TRACT: A NOVEL WRITTEN WITHIN THE CRACKS OF KING LEAR

‘Tract’--身体的一个主要通道--如呼吸道。--一片无限的土地或一种情节。--一段文字，即将分发出去。研究背景最近有几部莎士比亚的《李尔王》被重新改编。最著名的包括：简·斯迈利的《一千英亩》(1991)，其中土地占据了中心舞台；爱德华·圣奥宾的《邓巴》(2017)，其中李尔王的愚蠢以一个媒体帝国为背景；普雷蒂·塔内贾的《我们年轻的人》(2017)，将该剧重新定位到现代印度；以及JR·索普的《学妻》(2021)，它采用了莎士比亚的一位未写出来的人--也就是李尔的妻子--的独白形式。同样不成文的是，在科迪莉亚被流放后，愚人神秘地暂时离开了李尔王的宫廷。当李尔王对愚人说“我这两天没见过他”(1.IV.41)时，我们只知道愚人“被钉死了很多”(1.IV.72)。我们不知道他去了哪里，也不知道为什么。这是这部剧中的一个活板门，一个滴答作响的时钟，48小时的未经授权的缺席。然而，除了提到哀思，愚人的缺席被作家和学者都忽略了。这就好像李尔王的感叹“不再有那样的事了，我已经很好地注意到了”(1.iv.73)到目前为止，已经结束了任何进一步的猜测。对这一领域的贡献我自己的猜测将以Track的形式出现，这是一部实验性的混合小说，其动机是阅读《愚人的不在法庭》，类似于科迪莉亚的《不在法庭上说话》。他们被否定联系在一起，事实上，“一无所有”的概念--科迪莉亚的“一无所有，我的主”(1.I.87)与愚人的“你能不能什么都不用吗，叔叔？”(1.IV.129)相呼应。许多学者都注意到了《李尔王》中“一无所有”的概念(比如布莱恩·希林的《利用一无所有》，《语言学研究》(2013))，但这本书还会增加一篇小说，探讨在愚人和科迪莉亚的连环失踪中，我们是如何没有一个虚无的，而是两个虚无的，甚至可能是一场虚无的婚姻。T·S·艾略特曾写过一句著名的话：“我可以无物连接/一无所有”(《荒原》(1922))，当两个无物连接或相遇时，特雷特将追寻发生的事情。这是一个简单的‘O没有数字’(1.IV.158)加上一个没有数字的O的例子--一个简单的算术倍增，空的，肯诺主义的自我？或者是有某种邂逅？有没有‘I’和‘You’？如果是，他们是谁？然后会发生什么呢？在这里，对我来说，能引起共鸣的是保罗·西兰诗歌《浩瀚发光的拱顶》中的最后一句话：‘世界已逝，我必须带着你’(《诗选》，tr。迈克尔·汉堡包(企鹅1990)，275)。换句话说，Trand将读写超越一个始终如一的无世界的愿景，走向两个无的相遇或碰撞的愿景。

'Tract' - - a major passage in the body - e.g. respiratory tract.- an indefinite stretch of land, or kind of plot.- a piece of writing, to be given away.Research ContextThere have been several recent re-framings of Shakespeare's King Lear. The most notable include: Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991) where the land takes centre stage; Edward St. Aubyn's Dunbar (2017) where Lear's folly is set against the backdrop of a media empire; Preti Taneja's We That Are Young (2017) which relocates the play to modern India; and JR Thorp's Learwife (2021) which takes the form of a monologue by one 'unwritten' by Shakespeare - namely Lear's wife. Equally unwritten is the Fool's mysterious temporary absence from Lear's court following the banishment of Cordelia. When Lear remarks of the Fool that 'I have not seen him these two days' (1.iv.41) we learn only that the Fool has 'much pin'd away' (1.iv.72). We have no idea where he has gone or why. This is a trapdoor in the play, a ticking clock, forty-eight hours of unauthorised absence. However, save for the mention of pining, the Fool's absence has been passed over by both writers and scholars. It is as if Lear's interjection 'No more of that, I have noted it well' (1.iv.73) has, until now, put paid to any further speculation. Contribution to the fieldMy own speculation will take the form of Tract, an experimental hybrid novel driven by its reading of the Fool's not-being-at-court as analogous to Cordelia's not-speaking-at-court. They are bound together by negation, and indeed the idea of 'nothing' - Cordelia's 'Nothing, my Lord' (1.i.87) is mirrored by the Fool's 'Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?' (1.iv.129). Many scholars have attended to the idea of 'nothing' in King Lear (e.g. Brian Sheerin, 'Making Use of Nothing,' Studies in Philology (2013)) but what Tract will add is a novelistic exploration of how, in the conjoined disappearances of both the Fool and Cordelia, we have not one nothing but two nothings, even perhaps a marriage of nothings. T. S. Eliot famously writes that 'I can connect/Nothing with nothing' (The Waste Land (1922), and Tract shall pursue what happens when two nothings do connect or meet. Is it simply a case of 'an O without a figure' (1.iv.158) plus an O without a figure - a simple arithmetical doubling of emptied, kenotic selves? Or is there some kind of encounter? Is there an 'I' and a 'You'? If so, who are they? And what happens? Resonant here, for me, is the final sentence from Paul Celan's poem 'Vast, glowing vault': 'The world is gone, I must carry you' (Selected Poems, tr. Michael Hamburger (Penguin 1990), 275).To put this another way, Tract will read and write beyond a vision of one consistent world of nothing and towards a vision of the meeting or colliding of two nothings.