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Postcoloniality in Portia Coughlan: Marina Carr in search of Lost Others

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2010, 23(1), pp.153-180
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

정문영 1

1계명대학교

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ABSTRACT

Recently the critical approaches to Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan(1996), the second play of the trilogy of “the midlands plays,” emphasize its postcoloniality and tragicality from the two perspectives of postcolonialism and psychoanalysis. This paper tries to connect the distinctive perspectives which are supposed to explore the two different spaces, i.e., the political or cultural space of Ireland and the private space of subjectivity. In fact, the space created by Carr’s theatre based on Ireland’s midlands is located at the crossroad between the two spaces which are not separate but connective ones. Thus, in order to explore the connective spaces, this paper tries to synthesize Kristeva’s theory of “the abject” used by Wallace with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory, especially their body without organs(BwO) appropriated from Artaud, connecting them with each other. Through this connective synthesis of perspectives, this paper tries to find a new postcoloniality from the unstable milieu ceaselessly in motion and ever-renewing, like the Belmont River. Carr’s strong and brave woman, Portia has been regarded as the other, the repository of negative aspects of Irishness which must be purged to attain a new postcoloniality, from the perspective of postcolonialism which has rooted in Irish nationalism. But this paper argues that Portia attempts to “abject” herself to make herself a BwO instead of becoming a tragic heroine, and comes back to the stage as the dead body in the middle of the play to make an empty BwO into a full BwO, denying the catharsis. Her dead body leads spectators into a bloc of becomingsi, “the plane of consistency,” a field of pure intensities. There we can glimpse Carr’s new virtual theatre of BwO and a new Irishness, destratifying strata of fixed authentic Irishness.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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