his own indignation, inviting the physical frame of things to take its revenge upon its own injustice. No less than Achilles wrestling Scamander, or Ahab brandishing his harpoon over the white whale, Lear would see the very framework of the universe broken to pieces rather than endure his subjection to the pathetic limits it imposes upon his own self-worth: “strike flat the thick rotundity of the world, / crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once / That make ingrateful man.” The tempest becomes the momentary vehicle through which Lear is able to escape those limits; by identifying his anger with its “sulphurous and thought-executing fires,” he is able to harness an aggression that would seem to preserve his regal dignity from subservience to sorrow. Even in subsequent scenes, when the ferocity of his outrage seems to subside to a considerable extent, the madness that overtakes him still serves to shield him from the knowledge of his reed-like frailty. “I pray you, father,” taunted Regan, “being weak, seem so.” Yet rather than seem so, Lear will set up a lunatic as judge, only so that he may rant at a stool for the hardness of its heart.

It is the ministrations of his daughter Cordelia - a daughter who has been wronged by Lear himself far more severely than he was ever wronged – that redeems the king from the depths of his madness. Like Sonya, Cordelia responds to her experience of injustice not with indignation, but forbearance. “I know you do not love me,” says the king upon awaking and finding Cordelia by him, “for your sisters have, as I do remember, done me wrong. You have some cause; they have not,” to which Cordelia responds, simply but with great sweetness and gentleness, “no cause, no cause.” Lear eventually seems to learn this forbearance from her, and in doing so is able to cast his gaze upon reality once more – “pray you now,” he tells her as they exit the stage together, “forget and forgive. I am old and foolish.” This hard-won clarity of perspective coincides with the dissolution of his madness; in teaching Lear how to behold the broken frame of the world without rage, Cordelia returns him to sanity. Thus, when the battle turns against Cordelia’s forces, and she is taken prisoner along with her father, it is Lear who reveals an affective equipoise in the face of this latest injustice:

Come, let’s away to prison.

We two alone will sing like birds in the cage.

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness; so we’ll live,

And pray and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies.

Crucially, Lear has gained the resolve to contemplate the sorrows of life without succumbing to them in the way that had earlier precipitated his fury: “Wipe thine eyes,” he whispers to Cordelia, “the goodyears shall devour them, flesh and fell, ere they shall make us weep. We’ll see ‘em starved first.”

So what Cordelia bestows upon her father, through her simple presence at this juncture in the play, is a capacity to endure a knowledge of life’s flagrantly unjust suffering, without allowing the oppressive potency of that knowledge to summon forth the maddening rage that previously overwhelmed him. In the tender patience of the forgiveness she displays towards her father, she reveals a dignity that cannot be defaced by agony, let it be ever so outrageous and intense. She comes, after all, at the head of an army; her meek loyalty to her father is the origin of the only power capable of saving him. If the righteous battle she waged on his behalf ends disastrously for them both, it does not cancel out the fact that through her presence and example her father is able for a very brief moment, for the only time in the play, to encounter his world with humane and clear-eyed sanity. This is the strength she embodies and bestows. She appears in the play as the prop allowing her father to bear the bitter fruit of his ill fortune. From the moment he discovers her beside him, he becomes mindful of another, and wiser, way of responding to the sorrow at the heart of things. “Be comforted,” says the doctor to Cordelia as she tends compassionately to the king, “the great rage you see is cured in him.”

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