2022, Vol.35, No.1

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

pISSN : 1226-3397
https://journal.kci.go.kr/medak

This paper aims to analyze the characteristics of anti-Oedipus in Betrayal of Harold Pinter and woman-becoming of Emma, a protagonist in this drama. Pinter betrays the properties of Oedipus by destroying the traditional arrangement of time in drama and through the relation between Emma and three men (Robert, Jerry, and Casey). First, the reverse placement of scenes in Betrayal has an effect on destroying the Oedipus voyeurism of audiences who wonder what the fate of characters is and how events progress. Also, audiences always watch the stare of Emma on the stage from start to finish. Her stare is not that of an oppressed subject but that of destructing men-centered gazes in the traditional Oedipus regime because she serves as a center figure in the relation among three men. As the result, Emma collapses the men-centered desire of Oedipus and severs as the desiring-machine of anti-Oedipus. As an active subject or a desiring-machine, she realizes becoming-woman in Deleuze’s thought. Her becoming-woman is related to the affirmation of minority and difference that Deleuze stresses.

In the fluid social and political 21st century landscape, Churchill has continued to produce dialectical theatre, unique in its dramatic technique allowing space for critical engagement. In Here We Go, death is displaced from the ultimate tragic event by ageing. Irrespective of individual case, death is regarded as the common human condition determining human’s finitude and mortality. The ones participating in a funeral party as a grievable community make sense of their own death through the other’s. In the vein of Judith Butler’s precarity, the precarious body is grounded to establish the ethical relation and obligation toward the others. Moreover, ‘here’ and ‘there’ in the title indicate the proximity which alerts people to unawareness of bodily locatedness through media, focusing on the unequal distribution of precarity. Churchill’s anxiety of extinction is explicitly specified in Escaped Alone. The accounts of the apocalypse arouse a negative atmosphere by horror and threat. The negativity in this play corresponds to the nonidentical which is exclusive in achieving identity and unity in Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics. Through the nonidentical, the contradiction working under the dominant system is revealed on the surface. In Escaped Alone, the pervasive horror leads to the critical thinking about the fundamental reasons of global disaster. The point of thinking in contradiction takes on concerns of the globalization of economy and neoliberalism. In the end, Churchill foregrounds precarity of social and political dimensions governing the earth community in these two plays, soliciting spectator’s critical perspective.

This paper tries to understand the nature of Beckett’s literary allusion by way of analyzing the literary allusions to King Lear appearing in his later English texts. King Lear and Beckett’s works bear similarities in terms of the theme of the failure of divine reward, the experiment in human misery and sufferings and the element of the grotesque pantomime. As a frame of reference for our study, there are three major case studies on Beckett’s literary allusions respectively undertaken by Gontarski, Knowlson and Caselli, which respectively shed light on the echoes in the mythical patterns, the generality of quotation and its sensory embodiment and the self-reflective and ironical intertextuality. As this paper analyzes Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho and Endgame as the three representative cases of Beckett’s literary allusion to King Lear, Ill Seen Ill Said’s quotation of “vile jelly” is, firstly, found to create profound thematic echoes between the fruitless efforts of its camera-eye and those of Gloucester in King Lear. In terms of the general quotation and its sensory embodiment, the text echoes the senility dramatized in King Lear by materializing the frailty of the one frail remaining eye and the abject body of the old woman. The case of ironical intertextuality in the work is performed in the way in which, the better one understands King Lear, the better one can understands the work in allusion to it itself, as a subtle device in the text bringing about the inversion between origin and product. Worstward Ho sets Edgar’s line “the worst is not so long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” as a very important preoccupation as well as the most important thematic thread in the work. Endgame illustrates similarities to, and influences from, King Lear in its ethos and pathos. Peter Brook’s iconic 1962 production King Lear so effectively witnessed to and exploited those similarities as to alter the general interpretation as well as the critical opinion of the Shakespearean original. As Beckett himself explained, these literary allusions are like “bits of pipe” that he carefully and meticulously chose for a better working literary construction.