I had a remarkable freshman student who intuitively understood the modality of totalitarianism, and how it might be represented in literary form. In class she made the offhand comment that in King Lear, frivolous and deadly serious skirmishes follow upon one another without hierarchy or temporal markers. She said that chronological sense has to be removed to show that power, in the absence of sovereignty, exists primarily as pure bravado and as pure harm.

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Look in on almost any moment in Lear and you cannot quite see how bad the situation is. This is what struck me, reading it years later. A historian’s warning: it’s hard to see history as it is happening. Albany barely understands Lear’s nasty tussles with his daughters. It’s just an ordinary day with the in-laws; how did things get so bad? Kent has shown up at Gloucester’s castle and runs into Goneril’s steward/henchman, Oswald. No one knows it’s Kent because he is disguised as a fellow named Caius in order to stay on as Lear’s servant and bodyguard and because Kent answers to Oswald as a member of Gloucester’s household.

We soon learn that Kent is too direct to be an effective hero and has other less-nameable flaws that disqualify him for the job of the bodyguard and messenger. Regan and Cornwall, who happen to be guests at Gloucester’s castle, do not recognize that it’s Kent who has gotten into a tussle with Oswald, but the disguise hardly helps him. Oswald blinks uncomprehendingly at Kent’s anger toward him. I don’t know you, stranger! he cries, why are you insulting me and delivering blows?

In a Learian world, what people are capable of in the last instance can be glimpsed in the first instance, but you’d be hard pressed to recognize the first instance.

For these offenses Kent is put in the stocks. Does that seem unreasonable? Lear’s audiences often do not realize how bad Kent’s situation is, even when Regan arbitrarily extends Kent’s punishment. We’ll keep him like this till noon, says Cornwall. “Till noon?—till night, my lord, and all night too,” his wife replies. You hear, now, how eroticism and sadism share the same flippancy toward added time. It is a commonplace cruelty, like cats and dogs getting tied to a post somewhere and forgotten. And there Kent stays until…it’s hard to say.

From the director and producer’s standpoint, it’s not easy to convey how cruel this detention in the stocks really is. Kent can often just look foolish onstage, sitting there idling. It’s not torture, exactly. No screws are being applied. It’s the Fool who finally describes what we’re seeing, with reference to the spectacle of bearbaiting, then one of the most gruesome sports in Shakespeare’s England:

Look, ha, he wears cruel garters. Horses are tied by the
head, dogs and bears by th’ neck, monkeys by th’ loins, and men by the legs.

An arbitrary extension of immobility is hard to see. People can also be stoical in their sufferings, as Kent was. “Mak’st thou this shame thy pastime?” Lear asks Kent, still in the stocks. “No, my lord,” he replies. When he finally explains why he is where he is, the explanation sounds wordy, bizarre. I delivered your letters, and then another guy delivered letters, and then I was called forth, and he was too saucy….And then this small dumb thing happened, and then that small dumb thing happened, and then “your son and daughter found this trespass worth / The shame which here it suffers.”

The same problem occurs when Lear is locked out of Gloucester’s castle just as the weather turns bad. We’re still at Gloucester’s castle, where several unbelievable crimes happen. Kent being put in the stocks was just a foretaste, which Lear himself understood. You put my man in the stocks, and in someone else’s house? What will soon happen to me? Gloucester himself will soon experience the cruelty that Regan and Cornwall are capable of. In between Kent and Gloucester’s torture we are shown a crime of negligence for which it is hard to determine fault. In this famous scene, Lear storms out after his bitter quarrel with his two daughters and their husbands, his train reduced to nothing, as no one will pay for the soldiers anymore. Perhaps twenty or thirty have trailed along, but they’re nowhere to be seen. Lo and behold, it starts to storm. None of his children or in-laws go after him. Gloucester also does not go after him, despite many misgivings.

It’s a bit of schoolyard cruelty on the children’s part: Father wants to be petulant? Well, he must be taught a lesson! “O, sir,” Regan says to Gloucester’s weak entreaty that they cannot send an old man out into this kind of weather, “to willful men / The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters. Shut up your doors.” Lear was not locked out, then. Rather, he leaves, and no one cares. “My Lord,” says Goneril to Gloucester, “entreat him by no means to stay.” Gloucester, a weak man, cannot decide what to do. “Shut up your doors,” he is sweetly commanded a second time, this time by Cornwall, “Come out of the storm.”

Lear’s characters never see the horrible thing coming because they’re always reacting to being newly deprived or somehow in trouble. It all happens so quickly, and the effects are felt so slowly. It’s stupidly slow, blindingly fast. The King of France shakes his head in disbelief at the precipitousness of the turn at the beginning of the play. “It is most strange,” he remarks, that Cordelia—so good and so clearly favored—can “in this trice of time…dismantle so many folds of disfavor.” In the blink of an eye she has incurred…such hatred?

There’s a horrible play on words in the plucking of Gloucester’s eyes—I never saw it coming—a truly shocking moment in Lear that always has to be handled delicately on the stage. It’s so extreme. Gloucester did not see that coming. We did not see that coming because we do not believe people capable of such things; but, even more so, it does not seem like things had been building up to this point, though of course they had. From putting someone in the stocks to gouging out an old man’s eyes, one after the other? Regan and Cornwall’s capacity will seem out of the blue. But…you were my guests, cries Gloucester, finding himself bound in his own chair in his own hall. How could such a thing be possible? Though you know they are cruel, you really can’t guess what Regan and Goneril are capable of until you see what they do. Only the last step confirms your suspicions about the first steps.

In a Learian world, what people are capable of in the last instance can be glimpsed in the first instance, but you’d be hard pressed to recognize the first instance. Excessive flattery of a doting father—who could prosecute this? Copying one’s sister in excessive flattery of an irascible and needy father—on what charges can you arraign this individual, even in the private courts of human conversation?

Shakespeare made the title character someone who, like all fundamentally good people, never sees it coming. Lear is surprised by how it is that things can come to be this way, how people can do what they do, every single time, just as they’re surprised by his extremes, every single time. “Let them anatomize Regan,” he says, “see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes this hardness?” He just doesn’t get it, though it may largely be his fault.

“I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall”—this is how the play begins, remember?—in Kent’s confusion over his misplaced certainty in Lear’s judgment of character. He’s confused, the way people are confused when the bad are rewarded and the good punished, or when something really not right is happening. Having to speak to Gloucester and Edmund, the bad and the worse, Kent is confused from the get-go that some comment or conspiracy seems expected of him. He remains kind and fair. It takes him a second to understand the fact that Edmund is an illegitimate child, but he is kind when he reacts; “I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it being so proper.” Even disguised as Caius, Kent is recognizably Kent. He is someone who strategizes for the good but can only ever react to wickedness. He is always, to some extent, surprised by sin.

*

You didn’t see it coming. In this trice of time you cannot ascertain the timing and execution of the prosecution of personal slip-ups. You’re always surprised by the phrase “patterns of misconduct.” This is because tyranny always catches you by surprise. The possibilities of what can be spoken have shifted away from you, and you find yourself muzzled, made dumb. You could never have seen it coming, because you could never have anticipated such changes to the rules of discourse.

Here is my grandfather, quickly sketching the atmosphere of 1958 in his memoir:

I didn’t wish to fall behind in this political atmosphere. Every day I was full of readiness to work, going to committee meetings and education sessions, writing and directing little performances, performing onstage, even while having to perform “Three Red Flags” in the streets. I worked day and night, sleeping four or five hours a day, and didn’t feel fatigue.

At that time the newspapers daily reported the “satellite news”: “crop yield is twenty thousand kilograms”; “crop yield is thirty-six thousand kilograms”; “crop yield is one hundred twenty thousand kilograms.” The front-page news printed a photograph of a young child atop a hill of grain, making no dent in it at all, so you can appreciate the volume. The party reports in this way, who would dare to disbelieve. And in any case, at that time, everyone had become a poet. Frictionlessly, the words leapt from mouths and spread through the land: “However brave man is, that’s how much the land will yield!” You “inflated,” he “inflated,” everyone became an exaggerator, and we all lived out meaningless lives amid this hot air.

Visceral fear of the ever-changing rules and punishments made people give up on description and causality. Language helped to keep the frogs in the pan, and it worked by exaggeration and underdescription, by making too much out of nothing, and describing monumental wrongs as a trifling matter. Being sent down into the countryside didn’t seem all that bad, and still doesn’t to those who conjure images of cheerful lakeside camps. Up to the Mountains, Down to the Countryside Movement: it’s almost romantic. Even today anyone hearing about this period of history can just say, “What’s so bad about hard farm labor for a few years?” What could be so wrong about an extended, nonsimulated look at the reality of the laboring poor? Indeed, even to me that sounds like a good idea. Mao knew how to name things. Land Reform Movement. Great Leap Forward. Cultural Revolution. Three-Years Natural Disaster. Hundred Flowers Campaign. They sound like earnest, progressive movements punctuated by a small climate disaster. At most they sound like euphemisms for bland events, a talking up of small accomplishments.

Point your camera anywhere in China, as did photographer Marc Riboud traveling in China in the 1950s and ’60s, and you might not see anything amiss. Things seem strange but still well within the range of normal historical and cultural activity. How do you make sure you’re not overreacting or underreacting? Westerners and even Chinese people themselves couldn’t gauge the severity of Maoist pranks. Being doused in ink and being made to wear a dunce cap? Is that a very big deal? I think about photographs from the Cultural Revolution that show the mass bullying of teachers and elders, corky arms bound and lifted behind corky bodies. The bodies are obviously uncomfortable but not under obvious torture. So what—they had some ink thrown on them? It’s just paint.

Language helped to keep the frogs in the pan, and it worked by exaggeration and underdescription, by making too much out of nothing.

Mao had also fully grasped the natural suitability of photographic and filmic media for the broadcasting and cognitive technologies of totalitarianism. Posters and footage of bountiful plenty could be seen everywhere across a land that was actually ravaged by violent campaigns and manufactured famine. Photography also enabled the precursor of the “deep fake.” A 1958 photograph of Chairman Mao taking part in volunteer labor at the construction site of the Ming Tombs Reservoir shows Secretary Peng Zeng by his side. By 1978, when this image was republished in one of Mao’s many hagiographies, Peng Zeng had disappeared. In every layer of this world and its self-reporting you have falsification and distortion, done out of malice and real love.

Westerners looking in also compounded the problem. At the official invitation of the People’s Republic of China, Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni produced a documentary called Chung Kuo/Cina (Zhong guo/China). Chung Kuo hardly scratched the surface of what had happened in China up to 1972, when the film was made, as Antonioni had purposely avoided anything negative, at the behest of the Party. Almost no one knew what was happening to Westerners trapped inside China.

In 1968 a Jewish Dutch woman named Selma Vos was persecuted to death along with her husband, Cao Richang, an eminent psychologist who had helped found the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Cao Richang had been assigned to hard cleaning work two years prior after the couple had been spied on and turned in by other foreigners in China, including a writer and scholar named Sidney Rittenberg, the second foreigner to join the CPC. (In 1968 Rittenberg, who had helped the party victimize many, was himself subjected to ten years of solitary confinement). Selma Vos’s story is particularly Learian. Her mother and other family members had been killed in the Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. She and her father survived the Holocaust by hiding, like Anne Frank, in the attic of neighbors. How could she have anticipated such a second act? Vos even returned to the Netherlands briefly in 1966 and came back as a Chinese national, and therefore was unable to leave or seek amnesty during her incarceration, in part believing that things could not possibly come to that.

The crimes of the state, and of the people on the people, were drawn out, out in the open, socially normalized. Wang Bing’s 2018 Dead Souls, an eight-hour documentary of the prison-factories in Gansu that ran from the 1950s to the present, is protracted to make you feel the slowness of the terror. State officials are coming for a visit, pictures are taken, the labor camp’s demolition of human lives carries on in the background. Frightened protests are made to sound outlandish. There’s no time to think, and yet time passes so slowly.

Although people labeled “reactionaries” were certainly soon against the revolution, “reactionary” itself was a terrible misnomer for most of the people who were targeted for killing, dispossession, and humiliation. Intellectuals, merchants, artists, teachers, writers, and students killed or persecuted to oblivion were themselves liberal-progressive by mid- and early-twentieth-century Chinese standards and even by today’s standards. They had fought for a uniquely Chinese but also globally inspired anti-Learian outcome for their country: an equal and fair society in which all women, and not just ladies of the bower or favored children, would have equal access to education and resources; a clear separation of power in Chinese government; a society in which the disabled and the elderly would thrive and contribute and be treated kindly, criminals would be given a fair chance, and the burden of social infrastructures would be shared by all. Ironically, “reactionary” became a perfect description of their predicaments. In Mao’s era they could, in fact, only ever react.

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From The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear by Nan Z. Da. Copyright © 2025. Available from Princeton University Press.