Haunting the stage: the performance of trauma by contemporary female playwrights

DEPARTAMENTO DE LITERATURA INGLESA Y NORTEAMERICANA. DOCTORAL THESIS. Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights. Eva Gil Cuder Supervisor: Dr. Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo University of Seville May 2014. Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights. TESIS DOCTORAL presentada por la doctoranda EVA GIL CUDER para la obtención del grado de DOCTOR CON MENCIÓN INTERNACIONAL POR LA UNIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA. SEVILLA, 2014. La Directora de Tesis La Doctoranda Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo Eva Gil Cuder Acknowledgments. The accomplishment of this doctoral thesis has been possible thanks to the research fellowships granted by the Plan Propio de Investigación, Universidad de Sevilla, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). Without their financial support, it would not have been possible to culminate the work I now present. To my academic supervisor, Professor Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo, I will be in eternal debt of gratitude not only for her very illuminating commentaries and suggestions during the research and writing process, but also, and especially, for her confidence on my working capabilities. Her words of encouragement were of inestimable value during the work in progress of this doctoral thesis. For their trust and academic generosity during my early years as a university student, I thank Professors Juan Carlos Hidalgo-Ciudad and Michael J. Gronow. And for her boundless willingness to help, I will always remain grateful to Ana Luisa Martín Bejarano. The Department of English and American Literature at the University of Seville and the Research Group “Discursos de la Postmodernidad” (HUM-399), led respectively by Ramón EspejoRomero and Manuel Almagro-Jiménez, have also been supporting and encouraging environments during these years. To Professors Anthony Bale, Roger Luckhurst, Louise Owen and Mr. Colin Teevan from Birkbeck College, The University of London, whom I thank for their supervisory sessions during the very early stages of my doctoral work. I thank Professor Christina Wald for her very illuminating academic guidance during the early writing process and for receiving me at the University of Augsburg for a stay unexpectedly extended. To the exceptionally welcoming team at the Department of English Literature, I am grateful for their kindhearted and honest disposition to make me feel home. For his constant kindness and generosity to let me take part in the very stimulating activities there hosted, I am truly grateful to Professor Martin Middeke. The academic and personal value of my stay at the University of Augsburg is inestimable. Alejandra Camacho, Lisa Lehle, and Lisa Wendl have been a solid source of daily determination during the last stages of work, and for their constant support and encouragement I am also terribly grateful to Simone Hösch and Julia Elsner. Erin Suyehara and Dr. Antonella Russo have each differently been the guiding voice of experience helping me find my track back, and will always remain a reference for my personal self-improvement. To my German family, especially to Beatriz Sancho, Andrea Fuertes, Jose María Jiménez, María Couso and Rosa Álvarez, I owe my sense of purpose, and to Allende del Pino, Ana María Jiménez, Ares Ulises Díaz and Ana Asuero (& the Marians) I owe my sense of self, thanks to them still intact after months of investigative enclosure. For the most illuminating speech ever addressed to me at a moment of academic disbelief, I have learnt to regard Francisco Gil Cuder as the older brother he is not. To Julia Gil Cuder for her ever unconditional support and complicity despite distances. To my parents, Esperanza and Francisco, with ineffable gratitude. For everything. A mis padres, con inefable gratitud. Gil Cuder Haunting the Stage. i Contents. 1. Abbreviations…………………………………………………………………...v 2. La Estética del Espectro como Representación del Trauma en la Obra de Dramaturgas Contemporáneas……….…………………………...………....vii 3. Introduction……………………………………………………………………..1 4. Chapter 1. Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation: the Haunted Victim ……………………………………………………………….15 a) The Return of the Dead and the Ghostly Effect in Marina Carr’s Playwriting: The Mai, Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats……...26 b) “Think about speaking it’s pointless”: Sarah Kane’s Cleansed…..............................................................................................58 5. Chapter 2. Perspectives of Selfhood: Ghosting and the Split Self as a Lens to Traumatic Memory.…………………………………………………………..76 a) Sarah Daniels’s Beside Herself. “I see myself seeing myself”: Lacan’s Notion of Subjectivity in Eve/Evelyn’s Traumatic Struggle...................89 b) Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow. “As I stand there, I see myself here,” Scarecrow as Fantasmic Lens to the Trauma…………………..111 c) Carson Kreitzer’s Self Defense or Death of Some Salesmen. “There is no need for arms”: Women’s Battle against the Patriarchal Symbolic Gaze......................................................................................................133 6. Chapter 3. “I think I’ve had this conversation before:” (de)Mythologizing and the A-effect in Contemporary Feminist Rewriting …………………..155 a) “You will be beside the myth”: Feminist Demythologization in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale……………...165 viii Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . De darse una imagen, forma, o expresión capaz de contener lo que identificamos como el ‘sujeto contemporáneo’ (ya que encontrar dicha imagen es, después de todo, la tarea estética de cualquier obra de arte), la interpretación que Zygmunt Bauman ofrece acerca de la subjectividad en la actualidad, tomando una forma inestable e inconsistente, edificada sobre arenas movedizas, parece cobrar sentido en una contemporaneidad caracterizada por su precariedad. De manera opuesta a la construcción sólida y ladrillo a ladrillo de una serie de valores estables sobre los que basar nuestra existencia, los tiempos que corren, argumenta Bauman, se caracterizan por la vulnerabilidad del sujeto contemporáneo, que ya no viene a estar definido por la constancia de una vida certera o de camino fijo que marca dicho peregrinaje, sino más bien por la inestabilidad y la inconsistencia de un camino oscuro y pantanoso, donde las huellas por uno mismo trazadas, o las señales que nos indican en qué dirección debemos ir, se tornan opacas e ilegibles. Para mi proyecto de tesis doctoral me propuse abordar en profundidad la reiterada aparición en el mundo de las artes escénicas de una imagen que, de una forma similar a aquella propuesta por Bauman en la anterior cita, parece delinear la naturaleza intangible, opaca y elusiva que representa al ser contemporáneo en su precariedad ontológica. La figura del espectro, lo inmaterial y lo etéreo parece haberse erigido de forma persistente, tal y como pretendo demonstrar con este exhaustivo trabajo de investigación, como forma de representación escénica de la subjetividad contemporánea, en tanto que dicha naturaleza fantasmal apela igualmente a lo intangible y precario, como al carácter persecutorio y casi obsesivo que define la determinación humana por clasificar, simbolizar, contener o significar todo aquello que nos rodea. De esta forma, de igual manera que aquellas huellas o marcas inestables y de fácil erosión con las que Bauman simboliza la subjectividad líquida del ser Gil Cuder Haunting the Stage. ix contemporáneo, la naturaleza etérea e incorpórea del espectro, igualmente maleable e inestable, parece seguir persiguiendo e invadiendo representaciones recientes de la subjectividad postmoderna, en su estatus como eco o recordatorio de un pasado incontenible. Y sin embargo, al mismo tiempo, dicha imagen espectral parece ser incapaz de proporcionar una definición sólida de aquel pasado fugaz, y de proporcionar consuelo a dicha existencia actual, post-traumática y, de esta forma, fragmentada. A lo largo del trabajo que ocupa estas páginas, a través del cual solicito la mención internacional al doctorado, me dispongo a explorar y clasificar una serie de obras representativas dentro de dicha estética del espectro como figura capaz de articular la esencia del sujeto contemporáneo dentro del mundo de las artes escénicas. Dicha herramienta estética en evocación de lo fantasmal se ha manifestado de manera persistente, según he podido comprobar a lo largo de mi estudio, y según pretendo demostrar con el trabajo que aquí presento, en obras recientes dentro del mundo de la representación teatral. La representación del sujeto y su relación con la realidad simbólica en la que se desenvuelve ha ido cobrando forma a través de una serie de eventos sociales y culturales que han cambiado irremediablemente el curso de la representación artística actual. Tal y como ya han formulado una serie de autores reconocidos a nivel internacional (Dominick LaCapra, Cathy Caruth, Roger Luckhurst, Shoshana Felmann y Ann E. Kaplan, entre otros) y cuyas contribuciones serán contempladas a lo largo de esta tesis, los tiempos que corren han sido formalmente identificados como una “cultura del trauma” (“trauma culture” R. Luckhurst 2003:2), que viene a estar definida por la infructuosa búsqueda de algún método racional, ordenado (o, haciendo eco de la metáfora líquida propuesta por Bauman, algún método sólido) capaz de contener e inscribir nuestro pasado, de forma que esto permitiese la construcción de un futuro x Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . estable y certero. Este intento de representar (o, dicho de otra forma, contener) la esencia del ser contemporáneo fracasa estrepitosamente como consecuencia de la futilidad que caracteriza la contemporaneidad líquida. Los movimientos culturales contemporáneos vienen a estar definidos por la imposibilidad existencial de asimilar con éxito dicha eventualidad traumática, lo cual nos impide construir un prospecto de futuro estable, y de cimientos certeros. De esta manera, el actual orden simbólico y las bases de cualquier orden social dentro del mundo occidental se caracteriza por una completa falta de certidumbre moral y ética, que desemboca a su vez en una emergente precariedad existencial del sujeto que toma parte en dicho orden, tal y como ha venido siendo formulado por los críticos más influyentes (el trabajo de Zygmunt Bauman, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben o Slavoj Žižek, entre otros, informa el contenido de esta tesis). Como resalta el filósofo Alain Badiou, el ‘Ser’ está supeditado al ‘Evento’ hasta el punto de que la propia existencia del sujeto está determinada por el desarrollo de eventos transcendentales (Badiou 2005). De esta forma, es nuestra interpretación y la posterior representación de eventos contemporáneos lo que da forma a nuestro estatus social como individuos pertenecientes a un determinado orden simbólico, o como suplementos de dicha eventualidad. Eventos culturales y sociales de transcendencia mundial han dado forma, de esta manera, a nuestra visión contemporánea de la subjectividad. Y los eventos a los que me referiré a lo largo de mi tesis, dado su gran impacto en el mundo de la representación artística en general, y dentro del mundo de las artes escénicas en concreto, interrogan y cuestionan la construcción del sujeto femenino. Tal y como Christina Wald argumenta en su estudio exhaustivo sobre el Drama del Trauma, los años 90 fueron testigo del descubrimiento de una realidad que jamás con anterioridad había sido inspeccionada como consecuencia de su carácter abominable e Gil Cuder Haunting the Stage. xi inefable: una serie de eventos que apuntaban al abuso de menores por parte de sus progenitores comenzaron a salir a la luz (el más famoso de dichos casos siendo el denominado escándalo de Cleveland, que tuvo lugar en Gran Bretaña en 1987, tal y como señala Wald en 2007:99). Tal escándalo social sin precedentes se suma al impacto cultural generado por la publicación en los años 70 de la primera obra narrativa autobiográfica en la que la autora se confiesa víctima de abusos por parte de su padre (género que posteriormente pasó a conocerse como ‘narrativa de incesto’): Kiss Daddy Goodnight (1978), de Louise Armstrong. Junto con las diferentes posturas feministas que surgieron a lo largo de los años 70 (siendo el feminismo radical, el liberal y el social, los tres tipos de feminismos más representativos por alcanzar un mayor impacto cultural y social), la consolidación durante los años 90 de una atmósfera anti-patriarcal fortaleció la voz feminista en el mundo de la representación artística, que comenzó así a moverse de forma estable y segura en esa dirección (la representación de las inquietudes del sujeto femenino, y la reformulación de una voz femenina ahora más autoritaria y sólida). El teatro anglófono contemporáneo fue rápido en desarrollar interés por la representación y la denuncia de dichas preocupaciones éticas y políticas, y comenzó a explorar vías a través de las cuales despertar la actitud crítica del espectador, normalmente aletargada y silenciada por la oscuridad del patio de butacas. Esta tesis doctoral se propone desarrollar un estudio crítico de la evolución del teatro contemporáneo en inglés en su búsqueda por representar las preocupaciones de carácter ético que delinean al sujeto contemporáneo en la manera en que críticos contemporáneos como los ya mencionados Badiou y Bauman han venido formulando los últimos años. Desde la formulación de la individualidad fragmentada del sujeto traumatizado y, en concreto, la voz silenciada del sujeto femenino, y pasando por la xii Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . reconstrucción de la subjetividad post-traumática en el escenario a través de ciertos movimientos estéticos, el teatro contemporáneo ha llegado a desarrollar una visión amplia y una voz característica y transcendental en lo que concierne a la formulación del substrato ético y moral de los tiempos que vivimos. Dicha perspectiva abarca, de esta forma, no solo las vicisitudes de formaciones traumáticas a nivel individual (en particular, en lo que concierne a la reformulación de la femineidad), o los diferentes descalabros políticos a nivel doméstico, fácilmente reconocibles por un público euro-céntrico y occidental. La segunda parte de mi tesis (y especialmente el capítulo cuarto) ilustrará y analizará de forma crítica el giro de tuercas experimentado durante el comienzo del siglo veintiuno en lo que respecta a los cimientos éticos sobre los cuales se asienta nuestra subjetividad contemporánea como miembros de una comunidad u orden occidental, y en concreto, el análisis de la voz teatral que se ha ido desarrollando en consecuencia con el fin de capturar dicho giro ontológico. Dicha voz teatral, tal y como argumento en las próximas páginas, ha ido indagando, experimentando y desarrollando formas de interrogar, alienar y desconcertar a un público al que ahora se transporta a escenas distantes y extrañas, en representación de comunidades en las que la subjetividad euro-céntrica es cuestionada, y los valores simbólicos que la justifican, invalidados. Tal y como exponen Mark Berninger, Christoph Henke y Bernard Reitz (2012), [n]umerous productions in recent years have taken up the said challenges to moral certainty, sometimes by continuing traditional theatrical approaches rooted in pacifism, feminism or gay rights. Yet, more often than not, familiar ideological standpoints have come under revision and moral didacticism has been deconstructed in contemporary theatre. (2012:9) Esta tesis doctoral fue planteada con la intención de abarcar un estudio exhaustivo sobre la evolución que ha venido experimentando la voz teatral en su representación de las inquietudes éticas y morales del sujeto contemporáneo. La figura Gil Cuder Haunting the Stage. xiii del espectro y la irrepresentabilidad que ésta evoca, dado su carácter intangible y elusivo, se convierte, de esta forma, en objeto de estudio, al erigirse como estrategia consistente en la representación de estados traumáticos y de deconstrucción o ruptura intra-psíquica. La primera parte de mi estudio (especialmente los dos primeros capítulos de esta tesis) se centra, en concreto, en el análisis de la reconstrucción del sujeto femenino en el escenario, fragmentado tras años de silencio y opresión patriarcal, para pasar a continuación (especialmente en el capítulo cuarto) al estudio de la representabilidad dentro del mundo de las artes escénicas de la precariedad existencial en un contexto de guerra o ruptura sistémica en el que el substrato ético (y por lo tanto, las coordenadas ontológicas que aportan sentido simbólico a la existencia del sujeto social) parece desquebrajarse. Los tres primeros capítulos de esta tesis se dirigen, de esta forma, al análisis de obras teatrales contemporáneas en las que se explora la reconstrucción de una subjectividad femenina post-traumática (o post-evental, en términos de Badiou). Dicha preocupación (y como consecuencia de los eventos de carácter socio-cultural arriba mencionados) fortaleció la voz creativa de dramaturgas contemporáneas en direcciones que pretendo clasificar a través del presente estudio. Encaminada hacia un modelo estético delineado por la figura del espectro, o lo no-humano (vampiros, espantapájaros, o apariciones fantasmales de algún ancestro, tal y como se verá en los diferentes capítulos de esta tesis) la representación escénica de la subjetividad femenina, fragmentada por el trauma, trata de representar el lastre de un pasado persecutorio que ha ido reprimiendo o silenciando dicha subjetividad, y un futuro etéreo e inestable en el que predomina la incertidumbre existencial. Los diferentes análisis de los textos aquí propuestos y cuidadosamente escogidos, van encaminados a demostrar dicha la incertidumbre existencial que xiv Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . caracteriza al sujeto contemporáneo, la vulnerabilidad y precariedad en que dicho estado se retroalimenta, y cómo esta inquietud ontológica se ha venido reflejando gradualmente en términos estéticos en una desconfianza del orden simbólico y de los instrumentos lingüísticos y sistémicos que lo sustentan. Las obras teatrales a analizar manifiestan, de esta forma, un interés estético común en una visión deconstructiva y de desconfianza ante el lenguaje. El “peligro del habla” (Caruth 1995:154, traducción propia) en cuadros clínicos post-traumáticos reside en la certidumbre de que todo resquicio de verdad en relación al evento traumático se expone a mecanismos racionales, simbólicos y lingüísticos, e inevitablemente predestinados a ‘racionalizar’ (y por lo tanto, limitar) cualquier componente de verdad en la memoria traumática. Por este motivo, el drama contemporáneo se propone formular “la verdad de un evento, y la verdad de su incomprensibilidad” (Caruth 1995:153, traducción propia), ya que dicha incomprensibilidad constituye la naturaleza del evento y por tanto (siguiendo la lógica expuesta por Badiou), del sujeto traumatizado. Dicha incomprensibilidad no puede ser descrita a través de medios simbólicos o racionales, y es ahí donde reside la importancia de la representación teatral, ya que ésta engloba tanto medios narrativos como no-narrativos en su intento por formular la realidad del sujeto contemporáneo (Wald 99). Dicho evento es descrito como “algo que no puede representarse de forma directa, sino a través de la alusión” (Žižek 2008:5, traducción propia), ya que cualquier intento por representar el hecho traumático basado en la estética realista parece estar destinado al fracaso, al caracterizarse el hecho traumático precisamente por su incontenibilidad e irracionalidad. Es por ello por lo que la figura del espectro y el efecto fantasmal conseguido en las obras propuestas para análisis evocan con éxito la existencia frágil y casi etérea de las protagonistas de dichas obras; una existencia fundamentada en la indecisión y la Gil Cuder Haunting the Stage. xv inestabilidad, ya que sus vidas penden peligrosamente de un hilo que de forma difusa separa el mundo simbólico y racional, de sus existencias intra-psíquicas en el mundo de lo traumático. Por lo tanto, en su mayoría, las obras escogidas para análisis proyectan la lente deteriorada a través de la cual el personaje principal asimila la realidad que le rodea en un momento crucial, justo antes de que su realidad simbólica se desintegre al encontrarse estos personajes al borde de la muerte. Es por ello que la voz o mirada de estos personajes, formulada a través de medios estéticos objeto de análisis de esta tesis doctoral, se torna cada vez más fragmentada y carente de sentido y de contenido simbólico. Las protagonistas, ya en un estado semi-espectral, son objeto de un proceso de deconstrucción del que forma parte un lenguaje abstracto y areferencial. De esta forma, y como se analizará en profundidad en cada capítulo, estas obras ofrecen un lenguaje que avanza hacia un estado en el que cada vez existe menor conexión entre significado y significante, conforme las protagonistas van abandonando el ámbito de lo simbólico para pasar a formar parte por completo del mundo de lo espectral. Se formula, así pues, una voz o visión estética a modo de collage, o de mosaico lingüístico, en el que las palabras parecen en un gran número de ocasiones haber coincidido de forma casual, ya que su sentido completo solo alcanza comprensión cuando son observados desde una cierta distancia crítica. El primer capítulo de esta tesis se centra en el estudio de la representación teatral de la paradoja existencial por la cual el sujeto desarrolla una necesidad imperiosa de hacer frente y asimilar el evento traumático (que se caracteriza precisamente por ser irrecuperable), al mismo tiempo que trata de huir del hecho traumático para poder recuperar la normalidad dentro de su existencia como ser social bajo el orden simbólico. The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996) and By the Bog of Cats (1998) de Marina Carr, xvi Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . y Cleansed (1998) de Sarah Kane son las obras a ser tratadas desde este punto de vista, dada la inclinación que comparten ambas autoras por la representación del trauma individual en mujeres a través del uso de mecanismos que apelan a lo espectral y lo fantasmagórico. Dichas obras reflejan el carácter elusivo y a la vez persecutorio de la memoria traumática, y compensan las carencias del orden simbólico al tratar de acometer la misma labor al apelar a una estética anti-naturalista. Dicha estética gira en torno a la figura de apariciones fantasmales que cuestionan los límites del mundo simbólico, al introducir de esta forma elementos del mundo intra-psíquico en la realidad de los personajes. La tarea investigadora que desarrollo al explorar dichos textos toma como punto de referencia las contribuciones de Maria Torok y Nicolas Abraham en el estudio de los procesos internos continuos y en constante evolución que moldean y dan forma a la psique humana (proceso al que ellos llaman ‘introyección’, en contraposición a otros usos predominantes de dicho término). En concreto, en el primer capítulo, y con el objeto de analizar el uso de dichas estrategias que apelan a lo espectral en el intento de representar la fragmentariedad post-traumática de las protagonistas, me centraré en dos de los fenómenos psíquicos estudiados por Abraham y Torok como causas principales que entorpecen el proceso natural de introyección psíquica: la ‘incorporación’ (a través de la cual el ego del sujeto hospeda un objeto perdido y que de forma inconsciente permanece así alojado, reprimido dentro de la psique), y el ‘secreto intrapsíquico’ (que se desarrolla cuando el ego encierra y reprime como en una cripta o recoveco psíquico algún evento traumático no asimilado). Ambos procesos son definidos como obstáculo o impedimento en el crecimiento psíquico natural, o introyección, y constituyen los dos fenómenos intra-psíquicos, según argumento y demuestro a lo largo de este primer capítulo, que vienen a ser formulados a través de la estética fantasmal y etérea con la Gil Cuder Haunting the Stage. xvii que la subjetividad precaria de las protagonistas, que se debaten entre el orden simbólico y la realidad traumática, queda reflejada en el escenario. El segundo capítulo propone un nuevo acercamiento al análisis de la representabilidad escénica de la subjectividad femenina a través de una estética que apela a lo espectral e intangible. Sin embargo, y respondiendo a las estrategias estéticas a las que en esta ocasión apelan las tres obras objeto de análisis en esta sección, la lente de escrutinio que nos permite comprender el funcionamiento de los mecanismos a los que ahí se apelan se basan en procedimientos que distan del modelo psíquico-represivo al que apelaban Abraham y Torok, tomados como fundamento teórico en el capítulo anterior. En esta ocasión, se lleva a cabo un análisis de los mecanismos estéticos partícipes de la representación de procesos de fragmentación psíquica o ruptura del yo interior, manifestado por sujetos traumatizados, y en concreto en los casos a analizar, por personajes femeninos silenciados por un orden patriarcal ante el cual ahora se revelan. Mientras que Beside Herself (1990), de Sarah Daniels, apela a la ruptura del yo interior como consecuencia de un silencio opresor que desemboca en dicha fragmentación psíquica, las protagonistas de Woman and Scarecrow (2006), de Marina Carr, y Self Defense or Death of Some Salesmen (2001), de Carson Kreitzer, se enfrentan a la amenaza existencial de una muerte certera y próxima, y que (tal y como se muestra a través de los mecanismos a analizar en este capítulo) degenera en una desintegración gradual de lo simbólico, acompañada por dicha fragmentación psíquica, manifiesta en la aparición de un yo interior espectral y fantasmagórico. De esta forma, los medios estéticos reunidos para la formulación de una reconstrucción psíquica posttraumática tras años de silencio (en el caso de Beside Herself), y la fragmentación progresiva de un sujeto que degenera gradualmente hasta el punto de la completa ruptura psíquica y simbólica (tal y como exploran Carr y Kreitzer) se convierte en el xxiv Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . de la representación estética de la eventualidad o trauma colectivo y las posibilidades del campo teatral en la exploración de la desintegración ontológica y posterior reconstrucción de una comunidad en este sentido traumatizada (fragmentada, o carente de orden sistémico como consecuencia de la guerra). Las obras teatrales a ser analizadas bajo este prisma, Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, Naomi Wallace’s In the Heart of America y debbie tucker green’s Stoning Mary, recurren de forma similar a una estrategia común: un procedimiento que, a modo de péndulo, se mueve entre la creación de empatía hacia ciertos personajes a través de una exposición de su rutina diaria basada en una estética realista y que apela al componente emocional, y la introducción radical de elementos que distancian de dicha narración naturalista e introducen al espectador en una espiral surrealista y alienante de anti-narración escénica. Tal movimiento estético va encaminado al extrañamiento y la deconstrucción de la mirada occidental, llena de prejuicios, y de esta forma creando una nueva lente desde la cual poder reconsiderar y experimentar una realidad extraña, ahora formulada en el escenario. La aproximación que Churchill nos ofrece a la Revolución Rumana de 1989 a través de este prisma representativo ilustra dicho intento estético por equilibrar lo que primeramente puede resultar contradictorio: la empatía basada en el apego emocional a algún personaje y sus circunstancias (relacionado con la práctica teatral Dramática), y el extrañamiento más absoluto de la acción representada (que apela a lo que fue denominado teatro Épico). En este cuarto capítulo se profundizará en ilustrar el funcionamiento de dicha estética teatral a través de la cual la acción comienza a desarrollarse ensalzando los aspectos cotidianos de la vida diaria (y, de esta forma, apelando a la narración realista de los eventos), pero que progresivamente, y finalmente de forma radical, se va alejando de dicho modelo naturalista y adentrándose (en Gil Cuder Haunting the Stage. xxv ocasiones de forma inesperada y sorprendente) en un orden no-narrativo, surrealista y anti-naturalista en el intento por representar la auténtica inefabilidad que caracteriza la experiencia traumática del colectivo rumano (en este caso). Dicho giro drástico en el exposé al que se apela sobre el escenario evoca, de esta forma, la auténtica aprensión del individuo como partícipe de una realidad comunal post-traumática, y traslada al público de una forma efectiva un interés crítico y distanciado del ojo simbólico implícitamente impuesto por nuestra propia realidad sistémica, de manera que los eventos allí formulados puedan visitarse desde una nueva perspectiva crítica, libre de prejuicios fantasmales generados por el desconocimiento. A modo de ejemplo, la escena final en Mad Forest, de Caryl Churchill, trae a escena a los personajes principales de la trama (uno de ellos un vampiro, personificación del sistema capitalista que ahora amenaza al vulnerable estado Rumano) y les hace repetir, como si de un collage lingüístico se tratara, las líneas más significativas de las formuladas hasta ahora a lo largo de la representación. Dichas líneas, sacadas de sus contextos originales y desplazadas referencialmente, carecen de sentido discursivo, lo cual genera un vacío simbólico desconcertante, a ser interpretado por el lector/espectador. Las tres obras objeto de escrutinio en el capítulo cuarto comparten dicha disposición por cuestionar realidades dócilmente aceptadas y entidades ontológicas, tales como el espacio, tiempo, o lo real y lo soñado, lo humano y lo no-humano. Es por lo tanto la figura del espectro, o lo no-humano, tal y como expongo a lo largo del capítulo, la que sobresale y destaca en la representación de la precariedad del sujeto cuya realidad externa se tambalea al perder el engranaje sistémico y simbólico que la sustentaba. xxvi Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . El corpus de obras que propongo a lo largo de esta tesis doctoral ha sido cuidadosamente escogido con el fin de ilustrar el auge en el mundo de la representación teatral de una tendencia a cuestionar la construcción del sujeto contemporáneo y los procedimientos que contribuyen a crear la lente interpretativa desde la cual es analizado. La voz teatral contemporánea va encaminada, de esta forma, a una formulación estética que se apoya en la deconstrucción de una mirada que es moldeada a través de un filtro simbólico ineludible. El análisis de las diferentes estrategias traídas a escena (y, en especial, de aquellas que apelan a la estética del espectro, por haber sido detectadas como estética emergente), de su funcionamiento en términos teatrales, tanto a nivel de recepción como a nivel técnico, y el estudio de su repercusión a un nivel trascendental en lo que respecta a la formulación de unos cimientos éticos sobre los que asentar dicha subjetividad, ocuparán el discurso crítico que se construirá a través de las siguientes páginas. Gil Cuder Introduction. 1 Introduction. The world of pilgrimsof identity-buildersmust be orderly, determined, predictable, insured; but above all, it must be a kind of world in which footprints are engraved for good, so that the trace and the record of past travels are kept and preserved. A world in which travelling may be indeed a pilgrimage. A world hospitable to the pilgrims. And so the modern men and women lived in a time-space with structure; a solid, tough, durable time-space… The world is not hospitable to the pilgrims any more. The pilgrims lost their battle by winning it. They strove to make the world solid by making it pliable, so that identity could be built at will, but built systematically, floor by floor and brick by brick. They proceeded by turning the space in which identity was to be built in a desert. They found out that the desert, though comfortingly featureless for those who seek to make their mark, does not hold features well. The easier it is to emboss a footprint, the easier it is to efface it. A gust of wind will do. And deserts are windy places. It soon transpired that the real problem is not how to build identity, but how to preserve it; whatever you may build in the sand, is unlikely to be a castle. In a desertlike world it takes no great effort to blaze a trailthe difficulty is how to recognize it as a trail after a while. How to distinguish a forward march from going in circles, from eternal return? It turns virtually impossible to patch the trodden stretches of sand into an itinerarylet alone into a plan for a life-long journey. (Zygmunt Bauman 1996:8) 2 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . If there should be an image, form or impression picturing what we identify as the contemporary subject (and finding this image is, after all, the aesthetic task of any artistic piece), that is Zygmunt Bauman’s interpretation of subjectivity in contemporary times as constructed in the fashion of a sand-castle, built upon the unreliable and unstable sands of a windy desert. As opposed to the “brick by brick” solid construction of the modern man, contemporary times, Bauman argues, are characterized by the vulnerability of the individual, who undertakes his/her pilgrimage through life no more with the certainty of a substantial and sturdy fixed path, but with the unreliability and inconsistency of an obscure and swampy road where neither footprints nor direction signs are readable anymore. For my doctoral project I have been working on the analysis of an image that similarly seemed to formulate the blurred, the intangible and the elusive as representative of the contemporary subject’s precarious existence, as this image seemed to me to be persistently appearing in recent performing arts: just as the unreliable and easily deleted footprints of the contemporary subject point to our postmodern inescapably liquid (and thus malleable and unstable) existence, the ethereal and incorporeal nature of the specter seems to keep haunting recent representations of postmodern subjectivity in its status as a remainder of a more solid past, and yet being incapable of bringing present solace to contemporary unstable and fragmented posttraumatic existence. Throughout this work I thus intend to explore and classify a series of representative works relying on such aesthetics of spectrality and the ethereal in the attempt to articulate contemporary subjecthood. The formulation of the subject and his/her relationship with his/her symbolic reality has grown to be shaped by a series of social and cultural events changing the course of artistic representation. As already dealt with and comprehensively formulated by a wide range of internationally acclaimed Gil Cuder Introduction. 3 authors (Dominick LaCapra, Cathy Caruth, Roger Luckhurst, Shoshana Felmann and Ann E. Kaplan, among others) whose contributions will be further contemplated throughout this thesis, ours seems to be a time that has come to be identified as a “trauma culture” (R. Luckhurst 2003:2), defined by the subject’s fruitless persistence in the search of a rational and ordered (or, echoing Bauman, solid) record of our past that would allow us to build accordingly, and “floor by floor”, a stable and certain future. Such existential attempt proves to be unsuccessful due to the futility characterizing postmodern times and the overwhelming uncertainty concerning the direction of our ‘life pilgrimage’. Contemporary culture is thus identified with an existential impossibility to achieve a successful assimilation of traumatic eventuality that would subsequently allow the subject to construct a stable future. As contemplated by the philosopher Alain Badiou, ‘Being’ is supplemented to ‘Event’ inasmuch the very existence of the subject is determined by the course of transcendental eventuality (Badiou 2005). 1 It is thus our understanding and subsequent formulation of contemporary events that shapes our social status as symbolic beings. 2 Worldwide cultural and social events have thus shaped our contemporary views on subjecthood, and the ones that I appeal to, due to their unquestionable impact in the world of artistic representation, interrogate the construction of femininity. As Christina Wald claims in her exhaustive study on Trauma Drama, the 1990’s witnessed the 1 In his work Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001) Badiou defines the ‘Event’ as a remnant occurrence that appears unpredictably and in contrast to regular historicized situations, thus effecting a breach that may involve unexpected change in ontological terms. Hence, the ‘Being’ is supplemented by the event inasmuch he/she remains “faithful” (Badiou 2001:46) and open to such eventuality. And yet, the event vanishes as soon as it is complete, thus eluding, I will argue and try to illustrate throughout this thesis, narrative mechanisms for representability. 2 In contrast to Badiou’s use of the terms around which his philosophy centers, ‘Being’ and ‘Event’, I have opted not to capitalize either of them, nor any other of the terms coined by the critics appealed to in my thesis. Only the terms ‘Other’ and ‘Real’ (when evoking Žižek’s definition of the Lacanian Real) will be capitalized, on grounds of comprehensibility. My use of the term ‘Other’ will thus appeal to the face of the neighbor, host/hostage or alien being (in the sense of Agamben’s homo saucer) in the contributions of the contemporary critics informing this doctoral thesis. 4 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . formulation of a reality never before articulated due to its abominable nature: a number of events pointing to suspected sexual child abuse were starting to be publicly exposed, the most prominently known being the Cleveland child abuse scandal in Britain in 1987 (Wald 99). 3 Such unprecedented social scandal came hand in hand with the cultural impact brought about by the publication of the first incest narrative openly proclaimed to be autobiographical, Kiss Daddy Good Night (1978). Along with the different feminist positions that had emerged throughout the 1970’s (liberal, radical and social feminism being the three most encompassing and representative ones), and which thus moved away from the identification of one single and unified feminist movement, the consolidation during the early 90’s of such anti-patriarchal atmosphere invigorated the vindicatory nature of artistic representation in that particular direction (women’s concerns and the representation of femininity). Contemporary Anglophone theater quickly developed a preoccupation with the formulation and denounce of such ethical and political questions, and it began to explore means by which to awake the traditionally lethargic audience-disposition, silenced under the darkness of the theater hall. This doctoral thesis aims at a critical exploration of the evolution that contemporary drama in English has been subject to in its appeal to ethical issues and eventuality constructing and delineating subjecthood, in the ways Badiou’s contributions above mentioned contend. From the appeal to the posttraumatic fragmented individuality and the long silenced female voice, 4 and from the aesthetic reconstruction of traumatized subjectivity on stage, contemporary drama has 3 121 cases of suspected child abuse were diagnosed in Cleveland (now the county of Middlesbrough, England) by Dr. Marietta Higgs and Dr. Geoffrey Wyatt in 1987, this being the major incest scandal in Great Britain up to our days. 4 A vast amount of the work integrating this thesis explores the cultural reconstruction of female subjectivity during the late twentieth century due to the social and cultural impact that the revelation of numerous cases of incest and sexual abuse had during the late twentieth century. And I will commit to such investigative purpose particularly arguing that the reconstruction of female subjectivity relied to a great extent on the figure of the specter and other ghostly devices on the stage. Gil Cuder Introduction. 5 grown to develop a broader gaze contemplating not only the vicissitudes of individual trauma, or the shortcomings of domestic political issues, 5 well known and easily recognized and digested by a Western audience. The second part of my thesis (and especially chapter four) will thus illustrate and critically inspect the ethical turn experienced during the early 2000’s and its effects on a theatrical voice that searched now for means to interrogate, alienate and disconcert an audience that is now taken to alien settings and distant communities where predominant Eurocentric subjectivity is time and again thus transcendentally questioned. As stated by Mark Berninger, Christoph Henke and Bernard Reitz (2012), [n]umerous productions in recent years have taken up the said challenges to moral certainty, sometimes by continuing traditional theatrical approaches rooted in pacifism, feminism or gay rights. Yet, more often than not, familiar ideological standpoints have come under revision and moral didacticism has been deconstructed in contemporary theatre. (2012:9) This doctoral thesis was devised in the ambition to attain a comprehensive study of the evolution experienced in contemporary theatrical voice in its address to the formulation of a moral subject and the ethical grounds on which this construction relies. As already mentioned, the figure of the specter and the unattainability it evokes has been spotted, and fully explored, as a consistent strategy for the formulation of traumatic states and individual intra-psychic fragmentation (and here I focus on the analysis of the cultural reconstruction of femininity), as well as for the articulation of undecidable existentiality in a context of deconstructed ethical grounds. The first three chapters of this thesis are, in this light, directed at an analysis of contemporary plays, where the reconstruction of post-traumatic (post-evental, in Badiou’s sense) female subjecthood is explored. As will be illustrated with the different 5 Richard Patterson’s comprehensive study on late-twentieth century British Drama, Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights (2003), attests this interest mostly restricted to domestic political issues to a great extent characterizing British playwriting of that time. 6 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . text analysis carried out throughout this thesis, the existential uncertainty characterizing the contemporary subject cannot but ground a sense of vulnerability and precariousness that is aesthetically reflected in a mistrust of the symbolic order and the instruments erecting it (linguistic and systemic institutions). The plays to be here explored thus manifest a common aesthetic turn relying on a deconstructive and distrustful view of language. The “danger of speech” (Caruth 1995:154) in post-traumatic formulations resides in the loss of the actual truth of the very event as a consequence of exposing it to the rational and narrative mechanisms at the core of human language. Contemporary drama thus aims at a formulation of “the truth of an event and the truth of its incomprehensibility” (Caruth 1995:153), its incomprehensibility integrating the very nature of the event and so (following Badiou’s logic), of the traumatized being. And, as such incomprehensibility cannot be addressed by rational (symbolic) means, theatrical performance, also encompassing non-narrative modes of representation (Wald 99), appears as an apt arena for an approximation to the formulation of the event thus shaping subjectivity. Because realistic representation fails in the address of the traumatic event, as such event is precisely described as “something that cannot be addressed directly, only alluded to” (Žižek 2008:5), the particular appeal to the ghostly effect in the different plays here explored successfully evokes the fragile and almost ethereal existence of the female protagonists, due to the undecidability characterizing their lives, as they dangerously dwell in the threshold somewhere in between the symbolic and the traumatic. Hence many of the plays chosen for analysis articulate the deteriorating gaze of a character about to pass away, whose voice gradually becomes fragmentary and empty of symbolic meaning. The protagonists’ already half-spectral nature is thus further formulated by means of a deconstructing, and abstract kind of language, which Gil Cuder Introduction. 7 progressively moves to a greater distance between signifier and signified, as the characters gradually depart from the symbolic realm so as to meet their deaths. In a mosaic-like kind of fashion, words seem many times to have been randomly put together and to be made sense of from a critical distance. In chapter one of this thesis, I explore the theatrical address to the ontological paradox by which a subject develops the imperative need to face and assimilate the yet illusive and irretrievable traumatic event, at the same time that she tries to run away from it so as to resume her life in the symbolic real. Marina Carr’s The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996) and By the Bog of Cats (1998), and Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998) have been chosen for analysis due to their common inclination to perform individual trauma in women through the use of ghostly and spectral means that mirror trauma’s at once elusive and haunting nature, as counteracting a lack of words. In order to accomplish this investigative purpose, I rely on Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s contributions on the study of the continual process of self-fashioning and nourishment of the human psyche (which they define as ‘introjection’, thus opposing other predominant uses and definitions of the term). In particular, for the analysis of the aforementioned plays and the strategies there brought about for an effective rendering of a subject’s post-traumatic effects, I will rely on Abraham and Torok’s contentions concerning ‘incorporation’ (by which the subject’s ego is inhabited by a lost object) and the ‘intrapsychic secret’ (when the subject’s ego finds a cryptic enclosure so as to lock down and repress an unspeakable trauma) as two psychic processes hindering natural introjection. Chapter two similarly approaches the formulation of a female subject’s individual trauma and its representation through spectral and non-tangible figures, although this time tackling with a procedure that is distanced from the repressive 14 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 15 CHAPTER ONE. Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation: the Haunted Victim. In his introduction to The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Vol. 1 (1994), Nicholas T. Rand defines introjection in the terms established by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok as “the psychic process that allows human beings to continue to live harmoniously in spite of instability, devastation, war, and upheaval” and which represents “our ability to survive shock, trauma, or loss” (1994:14). Departing from previous conceptions of the term, Abraham and Torok grounded their views on psychoanalytic thought and therapy on the very nature of this psychic formation. They considered that the study of the human mind should be directed towards an understanding of the functioning of the manifold traumatic mechanisms damaging the subject’s psychic topography, and the identification of the right treatment to provide psychic recovery and facilitate introjection when psychological growth is impeded by such traumatic obstacles. Throughout their many contributions to the field, Abraham and Torok identified and studied the nature of four different mechanisms endangering the continual process of self-fashioning and nourishment of the human psyche (i.e. introjection): ‘incorporation’ (by which the subject’s ego is inhabited by a lost object), the ‘illness of mourning’, the ‘intrapsychic secret’ (when the subject’s ego finds a cryptic enclosure so as to lock down and repress an unspeakable trauma) and the ‘transgenerational phantom’ (by which a family trauma is handed down to an unknowing descendant). 16 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Such clinical investigations, however, are not restricted to the field of psychoanalytic therapy, as the authors themselves acknowledge the many connections between their scientific findings and the realm of literature, thus implementing collaborative ties between both disciplines. Both fields of knowledge offer two different contexts where a similar methodological insight may be successfully used. Hence, literature may become an instrument to expand the psychoanalytic understanding of human suffering (Abraham and Torok 1994:19). In this vein, in The Shell and the Kernel the reader repeatedly encounters not only clinical study cases but also examples taken from literary texts by which the authors try to illuminate and clarify their theoretical contentions (1994: 12, 19, 115, 118). Maupassant, Poe and Camus are some of the authors whose work Abraham and Torok use so as to illustrate the functioning of the psychoanalytical method they propose. But the most striking example stands out in part V chapter eleven, which shows Abraham’s own artistic endeavor at exemplifying his Transgenerational Phantom Theory by re-interpreting the final act in Hamlet. He ventures to re-write Shakespeare’s classic by adding a further act that would close the action in the play in a way that would help him diagnose a fictional case of what he defines as the Transgenerational Phantom (1994:187). Abraham chooses this particular form of literary expression to illustrate a case of traumatic interference to introjections, thus drawing attention to the inherent qualities of theatrical representation for the formulation of traumatic upheaval and the representation of the symptoms to be recognized by the analyst/spectator. Furthermore, Abraham and Torok’s linguistic choice to describe the psychic disorders analyzed in The Shell and the Kernel corroborates the theatrical nature of traumatic reenactment. In this line, in part IV chapter six, they allude to their experience as analysts when treating their patients and trying to deconstruct the symptoms they encounter so as to identify Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 17 the inherent trauma. They describe the stance of the analyst in similar terms to the experience of a spectator watching a performance: On the couch, even more than in life, the “I” stages the words, gestures, and feelingsin short, the entire imaginary lotof the lover who mourns for his forever “dead” object…From then on, the incorporated [object] becomes “decorporated” onto the analyst, so to speak. (1994:148, emphasis mine) They develop their ideas on the influence that the traumatic secret grieving the patient exerts upon the analyst’s performance with their work on the concept of phantom. Initially, Abraham and Torok introduced the term so as to “indicate a rift (inflicted upon the listening analyst by some secret of the patient that could not be revealed) which creates a formation in the unconscious of the listener” (Abraham and Torok 1994:190 footnote), thus alluding to a malady affecting the listener/bystander of the symptoms “performed” by the patient. In later works, they elaborated on the concept of the phantom and still insisted on the patient’s need to “stage” the traumatic upheaval so as to release the phantom that was hindering the natural process of introjection or psychic growth: Extending the idea of the phantom, it is reasonable to maintain that the “phantom effect” progressively fades during its transmission from one generation to the next and that, finally, it disappears. Yet, this is not at all the case when shared or complementary phantoms find a way of being established as social practices along the lines of staged words…We must not lose sight of the fact that to stage a word…constitutes an attempt, that is, to relieve the unconscious by placing the effects of the phantom in the social realm. (1994:176, emphasis in original) Abraham and Torok were, thus, already pointing at an idea that would later on be taken up again and developed by current Trauma Theory: the need to “stage” (to formulate) the disturbing event preventing a harmonious psychic development (introjection) as a means to heal the wounds caused by the haunting trauma. 1 Similarly, literature has also been acknowledged by current Trauma Theory as a potential means 1 (Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, Ann E. Kaplan, Roger Luckhurst and Shoshana Felman are the most prominent Trauma theorists whose work is contemplated in this thesis). 18 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . for the articulation of traumatic memory, as it may offer strategies fostering the reader’s understanding of human suffering without losing the original force of the traumatic event. However, Abraham and Torok’s implicit reference to the theatrical medium in their attempt to illustrate the nature of traumatic upheaval has not been revised so far by Trauma theorists, nor have they revisited Abraham’s definition of the phantom as a psychic disorder asking to be “staged” and acknowledged by an “audience”. As already contended by Christina Wald in her study on performative maladies and their representation on the stage, the theatrical field is an appropriate medium to stage traumatic states, as it encompasses narrative and non-narrative modes of representation (2007:99). My investigative concern in this chapter is to resume Abraham and Torok’s dialectic of the “phantom effect” as both a psychic disorder and the process consisting on “placing the effects of the phantom in the social realm” (1994:176). I will thus take into further consideration the strengths of the theatrical stage as an apt site for the formulation of haunting traumatic memories due to the possibility to create a particular aesthetics on the stage which would elicit the audience’s empathic understanding of the traumatic experience. Along these lines, and by means of a number of strategies to be analyzed in this chapter, theatrical representation may provoke a haunting effect that allows the audience to relate to and partake of the traumatic reenactment performed on stage. To such purpose, I will ground my study on Abraham and Torok’s work as well as on the recent contributions made to the field by current Trauma Theory. I will also consider modern theories on audience response (Marvin Carlson and Herbert Blau) so as to demonstrate that such ghostly and uncanny, non-realistic strategies lead the audience towards the experiencing of similar sensations to those outlived by trauma victims, thus verifying what was hinted at by Abraham and Torok and highlighting the Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 19 strengths of theatrical experience as a relevant medium for the transmission of traumatic knowledge. 2 To accomplish this task, I intend to study the contributions of playwrights Marina Carr and Sarah Kane to the articulation of a particular traumatic formation, melancholia or the trauma of loss, by means of the staging of ghosting and spectral effects in their plays. I will concentrate on Carr’s early plays, The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996) and By the Bog of Cats (1998) and Kane’s Cleansed (1998), so as to illustrate the functioning of the ghostly effect on the stage and its impact in terms of audience response. My analysis of these plays will follow from previous studies on that matter, such as Wald’s contributions. Relying on Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”, Wald contemplates melancholia as a gendering process by which female characters incorporate the essential features of a lost object. 3 Thus, Wald defines melancholia as a performative malady in which the acting out of “unresolved grief” (in this case provoked by the loss of a loved male object) is expressed by the unconscious incorporation of identity traits, thus performatively fabricating a new gendered and sexed body (Wald 2007:170). My analysis of the aforementioned plays will, to some extent, follow from Wald’s contention about the gendering effects of such traumatic 2 According to Trauma theorist Dominick LaCapra, it is by means of a kind of middle voice, in-between the certainty of the present and the precariousness of an already unattainable (in the sense of no longer fully representable in all its certainty) that the “hauntingly possessive ghostsof traumatic events” (2001:xi) may be approached. “The middle voice would thus be the ‘in-between’ voice of undecidability and the unavailability or radical ambivalence of clear-cut positions.” (LaCapra 2001:20). It is through the theatrical experience, I argue, that such ‘middle-voice’ stage, in-between realistic narration (the present everyday experience of a given subject) and the anti-narrative of an elusive, irrepresentable and haunting past is better formulated. And it is because of this that the theatrical stage emerges as the site where the empathic settlement required so as to achieve a traumatic understanding is effectively achieved. Such ‘inbetween-ness’ thus offered by theatrical performance (in between diegetic narration and mimetic antinarration) thus seems to formulate the kind of strategy that LaCapra appeals to for an effective representation of the traumatic effect: “such an objectifying strategy may well posit or assume a radical divide between objectivity and subjectivity (as well as between research and dialogic exchange) and lead to an either/or conception of the relation between empathy and critical analysis.” (LaCapra 2001:39). Throughout this thesis I will demonstrate how drama emerges as an apt field aiming at this critical effect simultaneous leading to an empathic understanding of traumatic experience. 3 Wald explores these issues in her work Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (2007). 20 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . formation, but it will grow to aim at a classification of spectral theatrical strategies managed by contemporary authors for an effective rendering of a character’s traumatic history. 4 The plays selected to be studied in this chapter share common strategies for the performance of a character’s tormenting past. Carr and Kane resort to the construction of ghostly and desolate settings haunted by the specters of male characters. These specters torment the protagonists by evoking an unresolved event, thus messing up with wounds that never healed and reenacting a past that, despite their many attempts, was never forgotten. The elusive ghostly presences in these plays thus elicit the paradox inherent to traumatic recollection: the victim is unable to own complete awareness and full recollection of the traumatic event, and yet the trauma keeps intruding into the victim’s life in the form of nightmares, visions or reenactments. In a similar vein, the ghostly presences in the play keep appearing to remind the characters of a painful past, but they belong to the inaccessible realm of the dead, which remains completely unexplored by the protagonists. This is the conflicting groundwork at the core of traumatic reenactment: the imperative need to assimilate the trauma, the victim being haunted by it, and yet the impossibility to do so due to its essentially entropic nature. The plays to be studied in this chapter try to address such ontological paradox by performing traumatic memory through the use of ghostly and spectral means that mirror trauma’s at once elusive and haunting dimension. These works hence answer the question posed by the prominent Trauma theorist Cathy Caruth, “[h]ow is it 4 Following from LaCapra´s premises in Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), I will rely on his definition of empathy (as opposed to sympathy) in the field of Trauma Studies as triggering a reader’s responsiveness and understanding of the traumatic event (LaCapra 2001:41). On that account, I will consider empathy and audience responsiveness as the cornerstone for a relevant and effective transmission of trauma: that in which the passerby/audience introjects the traumatic event despite his or her noninvolvement in the original trauma. Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 21 possible…to gain access to a traumatic history?” (1995:151), by providing a performative reenactment of traumatic memory with the help of such uncanny and supernatural means. Furthermore, they also appeal to Caruth’s warning about “the danger of speech” when trying to give an account of the traumatic event: “The danger of speech, of integration [of the traumatic event] into the narration of memory, may lie not in what it cannot understand, but in that it understands too much” (Caruth 1995:154). In the attempt to integrate traumatic memory into logical, verbal and narrative mental patterns there is the risk and the fear of losing the precision of recall, the truth-content of that very traumatic memory and the force of the original traumatic event. The fact that the plays to be studied in this chapter rely not so much on the spoken word as they do on the phantasmal and the unearthly makes of them appropriate vehicles for the formulation and transmission of trauma, as they counteract verbal ineffability with the reproduction of ghostly effects when it comes to the formulation of a traumatic history. Keeping in mind Dominick LaCapra’s contention about the importance of empathy for a historical re-visitation of trauma (2001:38), such an array of technical support directed to the representation of traumatic memory on stage facilitates the audience’s empathic understanding of the perspective from which the protagonists experience the traumatic reenactments (in the works to be explored in this chapter, mostly in the form of ghostly apparitions). 5 Marina Carr’s talent as a playwright resides in her attempt to speak the unspoken, mainly by means of the powerful images that she reproduces on stage, which are in constant tension with the words uttered by her characters. Such visual strength lies in the fact that, once the theatrical illusion is over, it is that very image that dominated the stage only for a few seconds that remains in the audience’s apprehension 5 See LaCapra 2001:30-42 for more on empathic settlement. 22 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . of the play. 6 Sarahjane Scaife, actress working with Carr for the first production of Low in the Dark in New York, declared that after the daily rehearsals of the play, she “would leave the theatre with some haunting image burnt onto the retina of [her] imaginative memory, such is the power and the beauty of the image within a play” (Leeny 2003:7). Carr’s work thus challenges the limits of representation by going beyond the boundaries not only of the written text but also the theatre house, as her unconventional advocacy to the mythic and the spiritual or her defiance of narrative standards contribute to the creation of images bound to keep haunting the memory of the members of the audience once the theatrical experience is over. Hester (herself a literary ghost, an inter-textual echo of Hawthorne’s socially ostracized female protagonist in The Scarlett Letter), protagonist in By the Bog of Cats, rebuffs the written law (binding her to abandon her house and her land) just as Carr overlooks written English’s phonetic, morphological and syntactic rules in order to stick to an Irish Midlands dialect that is “more rebellious than the written word permits” (Carr 1999:191). Rosana Herrero Martín esteems Carr’s predilection for orality as a sign of disobedience to “writtenness as a disconcerting, alienating threat…recurrently linked both to the rule of the Church and the British in Ireland” (2007:281). I furthermore regard this inclination for the oral and the performative (as opposed to the verbal written form) as the backbone of her talent to articulate a character’s traumatic history. Similarly, Sarah Kane became widely known for the powerfully visual impact provoked in the audience by the disturbing images she caused on scene. Kane’s playwriting may be succinctly defined as the attempt to bring to the stage anything that might be thought of as off-the-scene. Obscenity was thus said to be one of the main 6 The recovery of Portia’s body from the lake in Portia Coughlan (1996), or Hester´s first appearance on stage, trailing the dead corpse of a black swan in By the Bog of Cats (1998) are two examples of such theatrically powerful visual images reproduced on stage. Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 23 defining traits of her theatrical style, as she adhered to her self-imposed tenet: “there isn’t anything you can’t represent onstage” (Saunders 2001:24). This conviction materialized on stage in the shape of dead bodies, rape, mutilations and cannibal outbreaks, among other things, which earned Kane the critics’ repudiation as well as her reputation as an oddity and a kind of outsider of the British current theatrical trends. Kane’s voice as a writer gradually pared down linguistically (Urban 2011:313) and it tended to embrace the visual and sensorial for the representation of her characters’ psychological struggles. The great amount of stage directions in her work that are still found almost impossible to materialize substantiates this theatrical taste for the unconventional articulation of the ineffable pain her characters suffer. Thus, her plays grant the privilege for a given audience to introject and relate to the experience of traumatic reenactment, as is the case with 4:48 Psychosis (2000), which places the recipient in a position other than that of a static audience and rather has him partake of the anguish and ineffable agony experienced by the traumatized character (Saunders 2002:159). As Ken Urban contends in The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights, Kane “can make an audience feel as it is inside the mind of the character…[she] does not merely describe the experience of psychosis, but has the audience experience that psychotic state” (2011:316, emphasis in original). This is achieved by means of theatrical tactics such as the overlap of voices, or the nonspecificity in the stage directions concerning the number of characters/voices speaking, strategies which encourage the audience’s empathic settlement with the experiences the characters on stage are going through. In the attempt to accomplish the academic ambition motivating this thesis, this chapter explores the aftereffects of such spectral stylistic artifices fabricated to simulate on the stage the haunting effects of traumatic reenactment, thus contributing to provide 30 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . empathize and partake of the action on the stage and their awareness of the fictive nature of the events performed, due to the many resemblances between the action on the stage and some other popular and easily recognized stories (the inter-textual reference to Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter is probably noteworthy). As argued by Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, the non-assimilation of the traumatic event causes the victims to “experience long periods of time in which they live, as it were, in two different worlds: the realm of the trauma and the realm of their current, ordinary life” (1995:176). Similarly, the audience is inevitably moved by a drive to engage with the action performed and yet at the same time, through inter-textual referencing, they are reminded of the fictive character of the action performed on stage, and so, of the fabricated nature characterizing the grounds on which their emotional involvement relies. The plot in The Mai is in itself a reenactment (or rather a repetition) of a past story, as it tells about the coming back home of the Mai’s husband, Robert, who had abandoned her and their children five years earlier and who, throughout the play, gradually displays an inclination to repeat the same behavioral pattern again. The leading voice in the play is that of Millie, the Mai and Robert’s daughter, who is trying to re-tell The Mai’s tragic story. In that attempt, she becomes a sort of spectral apparition (“Note: Millie remains onstage throughout the play.” TM 107), to the point that she ignores narrative restrictions such as those of time and place. She is at the same time a character from the story and the narrative voice, so she is allowed to jump forwards and backwards from the past and to the present, eluding any narrative boundary and thus providing a somewhat confusing account of the events (hence reproducing the functioning of a victim’s traumatic memory). The action takes place inside the house whose construction the Mai had commissioned herself in her attempt to confine within its walls the memories of a happier past, and also evoking a dreamlike Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 31 reality that would allow her to recover what she had lost (her husband). Therefore, the Mai seems to, not only accept, but to intently search for and embrace the ghostly atmosphere projected in her cryptic house, as it is represented in the initial scene where Robert’s coming back is performed as a dream or fantasy: The Mai passes the window, turns to look out on Owl Lake, hears a cello notedecides she is dreaming. She enters the room, wearing a summer dress and carrying an armful of books. She places the books on the bookshelf, a few here, a few there. Drawn to the window, she looks out at the lake, waiting, watching. She places a few more books, then moves again to the window. A low cello note floats across the room. The Mai startled, freezes, listens: the cello plays, melodic, romantic, beautiful. The Mai moves to the double doors. She slides them across to reveal Robert engrossed in his playing. […] Robert. How did you know I’d come back? Mai. Don’t know. Just knew. Robert lifts The Mai and carries her to a chair by the bay window […] (TM 107-8). Such dreamlike scenarios generate a ghostly atmosphere that contributes to blur the line between what is real and what is imagined or remembered (a puzzling effect that Carr will pursue in her later works by the introduction of spectral characters on the stage). Along these lines, Carr’s use of windows on the stage in her early theatrical career becomes significant, as is the case with the huge window on stage in The Mai, which seems to exert some kind of enrapturing influence on the protagonist. The Mai is constantly “drawn to the window” (TM 107) as if bound to end up her days sitting by it, looking towards the lake and waiting for elusive past memories to materialize. Similarly, in The Mai, the window is designed to be the center of the audience’s attention to the point that it becomes the lens from which we can see the action performed on stage. The Mai is time and again seen through the window, or sitting by 32 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . the window threshold in a contemplative, dreamlike manner; some of the secondary characters access the house not through the main door, but through the window (TM 112); and it remains a central element in all the decisive moments in the play, as the scene where the Mai finally realizes she has been once again deceived by Robert: It´s evening, sound of a car door closing. The Mai stands at the window. Robert walks past the window, and stops. He looks at The Mai. The Mai takes of her knickers, and throws them at him through the window! They land on his face. The Mai. (banging window) Fukin’ bastard! (TM 153) The big bay window in the Mai’s house may be regarded as the threshold cultivating daydreaming, nostalgic memory and imagination, and as fostering the Mai’s fanciful existence the many years she spent sitting by it and dreaming about her husband’s return, longing for his coming back. It is her sitting in the window threshold all day long that grounds the Mai’s distracted and imaginative nature, more in contact with her dreams and fantasies about her husband’s return than with the taking care of her everyday life. The window is thus used as an existential threshold or as a frame from which the Mai’s fancied world of lost memories is represented. The ghostly effect is also managed on the stage by intermingling dreams (“elusive things” TM 125) and reality and by the blending of memories about the past and the more tangible daily existence. The dominant presence of dreams as a source for the interpretation of everyday life becomes, thus, essential in the construction of the haunting atmosphere predominant in the play. The many conversations revolting around the dreams that some of the characters have also work as foreshadowing for the Mai’s irremediably tragic doom: Robert …You really want to know what brought me back? … Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 33 I dreamt that you were dead and my cello case was your coffin and a carriage drawn by two black swans takes you away from me over a dark expanse of water and I ran after this strange hearse shouting, ‘Mai, Mai,’ and it seemed as if you could hear my voice on the moon, and I’m running, running over water, trees, mountains, though I’ve lost sight of the carriage and of you… (TM 125) In Robert’s dream, the cello case becomes another reference to the Mai’s cryptic enclosure where her traumatized ego remains confined, thus refusing to face the traumatic event originating her psychic repression and her absent, apparitional and almost incorporeal current existence: the fact that her husband already abandoned her and her children once, and that he is bound to do it again. The Mai thus lives in denial of the traumatic past (which the audience is able to access thanks to the intervention of Millie as the narrative voice) and remains submerged in a dreamlike state allowing her to idealize her past and to repress the trauma of loss, thus disdaining her daily existence (her children and family, her professional career and her social life) and, “like sleepwalk[ing] along a precipice” (TM 148), blindly approaching her inescapable fate. Adding to her disembodied existence, the Mai herself is described as a kind of apparition or as a lady in a portrait. The set of clothes designed for her additionally accentuate her ghostliness and her proximity to the intangible world of lost memories and dreams, as she is time and again described as wearing a “summerdress” (TM 103), “a waterly blue silk dress” (TM 129), or a “stunning black ball gown” (TM 165) towards the end of the play, once the audience already knows the Mai’s suicide is imminent. She is in this way projected on the stage as one of the blurry visions she muses about and beholds from the window threshold. The Mai. Now, honestly, tell me, am I all right? Beck. Mai, you’re a picture. Millie. You are, Mom. Granma Fraochlán. An apparition if I ever saw one (TM 166). 34 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . The effect achieved by showing the most revealing moments through the window glass becomes one of the main ghostly effects employed in the play and contributes to the attainment of a greater visual impact. It is because of this that the author does not need to resort to words to articulate the most unsettling moment in the play, the Mai’s death by suicide: At the end of ACT I and right before the beginning of ACT II the phantasmic image of Robert holding the dead body of the Mai in his arms is seen through the huge bay window: Ghostly light on the window. Robert stands there with The Mai´s body in his arms, utterly still. Millie watches them a minute. Ghostly effect. (TM 147-8). The ghostly effect is intensified by the fact that the audience learns about the Mai’s death long before the end of the play and so her ghostly nature, her proximity to the world of the deceased, is accentuated in her subsequent appearances on the stage. This vision of the Mai’s death is a traumatic flashback interrupting the regular narrative flow generally procured in the play by Millie, the Mai’s daughter, who formulates a failing attempt of detached post-traumatic narration. Therefore, the vision of Robert holding The Mai’s dead body in his arms may be understood as both a traumatic flashback (a glimpse of the kind of traumatic reenactments suffered by Millie) and as a narrative flashfoward (as it also anticipates the tragic ending of the story). Carr’s early work, in particular the three plays integrating the focus of this chapter, present a setting dominated by the presence of either a lake or a bog that is haunted by stories of death and suffering, as is the case of the Owl Lake in The Mai. It is Millie, the narrative voice, who, in a moment of traumatic regression, tells the audience about the mythic story accounting for the existence of the lake (a story also tainted by unfulfilled love and tragic death), and it is the very account of that story that elicits Millie’s memory of her mother’s corpse recovered from the lake. Eilis Ní Dhuibhne analyzes Millie’s double role as the narrative voice and as a character in the Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 35 traumatic story being revisited and describes how her narrative control is “fractured completely” as a consequence of her involvement in the story as a character (72). As illustrated in the traumatic flashback commented above, Millie does attempt to provide an ordered and well-structured account of the events, but inevitably fails, as she is herself vulnerable to constant interruptions due to the intromission of the traumatic memory into her narrative in the shape of disturbing images (TM 147-8) or disordered thoughts connected to the traumatic event (TM 128-9). Such interruptions render a linear account of the traumatic event impossible to achieve and Millie’s (thus anti)narrative becomes in this way an instance of a victim’s failing attempt to work through her trauma. She endeavors to formulate her traumatic memory following an ordered or a linear structure so as to make sense of the events, but she fails in her attempt to understand, as a traumatic history “is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its story” and by the need to transcend simple (verbal) understanding (Caruth 1995:153). Millie’s narrative attempt is in this way interrupted by multiple traumatic symptoms such as flashbacks or traumatic reenactments. This anti-naturalistic disposition inevitably provokes a Brechtian effect which distances the audience from the action on stage, as it is perceived as something unreliable due to the traumatic flashbacks interrupting the narrative and blurring the course of events comprising the performed “reality”. The traumatic interruptions found in Millie’s account anticipate The Mai’s death, hence foreshadowing the traumatic ending culminating with her suicide. This is another regular trait in Carr’s early work: in The Mai, Portia Coughlan (1996) and By the Bog of Cats (1998) the non-chronological disposition of the plays anticipates the death of the main character long before the story is coming to its end. In the case of By the Bog of Cats we are provided with this piece of information right on scene one ACT 36 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . I, while in The Mai and Portia Coughlan it is towards the end of ACT I where Carr uncovers the fatal course of events. Regardless of the exact moment when the death of the main character is revealed within the action of the play, this theatrical strategy that anticipates the protagonist’s death has a similar effect in all cases: that of altering the existential nature of the main character. If right from the very beginning Carr’s female protagonists seemed to be walking the line between real existence (their attempt to survive the loss and continue with their everyday lives) and the imaginary world of flashbacks and visions about the traumatic memory (their melancholic drive to reenact the encrypted love and their desire to recover the lost object), once the audience discovers that the protagonist is bound to die, their remaining apparitions on stage will situate her closer to the realm of the dead and the spectral than that of the living. This is reinforced throughout the course of ACT II in The Mai and enhanced by elements such as the protagonist’s apparel: “a stunning black gown” (TM 165). Wald already explored this idea in her analysis of Portia Coughlan, where she argues that “the temporal structure of the play … advances Portia’s death and thus gives her a ghostly character in the final act” (2007:197). This lack of a temporal structure following a logical narrative pattern becomes a common feature in Carr’s early work and another means by which her protagonists’ traumatized state is represented on the stage. The acting out of a traumatic event provokes “undecidability and unregulated différance, threatening to disarticulate relations, confuse self and other, and collapse all distinctions, including that between present and past” (LaCapra 2001:21). In relation to this, Wald also contends that in Portia Coughlan, “Portia displays her inability to conceive of a future that is radically different from the past and the present” (2007:196). This is reflected in each of Carr’s early plays to be analyzed in this chapter. There, the past and the present blend in an ever going process of traumatic collapse and Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 37 melancholic incorporation. Portia Coughlan (1996) becomes another example of this trend to disrupt the taken for granted narrative order of the play so as to provide the audience with a non-chronological line of action that imitates the chaotic experience of traumatic reenactment and memory intrusion into a victim’s everyday life, where past and present blend in the victim’s attempt to make sense of the traumatic experience. Similarly, such non-chronological plot disposition also raises the audience’s detachment to the action performed on the stage, as it is presented as something unreliable in terms of temporal disposition and also in terms of the characters’ trouble to distinguish between dreams, visions and apparitions, on the one hand, and their everyday ‘true’ existences on the other. This theatrical strategy prompts the interrogation of (ir)reality regarding the action in the play and “enhances the sense of inescapability, of being performed, that pervades the play” (Wald 2003:195). The sense of uncertainty and unreliability concerning the temporal disposition of the action on stage is to be found in the three plays by Marina Carr studied in this chapter. b) Portia Coughlan Portia Coughlan (1996) premiered at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin and was later on produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London, also in 1996. The play is named after its main character, a thirty-year-old woman who is constantly judged by her family, friends and her town neighbors as a consequence of her behavior concerning her husband (whom she deceives on a regular basis) and her children. Portia’s cold and distant attitude is explained by the traumatic loss of her twin brother fifteen years before the time in which action of the play develops (the temporal setting of the play is Portia’s thirtieth birthday, and so the fifteenth anniversary of her brother’s death by suicide). Portia’s melancholic state seems to be the cause of her careless attitude regarding her family and friends as she seems unable to take care of them, declines her husband’s 38 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . many intimate approaches and remains submerged on a constant state of dismay, most of the time confined in her house, her life seeming to her meaningless and superfluous. Portia Coughlan entails a further step into the analysis of a female character’s traumatization as a consequence of loss. In the play, Carr explores in more depth a character’s critical state between the urge to understand the traumatic process she is going through and her need to deny it so as to escape its damaging influence in her everyday life; and this is presented through the main character’s conflicting thoughts and behavior regarding the death of her twin brother, Gabriel. Gabriel has been haunting Portia in the shape of a ghost ever since he committed suicide, thus impeding Portia’s social integration and her harmonious psychic growth as an adult. As a consequence, Portia has remained on a state of continued childhood, as she demonstrates she has not developed some of the qualities expected of an adult. She behaves childishly, her behavior is still watched and controlled by her family (“Portia. I’m sick of you gawkin’ at me from behind hedges and ditches and sconces. I’m a grown woman and what I do is none of your concern” PC 214), she hardly leaves her room and she seems unable to take on the responsibilities that would be assumed by any mature person, such as taking care of one’s children (PC 233). Gabriel’s intrusive spectral apparitions seem to be the main reason originating Portia’s mental derangement, as these ghostly visions continually interrupt Portia’s otherwise natural social development and to impede the assimilation and working through of her trauma, which would grant her access to a ‘normal’ or regular existence as an adult. In this sense, Marina Carr works towards the representation of a similar and yet divergent model to the one provided by Daniels in her play Beside Herself, to be explored in chapter two of this thesis. There, the audience was granted access to the not fully developed, childish and dissociated ego of the main character, Evelyn, by means of Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 39 a vision represented by ‘Eve’. This illusory character symbolizes Evelyn’s fragmented self still in touch with the traumatic event that the ‘grown up’ Evelyn was not able to accept. In contrast to the model visited by Daniels, and as already mentioned in this chapter, Carr’s protagonists do not undergo dissociative processes leading to the split of a character’s ego into two (the social self who attempts to lead a ‘normal’ life and the traumatized self, who remains submerged in the re-experiencing of the trauma). Instead, and in agreement with the model defended by Torok and Abraham, in Carr’s plays the psychological defense mechanism undergone by the characters points to repression and reclusion (Portia barely leaves her house) as the main means to elude the agonizing past. And yet, Portia’s psychological strategy to evade (her need to deny the trauma so as to be able to lead a normal life) clashes with her inherent need to know about and to understand the trauma, so as to be able to assimilate it. In this way, by staging Portia’s conflicting behavior caused by the unsettling spectral apparitions of her brother, the play puts forward the processes undergone by a traumatized subject submerged on a state of melancholic incorporation. Portia thus attempts to elude the pervading presence of her brother’s ghost to become able to lead a normal life at the same time that she frequently attempts to reach this spectral figure so as to understand the meaning of these apparitions and finally to become able to work through the trauma: “Exit Raphael. Sound of Gabriel’s voice begins again. Portia listens a minute, puts on a CD to drown out voice and turns it up. Gabriel’s voice subsides. Exit Portia” (PC 195) and Sound of Gabriel singing. Portia registers this, runs from the living room. Gabriel appears by the bank of the Belmont River. Disappears as Portia arrives, out of breath. Sound of singing fades. She looks around. Silence, except for the following river and birdsong… Portia: Can’t you leave me alone or present yourself before me? Is heaven not so lovely after all? …Do you miss me at all? (PC 235) 46 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . import of the loss, a loss that, if recognized as such, would effectively transform us” (1994:127). The protagonist in Portia Coughlan avoids such painful process of psychic reorganization (or mourning) that would naturally follow the traumatic loss of the love object. Instead, the remaining gap left in Portia’s psyche after the loss of her brother Gabriel is filled by the intrapsychic crypt built so as to preserve the memory of the deceased person. Portia’s paradoxical mental state has her trying to lead a regular life at the same time that she elicits and looks for the ghostly atmosphere where the spectral figure of her brother materializes. This is exemplified by the fact that she marries her husband because, like his brother Gabriel, he has an angel’s name (thus attempting to replace her dead brother), but then, as mentioned before, she also married him hoping to escape such deadly atmosphere of traumatic regressions with the help of her husband, as Raphael is grounded and focused on everyday responsibilities such as family income, she sees him as her last chance “to enter the world and stay in it” (PC 255): Portia Do ya know the only reason why I married Raphael? Not because you and Daddy says I should, not because he was rich, I care nothin’ for money, naw. The only reason I married Raphael was because of his name, a angel’s name, same as Gabriel’s, and I thought be osmosis or just pure wishin’ that one’d take on the qualities of the other… (PC 210) and Portia I seen you long before you ever seen me, seen ya fishin’ one Sunday afternoon and the stillness and sureness that came off of you was a balm to me, and when I asked who ya were and they said that’s Raphael Coughlan, I thought, how can anyone with a name like that be so real, and I says to meself, if Raphael Coughlan notices me I will have a chance to enter the world and stay in it, which has always been a battle for me. (PC 255) In Writing History, Writing Trauma, LaCapra argues that the collapse of all human discerning capabilities enabling us to distinguish between self and other or past and present “prevail[s] in trauma and in post-traumatic acting out in which one is Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 47 haunted or possessed by the past and performatively caught up in the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes –scenes in which the past returns and the future is blocked or fatalistically caught up in a melancholic feedback loop.” (2001:21) This traumatic distortion of self and Other is given expression in Portia Coughlan in terms of the struggles concerning the main character’s identity, as Portia does not seem to be able to discern her own identity traits from those of her twin brother’s as a consequence of suffering from extreme melancholic incorporation. Along these lines, the deconstruction of time boundaries is another characteristic of traumatic reenactment, and is also a regular trait in Carr’s early playwriting. As seen in the analysis of The Mai, Millie (the narrative voice) finds difficulties when trying to make sense of and provide narrative order to the past traumatic events she revisits with her story. The non-chronological order established in Portia Coughlan also adds to the strategies Carr resorts to in her formulation of traumatic states. In the play, the action in Acts I and III takes place in consecutive time, but Act II jumps forwards and offers the audience a glimpse of the events taking place after the final act, Act III: Act II shows the moment when Portia’s dead body is retrieved from the Belmont River after her suicidal act, and the ensuing funeral gathering at her house. The representation on stage of such chronological distortion provoked by traumatic upheaval affects the audience’s perception of the action and facilitates their empathic understanding of the events there staged, as they are granted the opportunity to experience the post-traumatic disarticulation of the victim’s discerning capabilities (the distinction between past and present, in this case). Similarly, in Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (1998) time boundaries seem to blur at some point, thus provoking a similar foreshadowing effect. The play opens with the appearance of Hester Swane (the main character) trailing the dead corpse of a black swan that she was attached to since she was a child. She is soon interrupted by the unexpected appearance 48 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . of the Ghost Fancier (“A handsome creature in a dress suit” BC 261) who claims to be looking for the ghost of the late Hester Swane. This initial misunderstanding is solved when the Ghost Fancier learns that it is still too early: he had confounded the early times of the day with the late evening, which is when he will find Hester dead. Thus, the opening dialogue between Hester and the Ghost Fancier and the latter’s temporal displacement reveal the dramatic outcome of the action from the very beginning of the play, Hester’s death at dusk: Ghost Fancier I’m ghoulin’ for a woman be the name of Hester Swane. Hester I’m Hester Swane. Ghost Fancier You couldn’t be. You’re alive. Hester I certainly am and aim to stay that way. Ghost Fancier (looks around, confused) Is it sunrise or sunset? Hester Why do you want to know? Ghost Fancier Just tell me. Hester It’s that hour when it could be aither dawn or dusk, the light bein’ so similar. But it’s dawn, see there’s the sun comin’ up. Ghost Fancier Then I’m too previous. I mistook this hour for dusk. A thousand apologies. Goes to exit… (BC 266) In this vein, and as was the case with The Mai and Portia Coughlan, in By the Bog of Cats the audience learns about the death of the main character before the theatrical action reaches its end, thereby contributing to the spectral semblance of the main character (“Hester …for a long time now I been thinkin’ I’m already a ghost.” BC 321). The non-chronological order of the action in Carr’s early plays thus build up the uncertain lives of all the female characters, who debate between real life and their illusory existence triggered by their melancholic psychic mechanisms preserving the lost object. In addition to this, the disrupted action in the plays also transmits to the Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 49 audience the kind of traumatic upheaval experienced by the characters, as they are unable to make sense of and reconstruct the different events integrating their traumatic memory (the death of a brother, being abandoned by a mother or a husband, etc.). Such staging of the action provokes confusion and a slight sense of disorientation in the audience thus paralleling this experience with traumatic states of shock such as the ones encountered by the characters in these plays. c) By the Bog of Cats By the Bog of Cats premiered at the Abbey Theater (Dublin) in 1998 as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. The setting in the play points to a certain continuity regarding The Mai and Portia Coughlan, as the action in By the Bog of Cats also takes place in a natural landscape where either a lake or a river becomes predominant (to the extent that, in this case the importance of the bog for the development of the action is already made explicit in the title). As opposed to the flowing waters of the Belmont River in Portia Coughlan (indicating the passing of years in contrast to Portia’s permanent drowsiness, as well as reminding of the maternal womb where Portia and Gabriel blended and confused self with other), By the Bog of Cats introduces the presence of an equally enrapturing soil that the main character refuses to abandon (just a The Mai’s house or the Belmont River). The bog is the place where the past comes back to life (again, here, in the form of ghosts and dreams) and the last resource the main character has to cling to the past, thereby neglecting her present. Hester Swane (whose last name reminds of the black swan that is found dead at the beginning of the play) presents similar traits and afflictions to the other feminine characters analyzed so far in this chapter. As was the case with The Mai and Portia, Hester’s psychic life is also determined by the loss of a loved one. In this case, the source of her melancholic state is twofold, as she was abandoned by her mother as a child, and then also by her partner, 50 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Carthage, who is now going to get married. She refuses to acknowledge such loss and keeps insisting on the idea that Carthage belongs to her (“Carthage Kilbride is mine for always or until I say he is no longer mine” BC 269), thus depriving him of any human trait and describing him as a mere object to be possessed. In a similar way to Hester’s apprehension of Carthage as completing her own self (“My life doesn’t hang together without him” BC 269), in The Mai the female protagonist saw Robert as something that should belong to her (“he always comes back to me. He always does, and has done and always will” TM 161), and, also similarly, Portia claimed that she “owned” the most accurate memories of her dead brother (“Portia You fuckin’ liar, ya! You come in here talkin’ about Gabriel as if you owned him! He was mine first! And I lost him first! And I was the only one that mattered to him” PC 249). Hence, they all appropriate the love object, refusing to accept the loss and claiming to possess it, moved by their drive to complete the intrapsychic gap they developed after the loss. In addition to this, in By the Bog of Cats Hester is also attached to the place where she can reenact past memories. Despite the fact that she has signed a contract that compels her to abandon the place, she refuses to leave the bog because, as we will eventually discover, her mother promised her before she abandoned her that she would come back to the bog. Moreover, the bog houses all the memories that Hester and Carthage shared as a couple, and that Hester does not want to let go. In this sense, the bog is symbolic for the main character’s stagnant state. In “Reflections Across Water: New Stages of Performing Carr”, Melissa Sihra argues that “[t]he names which Marina Carr gives her characters also reflect those used in fairytales, where proper names are either avoided totally, or tend to be either so commonplace that they have no specificity whatsoever…these personal names resonate with mythical association” (70). Such sonority in the choice of names is accentuated in Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 51 some of Carr’s early plays as they appear on the very title, thus echoing the familiar fairytale tradition where the title of a story draws the audience’s attention to the main character around which it revolves. The Mai, Portia Coughlan, Ariel or The Cordelia Dream, are some of Carr’s plays where this is the case. Considering that the title of a play determines the audience’s first approach to the theatrical representation they are about to witness, Marina Carr’s consistent choice regarding the title of her plays irremediably generates a particular set of consequences in terms of both the initial expectations the spectator will develop concerning the theatrical experience before watching the play, and the aftereffects or the socio-cultural associations and implications the spectator will necessarily draw once the theatrical experience has come to an end. Consequently, Carr’s choice concerning the titles of her early works, in which the attention is focused on a female name that sounds familiar to the spectator (Portia, Cordelia or Ariel), generates a whole set of expectations that the audience will, consciously or not, hope to see fulfilled during the course of the play. In this vein, and especially concerning the names of the female protagonists in Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats (Portia and Hester, respectively), the choice of names here indicates that Carr is directing her audience to a set of culturally endowed assumptions that are inevitably elicited by the literary associations that both names implicate. Such (probably inadvertent) expectations raised by the names of the protagonists are gradually fulfilled by the development of the action in each of these two plays: Portia Coughlan deals with a brother and a sister and the intricacies by which they never manage to concur in time and space, as he is a ghost (he drowned some years before) but still keeps haunting her sibling on a daily basis. Eventually, as happened with the two twins that are separated in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Portia reunites her brother, in this case by committing suicide and succumbing to the realm of 52 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . the dead. Similarly, the name ‘Hester’, protagonist in By the Bog of Cats, also raises some implicit expectations that are met throughout the course of the play as the audience gets to know about Hester’s situation as an exiled mother (she lives with her nine-years-old daughter) in a somewhat withdrawn town ruled by primitive laws, thus very much echoing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In Theatre Semiotics (1990) Marvin Carlson argued that “[i]n the highly concentrated narrative world of the drama, the names given to characters potentially provide a powerful communicative device for the dramatist seeking to orient his audience as quickly as possible in his fictive world” (1990:26). In this vein, the choice of a particular name for the main character may resonate, as is the case here, with familiar connotations due to the taken for granted cultural background shaping the audience’s stance towards the performance. This will generate a particular set of effects in terms of the audience’s experiencing and understanding of the theatrical event. Literary re-writing and borrowing from popular stories thus becomes an effective strategy to implicitly elicit a particular set of meanings in the audience. It instigates and accentuates an ‘already behaved behavior’ theatrical effect according to which theatrical performance elicits a sense of doubleness and split awareness in both the performer (actor and character at the same time) and in the spectator (who is exposed to the performed events, and also the act of performing). 20 The re-visitation of popular literary works thus emphasizes the iterative nature of performance and the audience’s ‘hyperconsciousness’ (Kubiak 2002:158) concerning the fictive mechanisms functioning on the stage that generate such meaning-negotiation processes. As Patrick Campbell contends in his introduction to Psychoanalysis and Performance (2001), the receptive processes undergone by each of the members of the audience when watching a 20 For more on this see Marvin Carlson’s introduction to his book Theatre Semiotics (1990). Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 53 live performance render the spectator’s self to split into two, as it were, since he is subject to a double experience by which he is both suspended into the fictive action represented on the stage (which effects a particular set of emotions and elicits a given number of memories) and also witness to the performative processes by which the same events are acted out time and again by a group of actors: “the spectator’s psyche operates in a world of potential double consciousness, a world in which…there is a ‘mobile concurrency’ of our empathising and reflective selves” (Campbell 2001:8). By borrowing a particular number of elements from well-known literary works, Carr is establishing and trying to control the interpretative situation that the spectator will experience as a consequence of being exposed to the theatrical message. Just from the knowledge of the title of the play or the names of some of the characters, the audience will already inevitably (and yet sometimes unconsciously) associate the events expected on the stage with some other theatrical or cultural messages they have been exposed to before so that he would be re-visiting anew some already experienced situation. It has been one of my intentions in this chapter to demonstrate how, in a similar way, and to some extent, such is the mental process undergone by a victim suffering from traumatic flashbacks or reenactments, and how this parallelism consequentially distinguishes theatrical representation as an appropriate medium by which traumatic memory may not only be elicited, formulated or made known to a wide audience, but also be empathically assimilated and introjected by the observant spectator, despite his initial natural lack of knowledge and detachment to the traumatic events performed on the stage in the early stages of the theatrical experience. The victim is condemned to re-visit time and again an already suffered traumatic episode thus becoming subject to live in a state of “permanent duality”, “in two different worlds: the realm of the trauma and the realm of their current, ordinary life” (van der Kolk and van 54 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . der Hart 1995:177). In other words, when transported to the stage, the strategy to revisit a story or a particular literary work that is familiar to the intended spectator accentuates the audience’s dual state as witnesses suspended into the particular story being performed on the stage on the one hand, and as partaking of the collective role of theater audience on the other. Thus, re-writing strategies may contribute to the spectator’s self-awareness about the tactics employed on that technical theatrical level. This is the sense in which theater semioticians such as Carlson, Anthony Kubiak or Richard Schechner have defined the theatrical experience as “imitat[ing] or actualis[ing] a rehearsed ‘model’” (Wald 2003:12), and such is the cornerstone of the argument defended here concerning the theatrical suitability for the articulation of the also double, repeatedly or many times experienced and essentially entropic traumatic memory: the spectator is bound to “perform” the double role of empathizing with and wanting to partake of the action performed on stage at the same time that his status as a member of the audience is accentuated by means of theatrical strategies (for example, the use of literary re-writings or the use of non-realistic means such as spectral and ghostly characters) thus highlighting the fictive level of any theatrical representation. 21 Hence, and as if in a state of Brechtian detachment, the spectator is led to a situation where he is asked to partake of the action on stage at the same time that he remains aware of his status as active participant in the collective theatrical experience. Such strategy activates the spectator’s empathic settlement and involvement in a procedure that parallels the one suffered by trauma victims to the extent that he is subjected to the same alienating processes effected by the carrying out of a double role that is contradictory in its very essence. The everyday life of a trauma victim bounds him to experience his own memory’s paradoxical and essentially entropic nature by re-visiting the traumatic 21 The spectator is familiar with the story represented on the stage to the extent that he may become hyperconscious (Kubiak 2002:158) about the fictive nature of the representation and his role as a member of the audience at the same time that he is asked to engage in terms of the plot. Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 55 situation time and again in the form of unexpected flashbacks, visions, etc. despite his attempt to forget and continue leading a normal life. In this vein, the re-writing of popular literary works or the re-visitation of well-known literary traditions is a particularly effective theatrical device to bring to the stage in the attempt to formulate psychic traumatic processes, as the effect managed on the members of the audience parallels the dissociative processes suffered by trauma victims. This is so to the point that such techniques may activate the audience’s empathic identification with a traumatized character’s suffering. In this way, theatrical re-visitation thus complies with LaCapra’s contention signaling empathy as the central element for any reader/audience’s successful understanding of a particular traumatic disposition The iterative nature characterizing theatrical representation is acknowledged by Carlson in The Haunted Stage (2003), where he studies the effects of drama’s potential to “conjure the ghosts of previous productions” and how this “stimulates the spectator’s memory” (1998:49). In my analysis of Marina Carr’s plays I have tried to demonstrate how the re-writing of literary classics and its performance on stage accentuates drama’s inherent ‘haunting’ nature and how this ‘haunting effect’ functions as a means for the effective formulation of traumatic memory. Herbert Blau’s concept of the theatrical ghosting effect contends that theatre is not simply mimetic, as it rather reconfigures the present, to some extent, through the refracting lens of emotion and memory (2001:2133). In the context of trauma representation, theatrical re-writings play with both the spectator’s emotive response (trying to elicit his empathic settlement in trauma understanding) and his cultural memory concerning his previous knowledge of a given literary text or genre. The spectator is hence inevitably conducted to the re-experiencing of an already ‘witnessed’ literary event, thus paralleling traumatic acting out. This 62 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . some obfuscation in speech is found, this should be understood as a symptom that there is some kind of obstacle obstructing the subject’s natural process of psychic introjection. In Cleansed, most of the characters encounter some sort of impediment when trying to formulate their inner struggles through verbal means. Kane brings to the foreground the process of word-building from an analytical perspective, as she does, for example, in scene seven: Grace It’s talking without your voice. Same words you use all the time. Each letter corresponds to a sound. If you can remember which sound corresponds to which letter you can start building words. Robin That letter don’t look like it sounds. Grace R. Robin That one does/but that one don’t. Grace O. You know what this word/says? (CL 123) Robin’s struggles to formulate his thoughts through verbal means is pointed out several times throughout the play: Grace You can’t write, can you. Robin (Opens his mouth to answer but can´t think of anything to say.) Grace It’s not the end of the world. Robin (Tries to speak. Nothing.) (CL 115). And this same image capturing a character’s frustration at the impossibility to articulate one single word is also met by other characters in the play. As was mentioned before, Carl’s tongue is chopped off by Tinker as a punishment for going against the ‘rules’ of the institution where they remain, concerning his relationship with Rod: Carl Commitment. Rod You’ve known me for three months. It’s suicide. Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 63 Carl Please. Rod You’d die for me? Carl Yes. (CL 109) … Carl Please don’t fucking kill me God…Not me please not me don’t kill me Rod not me don’t kill me ROD NOT ME ROD NOT ME…I couldn’t help it, Rod, was out my mouth before I- … Carl sticks out his tongue. Tinker produces a large pair of scissors and cuts off Carl’s tongue. Carl waves his arms, his mouth open, full of blood, no sound emerging. (CL 117) … Carl (Looks at Rod. He opens his mouth. No sound comes out.) … (tries to speak. Nothing. He beats the ground in frustration). (CL 129) Such frustration as a consequence of language obstruction is further explored in scene eighteen. The scene takes place in The White Room, where both Carl and Grace have been subject to an operation by which their physical traits have been modified so as to match Grace’s inner desire to preserve the love object (Graham) alive, thus refusing to accept the loss. The reaction of both characters when first faced by their new external reality is that of unspeakable amazement: Grace FF- … Grace focuses on the mirror. She opens her mouth … Grace F- 64 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . … Carl lets out a silent scream. (CL 146) The power of Carl’s final silent scream reflects the complete state of shock experienced by a traumatized victim who is unable to articulate any recognizable verbal sound, being paralyzed by fear. It signals the unspeakability of inaccessible trauma and points to a state of obfuscation in the victim’s psyche that prevents the natural process of introjection. The idea to stage inarticulate fear and trauma by a silent scream was also carried out in a production of Portia Coughlan at the Metropol Theater (Munich) in December 2012. This production of Carr’s play both opened and ended with a ghostly and frozen portrayal of Rafael, Portia’s husband, letting out a silent scream that appealed to the same idea of unspeakable and paralyzing anguish explored in Kane’s Cleansed. This very image was not included in Carr’s original text but was introduced in this production by Jochen Schölch articulating a sense of deadening fear which transmitted that very experience of paralyzing trauma. 25 Similarly, with Cleansed, Kane experiments with the idea of bringing audience and actors to the same level: the many creepy and unsettling stage directions for the effects to be carried out on stage, such as the constant sound of rats as a background noise which is supposed to accompany the action in a metaphoric, rather than literal way (Saunders 2002:91). This creates an overall effect aimed at the translation of nightmarish glimpses of the trauma so as to grant the audience access to the traumatic experience. In an introductory note to chapter six in The Shell and the Kernel, Rand analyzes the initial model for introjection as posited by Torok and Abraham, so as to clarify its 25 A certain sense of paralyisis was also transmitted to the audience in Schölch’s production throughout Act II, which shows the moment when Portia’s body is found in the Belmont River. In this version of the play, the dead body is retrieved and left hanging up in the ceiling throughout the whole act while the rest of the characters remain onstage. Similarly, this very act opened with a frozen shot of all the characters standing at the background of the stage, wearing white raincoats and so projecting ghostly shadows and shapes on the stage. Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 65 functioning and to prevent any possible misunderstanding involving such psychic process and that of incorporation (which Abraham and Torok defined as one of the obstacles preventing a subject’s natural introjection). Torok and Abraham understand the primary role of introjection as the “communion of empty mouths” or as a process of “transferential love” that appears soon after birth (Rand 1994b:127). Rand explains how for Torok and Abraham the initial stages of introjection emerge when the baby experiences the mouth’s emptiness after having gone through the breast-feeding period. Introjection is a psychic developmental process that is based on the subject’s ability to react, assimilate and adapt to new life situations after the experience of a traumatizing or an unexpected event. Introjection also encompasses the consequent psychic changes that those events instill upon the subject’s life. The first model of introjection takes place therefore once the mother’s presence is gone and the baby is forced to experience oral emptiness and isolation, as this is the first ‘traumatizing’ experience undergone by human beings: having to react to the sense of isolation provoked by the absence of the mother. The baby reacts by trying to fill that oral emptiness by playing with the empty cavity with his tongue. That emptiness is initially experienced, according to Abraham and Torok, “in the form of cries and sobs, delayed fullness, then as calling, ways of requesting presence” and finally, as verbal language (1994:127). In this way, the baby needs to experience abandonment and emptiness so as to react, assimilate the new situation, and develop a mechanism (verbal language) which would help him adapt to the new circumstances. This is the first instance of such process of psychic growth and development that Abraham and Torok define as introjection: “The transition from a mouth filled with the breast to a mouth filled with words occurs by virtue of the intervening experiences of the empty mouth. Learning to fill the emptiness of the mouth with words is the initial model for introjection” (1994:127). Furthermore, the both 66 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . social and psychic growing up process involves the formulation of desires, fears, pain, happiness, and other experiences characterizing inner psychic life, so as to match the internal development of a subject’s ego with the external experiencing of the social world. Verbal language becomes thus the main instrument by which our inner and external lives meet: “Introjecting a desire, a pain, a situation means channeling them through language into a communion of empty mouths” (1994:127). Kane’s Cleansed offers glimpses of this human need to work through (react to, and assimilate) a given traumatic situation, and it also analyzes the frustration present as a consequence of introjection being obstructed by such impossibility to formulate and make sense of the traumatic event. Such paralyzing state experienced when introjection is interrupted is represented in the play by images such as the silent scream or the use of tedious and redundant repetitions, such as the counting down of numbers, which is carried out at two different points in the play and which, when performed, support this sense of suspension and repetitiveness signaling failed introjection. 26 Hence, Cleansed offers a view of introjection as interrupted by trauma that contributes to elucidate Abraham and Torok’s ideas about the initial model for introjection, as filling the oral cavity with words so as to overcome emptiness. When a subject becomes unable to formulate his or her traumatic experience, as represented by different characters in Cleansed, introjection is interrupted and there is no psychic growth or expansion whatsoever, but rather, the victim remains in a state of post-traumatic shock similar to the sense of emptiness experienced by a baby going through the initial model for 26 The production of Cleansed directed by Johan Simons and performed at the Münchner Kammerspieler in November 2012 stressed the tediousness aimed at in both scenes where there is a lengthy countdown by sitting all of the characters (and not only Grace/Graham, as established in the original script) in front of Robin, all of them attentive to Robin’s seemingly endless counting off of beads aimed at showing Grace that he has learnt how to count the numbers out. By bringing all of the members of the cast to the stage, who silently sat and watched Robin’s hypnotizing countdown in emulation of a theater audience, the director of this production accentuated such sense of complete paralysis on the stage that was thus transported into the audience. Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 67 introjection mentioned by Abraham and Torok. Language becomes in this way a flawed prosthesis (as it remains unable to fully convey such traumatic loss in its entirety) which compensates a traumatic absence and additionally grants us contact with the outer (as opposed to intra-psychic) world. In the terms established by these authors, speech is the first human reaction to a traumatic situation (the confrontation with isolation and emptiness due to the removal of the mother’s feeding breast), and so the whole psychic process of introjection remains to an extent connected with the oral cavity. 27 In Cleansed, Kane portrays several characters who face such inability to introject and who remain under such a state of speechless shock (to the point that such state of unspeakability is literally represented by the cutting off of Carl’s tongue). In tune with Abraham and Torok’s findings, many of these characters face such inability to introject by returning to the initial model of introjection: that of ingestion as a means to avoid the emptiness provoked by the impossibility to articulate the non-introjected trauma and as an instrument to convey that transferential love initially founded by the mother’s feeding breast and later on carried out by the word. In this sense, we find scenes throughout the play where each of the different stories (that of Graham/Grace, Rod/Carl and Robin/Grace) portray ingestion of food, drugs and even the ingestion of a love token as a reaction to posttraumatic speechlessness, which are somehow connected to the fruitless attempt to convey love or affection. That is the case with Grace, who asks Tinker to treat her as a patient after the shock of her brother’s death: Grace Treat me as a patient. 27 In his introductory remarks to The Shell and the Kernel, Rand explains how for Abraham and Torok verbal language is the best testimonial trace granting access to a subject’s psychic trauma: “they [Abraham and Torok] create avenues to study and overcome the obstruction that serve to separate linguistic entities from their potential and concealed sources of signification. Abraham and Torok view the unintelligibility they encounter in their patients as psychically motivated disturbances of meaning, as instances of psychic aphasia” (Rand 1994a:17). 68 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Tinker (Considers in silence. Then takes a bottle of pills from his pocket) Show me your tongue. Grace (Sticks out her tongue.) Tinker (Puts a pill on her tongue.) Swallow Grace (Does.) (CL 114) Tinker’s unfulfilled affection for Grace is ratified by his obsession to transform the woman in the booth, whom he calls ‘Grace’, into his love object. Grace becomes an inmate in this center where Tinker treats his patients, who are sick of love, despite the fact that he declares that he is not a doctor (CL 146). Therefore, due to the impossibility to expand his affection for Grace, he uses the woman of the booth as an object where to deposit both his unfulfilled love (scene six) and his frustration about it (scene fourteen). Likewise, Grace experiences a state of unspeakable shock after the loss of her brother, whom she metaphorically devours by acquiring his ways, voice and even his looks. Before that metaphorical ingestion, scenes such as the ones quoted above already point to this idea of the return to the initial model for introjection as established by Abraham and Torok by means of the ingestion of pills so as to suffocate the ineffable anguish that cannot be relieved by words. Similarly, the scene already mentioned and commented where Carl’s tongue is cut off, thus obstructing any future attempt of verbal communication, is followed by a scene where Carl’s now empty mouth (both literally, by the cutting off of his tongue, and metaphorically, as he has been deprived of the power of words) is filled by the one love token he gave Rod in another attempt to convey his love for him: Tinker produces a large pair of scissors and cuts off Carl’s tongue. Carl waves his arms, his mouth open, full of blood, no sound emerging. Tinker takes the ring from Rod’s finger and puts it in Carl’s mouth. Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 69 Tinker Swallow. Carl (Swallows the ring.) (CL 118) Later on, Carl swallows the other ring he was wearing himself and that becomes another symbol to represent unspeakable love and the unutterable suffering both characters were subject to, as they were aware they were about to part: Rod takes off the ring and puts it in Carl’s mouth. Carl swallows it. He cries. They hug tightly, then go to sleep wrapped around each other. Tinker is watching. He pulls Rod away from Carl. Tinker You or him, Rod? what’s it to be? Rod Me. Not Carl. Me. Tinker (Cuts Rod’s throat.) (CL 142). The interruption in the process of transferential love by the cancellation of words due to inner trauma renders the different characters to return to the initial model of introjection, when words were similarly not available, and such oral emptiness is filled by, in this case, a token representing the love object and such transferential love process (the ring by which Carl was trying to formulate his eternal love for Rod at the very beginning of the play). According to Abraham and Torok, the passage from food to language in the mouth presupposes the successful replacement of the object’s presence with the self’s cognition of its absence. Since language acts and makes up for absence by representing, by giving figurative shape to presence, it can only be comprehended or shared in a ‘community of empty mouths.’ (1994:128) In Kane’s Cleansed that transference is reversed, as characters lose the ability to communicate through words the traumatic anguish they are experiencing as a consequence of the extreme way in which they deal with love relationships. In this sense, characters such as Robin, unable to write, read, and even speak at some points 70 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . (see quotation above) experiences the agonizing punishment to eat one by one all of the chocolates he had managed to get for Grace, thus again ingesting a token which becomes metaphorical of transferential love, as it as aimed at Grace, a removed or absent love object: Tinker (He sees the chocolates.) … Robin They’re for Grace. … Tinker lets go of Robin He opens the chocolates. He takes one and tosses it at Robin. Tinker Eat. Robin (Looks at the chocolate. He starts to cry.) They are for Gracie. Tinker Eat it. Robin eats the chocolate, choking on his tears. When he has taken it, Tinker tosses him another. Robin eats it, sobbing. Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it. Gil Cuder Ghostly Elusiveness and Melancholic Incorporation. 71 Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another. Tinker tosses him the last chocolate Robin retches. Then eats the chocolate. Tinker takes the empty tray out of the box – there is another layer of chocolates underneath. Tinker throws Robin a chocolate. Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another. Robin eats it. Tinker throws him another. 78 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . The comparison Carlson draws between theatrical performance and a human being’s memory machine is therefore effective and accurate when dealing with social, narrative memory. A conversation among friends is shaped by each of their previous experiences (and recollections) on a given subject matter and the extent to which such experiences are coincidental or asunder, determines each of these individuals’ implication and involvement in social interaction. In a similar way to this social exchange, “[t]he expectations an audience brings to a new reception experience are the residue of memory of previous such experiences” (Carlson 2003:5) and a spectator’s involvement on the action on stage will inevitably be determined by his previous personal schema related to the issues represented on the stage. We are dealing here with representation (the re-visitation of an already experienced act) both in narrative memory and theatrical performance. So, in which ways can theatrical performance become a valuable instrument in the presentation of traumatic memory, purposefully elicited so as to be experienced with the precision of its original occurrence by the members of the audience? 2 Taking into consideration Carlson’s contributions where he compares theatrical performance with social (narrative) memory, in this chapter I aim at an exploration of how the stage is also an apt site for the re-construction and presentation of traumatic memory. The performative mechanisms Carlson mentions in his introduction rely on already behaved behavior, which is the cornerstone for the classification of literary genres from the point of view of audience/reader reception studies: “the audience of a new work in the genre can be normally expected to have read other works in the genre and to apply the memory of how those works are constructed to the understanding and 2 According to Caruth and Herman, one of the distinguishing symptoms of post-traumatic stress is the authenticity of the traumatic recollections and reenactments, as the victim re-experiences the event as if lived by the very first time (Caruth 1995 and 1996; Herman 1992). Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 79 appreciation of the new example” (Carlson 2003:6). In this sense, while performance relies on the re-experiencing by the audience of a number of strategies already familiar to them and associated to previous aesthetic processes, there are also mechanisms by which the theatrical experience may present the original traumatic event with accurate precision, thus transporting the audience to the reality (and not the representative imago of a reconstructed fictionalized memory) of the original traumatic event. In this line, Carlson talked about what he defined as a ‘ghosting’ effect which “presents the identical thing […] experienced before, although now [presented] in a somewhat different context. Thus, a recognition not of similarity [as is the case with the identification of a genre], but of identity becomes part of the reception process” (Carlson 2003:7). As I intend to show in this chapter, this is the process the audience go through when certain theatrical mechanisms are encountered that make extensive to them the experience of a particular disturbing event. This evocation of a traumatic memory is characterized by the precision of recall, as it is experienced not as a narrativized or rationalized memory, but as the truthful unassimilated traumatic event, still uncorrupted by the logocentric mechanisms of narrative memory. Henceforth, mechanisms which activate the spectator’s identification and empathy with the action performed onstage coexist with this defamiliarizing aspect in theatrical performance that evokes other realizations of one same act, thus consolidating an already known genre and pointing to the fictional nature of the action onstage. In other words, the ghosting effect that Carlson mentions very briefly at the introduction of his book puts forward drama’s likeliness to establish a personal and individual bond with each of the members of the audience who, I argue, are in this way transported to the actual first person experiencing of the traumatic event represented on the stage, thus becoming able to understand the intrinsic paradoxical nature of traumatic memory 80 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . mechanisms: the victim’s urge to cope with the traumatic event comes into conflict with the development of psychological defense mechanisms attempting to deny it so as to normalize the victim’s everyday life. In “Foreword: The Camera’s Posthuman Eye”, for the collection of essays Lacan at the Scene (2009), Slavoj Žižek talks about the network of already behaved behavior that surrounds each individual’s life experiences, and how this network, or as he defines it, “the complex web of past experiences, affections, and so on…” …colors our raw perceptions [and] plays exactly the role of a transcendental horizon which makes our reality meaningful. When we are deprived of this transcendental network, that is, of the fantasmic coordinates of meaning, we are no longer engaged participants in the world, we find ourselves confronted with things in their noumenal dimension: for a moment, we see them the way they are “in themselves” independently of us. (Žižek 2009:xiii). 3 In this way, the same distinction spotted by Carlson in his analysis of performance and memory mechanisms is also explored by Žižek from a psychoanalitic point of view. His stance aims at an exploration of the different ways in which reality can be perceived, and how that perception of things may be easily distorted when the ‘fantasmic’ safety network (the things already known or experienced by the individual) is removed or somehow displaced. In this light, both authors point to a duality when it comes to the experiencing of reality (Carlson concentrates on the onstage performed and fictive reality and how it is perceived by an audience), and both of them turn to a terminology that foregrounds the haunting nature of such dual experiencing of life events. Žižek refers to the “fantasmic coordinates of meaning” (that is to say, the safety network built out of the things we already have some knowledge of and those memories which build up our individual perspective on things), while Carlson talks about the ‘ghosting’ effect on drama (appealing to the spectator’s recognition of an element in a play moved by a 3 Throughout this thesis I will favor Žižek’s spelling and use the term ‘fantasmic’, as it regularly appears in many of his works to be here much cited. Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 81 sense of identity that is not corrupted by the symbolic order). Žižek contends that it is only when we are deprived of the “fantasmic coordinates of meaning” (Žižek 2009:xiii), our schemata or previously given assumptions about reality, that we are granted access to the way things are by themselves, independently of us and our individual preconceptions. Drawing from this idea, and relying on Carlson’s contributions to the field of audience response already hinted at above, in this chapter I will argue that this state of pristine and uncorrupted perception, untainted by our preconceived coordinates of meaning, is aimed at through the management of a number of theatrical strategies on the stage which employ haunting effects to be analyzed in the plays included in this chapter. 4 And it is precisely by this receptive state that the plays I hereby explore manage to delve into the nature of traumatic memory, characterized by a precision of recall that moves away from subjective retelling and narrativization. The fantasmic onstage mechanisms to be studied in this chapter explore one of the distinguishing symptoms in post-traumatic stress disorder victims: dissociation and the split-self psychological mechanism. The dislocation of a given character’s ability to distinguish between her inner reality and the external reality, and the different theatrical devices employed so as to present such fragmentary perception of things will be the main focus of the present chapter. Three plays will be analyzed from the perspective of contemporary psychoanalytic criticism, Trauma studies, and Audience Response Theory: Sarah Daniels’ Beside Herself (1990), Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow (2006) and Carson Kreitzer’s Self Defense or Death of some Salesmen (2001). One of the main tenets on which this chapter relies is the idea that theatrical performance stands 4 The correlation in the use of terminology to identify this experiential process signaled by Žižek and Carlson points to the fantasmic nature of the experiencing of life events, which is elusive, changing, and always bonded to the subject´s perception. Similarly, I rely on the metaphor that compares traumatic memory with ghostly psychic mechanisms, as the trauma is elusive (the victim cannot have the power to access that memory in a voluntarily way) and yet keeps reappearing time and again, unexpectedly. In this chapter I will explore different theatrical mechanism (both drama and performance-based strategies) by which such metaphorical ghostliness finds onstage realization. 82 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . out as an adequate site to present this distortion in the perception mechanisms of trauma victims and to make that experience extensive to the members of the audience. Drama is a medium able to shift a human being’s sense of perception from self-centeredness to other-centeredness. The spectators are led to feel identified with the action on stage (as mentioned above) and to leave behind their transcendental coordinates of meaning (as put by Žižek) so as to be able to experience the traumatic events performed on stage without the corrupting involvement of their individual life experiences and (narrative) memories. The haunting strategies carried out on stage in the three plays to be analyzed in this chapter are devised so as to lead the audience into the experiencing of the splitting of a victim’s traumatized self by the presentation of a fragmented reality on the stage. Strategies such as the use of TV sets, mirrors and imaginary characters who unveil a subject’s internal world (which at the same time clashes with the social reality she is living) are brought on stage, thus providing a Brechtian effect which foregrounds a sense of duality both in the performed action and in the reception process: the audience is asked to empathize with the characters on the stage, and yet this identification process is interrupted time and again by the introduction of non-realistic and defamiliarizing devices by which access is granted to the traumatized character’s inner reality. The result is an experience based on the spectator seeing himself (reflected on a character he has developed empathy for) from another perspective, thus developing a sense of duality. This duality is reflected both in the traumatized characters, doomed to experience a double reality (their everyday lives and their inner struggle to work through the trauma), and in the audience, as the spectators feel a close identification with the action performed on stage at the same time that the Brechtian devices used in the plays remind them of its fictive nature. Henceforth, this chapter will study several strategies that, as I will try to show, explore the attempts carried out on stage to Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 83 formulate psychic identity, subjectivity and the functioning of the traumatized human ‘eye/I’ when interacting with and interpreting reality. Melanie Klein’s contributions to the field of psychoanalysis come to the foreground in the study of a human being’s perception of reality and of selfhood. Her work focused on the role of the split self, child identity formation and the establishment of an inside and an outside world as cornerstone for the creation of healthy interpersonal relationships. Unlike Freud, she contended that there is not a one-way staged process, moving from a beginning towards the end in the formation of human identity. Instead, she believed in psychic ‘positions’ and the idea that a human being’s psychic life was defined by the constant shifting from two different positions: the paranoid-schizoid position, and the depressive position. Both positions may appear time and again, and are not fixed psychic ‘stages’ (thus departing from Freud) that we all go through as children, never to return to them. Therefore, despite her interest in the study of children’s psychic mechanisms and the relationship with the mother as a key factor for subject formation, Klein’s contributions may as well be applied as a lens to interpret adult behavior. The first of these two psychic positions, the paranoid-schizoid position, already delves into the nature of psychic splitting, which Klein initially associates with the way in which the child has been brought up: “People who have been brought up by adults whose behavior combined elements of both cruelty and care towards them, may have problems separating good from bad.” (Julia Segal 34). Being unable to tell good apart from evil is as damaging for the child’s psychic development as deeply splitting good from bad in such a way that the child becomes unable to conceive of the two as being part of one same object. Splitting thus becomes a defense mechanism the child automatically resorts to. The paranoid-schizoid position is characterized, therefore, by the child’s limited ability to establish a relationship with external objects, which is only 84 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . reduced to the child’s perception of reality as partial and fragmentary (the mother’s breast, hands, etc). However, Klein’s positions, though based on the formation of a child’s inner and outside world, may reappear at a later stage during adulthood. When this is the case, the subject splits not only the external object in question provoking the traumatization, but also himself, as his psychic mechanisms are shaped by his perception of the world (which is in this case corrupted by the splitting mechanism, separating things that may belong together). 5 In her reading of Klein’s work, Julia Segal explains the functioning of the paranoid-schizoid position and the splitting mechanism: When one set of perceptions and phantasies is kept apart from another, the child (or adult) splits not only the object but also him or herself…Adults often have perceptions of themselves as more than one self. They might say ‘I’m not feeling myself today’ or ‘That wasn’t like me’, when they have done something which surprised them. (34) The second position the child goes through in this process of subject formation is that of the depressive position. Here, the baby acquires the internal emotional maturity that allows him to experience others as a whole, containing both good and bad aspects. Jacques Lacan’s famous contributions to the studies of split identities go in the same direction, but there is the major difference that, according to Lacan, the splitting process is not a ‘position’ that may be elicited time and again both in childhood and adulthood, but a single psychic transition (‘étage’) in childhood that he defined as ‘the mirror stage’. This phenomenon was initially explored by Henri Wallon, who in 1931 developed an experiment with a child put in front of a mirror with the purpose of studying this child’s identification of his own body reflected on the mirror. Later on, Lacan revised Wallon’s findings and changed the name given by the latter (‘epreuve du miroir’) into ‘stade du miroir’, thus synthesizing the Kleinian concept of psychic 5 For more on human character being shaped by the way the individual perceives the world see Slavoj Žižek’s Foreword to Lacan at the Scene, by Henry Bond (2009). Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 85 phenomena as ‘positions’ the subject may return to during his lifetime, and the Freudian sense of psychic life made up of different ‘phases’ that are gone through by each individual, never to return to them. However, it was not until he worked on his famous collection of essays and speeches Écrits (1953) that Lacan developed in full depth the question of the different stages in the formation of the individual as a rational and social being. On a speech included in this collection and first delivered at the International Congress of Psychoanalysis in 1949, he dealt with this subject matter and provided an in depth analysis of the ‘mirror stage’ in a person’s development into a social being. In this mirror stage, the child discovers his own reflection in the mirror, and becomes aware that there is a social self which goes beyond his own recognition of selfhood. This is the moment “that will henceforth link the ‘I’ to socially elaborated situations” (Lacan 2002:5). This Lacanian notion of the ‘split-self’ has been later on considered on many other different spheres other than psychological sciences. Feminist critics have referred to women writers’ processes of splitting and disassociation when dealing with the gap between the demands of the patriarchal literary tradition and those of their own authorship. 6 In their monumental analysis of 19 th C female authors, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, point out that women have been doubly repressed by patriarchal language by not only being excluded from authorship but, in addition, by being subjected to male authority (Gilbert and Gubar 11). They argue that repression would explain that, under the disguise of patriarchal discourse, women writers resorted to strategies such as palimpsest, rewriting and parody so as to “attempt the pen” (11) and tell stories of their own. That would explain, for instance, that, instead of dismantling the stereotypical binaries defining women within patriarchal culture, women writers have tried to re-signify their position by “alternately defining 6 The emergence of literary re-inscriptions as a cultural weapon against the patriarchal symbolic order will be further explored in chapter three of this thesis. 86 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . themselves as angel-women or as monster-women” (Gilbert and Gubar 44) and through “creating dark doubles for themselves and their heroines” (Gilbert and Gubar 79); that is, by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal discourse. Catherine Belsey contemplated a similar notion in literary discourses. Belsey studied the historical construction of subjecthood and argued that Lacan’s mirror stage is a double process when studied from the point of view of a female subject, since there is a further splitting of the initial first person identification that was originally male. This position of double alienation has as a consequence that the female subject is silenced, since it is downgraded to a secondary position (Belsey 149). According to Klein, a subject going through the paranoid-schizoid position creates a part-object where to deposit the internal psychic conflict. In other words, the subject in the paranoid-schizoid position involuntarily splits his own perception of the objects involved in the conflict, thus distorting his view of reality: “In the paranoidschizoid position, one-dimensional, one-characteristic part-objects created in this way are often used as a ‘solution’ to internal conflict…These part-objects serve the purpose of avoiding (rather than working through) internal conflict and guilt” (Segal 44). These notions on ‘doubling’ one’s identity and the silencing and later resurfacing of the female subject are further explored in Sarah Daniels’s Beside Herself. Beside Herself offers several theatrical devices so as to present on stage these mental processes involving the splitting of the victim’s self. The major strategy is the apparitional device to introduce an imagined character, Eve, a child-like split-self of the main character, Evelyn, who seems to have no notion of appropriate social behavior whatsoever, as is the case with any subject’s ego before going through Lacan’s mirror stage. A second major strategy in the play so as to present such sense of fragmented reality is the use of a broken mirror Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 87 at the center of the stage. The distorted image offered by the mirror creates a sense of fragmentariness that is thus managed by means of its constant presence on the stage. Similarly, Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow resorts to the use of the splitself so as to present the inner struggles of Woman, who is on her deathbed and going through a process of self-examination of her past. Such struggle is represented by Woman’s arguments with Scarecrow, her psychic life-partner. This imaginary presence will be analyzed in this chapter from the point of view of Klein’s ‘objective identification’: the process that “involves a fantasy in which some aspect of the self, felt as unbearable, is got rid of into someone else.” (Segal 37). Moreover, Carr makes also good use of the mirror image as a metaphor for the human need of self-recognition and reassurance about one’s existence in a familiar context just some hours before disappearing, or leaving behind everything that is known (Woman’s life, so far, which she is about to lose). 7 Just as in Lacan’s mirror stage a little child becomes aware of his existence as a social being by the discovery of his reflection on a mirror (and thus, by the discovery of subjectivity in a social world), Woman tries to metaphorically grab that very self-image reflected on a mirror granting her existence in the world she knows. That self recognition in the mirror is her proof that she has not disappeared yet and it establishes and verifies the reality she tries to hold on those very few hours before passing away. 8 There is, likewise, a significant trend in contemporary drama to use mirrors with the intention to translate the ineffable sense of fragmentary self. 9 7 Scarecrow What do you want the mirror for? Woman To watch myself die. I want to see how I am. I always look in mirrors to find out what’s happening to me. Please, bring it to me. I want to see if I’m still here. (WS 165) 8 The subject’s instinctive search for the authenticity of the self will result in a sense of displacement and distrust of our collective reality, which will bring about the deconstruction and fragmentary of the subject and his reality. As will be further explored in the analysis of Carson Kreitzer’s Self Defense or Death of Some Salesman in this same chapter, contemporary theater brings to the foreground the proliferation of a multiplicity of individual lenses by which the contemporary and precarious Real is represented, imitated 94 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . In Beside Herself, Daniels’ attempts to challenge patriarchal impositions are made explicit throughout, beginning with the non-naturalistic prelude against the audience’s expectations, as the connections between the prelude and the subsequent action in the play are not clarified, and so the audience’s critical mechanisms are awakened. The four female characters at the opening of the play discuss the veracity of male-biased statements concerning their stories, and the consequences that these inaccurate reports of their lives have had on their reputation. The fact that their discussion about the authoritative nature of the male voice in storytelling takes place at a hairdresser’s reinforces Daniels’ humoristic voice from the very beginning of the play as the women try to demystify the male view predominant in storytelling but they do so at the very place that traditionally highlights the stereotypical patriarchal view of women as superficial, shallow and vane. Delilah …What d’yer want to know, Eve? That I was damned for being an evil castrating bitch? And that’s what everybody believes I am. But do they ever bother to try and imagine what it was like for me –being married to a man for whom and afternoon’s work was killing a few hundred people with the jaw bone of a donkey? Do they heck. Mary Oh, what did you do? Delilah It was his hair weren’t it? To cut a long story short, I did. Mary You cut your husband’s hair without his permission? That’s terrible. (BH 2) Yet, at the same time, the non-naturalistic nature of this opening prelude sets the audience’s attention into a critical mode that is directed to certain topics that will be further developed throughout the play by means of comments made by different characters where they refer to, for example, the functioning of memory (“Mrs Lot Funny what gets remembered and what gets forgotten” BH 3) or the unquestionable supremacy of men’s voice in storytelling (“Delilah In the beginning was their Word” BH 5). This non-naturalistic setting for the opening prelude already establishes a Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 95 Brechtian mode of detachment for the audience which arouses their critical mechanisms and establishes a number of topics that will be discussed and presented throughout the play so as to be scrutinized by the audience’s thus awakened critical gaze. The fact that the characters in the prelude cannot be seen (“Eve What difference does it make. She can’t see or hear me. Nobody’s taken any notice of us for centuries” BH 6) along with the fact that their discussion and storytelling is silenced by a man’s voice (“Man (voice over the tannoy) Would those women causing a fracas in the biscuit aisle please be quite” BH 6) are further strategies hinting at the critical overtone the rest of the play will put forward. One of the aims of the prologue, therefore, is to establish a sense of split reality by questioning well-known stories that were taken for granted and offering an alternative vision to reality through the first person accounts told by the four female characters on stage. This interrogation of the traditionally accepted male truth and the presentation of a new view of reality will be further developed in the play by means of several strategies that will support the sense of split existence established in the prologue. The use of certain props (a mirror, a painting hanging on a wall…) and the introduction of a character playing the role of a psychic double for the main character will be some of the theatrical strategies pointing to the splitting of the main character’ s self (Lacan’s innenwelt vs. umwelt). Additionally, the action of the play will question the supremacy of the predominant interpretative gesture, generally tainted by a prevailing male view, and will point to the unreliable nature of words and the deceitful process of symbolic appropriation by which a misleading version of a given event main gain authority over the Real, that remains, thus repudiated. The predominant critical procedures in current analytical and philosophic trends increasingly search for the essence of humanity by spotting out the means that distort a subject’s view of reality. The notion of subjectivity is thus questioned time and again, 96 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . and a new task seems to dominate today’s critical procedures: “to think the essence of humanity outside the domain of subjectivity” (Žižek 2005:15). The theatrical stage offers an optimal terrain where to delve into the functioning of subjectivity and a subject’s perception of reality. Brechtian theory already explored theatrical means questioning the logical unity of the real, and managed to do so with his Verfremdungseffekt, which offered a fresh and distanced (thus unbiased by society’s symbolic impositions) view of reality. Today’s performing mechanisms have inherited Brecht’s approach to performance in the search for a trustworthy means to reproduce traumatic memory and the procedure undergone by the subject’s traumatized inner self. Belatedness and dissociation, traumatic symptoms dealing with the perception of reality, have been explored on stage in the attempt to spread an understanding of how a given traumatic event may distort the perception of reality. Belatedness deals with the inability to assimilate the trauma at the moment of its occurrence, and dissociation involves the split of the subject’s perception into a double apprehension of reality (one in which the subject accepts society’s impositions, and one where the trauma dominates perception mechanisms, thus ignoring the symbolic order). The idea that theatrical perception is also guided by analogous mechanisms makes of performance an apt terrain for the analysis of the domain of subjectivity. The audience needs time after each performance so as to digest the aspects dealt with on the stage, and experiences a process that may be paralleled with traumatic belatedness. Similarly, the reception processes are subjected to the split procedure by which the spectator’s imaginary identification with the onstage action is interrupted by the contradictory relations of the symbolic. The audience’s experiencing of the action performed may be analyzed, therefore, at two different levels: the identification with the reality represented on the stage and the simultaneous challenge to and distancing from such theatrical sub-reality Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 97 achieved by means of the explicit reference to the performing mechanisms (which is the case, especially when the theatrical action is exposed by means of Brechtian effects). In her analysis of Lacan’s statement “I see myself seeing myself” included in his study on “anamorphosis”, Diamond concludes that “The subject never really sees herself, then, except through the gaze of the other” (1995:152). In Daniels’ Beside Herself, Eve is this ‘Other’-perspective from which Evelyn gets to see herself. This new perspective offered by Eve is distanced from the symbolic order and so complies with Žižek’s stance that we need to see things anew so as to approach the Lacanian Real (in this case, the truth of the initial trauma): It is in such weird experiences that one catches what Lacan called gaze as objet petit a, the part of our image which eludes the mirror-like symmetrical relationship. When we see ourselves ‘from outside,’ from this impossible point, the traumatic feature is not that I am objectivized, reduced to an external object for the gaze, but, rather, that it is my gaze itself which is objectivized, which observes me from the outside; which, precisely, means that my gaze is no longer mine, that it is stolen from me. (2009: xiv) and …once a fantasy is realized, once a fantasmic object directly appears in reality, reality is no longer the same…what happens to the body when it is separated from its voice, when the voice is substracted from the wholeness of the person? (2009: xii) The role Eve plays in Beside Herself coincides with the fantasmic object Žižek refers to, the angle or the lens from which Evelyn is now allowed to observe and examine anew her bodily and social relations and her surroundings. Her entire view of a reality (which is biased by society’s standards and the symbolic order) is now fragmented and estranged (defamiliarized) through this procedure that thus suppresses our transcendental coordinates of meaning. This brand new view of herself that is now granted to Evelyn by the apparition of Eve as a spectral lens from which to analyze her reality is further developed by the use of certain props on the stage, such as the broken 98 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . mirror that presides the stage and which Evelyn covers with a painting by Pieter Brueghel (Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1558): Evelyn I knew it was supposed to be unlucky to have a mirror over a fireplace but (Pause.) I look good. Eve Stupid Evelyn I feel okay Eve Dirty Evelyn I’m alright. Eve Worthless Evelyn Just go away. Now, best place for the picture. Eve You shouldn’t talk to yourself. Not here of all places. (BH 14) Evelyn then hangs Brueghel’s painting on the wall so as to “disguise some of the mess until you’ve had time to clean up” (BH 14). In this fashion, she performs a similar move to her daily struggle to conceal and disguise her own psychic “mess”, and by doing so complies with the kernel of ideology that dominates the social realm, where the patriarchal order monopolizes the formulation of the symbolic real. During her entire life, Evelyn has been running errands, doing charity work, and decorating, thus making up a life that seems like a beautiful painting that covers “the mess until [she has] had time to clean up”. Evelyn’s Innenwelt and Umwelt are hence antagonistic: Evelyn’s “big Other” (in Lacanian terms, the symbolic order that regulates social life) and her spectral self (Eve, or her fantasmic self that does not seem to fit the symbolic social order) are in complete contradiction, to the point that Evelyn’s sense of identity, or her own conception of selfhood, breaks into pieces, just as her own fragmented reflection in the broken mirror presiding the stage, which “merely reflects on [her] sanity.” (BH 14) The notion of the ‘split self’ is thus introduced in the story by the doubling of the main character, Evelyn, who splits into two at the very opening of the play, her alter ego Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 99 being Eve. 14 There is, in this sense, a doubling of Evelyn’s experiencing of reality: her attempt to fit in the symbolic-social order at the same time that her fantasmic self breaks apart the taken for granted symbolized materiality. The broken mirror is thereof introduced as a device adding to the splitting effect which furthermore increases the sense of fragmentariness already aimed at by the doubling of the main character. In “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” (1949), Lacan described the mirror stage as a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipituously from insufficiency to anticipation – and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality –and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. Thus, the shattering of the Innenwelt to Umwelt circle gives rise to an inexhaustible squaring of the ego’s audits. (2002:6) Daniels also uses the mirror as a means to reveal Evelyn’s undecidability concerning her existential drive to ascertain the truth of it, at the same time that her symbolic self keeps denying the event and conforming to the fragmentary self it generated. When she comes into the living room and faces her shattered reflection in the broken mirror, she likes what she sees, as if she was satisfied with having just a partial view of herself and did not need (or was trying to avoid) having a complete picture of herself. Eve, her alter ego representing her repressed subconscious, tells her that attitude is “stupid”. Evelyn’s attempt to silence the voice of the repressed (“go away” in the quotation above) indicates she does not want to face the traumatic memory. Moreover, she utters out loud affirmative statements that sound redundant but are actually aimed at convincing herself of their truth, so she is not only trying to avoid the traumatic memory, but she is also hiding it under the false pretense that she is alright. 14 Eve also stands for a more primitive version of Evelyn’s female self within the biblical echoes of transgression and sin. 100 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . The analysis of Eve/Evelyn in terms of their naming is also revealing of what the function of each of these two characters is from a Lacanian point of view. “Eve” can be considered as short-name for “Evelyn”, just as the character itself works as a kind of child-like Evelyn, or an Evelyn whose personality is not well developed into the adult, social world. Eve might be regarded, therefore, as a child-like Evelyn before going through the mirror stage and discovering her external, social self. She is uninhibited enough to state out loud what she really thinks about people or about a given situation, while Evelyn is the voice of what is socially more appropriate to do, considering the given circumstances: Shirley I’ve got to go out. It shouldn’t be too long but we are destined to have a call from a couple on behalf of the local ratepayers’ association. Would you see them and give them the benefit of your diplomacy? Evelyn Me? Shirley If you don’t mind. Eve I do mind. … Shirly (curtly) Try, if at all possible, to put the liberal point of view. Eve No, I don’t want to … Evelyn Shirley, I’d love to, but I’m afraid – Shirley (not hearing) And thanks very much for doing the decorating… (BH 44) Thus, Eve plays the role of an Evelyn that has not gone yet through the whole process described by Lacan, but who is stuck in that initial step before the mirror stage and before developing social skills. On the other hand, Evelyn is nothing but a social being, and because of that, she seems to have lost that touch of humanity, sensibility or the ability to deal with the Other, that characterizes the social subject. That is especially made visible in the scene where she finds the dead body of Dave, one of the patients living in the community house. While Evelyn is only worried about the impression it would cause on the neighbors visiting the community center, it is Eve the one that first notices the dead body and alarms Evelyn. Thus, while Evelyn remains untouched, Eve demonstrates having feelings that override any social politeness rule. Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 101 Eve He’s dead! He’s dead! Evelyn I’m afraid the mirror got broken and we’re still waiting for a replacement. Eve Stop being so polite. Gaynor Not a very welcoming omen. … Eve That man in that chair has died Gaynor (ruefully) Not to the first seven years at least. Evelyn Can I get you a cup of coffee? Eve Try and say excuse me but I think something’s wrong and I can’t cope. Evelyn Please, come to the kitchen. This kettle’s boiled and you can see what it looks like. (Turns to go into the kitchen) Eve Don’t just pretend it’s all right… Are you mad? Are you mad? Weeps. (BH 49-50) It is Eve, then, who first notices and who first wants to do something about Dave’s situation. She urges Evelyn to get rid of her social commitment (she is showing the community house to two neighbors) so that she can attend this other task that Evelyn is not able to cope with because of her inability to deal with feelings and tasks appealing to human sensibility, since she seems to have lost that capacity for empathy. Evelyn’s daily life is thus reduced to her social façade and to a number of habits and routines that she herself acknowledges to perform only so as to fit into the symbolic order (such as the fact that she “only smokes socially” BH 18). It is the fact that she does not seem to find the way to fit her Umwelt, or the Eve inside her into this social world (Lacan’s Innenwelt) that tears her inner world into pieces (which is, as mentioned before, symbolized by the broken mirror). The broken mirror is therefore symbolic for Evelyn’s fragmentariness, as her inner self is also broken to the point that she does not react at the sight of a dead body of someone she used to know, lest her social image (and thus her role in the symbolic order) is damaged. 15 It is precisely this event that triggers Evelyn’s nervous breakdown and that finally forces her to face the trauma and to try to put everything on its place, just like the broken mirror needs to be moved and replaced for another one showing a reassuring reflection of the symbolic real: Lil Unnerving, 15 Evelyn avoids acknowledging Dave’s death so as not to alert the two neighbors visiting the social center that very moment (BH 49). 102 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . ain’t ithow you can only see a piece of yourself in a shard of mirror. It’s sort of like trying to recall a dream when you can only visualize the bit that woke you up. (BH 12) Lacan elaborated his theory about the mirror stage between the years 1936 and 1949. Borrowing Henry Wallon’s terminology, Lacan’s contributions, especially his latest version of the lecture on the mirror stage, offered a view of the mirror stage as a phase that determines “the function of imagos, which is to establish a relationship between an organism and its realityor, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt” (Lacan 2002:6). 16 The mirror stage establishes the transition by which the subject moves from a view of the self that is fragmentary and prosthetic to a comprehensive social view of the self. In addition to this, our holistic view of any given object (the one we gain after we go through the mirror stage, when we acquire a perspective of reality as filtered by our symbolic apparatus) is biased by our existence in a given community. This view of the symbolic real may be fragmented and estranged by certain procedures by which our transcendental coordinates of meaning are suppressed. When we are deprived of this biased view of the symbolic order and dispossessed of our fantasmic coordinates of meaning, then we are granted access to things the way they are “in themselves” (Žižek 2009). These procedures by which we are, so to say, separated from our body (from our taken for granted relations with the external world) allow us to access a non-biased (and maybe prosthetic) view of reality, untainted by the symbolic order, thus approaching the unbiased Real (Hegel’s Absolute). Beside Herself and the other two plays to be analyzed in this chapter offer such strategies by which the audience is removed from their seats and from their daily and taken for granted relations with the outer world, in the attempt to make the experience 16 Lacan’s views on identity formation coincided with Freud’s notion of a given subject’s psychic life as constituted by a series of phases with a beginning and an end never to be gone through again. Thus, Lacan’s stance opposed Klein’s line of thought according to which a subject’s psychic life is determined by a series of fluid ‘positions’ that are not restricted to one stage of the subject’s life but which can be reexperienced at other stages throughout life. Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 103 of traumatic dissociation extensive and understandable by the wider audience. Eve and the use of a broken mirror on the stage are examples of such theatrical procedures dominating the stage that aim at an authentic approximation to the Hegelian Absolute Real. Žižek’s ideas on the distortion of our “raw perception” (2009:xiii) remind of Klein’s major theoretical contributions, which already supported the idea that “Nothing is seen simply as it is: some kind of unconscious fantasy is attached to every perception” (Segal 29). Her stance on identity formation revolved around the idea that a subject’s psychic growth is determined by the going through different positions that might be re-visited in adulthood. The paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position were introduced by Klein as the two main psychic stands accounting for anxieties determining the development of the self. The paranoid-schizoid position is the psychic process where the child/subject’s perception seems to be blurred and characterized by a tendency to split the perception of the symbolic real into the extreme ‘good’ or the completely ‘bad’, while the process that tends to follow this one, the depressive position, is identified by the acquisition of a level of discernment that provides the subject with a more comprehensive and inclusive perception of the symbolic real. In Beside Herself, Evelyn’s psychic position is characterized by her split perception of reality. Eve represents all that has not been assimilated and worked through by Evelyn’s inner self or Innenwelt, the fantasmic Other or what cannot be processed and is thus esteemed as strange and ‘bad’, while her Umwelt is that which she esteems to be ‘good’, correct, or ‘normal’, if measured from the perspective of symbolic coordinates of meaning. The paranoid-schizoid position is, therefore, “The process of sorting out good and bad objects [which] involves projection of parts of the self. Perception is distorted…The boundary between self and other is in some ways denied” 110 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . figure and the female body, and conclude that there is a patriarchal tendency to dominate, control and dehumanize the aching and agonizing female body, and that is a consequence of prevailing cultural stereotypes such as women’s weakness, victimized and wailing nature. The professionalization of the clinic, drawn towards an elitist approach to medical treatment in which the patient is regarded as an object of study rather than a sentient being, was labeled by Foucault as biopower, and its scope is now thus expanded by authors such as Margaret McClaren, Lois McNay, Jana Sawicki and Fernández-Morales et al. so as to include the chauvinistic regulation of medical analysis and treatment. In Beside Herself, the dismissal of Dawn as a potential inmate to be treated in St. Dympha’s would be an example of the dominating male voice appropriating the symbolic nature of the clinical universe. Defamiliarizing strategies such as the presence of a grown-up actor in children’s clothes playing the role of dissociated ego, or the introduction of the theatrical action by means of a number of characters existing in a kind of surrealistic universe set up the spectator’s reading mechanisms so as to receive in a critical way (and thus so as to react actively) the action performed on stage. This critical approach to the vertical and gender-biased relationship between doctor and patient has been further explored in contemporary plays such as the already mentioned 4.48 Psychosis (2000) and also in Margaret Edson’s Wit (1995), where a renowned university professor who is terminally ill narrates her journey towards the last minutes of her life. The audience witnesses her struggle to be treated with dignity while on her deathbed, as her body is scrutinized and inspected by doctors looking upon her as if they were dealing with a non-sentient object of study. In a similar way, Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow (2006) also offers an approach to a woman’s deathbed and her struggle to end her life with dignity and sticking to the truth of her life experiences, thus Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 111 denying any external voices attempting to falsify and corrupt her life memories (mostly her husband’s but also her own inner voice, as she fights with her own split self, who appears in the shape of a ghostly scarecrow). Woman and Scarecrow (2006) thus perpetuates this tradition to analyze the power relationship between women and men in the context of the deathbed, where the female voice struggles to gain authority by defeating the so far dominating male presence in storytelling. Carr continues to explore the issue of the split self (Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position) employing strategies that remind us of the ones so far analyzed: the use of a mirror on the stage as an instrument for the main character to verify the integrity of the self, or the use of a double that is only recognized and accepted in the main character’s inner reality. Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow. “As I stand there, I see myself here,” 18 Scarecrow as Fantasmic Lens to Trauma. The diagnosis of illness where the means of assessment mostly rely on psychological factors has been defined as psychologisation (Goudsmit and Gadd 1991). Diagnosis by psychologisation takes place when there are little medical resources granting a more thorough reading of a patient’s symptoms, or when there is a lack of knowledge on the part of the medical professional, who may be additionally biased by the patient’s intrinsic or psychosomatic traits such as age, sexual orientation or what ,Goudsmit argues, is behind the majority of misdiagnosis by psychologisation, gender (Goudsmit 1994:8). The stereotypical portrait of women as weak, whining, hysteric and unstable, has in numerous occasions led to the misinterpretation of a number of symptoms that, if properly and clinically considered, would have been apprehended as 18 WS 200. 112 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . signals for the medically documented disorders that actually occasioned their appearance. The symbolic code revolving around the field of the clinic has traditionally been characterized by the predominant and influential male medical gaze, as exemplified in the misdiagnosis of Dawn’s case in Daniels’ Beside Herself. The conventional and formulaic portrait of female weakness has led to a generalized disregard of illness and death struggle as experienced by women. In Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow, Woman’s role as a dying wife assumes the above mentioned traits to the point that they are taken for granted and received with spite and animosity by her husband, who only blames her for not being able to take care of the children herself, and for not being able to finally die once and for all: Him …The children aren’t talking to me because I won’t let them go clubbing. They haven’t been to school in weeks. We’re all waiting! We’re all waiting! Die if you are going to. If not. Get up! … Woman just stares at him. You drive me to the limit every time so I say things that shouldn’t be said…Look, take this stuff…it’s revenge enough you are going. Must I watch you go howling? (WS 187) Illness as suffered by women and regarded by the male (whether it is the medical or a familiar) gaze has, in such a way, been reduced to a number of stereotypes that are difficult to overcome. As mentioned above, in The Birth of the Clinic (1963), Foucault claims that it was in the nineteenth century that the medical and clinic specialization of illness took place. However, he argues that there are (and there had always been before that medical classification of disease came into existence) other possibilities in the distribution of illness: The space of configuration of the disease and the space of localization of the illness in the body have been superimposed, in medical experience, for only a Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 113 relatively short period of time--the period that coincides with nineteenth-century medicine. This is the period that marks the suzerainty of the gaze. (1973:4) This unison of the clinical and the pragmatic gaze towards the ill body brought about the classification of symptoms, bodily afflictions, and the gender-stereotypical labels above mentioned. In Woman and Scarecrow, Carr creates a number of defamiliarizing techniques by which this unison is broken, and the audience is allowed a fragmented, geometrical view of the ill body’s atlas. In Woman and Scarecrow, Woman’s own stance is fractured by means of the alter ego-figure who accompanies her on her last journey before death. This journey will take Woman to re-visit and regard her past experiences with new eyes that remain untainted by the symbolic attempt to make sense of the Real. The splitting experience is accordingly explored on a twofold basis, as Woman’s split procedures somehow parallel the audience’s double experience of both empathy and concomitant detachment towards the action on the stage, achieved by the theatrical effects to be here further analyzed. In the play, Woman’s own split perspective illustrates the Kleinian transition from depressive to paranoid-schizoid positions, as she is doomed to retrace her lifelong steps in (symbolic) identity formation as she approaches death. According to Emilia Steuerman, one of Klein’s great contributions to the study of the psychic formation of the individual is “the dynamic aspect of the interaction between our internal world of object-relations and the external world of intersubjective relations.” (67) Klein’s work recognizes the flexible nature of psychic regressions and positions which defines the ways in which we deal with new life challenges such as loss or, as is the case in Woman and Scarecrow, the preparation for one’s own death. Thus, Klein’s psychic positions indicate that a human being’s psychic life is defined by the inter-play of particular psychological defense mechanisms. In Woman and Scarecrow Woman’s psychological 114 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . armor debilitates as she gradually approaches death, her mental state becoming weaker. The audience is allowed to witness the deterioration of her psychic life and her retrocession in terms of the positions and stages in identity formation as established by Klein and Lacan. 19 The play may then be regarded as a journey exploring Woman’s steps back in identity formation, as the different social roles she acquired throughout her life are revisited in her retrospective examination of her life with the help of a spectral figure: Scarecrow. The presence of the Scarecrow figure works as guidance in Woman’s revision of both her multiple symbolic identities and her social frame (such as her body, which is analyzed into pieces as if a non-sentient carcass) on the one hand, and her memories and inner life, on the other. Woman and Scarecrow both revisit together Woman’s past through a revision of her roles as mother, wife, lover and daughter thus offering a retrospective view of Woman’s self as she goes through a gradual process of existential disintegration (Woman “It is wonderful to have such a critical spectator on all one’s most intimate journeys” WS 167). The minimalist setting of the play aims at conducting our attention to the perpetual dispute between Woman and Scarecrow about past decisions and experiences (their authenticity as retold by one or the other) and the upcoming steps to be soon taken. Described as “[c]laustrophobic, distressing and stomach twisting.” (Sierz 2010:48), the play is more in contact with Carr’s initial absurdist style (Low in the Dark 1989), and it could be considered as an opening for a new writing development to some extent distanced from her more macabre ghost stories explored in chapter one in this thesis. It appeals for a very visceral kind of humor which relies on a woman’s despair not to be robbed of her memories and her identity roles (as mother, wife, lover and 19 Klein’s contributions in terms of the establishment of a series of psychic positions will be the main critical focus here, but an analysis of Woman’s psychic retrocession considering the return to her psychic identity before going through the Lacanian mirror stage will also be explored. Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 115 daughter), her place in the only (symbolic) reality she knows, as she approaches her own death. The play begins with Woman’s request to return to where she came from (“Woman I started out west. I’d like to finish there” WS 153), a request which is denied by Scarecrow, although it paradoxically becomes suggestive for the journey undertaken from that moment onwards in the play. As Woman’s life approaches its end, we witness a shift in her discerning mechanisms that comes hand in hand with the struggle she fights against her own unconscious or alterego, Scarecrow. Woman grows increasingly detached from the symbolic order and the holistic (and yet imperfect) representation of the Real there prevailing, so as to acquire a fragmentary perception of the Real in her revision of her past life. From a Kleinian perspective, Woman’s psychological defense mechanisms shift as he approaches her symbolic disintegration, as she moves from the depressive to the paranoid-schizoid positions in her attempt to preserve her memories (the only legacy that she is left with these very last moments) and so as to protect her integrity, or her symbolic identity, from foreign threatening attempts to distort it (her aunt’s, her husband’s and even at some points Scarecrow’s own portrayals of Woman’s past, which contradict Woman’s views). Scarecrow I know you made it up. That baloney about the red coat. It never happened. Woman Now you’re going to hijack my memories. Don’t you start! Scarecrow Why would you lie like that? Woman Are you telling me there was no moment with my mother on the day she died? Scarecrow There was a moment all right, but that wasn’t it. Woman That was a defining moment and now you want to take it from me. (WS 199) 116 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . This inner self struggle concerning the authenticity of a very fugacious recollection leads to a fantasmic re-visitation of that very moment when Woman’s mother was herself struggling against death. This re-visitation is meant for Woman to re-experience that very moment with the help of Scarecrow, whose function is to bring her closer to a noumenal understanding of her life, and to grant her the chance to regard her life from a lens unbiased by symbolic restrictions. 20 The more Woman approximates her death, the more distanced she becomes to the symbolic code filtering her view of the reality surrounding her and, hence, from her restrictive ‘fantasmic coordinates of meaning’ (as put by Žižek), or her symbolic understanding of the Real: Woman Details are all I have. The larger canvas has eluded me. Leave me the details. Scarecrow I’ll leave you the details that are true. Woman Then tell me what I’m wearing. What did I look like? I can’t see myself. Scarecrow Can you see her? A pause…a long pause. Woman Yes…I can see her. Scarecrow And what is she doing? Woman She’s sleeping. Scarecrow What else? Woman Nothing else. She’s sleeping. Her mouth is open. Her tongue is moving as if she’s sucking on something…I’ve never seen her asleep before. She’s on her side. The sheets are hard and white. Her mouth is open, her tongue is moving. Her hair is flat across the pillow as if someone had ironed it and nailed it there…And that’s all…surely that can’t be all. (WS 200) 20 Although a pristine definition of the Real is deemed impossible to achieve (John Mullarkey 2009, Žižek 2005) there are mechanisms that manifestly acknowledge the faulty representation of the Real through symbolic means. These eventualities, traumatic aftereffects, provoke a breach in that very symbolic order, thus proving its inconsistency. In Woman and Scarecrow, Scarecrow personifies that very breach in the symbolic system (by, for instance, refuting the veracity of Woman’s past memories), thus proving (although yet being unable to reach) the authenticity of the Real. Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 117 Scarecrow’s function in the play is therefore that of Woman’s alter ego (Sierz 2010:48), and also that of Woman’s prosthetic self which can be removed from all symbolic processes so as to approach (despite it being unattainable) a perception of the Real in itself. Woman’s detachment of the symbolic comes thus hand in hand with her psychic retrocession as she approaches her death. She gradually falls back to retrace the steps taken in identity formation to the point that she recovers a prospect of reality less tainted by the self-inclosed, consistent symbolic order, as is characteristic of the earlier stages of psychic formation, when the subject’s view of reality is fragmented. In this way, and as seen in the quotation above, Woman is able to follow the traits of the Real as she gains access to a more pristine picture of her past, now rid of the supremacy of the symbolic order. A subject’s symbolic standpoint is inevitably breached by remnants of the Real that disrupt the stability of the symbolic realm. The symbolic, therefore, “is disturbed by the remainder of the Real, a traumatic left-over which resists being integrated into the symbolic and thus disturbs its balance, rendering it ‘barred’, introducing into it a gap, flaw or antagonism; in short, inconsistency…” (Žižek 2012:661). Scarecrow becomes, in this sense, an impersonation of Woman’s traumatic memories, such as her mother’s death, her husband’s many adulterous affairs or the death of one of her children. All of them, unconscious unassimilated traumas, such traumatic left-overs come back to Woman’s consciousness during her last minutes of life through the figure of Scarecrow, who is there to grant her access to the uncorrupted true episodes now evoked to her. Scarecrow meets the Lacanian definition for the unconscious, according to which the locus of the unconscious is the “reflexive ‘giving account’, the inscription of what a subject does in the symbolic texture” (Žižek 2012:553). Scarecrow’s role is in fact that of ‘giving account’ to Woman’s past, and that of translating all of those experiences still incomprehensible to her. Thus, Woman’s 118 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . stance becomes illustrative of the Freudian divided subject, that who needs a translator to understand him or herself (Žižek 2012:554), in this case personified in the figure of Scarecrow, who becomes thus not only Woman’s alter ego but also her ‘analyst’ and guidance: And exit Him. Scarecrow He’s almost tolerable when he stands up for himself. Woman I’m out of control. I won’t be happy till I’ve ground him into the dirt. Scarecrow Validation of oneself sometimes involves that. Woman Right now nothing will satisfy but to bring him down with me. Oh Scarecrow, I’m so afraid. … Woman I see tombs in shadow, mossy, weather-scarred tombs and all the dead squashed in and me with them wondering if there is starlight above. I’m being buried alive. I am my own ghost. Scarecrow Hush for a while till we try and articulate it right. (WS 190) Woman becomes a subject more in touch with her inner self or alter ego, and the stance towards the Real there housed, thus moving away from her former multiple symbolic identities (as mother, wife, lover, daughter…) granted throughout her life. It is now when she has acquired the detached perspective that is necessary to revisit anew her past and her performance in the different traumatic events now invoked. A given subject is divided into his social (symbolic) self and his inner ego as a consequence of the void of its cogito, a void caused by the non-assimilation of a given traumatic event into the symbolic order. Symbolic features become a referent so as to identify a subject, as was already explored in the previous section with the analysis of Evelyn’s multiple social (symbolic) faces, conflicting with her inner self’s (Eve’s) needs in Beside Herself. A subject’s psychic life is inevitably determined by this void: by the consequent clash thereby occasioned between that subject’s symbolic identity(es) Gil Cuder Perspectives of Selfhood. 119 and by his/her inner take on that very particular traumatic breach (this void understood as a remnant of the Real that has not been assimilated and translated into the symbolic code). The clash between Woman and Scarecrow is precisely brought to the stage as a confrontation between the symbolic sphere and the Lacanian Real. A given subject’s own multiple faces are, therefore, more difficult to be identified and assimilated by oneself than that of any other alien or external reality. As Žižek illustrates by his analysis of a well-known dramatization of World War II Europe’s fantasmic processes of symbolic identification, the subject has as many faces as it is required by a given social stance, thus the difficulties involved in terms of distinguishing the many symbolic features which identify a subject in the social reality, and the connection these many faces have with the subject’s inner world or Real signified: In Agnieszka Holland’s Europa Europa, the hero (a young German Jew who passes as an Aryan and fights in the Wehrmacht in Russia) asks a fellow soldier who had been an actor prior to the war: ‘Is it hard to play someone else?’ The actor answers: ‘It’s much easier than playing oneself” We encounter this otherness at its purest when we experience the other as a neighbor: as the impenetrable abyss beyond any symbolic identity.” (2012:555) This game of perspectives that becomes central in a subject’s inner world finds in theatrical performance an excellent articulation by which this struggle is spotted out and formulated. The theater is the one medium where performative iconicity might be fractured so as to manifest the multi-layered nature of a single subject’s symbolic performance. This is especially so when considering Brechtian representative strategies, as there the audience is invited to look beyond what is put on the stage by the author. In Brechtian performance, mimetic properties such as the principle of iconicity are infringed for the purposes of social criticism (Diamond 1997:45). The intention here is precisely that of raising awareness about symbolic restrictions, prejudices raised by a 222 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . stimulate their audience’s critical capacity by appealing to unacceptable social realities (Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights, 2003). Theater’s immediacy (as opposed to film) and its demand of complete and continued audience attention (as opposed to television) makes of theatrical performance a highly adequate arena to appeal to contemporary issues that would concern the audience’s daily lives, or to denounce a so far silenced reality, thus provoking immediate reaction (Patterson 1). In his book, Patterson provides a comprehensive theoretical introduction where he enumerates the elements distinguishing naturalist from realistic theater, or, what is to be the same, reflectionist (descriptive) from interventionist (Epic) theater. While all the works that occupy his exhaustive study are to be classified as interventionist pieces, as they go beyond superficial narration and commit to the challenging and questioning of a number of contemporary political concerns, they are still somehow distanced from the group of works with which the plays to be studied in this chapter are categorized. Patterson’s twentieth century Political Plays, as already said, commit to the reality surrounding them to the extent of experimenting on stage on a line issuing from Brecht’s non-Aristotelian and thus unsettling and defamiliarizing theater practices. The plays to be analyzed in this chapter, if still to a great extent relying on Brechtian aesthetics, go beyond the Political Drama recalled by Patterson in that their appeal does not meet the limits of a particular economic or political situation, but rather use such specific political or social eventuality so as to pose questions going beyond any particular context. The ways in which contemporary Anglophone drama has evolved in its ambition to intervene in the socio-political panorama and has formulated such nonconformist aspirations becomes visible when carrying out a time-scope comparison of mono-graphical studies such as Patterson’s and Boll’s. In this vein, while post-war British drama focused its critical target mostly on domestic and/or economic issues Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 223 rather than in universal ethical concerns (Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians, David Hare’s Fanshen, Edward Bond’s Lear or Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, among so many others), contemporary interventionist plays have come to the foreground by their appeal to the moral capacity of human beings, and to do so, they tend to engage us in processes that have mostly been silenced by the Eurocentric symbolic procedures dominating our current systemic order. Contemporary reactionary drama is thus erected on a quest for truth and the formulation of an “ethics of unrest” (Middeke 2014) that would help us understand the behavior and nature of the human being. Thus, providing no definite answer to the questions still posed by the ultimate instigator of such theatrical quest, the playwright, today’s drama seeks to articulate the precarious nature of a traumatized society whose existence seems as uncertain and unexpected as the very means to represent it. And, as put by Butler (2004:144), it is precisely this aesthetic representative void that establishes the very foundations of contemporary ontological precariousness. The theatrical pieces that occupy us in this chapter are situated within the contemporary urge to articulate the sense of uncertainty characterizing contemporary ontological worries, and to formulate the questions that, if still doomed to remain unanswered, will reveal new realities and will provide us with a new lens to stare at our inevitably codified (and thus already symbolically tainted) coordinates of meaning. The war plays to be analyzed in this chapter thus share an inclination to question taken for granted ontological facts such as time, place and even the ontological dimension where the events are taking place (whether tangible reality, traumatic flashback or reverie). This is a consequence of the uncertain reality outlived by the different characters of all of these plays, and their unreliable existences as remnant-subjects of a collapsing regime and as witnesses of the construction of a new symbolic reality. Caryl Churchill’s 224 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . exploration of the Romanian Revolution in Mad Forest (1990), Naomi Wallace’s deconstruction of the Gulf War in In the Heart of America (1994), which brings in elements from the Vietnam War in a surrealist fashion, and debbie tucker green’s minimalist view of the impact of AIDS in Africa in Stoning Mary (2005); all those approaches to a shattered community thus question the reliability of the fantasmic coordinates of meaning upon which such symbolic orders relied. The interrogation of the reality surrounding the characters of these plays intends to translate such uncertainty to the audience by destabilizing their granted daily realities and maxims by which their lives become symbolically meaningful. Which kinds of violence are to be accepted upon which circumstances, or to what extent should we trust and welcome an Other (in the specific form of a refugee, for example, in Churchill’s play) into our exclusive and protective community, are some of the questions indirectly posed by these authors. In his book Violence (2008), Slavoj Žižek puts forward a classification of violence according to its ‘visibility’, i.e. according to the procedures by which the human subject codifies, and thus understands and tolerates violence. He distinguishes subjective violence from objective violence, and claims that the different types of objective violence (linguistic and systemic) display a kind of violence that has been filtered by our symbolic understanding of the Real. Violence constitutes here the ‘nonviolent zero level’ upon which other forms of already interpreted violence materialize. In contrast to this, subjective violence is the kind that we most frequently witness (violence enacted by a social agent, by a particular evil individual, at a demonstration, by the police forces…). Subjective violence is the one we witness and tend to condemn or tolerate according to the symbolic background by which we read it (established precisely by the two different kinds of objective violence: our given linguistic grid and Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 225 systemic understanding of our communities, by which violence is silently, covertly and yet effectively manipulated): Subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a nonviolent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent…Subjective violence is just the most visible of the three (Žižek 2008:211). It is systemic and linguistic violence, the two types of objective violence distinguished by Žižek, that the authors of the three plays to be analyzed in this chapter try to deconstruct so as to expose our blindness to it. We are subject to the symbolic codification of the Real in general and of violence in particular, and take for granted a ‘zero-level’ standard, or the limits of what should be tolerated, without realizing about the indoctrinating procedures that we are subordinated to as members of a given community. It is then precisely the kind of violence that is tolerated by our society, the kind of abuse or aggression for which we do not try to find responsibility (as our social code interprets and reads it as acceptable) the one that these three authors question in their work. To achieve this purpose they appeal to specific conflict zones or war contexts where all symbolic and systemic coordinates of meaning seem to be on the verge of collapse due to war or revolution. And still, in their work, they go beyond the specificity of the given conflict upon which the very action of the play is built, so as to transcend that particular reality and formulate ethically and existentially relevant questions. Churchill, Wallace and tucker green thus partially rely on realistic strategies (the daily lives of the characters that become the focus of action, for instance) and yet manage to deviate from a naturalistic description of a recognizable world by aesthetically and transcendentally questioning the reality surrounding their characters. As way of illustration, the action of Wallace’s In the Heart of America, despite 226 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . initially relying on the pragmatic realities of a number of characters personally involved in the first North American intervention in Iraq (1991), turns into a surreal decomposition of each of the character’s stances, their involvement in the Iraqi conflict, and their personal lives before and after the war. Wallace thus twists taken for granted ontological parameters, and she blends past with present, introducing traumatic flashback and different realms in such a fashion so as to confuse memory with tangible real, alive with dead, and even the eventuality of the actual Gulf War with reminders of the Vietnam War. The audience hence reaches a point where all taken for granted realistic facts on which the action initially relied are questioned, as they move from the original attempt to partake of the action performed, towards a total unreliability that only reflects the uncertainty and precariousness experienced by the characters, all of them in some way or another victims of war trauma. The aesthetic equilibrium found between the realistic approximation to a character’s daily struggle and the extreme alienating distancing from the performed action through such non-narrative and non-naturalistic means brings these three plays together in their attempt to interrogate our own daily experiencing of either objective violence (as put by Žižek) or our natural (symbolically biased) involvement in major socio-political events. Churchill’s approach to the Romanian Revolution is mainly formulated through the gaze of two families, one of them visibly accommodated, the other one humbly struggling to maintain their social status. Additionally, in Act II Churchill explores the development of the revolution from the very first-hand accounts of random individuals who try to rigorously reconstruct in a disorderly and collage kind of fashion their experiencing of systemic uncertainty and violence during the revolt. The impact of the trauma, which comes forth only belatedly in their failed attempt to make sense of it, along with their uncertainty concerning what is left for them to hope for after Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 227 the derogation of a system that, despite being repudiated, was their only known reality; such conglomeration of human feelings finds representation in this dual aesthetic lens by which we are allowed access to the (still chaotic and precarious) testimonial formulation of the very traumatic event from the lens of the traumatized individual, just to be afterwards pushed away and distanced from it by means of a surrealist aesthetics deconstructing the whole reality upon which such individual experiences are built. The three plays to sustain the investigative focus of this chapter align with a view of ethics that is mostly based on Alain Badiou’s contention that all humanity is rooted in the identification with an Other. As a consequence of that, he argues, there is no ethics in general or abstract terms, but an ethics that draws its maxims from the specific situation of a given individual: All humanity has its roots in the identification in thought [en pensée] of singular situations. There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventuallyethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation…From the very beginning, ethics is the ethics of the other, it is the principal opening to the other, it subordinates identity to difference.” (2001:16-7) It is because of this that contemporary plays still rely on the realistic approach to the particularities of a subject’s everyday life experiences, as the everyday lives of the witnesses of the Romanian revolts in 1989. And yet, as I will try to demonstrate with my analysis of the three plays above suggested, these plays set forth a transcendental and ethical agenda aiming at the deconstruction and Brechtian defamiliarization of our ontological surroundings so as to be able to re-visit them with a brand-new gaze no longer tainted by our systemic and symbolic code. This ethics of estrangement, uncertainty and representational precariousness brings these plays together and characterizes contemporary plays dealing with the individual’s metaphysical struggles to make sense of our symbolic reality. Furthermore, it is this ambition, I argue, what moves contemporary aesthetics away from the foregoing interventionist political plays; 228 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . their appeal to ethical and existential questions goes beyond the realistic portrayal of a character’s traumatizing experience in war or any other social or political conflict. These theatrical attempts thus try to deconstruct, make sense of and denounce a reality that seems to vanish after the collapse (through war or revolution) of a no longer valid system, and similarly scrutinize the victim’s sense of unbelonging, unsteadiness and dispossession. Julia Boll’s study focuses on recent war plays and inspects different performative strategies brought about so as to materialize on stage the atrocities that would otherwise remain invisible for the Western audience. Contemporary war plays hence put the audience in the position of the victim and thus make war accessible for a kind of audience that would otherwise remain ignorant of it (Boll 24). In this chapter, I will try to demonstrate how this attempt to make war trauma extensive to the audience does not only rely on the realistic description of a number of character’s involvement in the war or conflict in question, but also, and especially, on a rather contrasting strategy that distances the audience in a Brechtian fashion from the atrocities staged. This is done by means of an aesthetics of deconstruction which manages to distance the spectator from the particular stories of the characters so that they are able to regard the reality performed from a new lens, rid of symbolic and systemic restrictions. The figure of the ghost and the aesthetics of spectrality, whose function in different theatrical contexts has been explored in the previous chapters of this thesis, now become a valid theatrical mechanism to evoke the uncertainty and precariousness that defines the traumatized individual, as well as the shattered community where he/she belongs. It is through the figure of the ghost, and the elusiveness and uncertain aura that surround it, that these plays manage to appeal to both the realistic specificity of a given individual’s Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 229 traumatic experiencing of a community’s deconstruction by war eventualities and the Epic distancing to such collapsing reality. By means of this theatrical strategy these three plays foreground the irrationality and surreal logic characterizing the precarious experiencing of war reality (the derogation of symbolic order and the questioning of social ontological realities that it entails). It is the ghost-figure that best captures the haunting and unsettling aura of war, as in its very undecidability, it becomes metaphorical and representative of such ontological void characterizing the liquid (in the sense established in Bauman’s contributions) transformation of a nation after war or revolution. The ontological uncertainty predominant in times when all that was known and taken for granted disappears is reflected in the experimentation with time, space and existential boundaries. And it is the theatrical terrain that offers the best arena to materialize such transcendental uncertainty by means of the plasticity it offers to re-dispose of time, place and ontological structures. Mad Forest resorts to the visitation of a character’s individual trauma by means of the transgenerational phantom theory already explored in chapter one of this thesis, when discussing melancholia as participating of individual trauma and studying the different mechanisms to perform it on stage. Similarly, Churchill makes use of other spectral figures (such as a vampire) and thus starts to experiment with the potential of stagnant and spectral aesthetics so as to formulate the existential precariousness of the individual when his/her surrounding reality is thus threatened by systemic collapse. 4 In the Heart of America uses the figure of two ghosts (one of them described in the characters’ description as “a ghost, but more solid”, the other as the wandering soul of a 4 Churchill will further explore such spectral aesthetics based on the inertia and aimlessness of the victim of totalitarian systems in her 2003 play Far Away. 230 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . still alive Vietnam War veteran) as medium to shake, distort and finally deconstruct the already doubtful reality on which the realities of the two living characters rely. Similarly, the unsettling and terrifying force stirred by the speechless ghost-figure, the Child Soldier, along with an overall minimalist and laconic use of language, contribute to the fragmentation of the characters’ reality and the overall interconnectedness of the thus scattered story presented to us in Stoning Mary. The ontological elusiveness, the inability to make sense of one’s systemic and symbolic surroundings and the consequent existential instability thereby occasioned is reflected in such fragmentary and spectral aesthetics of the elusive and yet persecutory and unavoidable trauma that the characters in the plays to be analyzed are doomed to confront. In her already mentioned and much commended study on traumatic memory, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Caruth contends that Ever since its emergence at the turn of the century in the work of Freud and Pierre Janet, the notion of trauma has confronted us not only with a simple pathology but also with a fundamental enigma concerning the psyche’s relation to reality. In its general definition, trauma is described as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flash-backs, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena (1996:92). The systemic and symbolic violence, in Žižek’s terms, triggering the outbreak of hostilities covered in the three plays object of study in this chapter is revealed by means of the fragmentary and deconstructive theatrical modes above mentioned with the intention to shed light on the psychic (at an individual level) and existential (in terms of the consolidation of a community’s symbolic normativity) mechanisms regulating the traumatic disposition of contemporary times. The formulation of the very ethical grounds through which the human gaze reads the different systemic crisis revisited on these plays seems to fall into the ineffable due to the non-symbolic nature of traumatic experience. The codifying means hence regulating a subject’s symbolic construction of Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 231 the reality surrounding him/her does suffice to read and interpret the traumatic experiencing, which remains then unidentifiable and yet insistently haunting the victim. The subject’s incapacity to interpret their traumatic surroundings (the derogation of the systemic reality upon which their daily lives were constructed) by the means at their disposal (their linguistic or systemic codifying means) is explored in these plays by the ontological and linguistic deconstruction strategies to be analyzed in this chapter, of which the elusive and yet haunting spectral aesthetics becomes herald. Churchill’s Mad Forest thus begins by warning the reader in the production notes about the play’s linguistic development, moving from silence and speechlessness towards extreme linguistic fragmentary, chaotic and non-narrative speech: “The play goes from the difficulty of saying anything to everyone talking” (MF 9). Tucker green’s Stoning Mary similarly visits the ineffability validating a subject’s trauma by means of a minimalistic and stinging style where the role of prolonged pauses and the silent and ghastly presence of specter-like characters builds up the breathtaking and sudden effect of traumatic re-visitation. As put by Žižek, and echoing Badiou in his definition of contemporary ethics around the truth of transcendental events, it is a traumatic event’s “very factual unreliability, its confusion, its inconsistency” (Žižek 2008:4) that constitutes its very traumatic, unreadable and uninterpretable nature. It is thus such non-symbolic, nonnarrative nature defining the traumatic recollection that identifies it as a truly relevant and ‘transhistorical’, in LaCapra’s terms (2013:148-64), traumatic event. The aesthetic turn hence attempting to grasp such precarious and elusive experience must appeal and evoke rather than aim at the accurate description of an eventuality escaping all symbolic and codifying means of articulation. “Realistic prose fails” (Žižek 2008:4) and it is at this narrative impossibility that the aesthetics of verbal collapse, ontological 238 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Gabriel. The poor Hungarians have a bad time because they’re not treated better than everyone else. How did they treat us when they had the chance? They go abroad and insult Romania to make people despise us. Lucia. This is what we used to say before. Don’t we say something different? (MF 53) Mihai. Nimic nu e pe baze realistice. (Nothing is on a realistic basis.) … Gabriel. Diferit acum. (Different now.) (MF 85, 87). Mary Luckhurst’s analysis of the play (which she herself directed and brought to the York Theatre Royal stage in 2007) centers on the idea that Churchill’s major concern was to reflect the events of 1989 from a foreigner’s point of view, hence the consequent experimentation with “clashing performance styles, her juxtaposition of the surreal with the real, of the imaginary with eyewitness accounts, of the dead with the living, and her subtle use of the micro-political to illuminate the macro-political…” (2009:63). The idea that the play accentuates an outsider’s view of the event, and focuses on the barriers of understanding which blur a foreigner’s transcendental stance concerning the systemic order of an alien community is explicitly formulated in the title, which announces that we are about to witness a play “from” (and not ‘about’) Romania (M. Luckhurst 2009:64). Similarly, Churchill clarifies the title at an introductory note to the published edition of the play, where she refers to the forest upon which Bucharest was erected, as “impenetrable for the foreigner who did not know the paths” (MF 7). The titles for each of the scenes are to be announced in Romanian, then translated into English and read “from a phrasebook as if an English tourist” (MF 14), and then repeated once more in Romanian. The image of the tourist is thus explicitly evoked so as to indicate, as M. Luckhurst argues, the blurred, confusing and fragmentary optics, as if from the perspective of an outsider, that the play puts forward. Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 239 And yet, still keeping in mind such certain stance that the play by all means reminds of an outsider’s partial and symbolically blurred and biased view, I would like to suggest a further lens from which to analyze the introduction of the tourist-figure (or the tourist-lens), following from Zygmunt Bauman’s understanding of modern life. In contrast to the previous conception of life in former times, by which our existence could be measured by the steps we take, the paths we choose and the self-reality we gradually and episodically construct, the contemporary subject has no certain soil where to rely and no chance of constructing a cohesive and consistent life strategy. Modern lives resemble more a collection of ponds than a river (Bauman 1996:10). We do not stand anymore in secure soil but on moving sands where our steps do not leave a track, and so it is impossible to build a safe and purposeful path. According to Bauman, the figure of the pilgrim arduously and diligently completing a lifelong and meaningful pilgrimage does not apply anymore to the modern subject, who is rather identified with the tourist, aimlessly wandering around an unfixed world where he does not belong; the tourist just keeps moving without actual certainty or strategy. Mad Forest is a superb materialization of Bauman’s theory about the tourist and the vagabond as modern paradigms for the contemporary precarious subject. As Churchill herself formulates through one of her characters in her later play, Far Away, “everyone’s moving and no one knows why” (2000:43); and as the vampire in Mad Forest states and then repeats in the line by which the play finishes: “you have to keep moving faster and faster, that eases the pain, seeking” (MF 46). The uncertainty of such aimless and yet nonstoppable existential move thus exposes the lack of solidity characterizing the contemporary being that Bauman no longer identifies with the figure of the foresighted, constant and steady pilgrim able to acknowledge the path already walked and to plan his upcoming route, but with the figure of the unfixed tourist. Furthermore, in “Tourist and 240 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Vagabonds: Heroes and Victims of Postmodernity” (1996), he further distinguishes the figure of the vagabond as opposed to that of the tourist relying on a trait which opposes one to the other: free will. In Mad Forest, the curious tourist peeping at the events taking place in Romania in December of 1989 from a completely detached and uninvolved perspective (thus our free choice to either watch or ignore the event) clashes with the individuals whose traumatic involvement in the event occupies the central action of the play (thus dog-like ‘vagabonds’ having no choice but to struggle to construct a new whole existence from the remnants of the traumatic occurrence). 10 In this sense, the formulation of the play through a tourist’s lens, so to say, also points to a superb aesthetic formulation anticipating the fluid dynamics of modernity that Bauman would later on capture and define in his theory of the tourist and the vagabond: “tourists and vagabonds are the metaphors of contemporary life…Having this in mind, I suggest that in our postmodern society, we are allto one extent or another, in body or thought, here and now or in the anticipated future, willingly or unwillinglyon the move” (Bauman 1996:14). The naïve and shallow description of each scene as announced by the scene titles (read as if from a tourist’s phrasebook, as mentioned above) thus not only underlines a foreigner’s ignorant gaze, as already pointed out by M. Luckhurst (63), but it also formulates a criticism of today’s world order as articulated by Bauman’s theories of the individual and his constantly ‘on the move’ existence in modern liquid times. The vampire in Act II thus encourages the homeless dog to constantly stay on the move so as to avoid unnecessary pain. 11 And the abandoned dog finds no other way but to follow the vampire to an eternity of uncertain and unreliable existence. The lack of free will 10 See below for an analysis of Act II in Mad Forest, where an abandoned and beaten dog embraces the only chance for survival presented to him in the shape of a vampire. 11 “The shorter the trip, the better the chance of completing it.” (Bauman 1996:10) Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 241 characterizing the vagabond (just as the dog in Act II) thus contrasts with the tourist’s privileged uninvolved lens. Such shallow voice is hence formulated at scene headings such as “6. Doi oameni stau la soare. Two men are sitting in the sun” (MF 17), for a scene actually showing how Bodgan is being coerced by a Securitate, “4. Elevii ascultă lecţia. The pupils listen to the lesson” (MF 16), for a scene where Flavia, a school teacher, convincingly indoctrinates her students into Ceauşescu’s ideas, presenting him as a hero and liberator, or “2. Toată lumea speră ca Gabriel să se însănătosească repede. Everyone hopes Gabriel will feel better soon” (MF 47), scene which actually presents the two families’ growing disquietude and post-traumatic anxieties, and their initial struggle to start formulating and belatedly making sense of the event changing their lives. Reminiscent of a child’s perspective, the titles summarize from a completely simplistic perspective the content of each of the scenes. They thus formulate in an alienating fashion the superficial and sometimes careless Western voice in our detached, superior and tourist-like approach to the appalling reality affecting an Other which appears to our eyes as a far and abstract reality (a reality that we, as allowed by the free will granting our privileged status as existential ‘tourists’, might just as well ignore). The three acts-structure of the play, far from falling into traditional dramatic arrangement, formulates the stages gone through by a community exposed to collective trauma. Act I is thus an articulation of Romania’s stagnant fantasmic state defined by the inertia of a system which is in vain dragged to aimless (and this useless) movement. Silences and the appearance of ghostly and non-human characters support the aesthetics of dormancy and stagnancy which formulate the Romanian community’s reality before the revolution. The turning up of the radio’s volume so as to cover the silence (most notably in scene one, Act I) and prolonged inarticulacy (for instance, Bodgan, father to 242 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . the Vladu family, only gets to articulate four words throughout Act I) are already met from the very beginning at the opening scene where nonsensical conversation blurred by the loud music on the radio guide the audience to rather concentrate on the interaction between the characters, by which the sense of insecurity and precariousness is transmitted: LUCIA and FLORINA laugh. BODGAN picks up an egg and breaks it on the floor. IRINA gathers the other eggs to safety. LUCIA and FLORINA keep still. IRINA turns the radio up loud and is about to say something. BODGAN turns the radio completely off. IRINA ignores him and smokes FLORINA gets a cup and spoon and scrapes up what she can of the egg off the floor. LUCIA keeps still. (MF 14) Disturbing silences thus repeatedly transmit a sense of disconcert and fear (scene five, Act I) characterizing the resignation to the inertia of concatenated occurrences under a vicious system that is taken for granted and accepted with resignation. Scenes throughout Act I that do show regular daily conversation only reflect the falsity and corruption of a systemic reality about to meet its collapse. That is the case of scene six, where “[t]wo men sitting in the sun” (MF 17) happen to reflect governmental distortion, or scene nineteen, where words clash and contradict the fraudulent practices allowed by the corrupt systemic coordinates under Ceauşescu’s regime: LUCIA and a DOCTOR. While they talk the DOCTOR writes on a piece of paper, pushes it over to LUCIA, who writes a reply, and he writes again. Doctor. You’re a slut. You’ve brought this on yourself. The only thing to be said in its favour is that one more child is one more worker. Lucia. Yes, I realize that. Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 243 Doctor. There is no abortion in Romania. I am shocked that you even think of it. I am appalled that you dare suggest I might commit this crime. Lucia. Yes, I’ m sorry. LUCIA gives the doctor an envelope thick with money and some more money. Doctor. Can you get married? Lucia. Yes. Doctor. Good. Get married. The DOCTOR writes again, LUCIA nods. Doctor. I can do nothing for you. Goodbye LUCIA smiles. She makes her face serious again. Lucia. Goodbye. (MF 19) In this fashion, when words are uttered, they do not seem to meet the reality about the functioning of these characters’ world, but rather contribute to the falsity and symbolic pretense protecting the very system condemning them to their fantasmic existences. It is precisely in the spectral realm, where they are allowed to talk to nonhuman entities, that the characters find protection and the freedom to meaningfully utter their real inside feelings: Scene nine, where a priest reveals his distress to an angel, or scene twelve where, against her husband’s seemingly inexorable silence, Flavia reveals her fears to the ghostly figure of her dead grandmother. Both characters are shown as terrified not only about the regime strangling their existences, but also about the inevitable passing of time with a sense of not having made use of it, and under the uncertainty concerning the direction where they are headed. Hence, both the priest and Flavia resort to such non-realistic fantasies so as to liberate their fears and uncertainties, otherwise suppressed by the restrictions of the systemic order governing their existences: Priest. I don’t trust you any more. Angel. That’s a pity. Who else can you trust? 244 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Pause. Would you rather feel ashamed? Pause. Or are you going to take some kind of action, surely not? Silence. Priest. Comfort me. (MF 22) and Grandmother …Who do you talk to? Your closest friend is your grandmother and I’m dead, Flavia, don’t forget that or you will be mad. … Flavia. Yes, my life is over. Grandmother. I didn’t say that. Flavia. I don’t envy the young, there’s nothing ahead for them either. I’m nearer dying and that’s fine. … But nobody’s living. You can’t blame me. Grandmother. You’d better start. Flavia. No, Granny, it would hurt. Grandmother. Well. Silence. Flavia. Mihai. MIHAI goes on working. Mihai. He looks up. Silence. (MF 27) In this way, Churchill blends real with imagined and human with non-human, so as to create a dismal atmosphere of ghostliness, hybridity and stagnancy which defines these characters’ resigned and subdued commitment to their empty and false symbolic reality. Consequently, the blurring of ontological foundations thus contributes to the creation of Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 245 an alienating aesthetics which will gain more prominence as the play develops. The first scene of Act III, “1. Cîinelui îi foame. The dog is hungry” (MF 44) becomes in this sense a defining moment in the play, as it announces the development of such surrealist aesthetics of ghostliness. The conversation there held between an abandoned dog and a vampire becomes metaphorical for the situation of the individual under a state of complete precariousness after the dissolution of the systemic and symbolic reality sustaining his existence. Just as Bauman’s vagabond, the subject whose systemic real has been shattered into pieces wanders in a state of disorientation and vulnerability (having no reality where to ground his own social persona, and so no other choice but to keep moving with no ontological certainty), like an abandoned dog, desperately looking for an owner who would protect him and give him shelter. The dog’s ambivalent feelings towards his last owner, who kicked him and mistreated him, are thus also met by the individual facing the construction of a new whole systemic real, who condemns but at the same time misses the former dictatorial system causing his existential asphyxia: Vampire. Do you belong to anyone? Dog. I used to but he threw me out. I miss him. I hate him. (MF 45) and Silence. Radu. What? Why? Florina. I miss him. Radu. You miss hating him. Florina. Maybe it’s that. Radu. I hate Iliescu… (MF 61) 12 12 Ion Iliescu, to be elected for presidency as leader of the National Salvation Front at the legislative elections held in 20 May 1990. 246 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Luckhurst’s reading of the opening scene to Act III understands it as “a reminder that material deprivation and poverty provide a dangerous engine to the political machinery of state” (M. Luckhurst 68), as she identifies the figure of the vampire as “a manifest allusion to Ceauçescu himself” (67), and the dog, disoriented and desperately looking for an authoritative figure to subjugate him, with the Romanian community after the deposition and execution of Ceauşescu. Along these lines, the abandoned dog, “undecided between eagerness and fear” (MF 44), represents in a Brechtian defamiliarizing fashion the precarious subject’s excitement after the triumph of a community over his vampiric instigator (“Doctor. For the first time in my life I felt free to laugh” MF 38) and yet, at the same time, the simultaneous sense of panic at the ignorance about what is coming next on the one hand, and at the sense of emptiness at not having any tangible reality on which to rely, on the other (“Mihai…Nothing is on a realistic basis” MF 66). Flavia’s words at her son’s wedding, represented at the last scene of the play, summarize such ambivalent post-evental feeling of speechless euphoria and yet inner fear: “What’s so wonderful about a wedding is everyone laughs and cries and it’s like the revolution again.” (MF 74) Act III becomes in this way the aesthetic articulation of the individual’s posttraumatic uncertainty about the event, and his relentless determination to grasp the evental occurrence in its exact entirety, which time and again proves to be impossible. The characters thus constantly search for sources confirming what they esteem to be the truth of the event, even though such sources might be defined by their very fictional basis, as is the case of dreams, nightmares, or television: Patient. Did we have a revolution? Or what did we have? … Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 247 Radu. The only real night was the 21 st . After that, what was going on? It was all a show. Lucia. No, it was real, Radu,/ I saw it on television. (MF 53) In such a context of distrust in which the boundaries separating real from fiction/dream and dead and alive are thus blurred, the traumatized and disoriented community keeps desperately searching for means to grasp the truth of the event. Badiou defines the subject as incomplete and inexistent before the very occurrence of the event. And it is precisely in their attempt to grasp and make complete and rational sense of the traumatic event (which proves to be impossible due to its ghostly and elusive nature) that the characters of the play look for self-existential confirmation. As already discussed throughout this thesis, due to the ineffability characterizing the very traumatic event, belated performance appears as the most effective strategy in the attempt to formulate the veracity of the event, due to the void characterizing the symbolic order on those grounds. Under a state of complete disorientation, with no symbolic or systemic reality on which to rely any longer, the Romanian community found in Churchill’s (despite it being from a ‘tourist’s’ perspective) performative attempt a relieving working-through experience by which their inarticulate precariousness found momentous aesthetic pair. 13 Identically so, the meta-representation of the very moment of the execution of the Ceauşescus, performed by the characters of the play in scene six, appears as a traumatic acting-out mechanism to confirm the truth and veracity of the event (MF 68-71). According to Badiou, it is the very fidelity to the event that defines the human nature: “It is our capacity for truthour capacity to be that ‘same’ that a truth convokes 13 Despite the play’s “unfinished feel” (Nightingale 15) and its pretension for an alienating and distancing effect to awaken the audience’s critical eye, during its performance in Romania, the audience responded with cheer and applause to many of the scenes staged, at the post-traumatic relieve to approach a reformulation of the original event (Aston 1997:47). 254 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Back to the daily reality of the characters met in Act I after the fragmentary testimonial approach of Act II, the silent and stagnant atmosphere dominating their reality as presented in the first act finds now a substitute in incontrollable and overlapping post-traumatic speech which is in all cases less meaningful and revealing than their previous ghostly silences. In this line, in scene 3.iv Irina confesses “I used to say more with the radio on” (MF 55), when actually the volume of the radio was the device they used before (Act I) so as to conceal their speechlessness. Linguistic uproar and chaos, expressed in the form of simultaneous talk or overlapping speech becomes one of the most notable strategies pointing to the existential confusion belatedly invading the characters in the play after the destruction of their symbolic coordinates of reference. Such need to formulate and make sense of the revolution also finds expression in the characters’ attempt to perform it theatrically in its exactitude, as already mentioned above, and in the strategy to contrast different speaking paces so as to foreground the restlessness of a generation concerned about their whereabouts after the revolution and the uncertainty and eagerness invading them concerning the direction their lives are moving towards (“The GRANDPARENTS are sitting side by side on the bench, the others around them. The GRANDPARENTS speak slowly, the others fast” MF 61). The last scene of the play matches the mosaic-like reconstruction of the event already exploited in Act II with the individual testimonial performances which moved towards a diffuse and chaotic traumatic collage. The fragmentary style is now taken to extremes by means of the formal and symbolic deconstruction of the collective image or picture unsystematically and disconnectedly built up out of such individual traumatic experiences. The painstaking attempt to codify and assimilate the occurrences changing their systemic Real is now deconstructed and shattered into pieces in a surrealist and Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 255 non-narrative move at the end of the play. As put by Philip Roberts “[the play] in fact ends abruptly, for there can be no ending to a fluid and ongoing situation” (121). Churchill brings about each characters’ most significant line, and creates a momentous frame in which the existential frustration, anger, disorientation and panic of each of the characters is thus captured at their uncontrolled and most extreme expression. The stage directions before the last lines of the play (to be spoken in Romanian) put forward the surreal confusion aimed at to close the action of the play: [After a scene where they have been fighting each other in a nonsensical way] They pick themselves up, see if they are all right. Musicthe lambada. Gradually couples for and begin to dance. BODGAN and IRINA, MIHAI and FLAVIA, FLORINA and RADU, LUCIA and IANOS, GABRIEL tries to dance on his crutch. For some time they dance in silence. The ANGEL and VAMPIRE are there, dancing together. They begin to enjoy themselves. Then they start to talk while they dance, sometimes to their partner and sometimes to one of the others, at first a sentence or two and finally all talking at once. The sentences are numbered in a suggested order. At 14, every couple talks at once, with each person alternating lines with their partner and overlapping with their partner at the end. So that by the end everyone is talking at once but leaving the vampire’s last four or five words to be heard alone. At first they talk quietly then more freely, some angry, some exuberant. They speak Romanian. Vampire. Incepi a vrei sînge. Membrele te dor, capul îţi arde. Trebuie să te mişti din ce în ce mai repede. (You begin to want blood. Your limbs ache, your head burns, you have to keep moving faster and faster.) [End of play] (MF 85, 87) Churchill thus finishes the action of the play relying on a sheer Brechtian sense of unfinished agitation, disorientation and frustration at finding no answer solving these characters’ existential quest and, extensively, leaving open the transcendental ethical issues addressed on the play: how does the individual meet a new subjectivity in a context of systemic dissolution, what is the direction to which the new systemic Real should aim, or how is such ineffable sense of post-evental precariousness assimilated and codified by a community? 256 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Moreover, in the post-dictatorial context of the play, any sense of an ordered closure might suggest a return to the old forms of tyranny and discipline. Churchill’s drive is thus to force the audience’s departure from their accommodated position as uninvolved tourists, in Bauman’s terms, so that they make use of their free will (defining them as such) and get critically and emotionally engaged to a vagabond’s precarious perspective of life as condemned to aimless liquid mobility. The discussion of how to combine Brechtian estrangement procedures with emotional empathy and identification will be one of the main focuses of attention addressed in my analysis of Naomi Wallace’s In the Heart of America (1994), following this. Essentially contradicting Brechtian precepts about audience alienation and dis-identification as a means to effectively activate critical receptivity, empathy and emotional identification emerge as valid strategies that the authors addressed in this chapter adopt so as to create an effect of agitation and ethical concern. Thus moving from empathic individual exposition and the visitation of particular characters’ traumatic nightmare, 15 the plays here analyzed unfold into surrealist and deconstructing aesthetics, employed so as to provoke the desired alienating effect. It is initially by empathy with the Other and emotional identification, and then by extreme symbolic deconstruction, that the spectator’s understanding is broadened so as to assimilate foreign traumatic eventuality. In my analysis of Wallace’s In the Heart of America, I explore the balance between such affective turn and the aesthetics of fragmentation, on the one hand, and Brechtian defamiliarization, by which effective ethical concern is raised, on the other. 15 As contended by Badiou, there is no ‘ethics in general’ or ‘universal ethical norms’ to be applied systematically, as our ethical concern is always born out of our natural capacity of identification in thought with the other (Badiou 2001). The playwrights whose work is approached in this chapter hence take a given character’s specific existential quandary as point of departure so as to aesthetically evolve from there towards a formulation of a number of transcendental ethical concerns. Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 257 “The army will give you a quite sense of pride”: 16 Ghostly Wandering and the Search for Symbolic Self-confirmation in Naomi Wallace’s In the Heart of America. In 1967, Jacques Derrida published three influential books setting the grounds for his theory on linguistic deconstruction, phonocentrism and logocentrism: Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference. There, Derrida puts forward his ideas counteracting Saussurean thought, which had previously sustained the identifying unit constituted by thought and sign. The cornerstone for Derrida’s linguistic theory sets forth the view that signifier and signified are in constant movement, breaking apart and coming together in new and endless combinations which thus render meaning-signifier identity impossible. Language appears, therefore, from Derrida’s views, as a completely unstable phenomenon, and in constant movement and renovation. It is thus made up of endless traces left by elder combinations, and of resonances and connotations acquired in a constant basis by its incessant introduction into new symbolic contexts; signifying bits whose connotations (signification) come to the surface on a greater or smaller basis depending on the context in which such linguistic occurrences are evoked. As put by Terry Eagleton, It is an illusion for me to believe that I can ever be fully present to you in what I say or write, because to use signs at all entails my meaning being always somehow dispersed, divided and never quite at one with itself. Not only my meaning, indeed, but I myself: since language is something I am made out of, rather than a convenient tool I use, the whole idea that I am a stable, unified entity must also be a fiction. (130) In her acclaimed 1994 play, In the Heart of America, Naomi Wallace explores linguistic instability, symbolic identity and the extent to which language distorts and corrupts our reality from a Derridean point of view. In a fashion similar to Churchill’s 16 HA 90. 258 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . linguistic collage at the very end of Mad Forest, where the most significant lines spoken by each of the characters are brought to mention again in a disorderly fragmentary fashion, Wallace’s play uses linguistic construction as a means to appeal to ontological and existential instability: symbolic and linguistic areferentiality, the manipulative use of euphemisms, social labeling so as to symbolically validate a piece of reality, and misleading and ambiguous punctuation and pausing are some of the strategies by which language, and so the reality it names, is deconstructed and questioned throughout the play. Additionally, Wallace resorts to alienating performing strategies reminiscent of actors’ rehearsal in the very preparation to perform a given theatrical role by directly appealing to the very fictionality and functioning mechanisms behind dramatic fabrication (thus enhancing the desired estrangement effect). The actual physical rehearsal of daily performative acts such as walking, and then ethically bound acts such as violence in war is introduced by Wallace as an aesthetic device which goes beyond the meta-theatrical strategies and the play-within-a-play device previously explored in this thesis (in particular, in my analysis of The Love of the Nightlingale and Mad Forest) in that rehearsal does not aim at the belated formulation of an event as a consequence of the failure of symbolic means to represent it, but rather appears as an extreme defamiliarizing mechanism allowing us to step by step and scrupulously scrutinize the performance of normative and taken for granted social practices such as the way we walk, the way in which torture of war prisoners proceeds, or our human reaction to death. Rehearsal is therefore not a belated and retrospective mechanism, but a deconstructing device aiming to change our future understanding of symbolic and systemic realities. Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 259 Finally, the third destabilizing and deconstructing mechanism functioning in the play so as to question symbolic normativity in a war context focuses on the dismantling and interrogation of accepted ontological establishments grounding our understanding of reality. Time, space and dimensional boundaries are thus deconstructed to the extent that a character may simultaneously have a conversation with a ghost and a human being (HA 138-9), concurrently partake of two different realities at two different realms (memory and present reality), freely and tourist-like travel throughout time and space (Lue Ming), or be bound and tided in a vagabond-like manner to ghostly wandering around the world in the shape of a body-less soul (Boxler, soul of lieutenant Calley). All three Brechtian mechanisms contributing to the audience’s estrangement and subsequent questioning of the (sur)real evoked on stage are called forth after the previously mentioned procedures working towards emotional identification by which the spectator’s empathy is activated. Such back and forth movement deriving in extreme deconstruction by the means already mentioned gives way to the interrogation of a Real with which the audience is thus made to partake. As already set forth at the introduction of this chapter, contemporary ethics is not limited to the denounce of issues bound to the familiar surroundings of Western communities, but is rather inclusive of symbolically obscured foreign realities; and the theatrical conventions that are met to reach such vindicating purposes are aesthetically formulated in Wallace’s successful 1994 play in the mechanisms above mentioned, to be now in depth explored. While Saussurean theory formulates the illusion (as put above by Eagleton) that code and meaning are implicated in a relation of identity, Derrida’s later contributions were directed at the derogation of the idea that there is such a thing as symbolic (signifier) and ontological (signified) unity allowing the subject to evoke the full reality of a thing or being by naming it or symbolically codifying it. A subject or thing is never 260 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . caused to be fully present by symbolic and codifying formulation. Signs can only partially evoke fragments of the reality named in an incomplete way, as language is build out of the semantic traces or remains left by previous use which is still contained by a particular sign, and is subject to constant symbolic renovation. The dislocation of evental occurrence and the deconstruction of human existence by linguistic, performative and ontological means in In the Heart of America formulate reality in a way which verifies Derridean thought, radically opposing Saussure’s views on the sign and its functioning. There is no form of pure expression for the reality evoked in In the Heart of America (the first Gulf War and its impact in the lives of several subjects there involved), just as there is no valid codifying means to truthfully recover the very eventuality there re-visited in its entirety, or how it changed the existences of the subjects involved. The means of articulation by which Wallace touches the individual traumatic experiences of each of the participants rather puts the pieces together in a disorderly and unsettling fashion thus making up a surrealist collective picture about the first Gulf war and its evental impact in several individuals. It is therefore not only language that is “dispersed and divided”, but the reality it names, as it inevitably relies on such symbolic and codifying grounds only able to construct such unreliable order of things. As Eagleton ingeniously points out, it is thus not only meaning that we try to formulate by symbolic means, but also our own persona, inherently defined and made out of the very language by which we inspect the Real, that is thus shattered and unstable. The subject appears, from a deconstructive point of view, not as a unified and stable entity, but as the disorderly constellation of dispersed and fragmentary pieces that can be named and filtered by codifying means (the daily and normative tools by which we are compelled to inspect the human subject). Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 261 The understanding of human existentiality is thus approached in Wallace’s play, where the past of the characters is revisited in such fragmentary and precarious fashion. The childhood of the two main characters, Fairouz and Remzi, brother and sister, is thus stated never to have existed in its entirety, but rather as a collection of pieces now put back together in a retrospective fashion as if in a puzzle: “Fairouz: He and I. We were never children. We were pieces of children. After that. But what is a piece of a child?” (HA 136). Throughout the play, Wallace directly refers to the symbolic procedures by which we codify our reality, appealing to the mechanisms we unconsciously apply to interpret our surroundings and so as to expose its very artificiality. The action in the play centers on five characters: two of them alive and three of them either dead or somehow immaterial (the latter being the case of the wandering soul of Lieutenant Calley, who separated from its still alive body). Craver and Fairouz, the two characters that are alive, are connected by means of a third character, Remzi, brother to Fairouz and Craver’s lover (although we are not provided with that piece of information until the very end of the play). Fairouz visits Craver looking for answers concerning her brother Remzi, an American-Palestinian soldier sent to Iraq during the first Gulf War and who never came back. Craver, Remzi’s comrade sent back home in Kentucky, is initially reluctant to deliver any information, but finally, in a belated attempt to work through the trauma, reveals that he and her brother were actually in love (“Craver. It might keep me alive. Talking about it might keep me alive” HA 138). The other two characters, initially not involved in the event connecting the other three characters together, appear in a surrealist spatio-temporal intrusion as apparent remnants of long lasting traumatic evental occurrence taking place much earlier than the (both personal and war, global-wide) experiences recalled by Craver and Fairouz. Lue Ming is the 262 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . ghost of a Vietnamese woman whose baby was killed by Boxler, whom she desperately searches throughout time and space realms, ignoring all ontological thresholds, just to be able to identify and interrogate the perpetrator of her life[and death]trauma. The action of the play thus gradually and deconstructively evolves to an extreme where the world of each of the characters blends in a fragmentary way shattered by personal and collective (war) trauma. Fairouz’s childhood memories about her brother taking care of her damaged foot blend in a disorderly fashion with her present-day conversations with Craver, just as Craver’s pieces of memories about his races with Remzi appear in a flashback mode at the same time that he talks to Fairouz. Boxler becomes the lieutenant teaching Craver and Remzi how to torture prisoners, thus confusing existential grounds (he still believes to be in Vietnam). The play is therefore made out of remnants or traces of traumatic experiences that keep haunting each of the characters in a ghost-like fashion, who become thus involved in evental conflicts not pertaining to their own experiences in such a fragmentary, uncertain and precarious deconstruction of their realities. As argued above, language itself is made out of traces of previous pieces of meaning and significations (HA 92). This Derridean approach to the codification of reality becomes one of the main strategies building up such a shattered and unreliable Real throughout the play. Wallace exposes the falsifying meanings by which we filter our reality and appeals to issues such as biased labeling and how it corrupts our reading of the reality surrounding us. Remzi and Fairouz repeatedly appeal to their harsh experiences during childhood as a consequence of social intolerance, just as Craver is continually called “white trash” (HA 99, 112, 114, 134, 136) and Lue Ming submissively accepts the role of “gook” by which she is identified and regularly uses it as a means helping her identify other people’s identity: Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 263 Lue Ming. Arab! Slope! Dink! Fairouz. No, they didn’t call me that: slope. Lue Ming. Thought I’d through it in. Slope. Dink. Gook. Fairouz. Gook I’ve heard of. Lue Ming. The Phillipines war. It was used again for Korea, and then recycled f or Vietnam (HA 92). Lue Ming. …How many gooks have you killed? Craver. I don’t kill gooks. I kill Arabs. Iraqi Arabs, Saddam Arabs. But that war is over now too. (HA 86) Lue Ming’s retrospective and etymological approach to the label by which she herself is obnoxiously identified echoes Derrida’s views on language as an unstable system subject to temporality and signifying restructuration. Similarly, it critically recalls the fantasmic nature of the other, whose actual reality and circumstances are not available for symbolic interpretation and is so understood as a threat to our community. It is our ignorance about the other what drives us to phantomize and terribilize their existences by means of symbolic codification. As put literally by Craver when describing what his and Remzi’s mission in Iraq was: Craver. It’s nothing personal: we’re not just here to get them out of Kuwait, but to protect a way of life. Remzi and Craver. Flawed it may be, but damned well worth protecting! Craver. Those poor bastards are so brainwashed by Saddam, they need to kill like we need oxygen… (HA 87) Remzi. Why are we here (Beat) killing Arabs? Craver. For love? Say it’s for love. Don’t say for oil. Don’t say for freedom. Don’t say for world power. I’m sick of that. I’m so fucking sick of that. It’s true, isn’t it? We’re here for love. Say it just once. For me. Remzi. We’re here for love. (They kiss). (HA 126) Remzi’s and Craver’s proud alignment on the US military sprouts from their lack of reliance of a symbolic reality safeguarding and preserving their subjectivity and 270 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Craver. I’m going to try Fairouz. But what is it for? Craver. It might keep me alive. Talking about it might keep me alive. Fairouz. I mean the ram’s horn. What is it for? (HA 138) Such drastic referential movement granted by a semantic non-correspondence (Fairouz was talking about what to do with the ram’s horn her brother sent her from Iraq, while Craver thought she was bringing forth a more transcendental question about the meaning of their lives after the war and Remzi’s death) illustrates the contradictory audience response elicited by Wallace’s theatrical deconstructing technique, by which the audience’s stance unexpectedly moves from emotional understanding to alienating Brechtian critical reading. As argued above at the introduction, the three plays analyzed in this chapter align with a view of ethics based on Badiou’s ethics of the individual which draws its maxims from the particular case of a given individual with whom we empathize. It is only from that individual identification that broader and transcendental questions may be formulated. Wallace’s work thus presents the action in such a way that the audience is made to feel some kind of identification with the character in question, thus relating to the event performed and partaking of a given character’s traumatic experiencing; and yet, at the same time, by means of a deconstructing and fragmentary aesthetics of hauntological/ontological scrutiny, she manages to alienate the audience from the action staged by exposing the contaminating symbolic procedures to which our human understanding is tied. Therefore, and as has already been explored in Churchill’s Mad Forest, these playwrights resort to mechanisms such as ineffective and fractured conversation, a demolished systemic Real leaving the characters disoriented and unable to distinguish anymore between real and corrupted traumatic memory, dream/nightmare, or ghostly surrealist dimensions blending with real life. The stylistic Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 271 choice they rely on thus presents the audience with individual experiences of traumatic events which activate their empathic understanding of a given occurrence (the Romanian Revolution or the Gulf War), just to progressively move towards Brechtian distancing and alienation so as to question and dismantle a taken for granted symbolic order. Rehearsal emerges as another mechanism contributing to such aesthetics of estrangement deconstructing the real and interrogating what is taken as normative. Rehearsals analyze the step by step behavior of a character, thus bringing us closer to an understanding of his motives. Additionally, it simultaneously deconstructs (and thus estranges and interrogates) an action that would otherwise be assimilated as normative and would pass unnoticed (from the daily and customary act of walking, to the silently accepted acts of torture of war prisoners). The fact that the stage is described as minimalist (HA 80) contributes to both the close analysis of a character’s individuality, aimed at an empathic understanding of the characters’ situation, and the stark Brechtian deconstruction of non-questioned symbolic acts. Thus rid of the symbolic filter by which they are interpreted, daily acts as natural as the act of walking or eating are deconstructed and approached again from a critical distance. It is in this fashion that the play reveals how a customary act is subjected to the eventualities shaping a given community’s ontological order that are symbolically codified, accepted, and assimilated without further questioning: Fairouz is practicing a walk, in a similar, but different motel room. … Fairouz. How do women walk in your country? Lue Ming. Not as upright as we’d like. Hunched over a bit most of the time. Fairouz. Show me. 272 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Lue Ming. (Shows her): The lower a body is to the ground, the less of a target. (HA 91) As put by Lindsay B. Cummings, “rehearsals are liminal processes, often requiring us to question that which seems ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ in life. In rehearsal, ‘strips of behavior’ are broken down and reassembled in new ways” (72). The scrutinizing lens provided on stage by rehearsal thus deconstructs our symbolic view on acts that would otherwise be taken for granted and would therefore remain unquestioned. It furthermore allows us access to a given individual’s motivation (such as the reason why Lue Ming performs the act of walking the way she does) as, through rehearsal, an individual’s motives and positioning is explored to the detail through step by step decomposition of the very act in question. Remzi’s death (Act I, scene three) is in such a way pre-visualized and pre-enacted in a move which requires, not only Craver (the very person rehearsing his reaction to Remzi’s hypothetical death and thus prematurely exploring what his feelings would be), but also the audience, to place themselves in a given character’s positioning, thus inevitably getting also personally and emotionally involved: Remzi. Craver. This is something important I am talking about. Let’s say I’m you and I see my lying up ahead, dead. I stop in my tracks. I’m upset. We were friends, and I’ve got to cross the thirty or so feet between us (Does a “walk” over to the imaginary body). No. That feels too confident. Craver.And you wouldn’t feel confident because… Remzi. Because I’d be thinking: that could just as easily be me lying there as him. Craver. Right. So maybe you’d like to do it like this. Kind of… (Does his “walk” up to the imaginary body) Remzi. That’s too careful. Craver. Yeah, and too scared. I mean. I might be feeling in a pretty nice way, thinking about being alive and not quite as dead as you. Remzi. You’ve got a point there. You might be feeling pretty OK. Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 273 Craver. And fucking lucky too, ‘cause the blood’s still rolling through my veins. Remzi. Something like this maybe. (Does another “walk,” a sort of combination of the others) Craver. Yes! That’s it! That’s it! Let me try. OK. I see you up ahead of me, twenty feet, maybe thirty, and I want to get closer to you…Why do I want to get closer if you’re dead and I know it’s you? I mean, there’s nothing else to figure out then, is there? Remzi. Because…I’m your friend, and you’d rather be the one to report my death than some jerk who doesn’t know I exist. Craver. Right. So here I go. Remzi. Get on your mark. Craver. Get set. Remzi. Go! (HA 88-89) In her essay “Naomi Wallace and the Dramaturgy of Rehearsal”, Lindsay B. Cummings discusses the emotional procedures the audience goes through, being subject to such sentimental reading, granted by deconstruction through rehearsal. She addresses the intrinsic paradox to treat Brechtian defamiliarization along with empathy procedures by which the audience is thus (in this case through deconstructing rehearsal) invited to understand a given character’s position. She reminds that Brecht’s goal was precisely to distance the audience from the fictionality staged so as to awake their critical gaze, thus rejecting all kinds of emotional content associated to Dramatic theater and which attempted at an affective identification and unquestioning acceptance of a character’s stance and ideas. Cummings’ consequent move so as to account for the aesthetic balance between Brechtian distancing and emotional empathy however falls in a philosophical quandary which is difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. She argues that the empathic procedures appealed by Wallace’s theatrical rehearsal do not fall on emotional understanding, but remain at the level of “using all that you understand about the other to imagine her feelings and reactions in that particular situation” and how 274 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . “[t]his process may not lead to a shared affective experience” (75). She carries out a study of the meaning and implications of empathic processes and argues that empathy is in fact not an emotional procedure. The very moment in which we start to develop an affective response, we move away from empathy and start developing, according to Cummings, an affective experience of our own (76). Again relying on Badiou’s ethics of the individual, according to which our ethical principles act moved by our capability to relate to an Other, I consider Cummings’ philosophical move to be misleading and inexact, as it asks us to measure the extent to which the audience develops an emotional response so as to esteem whether such response would coincide with “critical empathy” (L. Cummings 76) or with the development of their own affective experience. As put by Wallace through the words of her characters, our affective appeal cannot be measured to the exact detail. Just as Fairouz’s and Craver’s anguish to re-visit Remzi’s death in a post-traumatic fragmented way cannot be grasped by symbolic means, or their memories of Remzi’s physicality (her body is never to be recovered) cannot be successfully measured by mathematical procedures, our own emotional response as members of an audience cannot be mathematically calculated with the exactitude required by Cumming’s definition of empathy: Fairouz. If you could give his flesh a velocity?...or a number, what would it be?...If you could give his flesh a number?...A number that’s short of infinity? Was that your desire for him? (HA 111), and Craver. I took him in my arms. The blood had stopped coming out. (Beat) Five foot…eleven inches. That’s how tall you were” (HA 136), or the appeal to similar exacting means to measure abstract phenomena, like the attempt to measure the weight of death: Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 275 Lue Ming. I woke up after you and your troops were gone. I woke up with a child in my arms. A dead child weighs so much more than a live one…What sounds it like to go on living and the child in your arms is so heavy and she is dead an you are dead and I am dead but- … It sounded like this: (Lue Ming, Fairouz and Boxler all scream: “No.” Their screams are deafening and mixed with the sound of thundering jets. Remzi and Craver look up at the awe-inspiring jets above them.) (HA 131,134) The memory of Remzi’s existence and the traumatic loss and the affective impact thereupon evoked cannot be measured by exacting means but rather slips through the fingers of such rational scrutiny, as evoked by the scene quoted above (HA 137). Similarly, the extent to which the audience undergoes either a more or less emotional (and thus self-focused) experiencing, or a more detached empathic procedure cannot be measured by tangible means. Cummings suggests that a combination of Stanislavskian empathy with Brechtian estrangement can work on the grounds that such empathy remains at a critical level, due to the Brechtian annulment of feelings in exploring a given character’s positioning by means of the aesthetics of rehearsal advanced by Wallace. Nevertheless, it is actually not the cancelation of an emotive reading what makes Wallace’s rehearsal mode effective, but rather the achievement of a perfect equilibrium between empathic affective understanding and the posterior drastic distancing by which the whole performative act is deconstructed, and so its real basis interrogated. As put by Badiou, “the singularity of situations as such… is the obligatory starting point of all properly human action” (Badiou 2001:14); and contemporary drama appeals to such understanding of the particularities of the other’s existence by questioning broader and transcendental symbolic and systemic establishment. In other words, contemporary ethics demands our truthful involvement in the singularities of an Other so as to shatter the silently imposed normativity of our given symbolic and 276 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . systemic structures. Empathy, affectivity and emotional response or understanding cannot be measured, and in all cases should not be annulled so as to grant a distanced (and thus critical) reading of a given eventuality. Contrarily, and as suggested by the three contemporary playwrights whose work is revisited in this chapter, it is from such singularities explored through empathizing procedures that our broader understanding of an ethical program should sprout. Wallace’s criticism of war therefore emerges from the specificities of a number of characters thereby affected; and it is by our understanding, partaking of, and relating to their circumstances, that a broader stark criticism can be generated (and eventually achieved by means of the deconstructing Brechtian devices here analyzed). From the particular experiencing of war trauma, explored by the initial glance to the specific situation of each of the characters, the action of the play thus moves to interpret not just the Gulf War, but all wars (“Lue Ming. The past is never over. Boxler. The war is over. Lue Ming. Which one?” HA 125). Wallace thus ingeniously moves from the individual belated experiencing of trauma, to the painstaking formulation of a transhistorical (in LaCapra’s terms) outlook which aims to interrogate and shake our ethical forethought. The rehearsal mode explored on stage meets both readings, as it allows the audience to step by step partake of particular performative acts to which the characters are tied, at the same time that the dismembering of a given act’s symbolic meaning inevitably questions its nature. The interrogation of given ontological establishments is thus accomplished by such deconstructing strategies literarily distorting and dismembering acts and bits of reality that would otherwise be naturally assimilated. Wallace further explores ontological interrogation and fragmentation by metaphorical images appealing to physical rupture and dismemberment, thus Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 277 additionally appealing to the scatological reality and the very materiality of war experience from a critical prism: Remzi. What was it like, you son of a bitch? To carry a man’s leg? Craver. We were ordered to pick upRemzi. (Interrupts): To carry a man’s leg when the man is no longer attached? Craver. To pick up the pieces and put them in holes… (HA 123) And Boxler. I pulled his rib cage wide open…and stood inside his body. I said: …Hey, boys, now I’m really standing in Iraq. (HA 129) Wallace’s strategy to jump from emotional empathy to Brechtian alienation thus guides the audience in a journey starting from individualized traumatic struggle to a fragmentary, and thus critically distanced, exploration of the ethical grounds on which our contemporary Western community allows for such atrocities to be held. By means of an aesthetics of ontological dismembering and deconstruction, Wallace moves from the close analysis of a subject’s precarious and unreliable (as memory fuses with real) post-war reality, to the abstract and transcendental questioning of contemporary ethical and existential issues: Craver. When I woke up, I took him in my arms. The blood had stopped coming out. (Beat) Five foot…eleven inches. That’s how tall you were. I used to run my hand up and down your spine like I was reading the bones. Remzi. I wanted to travel everyplace on your body. Even the places you’d never been. Love can make you feel so changed you think the world is changed. Up till then, we’d survived the war. (To Craver) What are you? Fairouz. (To Craver): What are you? Remzi. (Louder): What are you, Craver? Craver. (Whispers): What are you? What are you? (Shouts) What are you, Craver? (Remzi says the following words with Craver, beginning with “Indian.” Remzi’s words are spoken just a fraction sooner than Craver’s.) I am White Trash, 278 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Craver and Remzi. Indian, Sandnigger, Brown Trash, Arab, Gook Boy, Faggot- (HA 136). Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the homo sacer departs from his classification of the human being according to his social role. He takes two Greek terms from Aristotle and his contributions on the state of being. Thereupon, according to Agamben, zoe denominates the mere and biological fact of living that we humans share with animals, while bios refers to our taking part in a social distribution and our participation in a community which determines the way in which our lives befall and progressively unfold, thus engendering what is esteemed by the aforesaid community as ‘the good life’ (Agamben 1998:1). On further exploration of the functioning of such social groups and the way the social being (bios) is upon it defined by the social dispositions grounding such communities, Agamben builds up the figure of the homo sacer as the person who is cast out (not legally recognized) by its community, being left bare of any social or communal recognition, and thus in a precarious state of non-existence when it comes to juridical and systemic interpretation, as he is regarded as some sort of ‘bare life’ who cannot be read or symbolically identified by its own community: “in the case of the homo sacer a person is simply set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law” (Agamben 1998: 82). In In the Heart of America, ‘white trash-Craver’ and ‘sandnigger-Remzi’ articulate Agamben’s notion of the homo sacer as a social being who has been expelled from the community where it should belong, thus irremediably condemned to unstable and uncertain bare existence. The homo sacer needs to have committed a crime (or what according to the given community’s divine law is esteemed as crime) so as to be casted away from social and systemic recognition, which in this case is identified with the actual realization of what is thereupon interpreted as abject (following Kristeva) and taboo. 21 The commitment of 21 i.e., Remzi and Craver’s love relationship. Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 279 such ruthless murder, the assassination of Remzi at the hands of his own fellows explicitly revisited in Act II scene nine, is therefore legitimized by divine law, as it is formulated as the corresponding punishment for committing a ‘crime’ against the ‘good life’ aimed by the society they were trying to be part of. Furthermore, and in accordance to Agamben’s stance, Remzi’s and Craver’s status as homo sacer made of them vulnerable to aggression by an Other, by a righteous member of the social circle they have been expelled from, due to their bare nature, or bare lives, which deprives them of any kind of civil or human rights and thus makes of them the tentative target of legal aggression. According to Agamben, the homo sacer is an empty life, a residue of humanity that is no longer read or interpreted as such and who can be accordingly killed without civil or legal punishment. And yet, the homo sacer is precisely defined and given an identity by this self-destructive identification in relation to the community that is at once expelling it and yet giving it a name as an outcast. Contemporary war plays appeal to that ontological inconsistency by which precarious figures such as refugees (the child refugee in Churchill’s Mad Forest), war veterans (such as Boxler in Wallace’s play) or child soldiers (the ghostly figure in Stoning Mary, to be object of analysis in the next few pages of this chapter) are formulated in all their self-contradictory existencial nature. The main argument grounding the present chapter, and which will be further reinforced with my analysis of tucker green’s work, addresses the simultaneous identification and distancing from the atrocious war eventualities staged; a double reception move by which the audience is made to empathically explore these given subjects’ reality at the same time that these subjects’ very status as ‘bare lives’ takes them to a state of extreme animalization by torture and/or punishment which cannot provoke any other reaction but Brechtian alienation, in this case moved by moral appall 286 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . existential precariousness, in this particular case caused by subjective self-awareness about an upcoming death. Both Mary and her parents, Husband and Wife, are formulated as vulnerable beings whose existential integrity their communities can no longer protect. 25 As hinted by Heidegger in his work Being and Time (1927), and as put by Paul Hegarty in his analysis of Agamben’s and Heidegger’s contributions, according to both philosophers “authentic existence occurs only in awareness of death, of death as something that will come, and yet, ‘I’ will not be there when it happens to me. So the most authentic human experience possible is one of absence” (Hegarty 16). Theatrical experience materializes as a most fitting medium to articulate such existential selfdenial by which the human nature is defined, due to its aesthetic malleability, which allows for an open examination of ontological boundaries such as time, place or the liminal threshold defining the human self, as is being explored in this chapter. By way of example, Hippolytus’s very last lines in Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love (1996) thus appeal to such extreme experiencing of one’s significance as a human self, which comes simultaneous to one’s own absence and face to face recognition of imminent death: “if there could have been more moments like this” (Kane 2001:103). Tucker green similarly appeals now to this very liminality of the human nature which, again according to Agamben, is thus defined by negativity, as opposed to animal life, for example, or as in being alive opposes being dead. In this line, one’s own existence as being alive becomes more pronounced (more intense or extremely experienced, as it were, as put by Kane’s Hippolytus), when in complete awareness of 25 Husband and wife were also threatened by tentative death even before the appearance of the child soldier due to the fact that they only had one medical prescription to protect just one of them from the implacable raid of AIDS menacing their community. Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 287 one’s own upcoming disintegration. And such ontological disintegration is sharply articulated by tucker green’s style, described as “sparse, stylized” and with a “minimalist, condensed simplicity and accumulation” (Middeke 2014:107) which very much suits the formulation of the human voice. In Stoning Mary it is thus by means of tense silences relying on such minimalist atmosphere and moving towards such aesthetic sense of accumulation (mostly achieved by repetitions) that the exploration of “human authentic experiencing” (Hegarty 16) as recalled by Heidegger in Being and Time takes place. Such conception of human reality as defined by its opposite is at its best reflected in human language, in its very failure to contain it, according to Agamben. For Agamben, language works covering true meaning (as it tries to name a meaning that it cannot contain), and that is precisely the actual meaning of the human nature, which is the reason why he esteems language to be “the opening of the ontological dimension” (Hegarty 17). In other words, reinforcing Agamben’s stance to define reality through the scope of negativity, language cannot convey the meaning of human existence, as it is doomed to always contain a meaning that it cannot completely convey. But it is precisely this incommensurability that simultaneously defines the precariousness (in Butler’s sense) characterizing the human being. This is the point in Language and Death (1991) in which Agamben turns to define what he calls ‘Voice’. The voice is the phenomenon by which human existence is distanced from animal sounds, and yet it does not seem to reach the experiencing of meaning. The voice is defined as some intermediary point in between animal voice and human rational discourse, as if in the attempt to run away from the one so as to reach the other (Agamben 1991:35). Agamben’s voice and his definition of language as the upmost form of expression of human incommensurability are formulated in tucker green’s Stoning Mary 288 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . by the aesthetic interplay between silences and verbal accumulation. As if tiptoeing around the true meaning wanting to be formulated, which never quite manages to be fully expressed and which is always, in some way or another, relating to death, the characters in Stoning Mary move from silences and a kind of discourse that seems to be afraid to formulate the reality wanting to be named, to an accumulation of sometimes already formulated half-sentences, thus gradually constructed in what finally culminates in a disorderly, deconstructed and fragmentary kind of speech: FOUR ‘The Child Soldier’ MUM and DAD are trying to think. MUM Umm. Umm… DAD Er. MUM Umm… DAD coughs Yes? DAD Er… MUM Yes? DAD Um. MUM…To watch…to watch him. Lovin that. Lovin doin that. Doing that. Er. Hold. To hold himhis hands his fingersfingertips, onto him, onto his gazeinto his gaze his any-little-bit-a-him, to hold thatonto thatto have that, into that, to have and to hold that. To have that to hold… Having that to hold on to. Having that. Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 289 Doing that. Miss that. …To smell. Have his smell. Smell his smell, smell his smell on himsmell his smell on me. The never-get-used-to-that, the never-get-enoughof-that. The after-bath-aroma, the first thing of a morningthe just-comein-from-out wanting more of that smell. The smelllovin that the smell of lovin thatlovin smellin that. Me doin that. Waiting for that. That smell. That. His. Him. Doin that. Me. Miss it. Umm.. Touch. Touch him. Doin thatDAD said that. MUM I saidDAD you said that/ already. (SM 18-19) The inarticulacy of post-traumatic speech (Mum and Dad are the parents of the child soldier killed by Mary) is in this way formulated in stuck speechlessness that simultaneously coincides with Agamben’s notion of the voice and the idea that language contains a meaning that it cannot really say. Human awareness of death (in this case in the form of post-traumatic working through) is always lost, and never to be fully grasped, as it is “always deposited in the voice without meaning, and in turn, this voice without meaning is the indicator that Being is bordered and defined by death” (Hegarty 16). 290 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . The staccato-style characterizing the dialectic confrontations in the play thus evoke Agamben’s voice and his view of language as a core of nothingness, as it fails in the formulation of a reality defined in terms of negativity (what is not), which at the same time succeeds in the appeal to the ineffability of the human nature. Additionally, the negativity upon which our reality is defined entails, as mentioned before, a definition of life in terms of negativity, as opposed to death, which is precisely heightened, and yet still not bound to be linguistically contained, by the materialization of death itself. Consequently, the incommensurability of life as heightened by death (in a fashion reminiscent of Hippolytus’s last claim in Kane’s Phaedra’s Love) is here appealed to by means of tucker green’s fragmentary, sharp and minimalistic style, drastically moving from stark and tense silence, to concatenated speech. The approach to language from a deconstructive perspective so as to explore the very moment of a subject’s confrontation with death has already been investigated in previous chapters, in particular for the analysis of Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow and The Cordelia Dream, and Kreitzer’s Self Defense or Death of Some Salesmen. Similarly evoking an aesthetics of linguistic and ontological deconstruction, these plays appeal to the very process by which a subject’s reality is shattered down to pieces as death comes closer. And also in an analogous way, that approximation to the end of all that is known is likewise signaled on aesthetic terms by the blurring of existential boundaries by the introduction of characters coming from a spectral dimension, such as Scarecrow and ghostly Cordelia in Carr’s plays, or the angelic choir in Kreitzer’s Self Defense. On a similar move, tucker green explores now the figure of the ghost so as to appeal to the realm between the human and the non-human. It is thus by means of the ghost’s silences that tucker green appeals to a performative tension that revolves around this interplay between verbal minimalism and concatenated, accumulating speech: Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 291 WIFE We don’t HUSBAND we don’t WIFE we don’tHUSBAND have anythingWIFE we/don’tHUSBAND for yer. Something aint here, nuthin aint hereif something was here we’d say, if anything was here we’d tell yerWIFE honest. HUSBAND Honestthere’sWIFE there is/nuthin HUSBAND there is nothingWIFE we don’t/have HUSBAND nuthin hereWIFE no. No. HUSBAND Anything here. WIFE No. No. HUSBAND Something here for yer. Honest… Honest HUSBAND CHILD WIFE CHILD HUSBAND WIFE WIFE Exceptif it’s foodHUSBAND do you want food? WIFE Does he want/food? HUSBAND This isn’tWIFE is it/food? HUSBAND about that. 292 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . WIFE We have that we have that we have that if that’s what you wantif that’s the something you want we have that but apart from/that. HUSBAND apart/fromWIFE apart from that. HUSBAND we don’t have nuthin. WIFE There isHUSBAND nuthinWIFE there/is HUSBAND there is nothinthere is nothing here for youthat we have… WIFE No. Except food… … No. No. Tell him… HUSBAND And he’s not here for /theWIFE it’s not much. HUSBAND And he’s not come for/theWIFE I know it’s not/ muchHUSBAND He’s not here for that WIFE but this will be everything. HUSBAND There’s nothing. WIFE there is/nothing HUSBAND yes there’s nothingWIFE no. No. HUSBAND There is nothing else we can do… Is there. Is there? Is there. CHILD HUSBAND CHILD HUSBAND Gil Cuder Spectrality and Ontological Deconstruction. 293 WIFE offers up the prescription to the CHILD SOLDIER. Beat. The CHILD SOLDIER destroys it. CHILD Beg. (SM 36-41) In Stoning Mary, war is not present on stage by traditional narrative means. Instead, it is the very elusive figure of the ghost-child soldier, bringing about such tense and restive atmosphere that addresses the implicit war being held at a background. And yet, even if at a background level, the war atmosphere is present on stage through the child soldier figure. Playing around the threshold separating the human from the animal, the child soldier appears as the metonymical means by which war becomes a character itself in tucker green’s play. Despite constructing abstract war scenarios whose exact location or actual reality tend to remain thus obscured (hence formulating the implicit menace for the western audience that a similar war conflict might occur in their immediate surroundings thus involving their very communities), contemporary New War Plays have found new means to articulate war on stage, such as the strategy by which war itself becomes one more (though unlisted) character (Boll 38). In this vein, tucker green appeals to the “ethics of unrest” (Middeke 2014) on which the continuous re-construction or reformulation of a community shattered by war relies. In this chapter I have tried to demonstrate how the attempt to make war trauma extensive to the audience becomes successful by means of an ontological jump from the specificities of a subject’s existential quandary, to the broader and transcendental interrogation of contemporary ethics. In aesthetic terms, this move is translated in an initial step focusing on the realistic description of a number of character’s involvement in the war or conflict in question, which radically meets the alienating strategy that distances the audience in a Brechtian fashion from the atrocities staged. This is particularly done by means of an aesthetics of deconstruction which manages to distance the spectator from the events performed on stage concerning the different 294 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . characters so that the audience becomes able to regard the reality performed from a new lens, rid of symbolic and systemic regulations. The figure of the ghost and the aesthetics of spectrality, whose function in different theatrical contexts has been thoroughly explored in the previous chapters of this thesis, contribute to evoke the uncertain and obscure destiny that defines the traumatized individual, as well as the precarious shattered community where he/she belongs. It is the ethereal and undecidable figure of the specter that best captures the haunting and unsettling spirit of war and revolution, as it is, furthermore, metaphorical and representative of such existential nothingness and the sense of aimlessness characterizing the liquid transformation of a contemporary community victim of such processes of ontological deconstruction as the ones revisited through this chapter. Gil Cuder Conclusions. 295 Conclusions. Appealing to the symbolic disidentification and the verbal ineffability that has been time and again revisited throughout this thesis as a theoretical cornerstone of Trauma Studies and contemporary critical theory (and I rely here again on Butler’s famous claim about the precarious representability of the postmodern subject in 2004:147), the title of this doctoral project similarly seems to fall in the troublesome task to name, and thus limit, the investigative ambitions instigating this doctoral thesis from the very beginning. Under the title Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Women Playwrights I have thus tried to explore what I argue seems to have emerged as a prominent theatrical strategy for the articulation of the contemporary subject: spectrality and the haunting and alienating procedures provoked by the A-effect evoked in the plays here analyzed. As announced by the words I borrowed from Zygmunt Bauman so as to open the critical discussion that has occupied this doctoral thesis, the contemporary subject has grown to be identified by the inability to preserve one’s identity in a context of undecidability 1 in which there is no longer a teleological existence, but rather a circular movement, or an uncertain wandering ending in eternal return (Bauman 1996:8-9). The post-traumatic deconstruction of a subject’s intra-psychic persona and the existential quandary to define one’s own identity in a context of shattered coordinates of meaning have come to be aesthetically signified by the figure of the specter or ethereal non-human being, such as Churchill’s wandering vampires (chapter four), Carr’s haunting specters (chapter one), Kreitzer’s angelic visitations (chapter two), or Nottage’s defamiliarizing musical numbers, hauntingly evoking the abominations of war (chapter three). 1 As already noted by Middeke in his analysis of Crimp’s and tucker green’s formulation of contemporary subjectivity in two of their most outstanding works (Middeke 2014:98). 302 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . achieved by the introduction of spectral figures in a surrealist context), I argue, becomes the predominant aesthetic effect by which audience reaction is stimulated. The ethical move in the arts in general, and in performing arts in particular, seems thus to have directed its audience and readers to an aesthetic experience that increasingly tends to offer more interrogation and less narrative certainty; more gaps to be filled up and gradually less sententious political readings. And the figure of the wandering specter, be it in the shape of a ghost, a vampire or a scarecrow, as I have intended to prove throughout this work, has emerged as a principal and key element conducting the ontological deconstruction the subject of such existential quandary is object to. If maybe relying on many (and many times dissenting) critical voices, from Agamben to Žižek, and from Carlson to Diamond, the work accomplished throughout these pages, the exploration and critical scrutiny of the wide range of texts hereby presented, has inevitably asked for theoretical support in the search for research and investigative rigor. The different textual analysis have thus been fully informed by a wide variety of respected critical voices and, at the same time, I have struggled to keep raising my own, by trying to prove throughout these pages that the precarious and uncertain times faced in contemporary cultural eventuality have come to be symbolized (in this human/artistic inexhaustible attempt to symbolically contain what is intrinsically ineffable) by the ethereal and elusive specter in the manifold ways shown in this extensive study, product of a large expanse of conscientious investigative work. In order to support my argument, and throughout the analysis of the texts here suggested, I have thus relied on a wide range of authors whose contributions on the analysis of the subject, both from an introspective and psychoanalytic perspective, and from a sociological an ethical point of view, has been indispensable to find my own critical voice throughout this academic process that along these lines comes to an end. Though Gil Cuder Conclusions. 303 departing from the primal concern about the controversial theatrical representation of trauma (one existential experience which makes the subject’s meaning and identity coordinates collapse and thus demands alternative strategies for its testimonial formulation) this work has hence grown tree-like as the different plays of the corpus demanded specific critical approaches to the distinct aspects and responses to traumatic reality. As way of recapitulation, and thus as a kind of mythical reopening of Bauman’s discourse about the malleability of contemporary liquid times that I appealed to at the introduction of this thesis, I must state that along the pages of this doctoral project I have consistently attempted to delineate the aesthetic turn that, on account of its elusiveness and uncontainability, I have hereby formulated (and also incorporated in the very title of this work) as theatrical ‘hauntology’. The various ways in which evental trauma, its unrestrained specters, uncontrollable remnants and vanishing traces force us to re-think and re-formulate our very subjectivity place us at an ambivalent ground of undecidability; at an undefined ontological locus between the present and the absent, the material and the ethereal, which inevitably matches such existential move that I have thus referred to as ‘hauntology’. As conveniently put by Fredric Jameson, Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and work, within the living present: all it says, if it can be said to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us. (1999:39) Hauntology, and in particular, its theatrical formulation, thus becomes a powerful instrument so as to formulate transcendental considerations on contemporary subjectivity. My investigative intention with this work has been to demonstrate how the contemporary ontological move towards the precarious asks for aesthetic mechanisms 304 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . remarkably met by the contemporary theatrical panorama and its aesthetics of ‘hauntological’ deconstruction to extents that are not reached by any other artistic means. Traditional representational mechanisms appealing to a realistic narrative discourse fall short of instruments to evoke such discursive struggle to contain the unrestrained or to represent the irrepresentable implied in traumatic experiences, and it is through the figure of the specter, the ethereal and non-human, and its emergence in a context of aesthetic deconstruction, that such existential quandary is thus effectively represented in the terms throughout this thesis illustrated. The theatrical stage thus emerges as an apt arena for the development of a Brechtian alienating mode capable of constructing a defamiliarized lens from which to scrutinize the otherwise blurred and incomprehensible spectral figure of the precarious contemporary subject. As thoroughly proved throughout these pages and in the various ways hereby appealed to, the contemporary theatrical stage and its spectral call for liquid and fragmentary subjectivity emerges as an arena integrating a critical paradigm from which to inspect contemporary ethics from a thus sharpened and broadened analytical gaze. Gil Cuder Conclusions. 305 306 Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights . Gil Cuder Bibliography. 307 BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources: Carr, Marina. Plays: One (Low in the Dark, The Mai, Portia Coughlan, By the Bog of Cats). London: Faber and Faber, 1999. ---. Plays: Two (On Raftery’s Hill, Ariel, Woman and Scarecrow, The Cordelia Dream, Marble). 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Gender, Politics, Subjectivity: Reading Caryl Churchill. Diss. Universitat Barcelona. Barcelona: U. Barcelona, 2002. Print. http://www.tdx.cat/bitstream/handle/10803/1659/TESI.pdf?sequence=1. 9 March 2014. Mullarkey, John. Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Mumford, Meg. “Gestic Masks in Brecht’s Theater: A Testimony to the Contradictions and Parameters of a Realistic Aesthetic.” New Essays on Brecht: The Brecht Yearbook. 26 (2001): 143-173. Münkler, Henfried. The New Wars. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Narbona-Carrión, María Dolores. “The Role of Female Bonding on the Stage of Violence.” Performing Gender Violence: Plays by Contemporary American Women Dramatists. Eds. Barbara Ozieblo and Noelia Hernández-Real. New York: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2012. 61-79. [Document text truncated for crawler view.]