Body And Event In Howard Barker’s Drama: From Catastrophe To Anastrophe In The Castle And Other Plays 3030286983, 9783030286989, 9783030286996

Table of contents :
Author’s Preface: New Cartographies of Catastrophe......Page 6
Acknowledgement......Page 11
About the Book......Page 13
Contents......Page 14
Chapter 1: Encastleing England: Evental History and Histor(y)iography in Barker’s Work......Page 15
1 Encastling England: Barker, Genealogy, and Histor(y)iography......Page 16
2 The Critical Scholarship......Page 28
3 The Argument......Page 34
Bibliography......Page 40
Chapter 2: The Castle and Other Plays......Page 42
1 Logos Redux: The Corpus of the Castle Un­/­Done......Page 43
2 Stucley’s Catastrophe and Ann’s Anastrophe......Page 49
3 Krak and the Rationality of the Phallogocentric Discourse......Page 55
4 The Castle: “The Castle Is by Definition Not Definitive”......Page 59
Wall......Page 61
Bibliography......Page 72
Chapter 3: Desire, Language and Pregnancy/Maternity in The Castle and Other Plays......Page 73
1 Ann’s Mode of Relationality, Desire, and Language......Page 74
2 Desire in The Castle and in Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipal Model......Page 78
3 Pregnancy and Maternity in The Castle and Other Plays......Page 89
Bibliography......Page 97
Chapter 4: Aporias of Religion in Barker: God, Deconstruction, and the Re-writing of the Bible......Page 98
1 The Question of Religion and God in The Castle: Re-writing the Bible......Page 99
Chapter 5: Disciplinary Apparatus and the Paining of Transgressive Bodies......Page 117
1 Skinner and the Vicissitudes of the Disciplinary-Transgressive Body......Page 118
2 Skinner and the Court Scene......Page 126
Chapter 6: The Moment of Con-tactile Aesth-Ethics......Page 132
1 The Moment of Con-tactile Aesth-Ethics and Its Ramifications......Page 133
2 The Castle Re/Dis-figured......Page 144
Bibliography......Page 150
Index......Page 158

Citation preview

Body and Event in Howard Barker’s Drama From Catastrophe to Anastrophe in The Castle and Other Plays

Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

Body and Event in Howard Barker’s Drama

Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

Body and Event in Howard Barker’s Drama From Catastrophe to Anastrophe in The Castle and Other Plays

Alireza Fakhrkonandeh University of Southampton Southampton, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-28698-9    ISBN 978-3-030-28699-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28699-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my love, Sara and my son, Surena

Author’s Preface: New Cartographies of Catastrophe

There is always only one question in the ethic of truths: how will I, as some-­ one, continue to exceed my own being? How will I link the things I know, in a consistent fashion, via the effects of being seized by the not-known? (Badiou, Ethics 50) You are in terror of your sensitivity. You are in terror of your soul…One day your soul will burst out of its servitude … And run screaming through the empty galleries of your mind. It will send the doors of your conscience flying back on their hinges, your brain will shudder with the sound of crashing doors, I pity you, you will have no sleep. (The Power of the Dog 20)

This book takes event and the pivotal loci of the occurrence of the event— to wit, the body, language, and the unconscious and consciousness of the subject—as its focal points. Commonly not taken, by the critical establishment, as a seismograph for the manifestations of the zeitgeist, Howard Barker’s work, as is claimed in this book, maps out not only an “ontology of the present”1 but also an “ontology of the non-present.” Barker accomplishes this twofold task primarily by predicating his dramatic world and aesthetics on the notion of catastrophist event in a sense that transcends the common conception of (disastrous) event(s) as “innerworldly facts” and incidents (see Romano 21–31).2 Howard Barker (1946–)—acclaimed by Sarah Kane as “the Shakespeare of our age” and credited by The Times as “the greatest living British dramatist”3—is philosophically the most challenging and aesthetically the most complex dramatist since Samuel Beckett. Barker is a highly prolific and versatile writer—at once a dramatist, theovii

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rist, poet, painter, scenographer, and photographer.4 Over the last five decades (since 1969)5 he has written over 100 plays, 6 volumes of poetry (since 1985), and 2 books of theory—Arguments for a Theatre (first edition 1989, 4th edition 2016; henceforth AFT) and Death, the One and the Art of Theatre (2005; henceforth DOAT). The former is written in an Adornian essay-­like form, formally in conformity with the speculative, experimental, and critical thought content presented in them.6 The latter—written in aphoristic-­fragmentary passages—contains Barker’s aesthetic theories and the philosophy of his tragic drama in conjunction with poetic vignettes and phenomenologically inflected anecdotes which revolve around the lived experiences of loss, pain and desire, nature, experience and representations of death, coupled with the nature of the relationship with the beloved (designated as The One). DOAT, both in its thematic focal points and its stylistic rendition of these points, bears a striking resemblance to Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse (1990, first published 1977).7 Put succinctly, both Barker and Barthes adopt a “figural-choreographical” style, albeit Barker’s approach evinces a distinctive evental-tragic vein. Barker has also written a quasi-autobiography, A Style and Its Origins (2007; henceforth SAO), co-authored with an imaginary character, an alter ego, Eduardo Houth, in which he delineates the trajectory of his personal life and artistic career by presenting snatches of his decisive encounters with other persons, allies, and associates, both throughout his life and the life of his theatrical company, The Wrestling School (since 1988). Here, Barker/Houth comes to define his conception of style as “something arrived at by painful study, a distillation of thought and practice, and essentially a moral decision” (SAO 32). Moreover, he articulates his intention in devising such a style to be the drawing of the audience into “an ecstasy by the spectacle of excess even to the contemplation of death which is the essence of tragedy” (SAO 64). Significantly, Barker has also come to assume increasing responsibility for the production of his own plays as director and dramaturge (including sound and costume design). This multi-mediality and poetic style of his drama is vividly reflected, not only in his language (intensely musical and densely poetic in its phrasing, imagery, rhythm, and the use of metaphor) but also in his highly elaborate audial-visual aesthetics of production.8 Howard Barker is a central off-centre dramatist in more than one sense. Since his very first (radio) play One Afternoon on the 63rd Level of the North Face of the Pyramid of Cheops the Great (1970, broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)), through one of the culminat-

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ing achievements of his drama Found in the Ground (2001), up to his most recent plays such as Blok/Eko (2011), The Forty (written 2006 staged 2011), Harrowing and Uplifting Interviews (2016; HUI), and In the Depths of a Dead Love (2016; IDDL), his plays—through their heterotopic landscapes—tend to depart from realistic aesthetic, historically recognizable settings, and everyday socio-symbolic reality. These plays, by thrusting forward a “now” that resists being turned into a commodified “new,” insist on keeping a distance from the ideologically overdetermined history of the present moment and on their aesthetic and ontological autonomy. The latter two attributes are indeed posited by Barker as necessary for imaginative creation, becoming-other(wise) for the individual characters and audience, and moral speculation. To give a fleeting glimpse into the manner in which the plays incarnate the foregoing features, the first play (One Afternoon) is set in ancient Egypt, where workers, with a simmering sense of discontent and defiance, are encumbered with constructing a spectacular edifice to both immortalize the monarch and to serve as a symbol of the ideological imperishability of his power. Found in the Ground, with its expressionistic setting, albeit situated in a historically indeterminate place, is haunted by Egyptian pyramids in the backdrop, where their silhouette looms over the current setting. While driven by a thanatotically iterative impulse stemming from the European unconscious, this latter play evinces the traumatized landscapes of the melancholy European psyche (rooted in the denial and/or repression of traumatic losses: WWI, WWII, Balkan Wars, etc.) and contains residual traces of European history (burning of books and libraries, a judge from Nuremberg, and incinerated remainders of war victims). The last three plays mentioned in the previous paragraph depict either “a wretched hut on the frontier” of an indeterminate Empire (HUI) or “a well in ancient China,” while no trace of actual history of China is discernible (IDDL). Indeed, in cases akin to the latter, the name of the place in the play serves a semiotic, rather than historical, function; more strictly, the spatial-historical descriptor serves as a signifier of ontological remoteness and historical difference of the world of the play, thereby evoking a sense of non-realism and non-topicality. One Afternoon, like The Castle, depicts a situation in which a geometrically complex and metaphysically overdetermined piece of architecture— the pyramid—epitomizing (either metaphorically or literally) an ideologically contrived hierarchy not only exacts the imaginative, ­intellectual/mental, and emotional investment of individuals, but consti-

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tutes the individual subject by moulding their apparently personally motivated desires, interests, and values. The pyramid in One Afternoon, analogous to the castle in the eponymous play, features simultaneously as an Ideological State Apparatus (as embodying the eternal values of art, culture, and divinely determined history) and a Repressive State Apparatus—in which workers are exploited through the crude exertion of penal/punitive force and discipline. Ideology, as depicted in One Afternoon (as well as many other early plays, including The Castle), instigates and embeds both “productivity consciousness” and “corporal incentive.” As such, ideology, as conceived in these plays, is closely resonant with Althusser’s definition of it: “an imaginary assemblage” or an “imaginary lived relation”; more strictly, “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of the individuals to their real conditions of their existence” (1977, 151, 153). As Althusser further elaborates: “It is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that ‘men represent to themselves’ in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there. It is this relation which is the center of every ideological, i.e. imaginary, representation of the real world” (154). Akin to The Castle, One Afternoon, albeit aesthetically less sophisticated and politically (to wit, as regards the gender politics coupled with the political economy and political theology informing it) presenting a less complex vision, seeks to reveal the nature and functions of ideology along with its contradictions. Here, the Pharaoh, disguised as a slave, appears among the slaves and, while pretending to be an insurgent worker, spurs the other slaves into a paradoxical action by suggesting that the only way of undermining the oppressive system is to work harder. Indeed, One Afternoon depicts the way in which the dominant ideology (the Pharaoh) can assume the mantle of counter-ideology thereby diffusing the revolutionary impulse among the oppressed by both showing the perverted way the latter has invested interest in the survival of the dominant power and revealing the ubiquity of ideology. Such omnipresence of ideology is intended to inculcate the illusion of its omnipotence, thereby suffocating any possibility of resistance. We see how this motif recurs in The Castle too, specifically by Krak. This book, thus, undertakes a re-reading of The Castle and other aesthetically thematically related plays by Barker in order to critically unmoor the play away from the Seductionist reading/dynamics and to re-situate both this pivotal play and more broadly Barker’s work within my ­proposed—“evental”—analytical framework. In this book, accordingly,

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The Castle will be considered as a gravitating point around which analogous thematic and aesthetic issues running through other plays will be probed too. As such, the ensuing chapters focus on the evental nature of central issues such as the ethics-aesthetics of pregnancy, transgression, sacrifice, and spiritual-carnal proximity between self and the other (as the singular individual), encounter with death or inhabiting (or being relegated to) a near-death zone, and, finally, re-defining one’s relation to the transcendental signified (God) as well as the symbolic order (dominant socio-­political order) surrounded by competing discourses. The ensuing chapters will undertake the scrutiny of the evental dynamics of the foregoing issues in various plays. As will be demonstrated, the adoption of such an analytical framework shall yield a novel way of conceiving the fundamental facets of Barker’s catastrophist drama: the tragic aesthetics in Barker, the questions of (ontological and ontic) autonomy and heteronomy, ethics of tragic subjectivity, history, and nature and dynamics of catastrophe. Southampton, UK

Alireza Fakhrkonandeh

Notes 1. See Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others (2010), 21. 2. See Romano 45–8. 3. See Dan Rebellato, “Sarah Kane: An Appreciation” New Theatre Quarterly 59 (1999): 280–1. 4. For a detailed treatment and exploration of the nature of photo and the role of photography, see Alireza Fakhrkonandeh (2018). 5. His first stage play was Cheek (1970). 6. See Adorno, “The Essay as Form” in Notes to Literature 8–18. 7. For Barthes’ illuminating comments on the choreographic and kinaesthetic facets of the two notions of “discourse” and “figure,” see Lover’s Discourse 1–4. 8. For an extended account of the performance-related details of recent dramaturgical developments in Barker’s theatre, see James Reynolds and Andy W. Smith (eds.), Howard Barker’s Theatre.

Acknowledgement

This book has seen various existential, intellectual, and historical vicissitudes whilst in the making. The gestation of some of the ideas underpinning it dates back to 2008, when I completed my MA in English Literature and Critical Theory. Some of these early insights and analyses, evolving and brewing in my mind ever since, later found their way into one of the chapters of my PhD thesis (2011–2015), albeit in substantially revised form. During this latter period, the project benefited from the indispensable supervision of Thomas Docherty, Daniel Katz, and Anthony Howard. Their criticisms, suggestions, and intellectual guidance helped me copiously in finding the final contours of the arguments of this book. I owe a special debt of personal gratitude to Daniel Katz. Since our first meeting, he has proved a friend indeed. The meaning of such a mutual friendship is well captured by Agamben’s remarks in “What Is an Apparatus?” There have been other friends and colleagues who have also done me the favour of reading various drafts and parts of this book and sharing their thoughts with me. These include Prof. Nicholas Royle, Prof. Nadine Holdsworth, Prof. Martin Middeke, and Prof. Ros King. Stephen Barrell has never ceased to surprise me with his invaluable friendship, inspiring companionship, and sense of invincible wit. I would also like to thank The Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (Walter de Gruyter), and its editor Prof. Martin Middeke, for generously allowing me to include (albeit in drastically revised forms) parts of the article I published with them in December 2013. Above all, I have been so privileged to receive invaluable guidance and encouragement from Howard Barker since my arrival in the UK in 2010. I am immensely grateful to Howard Barker, who generously read xiii

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various drafts of this book and graciously offered encouraging comments and very helpful hints. The end of an acknowledgement is its interior and intimate space, invariably reserved for the most important people. As Eliot states: “In my end is my beginning” (Four Quartets). This project would not have been possible without the unstinting support, care, and love bestowed on me by my wife, Sara Abbasi, and my mother, Mahnaz Taghavifard. Sara has always been the first audience of my morass of ideas. I would like to express my gratitude to Sara for the affection, wit, and pleasant distraction she provided. The final stages of the preparation of this book coincided with the birth of my son, Surena. Surena has proved a blissful blessing ever since. It is to them that I dedicate this book.

About the Book

This book characterizes Howard Barker’s drama as an “evental” drama. This “evental” nature is manifested in the aesthetic, ethic, ontological, and subjective-­existential dimensions of his drama. Predicated on this evental dynamics, this book elaborates how Barker’s work, in its engagement with social, historical, and political issues, is distinguished by its mapping out of not only an “ontology of the present” but also an “ontology of the nonpresent.” On this basis, this book undertakes a revisionary reading of The Castle and other aesthetically and thematically related plays by Barker in order to critically unmoor Barker’s work away from the Seductionist trend in Barker criticism and to re-situate both this pivotal play and more broadly Barker’s aesthetic within my proposed—“evental”—discourse or analytical framework. Finally, this book will argue how Barker’s engagement with politics and metaphysic of gender(s) is neither feminist nor dialectical; rather, it is a hyper-dialectical and chiasmatic model—informed by an irreducible différance between the parties—predicated on trasitivism of the flesh, transcription of affective-cognitive schemas, and transversal dynamics.

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Contents

1 Encastleing England: Evental History and Histor(y) iography in Barker’s Work  1 2 The Castle and Other Plays 29 3 Desire, Language and Pregnancy/Maternity in The Castle and Other Plays 61 4 Aporias of Religion in Barker: God, Deconstruction, and the Re-writing of the Bible 87 5 Disciplinary Apparatus and the Paining of Transgressive Bodies107 6 The Moment of Con-tactile Aesth-Ethics123 Bibliography141 Index149

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CHAPTER 1

Encastleing England: Evental History and Histor(y)iography in Barker’s Work

Abstract  The primary aim here is to explore how “the evental” model informs Barker’s epistemological-aesthetic stance towards history. We will see how Barker’s drama, in its treatment and conception of history, diverges from various modes/trends of historical representation by developing an “evental”—rather than a linear-progressive or dialectical-­ teleological—model. This evental model is driven by the aporetic logic of arrivant (Anti-History) and actualization of the immanent virtual. Second, this chapter demonstrates the uncanny contemporaneity of The Castle and, more generally, Barker’s oeuvre particularly in the post-Brexit context where a binary/dichotomy-based discourse of nationalist ideology and national sovereignty (described here as “wall or encastling ideology”) has emerged not only in the UK but, more broadly, across the globe. Finally, this chapter intends to re-cast the established reading of The Castle— where Skinner is depicted as the main tragic protagonist—and posits Ann as the central character. Ann is here argued to embody an alternative (to the matriarchal or patriarchal) economy and ethics (of desire, gender, and subjectivity) thereby instigating the three pivotal events of the play: the re-writing of the Bible, the construction of the castle, and Krak’s symbolic conversion. Keywords  Evental history • The virtual • The castle • Wall ideology • New materialism • Aporetic logic of arrivant

© The Author(s) 2019 A. Fakhrkonandeh, Body and Event in Howard Barker’s Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28699-6_1

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1   Encastling England: Barker, Genealogy, and Histor(y)iography The only difference between the love that flows through the envelope-walls of our skin or mucous fluids and the love which appropriates for itself in and by the same, lies in the through which allows each one their living becoming. (Irigaray, Elemental Passions 1992, 27) Desire does not coincide with an unsatisfied need; it is situated beyond satisfaction and nonsatisfaction. The relationship with the Other, or the idea of Infinity, accomplishes it. Each can live it in the strange desire of the Other that no voluptuosity comes to fulfill, nor close, nor put to sleep Neither knowledge nor power. In voluptuosity, the Other—the feminine—retires into its mystery. The relation with it is a relation with its absence. (Levinas, Totality and Infinity 179, 260–1) So in an era when sexuality is simultaneously cheap, domestic and soon-to­be forbidden, desire becomes the field of enquiry most likely to stimulate a creative disorder. (AFT 38)

The issues of castles and their walls feature prominently in Howard Barker’s The Castle, providing the impetus for many of the play’s events. Considered more generally, castles and their walls confront us with a puzzle in the form of a two-piece tableau-vivant. On the one hand, there is the symptom and crisis to which the castle and its walls (or the act of their construction) offer themselves as remedy.1 On the other, there looms the prospect of socio-political and existential consequences, the inside-outside binary and the phantasmatic jargon of (national-nativist) authenticity embedding an (self-)alienating discourse into the life of the community and the individuals that compose it. Suffice it to say, such a binary discourse refuses both the recognition of the Other per se and its inherent proximal intertwinement with the self. It prompts a dichotomizing relationship that presumes a sovereign self and an other that is either alien and alienating or merely an object of knowledge for the self—thereby breeding “uncanny” repercussions within.2 Let us begin with the notion of symptom and crisis. On 22 May 2017, the twenty-two-year-old suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, detonated himself amidst a crowd of people attending a concert in Manchester. Thus what started as a night of elated revelry ended as a gruesome nightmare, leaving twenty-two dead and fifty-nine injured. A first-generation British-­

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Libyan, Abedi was raised by Muslim parents in Manchester, in the UK. It is not the case, then, that he had managed to penetrate the near impregnable walls of the island (although his father had); rather, he was already within the confines of the English castle. One of the motives adumbrated by his relatives was that “he was driven by America’s military attacks in the Middle East [… He] saw children—Muslim children—dying everywhere, and wanted revenge” (Wall Street Journal, 25 May 2017). The gaping wound of this trauma had hardly begun to heal when, on 3 June 2017, a second attack was made by three terrorists (Khuram Shazad Butt, Rachid Redouane, and Youssef Zaghba) in London. This time, the terrorists were equipped with knives and hoax bomb belts. Apparently driven by similar motives to those of Abedi, they attacked innocent civilians, murdering seven and severely wounding forty-eight. While Butt had UK citizenship, this time none of the terrorists were UK born or ethnically British. If we add to these two incidents an earlier terror attack committed on 3 March 2017, we see that all three were intimately linked to, and perpetrated in, the wake of an array of cataclysms: 9/11; the US’ NATO-supported invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; the human crisis and political turmoil instigated by these attacks; the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS); the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia’s proxy wars and interventions in Syria and Yemen; the consequent immigration crisis in Asia and Europe; and last, but not least, the Brexit referendum in which the UK had voted to leave the European Union. Thus we are confronted with cases in which national interests and international issues are tackled both at national borders and on trans-national levels (in wars of power, resources, and faith). The second part of the tableau-vivant, which foregrounds the contemporaneity of The Castle, relates to the question of the wall, limit, and castle. It concerns the ostensibly anachronistic, yet pervasive, erection of state border walls across the world, ranging from Britain, America, and Israel to Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and India (see Wendy Brown 8–19). This significant phenomenon, which I have termed “encastling,”3 has been widely adopted to assert nation-state sovereignty and curb the flow of illegal immigration. Wendy Brown acutely articulates two main reasons underlying such a move. Not only has nation-state sovereignty been eclipsed and eroded by the steady growth of international economic and governance institutions (such as the IMF and WTO) and the widespread dominance of global markets, but it has also been considerably u ­ ndermined by neo-liberal rationality. The latter “recognizes no sovereign apart from entrepreneurial decision makers, which displaces legal and political prin-

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ciples (especially liberal commitments to universal inclusion, equality, liberty, and the rule of law) with market criteria, and which demotes the political sovereign to managerial status” (22). Nevertheless, when viewed in the context of globalization and free market capitalism, such a rampant resurgence of interest in wall construction confronts us with four paradoxical relationships: the first is between sovereignty of the nation-state and global (free market) capitalism; the second, between national economy and corporate multinationalism (where fluidity of borders, mobility, and post-nationalist political-economic principles are vital); the third, between national(ist) attempts at physical border building and wall construction, which is jarringly coterminous with the age of cybernetics, networked communication, and virtual power; and the fourth between and post- and trans-nationalist universalized values (democracy, human rights, and cosmopolitanism), and neo-colonial acts of exclusion and stratification (see Brown’s Walled States 20–5). This nexus of paradoxes, lying at the core of wall-construction/encastling discourse, reveals the true nature of late-capitalist political economy. It reveals how the idea of free mobility and freedom of movement in the context of such global order designates only a unilateral—rather than reciprocal—flow (from the Western, and now also Chinese, central to the peripheries of under-developed and developing countries) of commodities—and not people. Palpable echoes are already audible between the cases we have related to the first part of the tableau-vivant and the issues at stake in The Castle. In the play, Krak, an Arab mathematician, scientist, and architect is brought home as a captive, but resented for speaking English more fluently and eloquently than the natives. Haunted by traumatic memories of his family’s massacre by Christian troops in the Crusades, he harbours a profound sense of vindictiveness and, like the terrorists we have considered, looks for an apt moment for revenge. Because of his training, Krak is entrusted with the task of designing a castle that will establish patriarchal authority and suppress the enemies within (women). The castle is, however, dismantled at the end of the play for a multiplicity of reasons: Stucley’s incremental deterioration of sanity and intensification of paranoia, the relationship (of heteronomous desire and intimacy) between Ann and Krak; Ann’s suicide followed by the mass suicide of women; Skinner’s acts of relentless resistance; and the complicity between Krak and the neighbouring region’s engineer. As is evident, questions of faith, religion, nationhood and nationality (Stucley’s persistent indication of his being English), science, and ethnicity lie at the core of the play.

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With regard to the second part of the tableau-vivant in relation to The Castle, we note that the castles are primarily defined by their literal/architectural and symbolic/ideological use of walls. Walls themselves are conspicuous concretizations of the idea of the limit. Resonant with the aforementioned issues and aporias, The Castle evokes a host of problems revolving around the question of borders, territories, and the tension between horizon-crossing and horizon-owning attitudes (respectively exhibited by Stucley/Skinner and Ann). The castle in the play features not only as a thematic-narrative component but also as a physical/actual and virtual prop or object upon the stage. As a result of these physical walls and this psycho-spiritual character, it simultaneously proves to be and refuses to behave as what Susan Leigh Star and Latour call a boundary object.4 In this regard the characterization of the boundary object by Holford et  al. illuminates the potentiality of castle walls as boundary constructions: an effective boundary object is in a constant mode of actual and potential transformation resulting from actors continually co-constructing and re-­ constructing it in both the physical and imaginary sense. In turn, this active co-construction (or boundary construction) serves as a powerful mechanism for enriched sense-making [34] and non-coercive sense-giving. (2008: 10 Qtd. in Max Stephenson 6)5

This is evident in the drastic formal changes the castle undergoes and their epistemological and ontological correlates and corollaries. (The latter are readily observable in the alterations in self-understanding and the mode and meaning of social interactions that affect the personal and social worlds of characters.) Such changes lead to a re-configuration and re-­ distribution of local objects, thereby changing the global layout (outward-­ looking) that prompts the audience/reader to reconceive borders and boundaries as fluid and malleable. The question of the wall and, by extension, the nature, function, and history of the limit (and its concomitants such as law, transgression, and liminality), will be dealt with in what follows. For now, we may observe not only that it has been an abiding preoccupation of Barker’s but also that its exploration becomes increasingly ontological in later works such as Fence in Its Thousandth Year (FITY), Gertrude-­The Cry, and More No Still. Lying at the heart of The Castle is a disciplinary-symbolic apparatus: read allegorically, the castle reveals a certain nationalist-religious ideology

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and invokes the psycho-geographically inflected imaginary of the nation held by both its rulers and inhabitants. Such a castle, and the concomitant castle mentality, far from being anachronistic (the play is mainly set within a medieval world) takes on salient contemporary reverberations. The castle mentality evoked in Barker’s play, I argue, is more about the contemporary Britain of late-capitalist economy and neo-liberal politics than the Mediaeval Britain of feudal politics and religious crusades. Nevertheless, such a parallel not only reveals continuities between two widely separated historical periods but comes as a riposte to modernity’s claims of progressive politics and Enlightened rationality. Barker, though apparently critiquing the paranoid-fascist mentality of an apparently medieval sovereign, reveals, more generally, the way in which a dichotomizing attitude informs ultra-nationalist and phallogocentric discourses. Written in 1983 on the commission of the Oxford Playhouse Company, The Castle is undoubtedly one of the most prominent and provocative of Barker’s plays and continues to resonate as highly relevant even today. The play continues to engage audiences on an international level, not only because it traverses intercultural borders but also because it brings audiences back to the edges of national history and prehistory itself. There have been numerous reproductions, stagings, and performances of the play in the US, Canada, and Europe.6 Along with Downchild and Crimes in Hot Countries, with which it forms a trilogy, The Castle was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican in 1985. At that time, drama was widely deemed to be preoccupied with a Reaganite intensification of the arms race and oppositional feminist movements and values, outstanding among which was Greenham Common, or the Greenham Peace Movement.7 One of the more prominent and recent performances of the play was a revival at the one-day international 21 for 21 festival in 2009. This re-historicizing production brought about a notable shift of focus in the cultural perception and reception of the play, shifting emphasis from its feminist aspects to its religious and neo-colonialist ones. It thus brought into sharper relief certain unobtrusive facets of the play and cast them in a new light. Exemplary evidence of such a shift can be found in David Ian Rabey’s 2006 recognition of The Castle, with its Muslim prisoner of war, as prophetic, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror” (a latter-day kind of crusade) unleashed on the Middle East, with Iraq and Afghanistan as its primary targets. As Rabey notes: The Castle “predicts aspects of global politics and the paradoxical reflexes of the socalled ‘war-on-terror’” (Gritzner and Rabey, Essays on Catastrophe 19).

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Barker describes The Castle as depicting “appalling passions and bottomless despair” (A Style and Its Origins 41). Accordingly, three thematic strands prevail in the work: (1) the aporias of corporeality (embodiment), sexual love, desire, and gender politics; (2) the depiction of human mind and body in eventful moments of extremity, crisis, and transgression; and (3) the exposition of the metaphysical-theological, ethical, and psycho-­ somatically pathological underpinnings of human motives. The Castle can thus be deemed as one of the paradigmatic and earliest attempts made by Barker at the deconstruction of the metaphysical roots of religion by revealing how the sensible lies at the core of the problems of desire, the spiritual, and the religious. The text transpires as one of the most multivalent and challenging of Barker’s oeuvre, weaving an essentially (inter)corporeal and relational conception of the self into a densely packed ontological framework and ethical con/text of relations, subtended by a socio-symbolic arras of an extensive scope. With its medieval landscape intermittently traversed by anachronistic phenomena, instantiated both materially and linguistically, The Castle strikes the reader/audience not only as demanding (a great range and complexity of emotions, images, and ideas pervade the play) but also as exhausting (in terms of imaginative magnitude, radical temporal complications and dislocations, and narrative structure, but also the play’s running time of two hours and fifty minutes). In this respect, The Castle only bears comparison with plays such as The Bite of the Night, Rome, and The Ecstatic Bible. At various junctures in his Arguments for a Theatre, Barker vehemently denigrates drama (and plays) that serve a certain function, be it ideological, socio-political, or cultural-educational enlightenment. This is a stance which he associates with Brecht, Chekhov, Shaw, and the whole host of contemporary Brechtians and Naturalist-Realists (AFT 74, 77, 92, 94, 96, 104, 112, passim). He argues that the dominant “discipline of political theatre eliminates complexity and contradiction” from the human, the world, and theatre by “effectively abolish[ing] poetry from the stage” and valorizing “clarity and realism” (AFT 79). Countering the trend, prevalent in Brecht and Naturalism-Realism strands of contemporary drama, of positing an “autocracy of the author” as the source of authority, meaning, and truth, Barker asserts that his plays are “without message” (because “[w]ho trusts the message-giver any more?”) but not “without meaning” (38). In this way, he seeks to liberate the audience from “the shackles of meaning” (82). As such, his work “derives its meaning precisely from the

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dissolution of coherent meaning” (53), whereby the audience “deprived of the predictable, is obliged to construct meaning for itself” (58). He also denies that there are topical political messages in his plays: “the art of theatre disposes of the self-evident with every gesture” (DOAT 35). Nevertheless, such a claim to ontological dissociation from dominant discourse and everyday reality does not cause Barker to lose sight of the otherwise deep connection between the institution of theatre and social reality and its principles: “If a serious theory of dramatic practice is to exist it can only do so on the basis of an analysis of social formation” (AFT 185). In the same vein, he also underscores how the complexity and ambiguity of meaning, language, the human (character), and the world they inhabit, which characterizes the theatre of catastrophe, can be “a political gesture of profound strength” (AFT 48). This is particularly so in a society “disciplined by moral imperatives” that are utilitarian, authoritarian (based on identity-thinking), and restrictively rationalist (functionalism and performance-­based) (Ibid.). More recently, decrying the contemporary socio-political order that has fostered the degenerate populism-empiricism and ethically existentially alienated condition of the British masses (and, indeed, late-capitalist consumerism per se)—producing a media-saturated mass with an atrophied sensibility, for whom “beauty is unaffective, and ‘strange’ ideas are viewed as crazy eccentricities”—Barker identifies the “tragic personality” as the audience of his tragic drama: “We talk only to the restless, for whom life is not enough” (in Wrestling with Catastrophe 83). Barker explicitly links The Castle to Greenham and the Cold War in two interviews he gave at the time. Speaking to Finlay Donesky, in New Theatre Quarterly (1986), Barker explains that The Castle “was very much my reaction to Greenham, but also a reaction to other playwrights’ reactions.” In particular, he expresses misgivings concerning the way his contemporaries (including David Edgar and Howard Brenton) invoked and deployed the Greenham event in two respects: their instrumental and ornamental use of it solely to promote the contemporaneity of their work; and their attempt to present Greenham as a solution (338). In another interview, with Tony Dunn in Gambit (1983), Barker described a new play that was inspired by the destructive power of science, and presumably nuclear weapons in particular. Here Barker expresses one of his main aims in writing The Castle as being “an attempt to discover some metaphorical basis for talking about scientific mayhem. That’s what we have now, it’s the crucial issue of our time. As I never write about a single issue I expect it will also involve sexual love and its redemptive power. I’ve said I’d write that kind of play before, but never have.”8

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The final product, The Castle as a dramatic text, is far from being amenable to being reduced to an allegorical or metaphorical level in several decisive respects. (These include gender politics and economy, the ethics of inter-subjective relationality, the question of faith/belief, one’s conception of the divine/God and its relation to one’s self-conception, and their ontological-metaphysical dimensions.) One of the principle aesthetic precepts of Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe consists in pitting the “imaginative play” (of the Theatre of Catastrophe) against the “researched play.”9 In keeping with this, historical issues are not only never directly invoked in The Castle, but their traces are so oblique and latent that if we disregard the play’s extra-textual history and context, they prove vestigial to the point of indiscernibility. Furthermore, as we will see below, Barker, in his approach to the issues at stake, refuses to restrict them to gender economy and gender politics, refusing both essentialist, or analogously grounded, feminist attitudes. Treated strictly, his stance can even be deduced to be implicitly critical of certain (militant and identitarian) feminist positions, power relations, and gender politics and, in certain respects, starkly defiant of such feminist appropriations. As the foregoing points amply attest, it is not tenable to conceive The Castle as a partial allegory for Greenham Common and the Cold War. Rather, the play is a (re)creation of history with an imaginative vision towards the present and an ethical-existential focus on the non-present. In other words, rather than depicting the pursuit of politically specific causes by the feminist resistance movement in a historically and socio-politically recognizable context, The Castle depicts history as “the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by, the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]”; The Castle thus depicts moments of rupture “out of the continuum of history” (cf. Benjamin “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” XIV, Illuminations 261). More specifically, The Castle ponders the issues of gender and body primarily from an ontological and existential-ethical perspective, though firmly located in a hybrid socio-political context. Correspondingly, it is the question of desire (and its evental nature and potentialities), and only secondarily gender, that is at stake in the play. Desire, though not detachable from one’s gender, is far from being bound to binary gender categories. Desire, as I shall argue in this book, features more as a deterritorializing, productive, and ­schizo-­nomadic force that not only disrupts modes of identitarian gender politics and identity (whether phallocentric or gynocentric) but opens up new spaces in and between characters for being/becoming otherwise.

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If we gauge The Castle against plays concerned with similar issues and belonging to the same period, we can more palpably perceive the aesthetic, stylistic, and ontological features that characterize Barker’s theatre of catastrophe. These features set it apart from its contemporaries with regard to its approach to history and its treatment (representational or otherwise) of immediate historical context and/or issues. In this regard, Edward Bond’s trilogy, The War Plays (comprising Red, Black, and Ignorant, Tin Can People, and Great Peace 1983–1985), offers itself as a particularly apt example. When asked by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) to write a play about “Thought Crimes” rampant in the 1980s (the period of the Thatcherite administration), Bond decided to write a play in which he demonstrated how a lack of self-knowledge and an alienating social reality lead to non-­rational acts (Bond qtd in Roberts, 1985, 52–3). Written within the space of two years and set in a post-apocalyptic context, Bond’s trilogy is concerned with the issue of nuclear war and the dehumanizing ramifications it has for humanity. In this regard, it strikes us as an allegory of Western consciousness (see Mick Mangan 72–80). Therein, Bond tackles the question of essence (quiddity) and the survival of humanity in a non-rational context by engaging with the issues of paradox (the Palermo paradox),10 contradiction (dialecticizing history), and violence. Although, in The War Plays, he partly abandons realism in favour of a new poetic form of drama (expressionism), the works still explicitly take the form of learning plays, being overtly ideological with clear messages about the institutionalized brutality of the bourgeoisie, the portrayal of violence, class consciousness, and capitalist ideology. Putting emphasis on the contradictions of a capitalist and class-structured society, the plays depict situations involving paradox and contradiction, in which characters have to decide to act as a human the result of which can at once be humanizing and/or dehumanizing, depending on the act and the subjective-discursive perspective from which we consider it. Exemplarily, in the first play “a man [the Monster] who has not been born [because of being stillborn and burnt in his mother’s womb in a nuclear explosion] recounts the life he did not lead” (343). Here, a soldier (the Monster’s son) comes back home, having been commissioned to kill one person arbitrarily. He first decides to kill one of his neighbours, yet ultimately chooses to murder his own father. Interestingly, the dying father (the Monster) lauds the decision as moral and humanistic: “The first playwrights said know yourself / My son learned it was better to kill what he loved / Than that one creature who is sick or lame or old or poor or a stranger should sit and stare at an

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empty world and find no reason why it should suffer” (WP 38). Tin Can People depicts a few survivors in a post-nuclear landscape, left with a huge larder of unsullied canned food and the question of how to be and act as a human in such an inhuman world. In this second play, an outsider enters this foreclosed post-­nuclear community and is gradually perceived as the source of calamities befalling them. He is taken as a scapegoat onto whom they project their fears and anxieties and is ultimately killed/purged. In the third part, soldiers are once more sent home to kill one baby in their neighbourhood in order to enhance the possibility of surviving the severe shortage of food. The soldier the play focuses on, on returning home, is ineluctably embroiled in an imbroglio in which he must decide between murdering his own sibling and a neighbour’s child. As with the first play, he decides to kill his sibling. Later in the play, we see the Soldier’s mother, Woman, wandering in the wilderness of the wasteland pushing the pram containing the shredded bundle of her murdered child. As is observable in the foregoing succinct account, The War Plays are in keeping with Bond’s Brechtian idea of Rational Theatre. Thus, in the first place, they bear a number of metaphysical assumptions, such as the inherent goodness and rationality of the human infant. Second, they are saturated with dichotomizing value-laden normative ideas: human-inhuman; technology/machine-radical innocence; good-bad; and rational-­irrational. Finally, they are marked by an ironizing gesture, in which the inhuman (Monster in the play) is human(e) and vice versa. This issue is vividly reflected in the following two statements from and about the play. In the first play, the Monster says: “In bad times it should be human to do good. But in bad times good cannot be done” (WP 25). Commenting on the third play, Bond observes: “In Great Peace the people go to hell to take the world out of the hands of Gods and armies and put it into their own. They are our guides to the ruins” (WP 352). Furthermore, this statement of a moralistic and didactic agenda attests to the considerable distance (ontological and ideological) between Barker and Bond: “Theatre is a way of judging society and helping to change it; art must interpret the world and not merely mirror it” (Notebooks of Edward Bond, volume 1, page 34). Bond even goes so far as to domesticate and humanize the unconscious under the rubric of “radical innocence”: “Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human. […] out unconscious makes us sane” (“Commentary” 250). Such obtrusive and easily recognizable dichotomies are irrelevant to Barker’s plays, and The Castle in particular. This is evident in the subtle

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affinities found even between those characters who apparently belong to opposing poles (of identity, of ideology, of gender politics) such as Skinner and Stucley. Equally important is the way that, in addition to compounding apparent binaries by exposing such imbrications among characters, Barker introduces a third, or différant, mode of being and relationality to those belonging to either pole. Notably, however, in Barker’s earlier plays, (to wit, prior to his break with social realism and the emergence of his fully fledged Tragedy of Catastrophe), there are certain discernible affinities between his work and Bond’s. Isted’s speech in Passion in Six Days, in which he vehemently condemns the pernicious consequences of nuclear war and nuclear pollution for humanity and the human race, and urges disarmament, is a salient case in point: THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A SLAVERY LIKE IT. It mocks this democracy! It laughs in the face of your so-called choice! It hangs over you, and not over you alone, but over what you carry in your blood, and in your semen, and in your womb. What your parents gave you, and what links you to your ancestors, and what you hand on, your place in that endless chain which is the greatest comfort of mortality, THEY ROB YOU OF THAT! (49)

Still, concerning significant differences between Bond and Barker, it is worth underscoring that such overtly topical speeches are only part of a highly intricate and manifold pattern of action and psychologically complex characters with various visions and individual anomalies. The totality of such a pattern defies reduction to a didactic play, or to the promotion of a mode of consciousness or historicity. Instead, we find characters that are already obsessed with the insight that “socialism must be moist and passionate” (51). Thus such early plays already point beyond social reality and social realism (and satire) as the totality of reality and the effective means of solving the issues at stake in it. The other notable difference resides in the vastly different conceptions of history found in the two dramatists’ respective plays. In Barker’s case, as demonstrated above, for every moment in history there is an individually prompted moment of Anti-History, which refuses any dialectical synthesis and reconciliation with the former. Anti-History is virtually immanent in an individual and is actualized in a disjunctive encounter with an event (alterity or exteriority) in terms of their immanent transcendence of the constraints of history and the discursively determined self. This moment of Anti-History is thus pursued as an evental site for re-­

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individuation and self-overcoming. Bond, in contrast, and in keeping with his orthodox Marxist attitude to history, explicitly affirms that history is not immanent in the individual, but transcends and subsumes it. (It is material circumstances—economic and socio-historical—that determine individual consciousness, rather than vice versa; and the idealist moment of such a dialectics is that of the reconciliation between the two: abstract and concrete, universal and the particular): History wouldn’t be shown as immanent in an individual, individuality would be transcended by the historical pattern which it represented. Incidents would be chosen to show how historical problems arise and how they lead to resolutions. […] The characters wouldn’t be moved by personal motives but by the forces of history. They’d be epic in analysis but not necessarily in size (“The Activists Papers” in Bond Plays: 4, 129)

The other important difference between the two plays is the role attributed to the author in relation to truth, critique, value, and meaning, where these are related to the human, reason, history, and society. Bond posits the task of art thus: “The artist’s job is to make … public images in which our species recognizes itself and confirms its identity” (Edward Bond, “Introduction” to The Fool, xv). He paints the author as one who is committed to the expression and exposition of truth. Bond’s criticism, below, can be taken to refer, in an anticipatory manner, to dramatists such as Barker, when Bond reprimands the artist who is “shut up in private fantasies, experiments in style, [and] unrewarding obscurities” (Edward Bond, “Introduction” to Bingo, Eyre Methuen, 1974, ix). In keen contrast, Barker’s theory of drama abounds in moments in which he levels a rigorous criticism at the “autocracy of [the] author” (AFT 21) taken to embody moral and institutional authority. In his plays he undertakes a consistent and sustained deconstruction of the role of author as the determinant of networks of relations, origins of meaning, and sources and structures of (moral) value. Prominent examples of this trend include (Uncle) Vanya, The Last Supper, The Bite of the Night, The Road the House the Road, I Saw Myself, and Hurts Given and Received. Barker explicitly repudiates this whole host of aesthetic principles in his theory of theatre of catastrophe. This theory dismisses the author as authoritative source of value, meaning, and truth, the imposition of authorial intention on the dynamics and trajectory of narrative and characters, and the postulation of the didactic and enlightening role of the author. That is, it repudiates the aesthetic and

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dramatic form adopted by Brecht, Shaw, and contemporary playwrights belonging to the critical and social realism movement (AFT 48, 50, 53, 54, passim). To Bond the author has an obligation to the idea of truth (by means of a combination of reason and imagination); to Barker, in contrast, the author’s sole obligation is to his own imagination (48).

2   The Critical Scholarship As regards the critical scholarship on The Castle, there have been two sustained engagements with the play, along with a couple of shorter discussions of it by other critics in more general articles on Barker’s work. Rabey’s study of the play (discussed along with Women Beware Women), though shedding some light on the tangled relations between body and power that it contains, remains chiefly an expository account, with a primary focus on its thematic and performance aspects. Nevertheless, with respect to certain issues, such as “obsession” (approvingly ascribed to Skinner) and the analysis of characters’ existential and psychological features, there are significant points of contention between his analysis and the one set out here. These differences will be tackled in the course of the discussion below. Mary Karen Dahl in “The Body in Extremis: Exercises in Self-Creation and Citizenship,” draws on Jean Amery’s psychological exploration and moral musings on pain and torture to discuss the role of Skinner. According to Amery, the relationship between the “the body and the self” and/or the “physical and metaphysical” is foregrounded under arbitrary pain or torture. Moreover, a person loses trust in the world (alienation) and the credibility and truth of the social contract as soon as arbitrary torture is inflicted on them: “individuals who seek to unmake and remake the demos” (97). She argues that, in both Terrible Mouth and The Castle, women “women undergo violation, but elude male control […] reversing efforts to constrain their feelings and choices” (97). Dahl, in her discussion of Skinner’s subjection to torture, valorizes and dignifies her as the main protagonist and the one who heroically defies the authoritarian state (99–100). Curiously, however, she identifies “Skinner’s womb” as the field upon which the struggle for power is carried out (98), while, as Skinner herself confesses, she is barren and despises pregnancy and harbours profound envy and hatred for Ann for this very reason. Such a proposition, therefore, given Skinner’s barrenness, seems at best untenable. Furthermore, while aptly indicating that Skinner “[r]efus[es] to suffer gra-

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ciously” and that “she rejects those who seek to appropriate her pain and again subject her to the state’s government” (100), Dahl misses a host of points about the negative aspects of the change Skinner undergoes in the course of the play (towards a kind of solipsism and denial of necessity of intimacy and relationship with the other and the priority of the other/ event). In the following sections, I shall also take issue with her presumption of the patriarchal as authoritarian and un-natural and matriarchal as natural and peaceful. Lamb, in his extended analysis of the play (which constitutes the core section of his book on Barker), perceives “seduction”—as elaborated by Baudrillard in his book Seduction—to be at work at almost all levels in the play. He maintains that seduction animates all the relations in the play, including that between Ann and Stucley, between Stucley and his God, between Ann and Krak and between Skinner and other male characters. In effect, he goes as far as positing seduction as the governing illogical logic of not only The Castle, but of Barker’s aesthetics and performance style/ logic in general. Elaborating on his account of seduction as it informs Barker’s work, Lamb indicates the reversibility and subversion of claims to universal and normative truth, authenticity production, and meaning as the principal characteristics of this trend in Barker. As illuminating as this analysis is in unravelling certain aspects of The Castle—such as the dynamics of interaction between characters (and, indeed, Barker’s work more generally)—I would contend that seduction (in Baudrillard’s sense), at its best, might appear only as an occasional strategy or streak in characters and their action. Adopting this Baudrillardian concept and arguing for its applicability to Barker in an unqualified manner, as Lamb does, is a strategy riddled with numerous inadequacies and, far from being tenable in relation to Barker’s later work (of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s) in particular. Indeed, I would argue that approaching the plays on the basis of Lamb’s thesis of seduction prevents one from appreciating the “productive” effects of the (immanent) ethics (of the Other and the event) and the aesthetics of self-fabrication and becoming-other. Further there are numerous modes of relationship, interaction, and character motivations that cannot be accounted for in light of his thesis. The primary point worth noting in this regard is that I do not intend to dismiss the viability and the presence of moments of “seduction” as a dramatic element in general in Barker. What I find problematic and am taking issue with here, however, is the scope and extent of its presence and relevance as claimed

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by Lamb and Rabey on the one hand, and the restriction and tying of seduction, strictly, to a Baudrillardian sense on the other. Though extensive critical engagement with Lamb’s proposed thesis is undertaken below, a few initial points must be made here. Putting aside the fact that the axiomatics of seduction do not hold for, and fail to account for, a considerable number of events and relations in Barker’s plays, it should also be noted that the so-called moments of wrong decision, or irrationality, are not solely impelled by seductive motivations or purposes. As expounded below, there are at least four crucial idiosyncrasies of Barker’s work that are saliently at variance with the principles of seduction theory as advanced by Baudrillard and appropriated by Lamb. First, there is love (such as that between Gertrude and Claudius, Vanya and Helena, Dancer and Caroline, Judith and Holofernes, or that between Katrin and Starhemberg, among many others) which, however streaked with certain complications and contradictions in Barker, defies the terms of seduction theory. This is because the seductive relation, by definition, excludes the kind and degree of responsibility/responsivity, self-exposure, and self-sacrifice entailed in love. As Piotrek Swaitkowski, elaborating on the logic of phantasm in Deleuze’s philosophy of the event as delineated in his The Logic of Sense, observes: “[in Deleuze’s account of the event] love can go beyond narcissism. It may lead to an opening towards the world. Partners might become mutual sources of events and open each other towards yet unforeseen ways of being” (Deleuze and Desire 177). Second, there occur actual, material productions, or, more strictly, productive alterations. These are creative, transformative changes in the real sense of the word. In Barker’s work, they affect a character’s embodied subjectivity, language, perception (of self, the other, and reality), and mode of (inter-subjective) relationality. All of this takes place in the throes of liminal relations and limit events, such as during inter-corporeal moments of proximity, intimacy, and transcription of affective traces, corporeal schemas, and figural patterns between characters. “Seduction,” however, opposes the notion of production in principle. Indelibly linked with this attribute, there is the failure not only to accommodate the temporality of such an aesthetics of transversal becoming (and selftranscendence and self-cultivation), but the ethics of heteronomous exposure to the Outside or the Other. For instance, Lamb neglects some of the concomitant aspects of Seduction theory, which are incompatible with central preoccupations of Barker’s characters’ acts of (ethical) self-transcendence and self-overcoming in inter-subjective proximal relations. “Narcissism,”11 as an inextricable facet of seduction theory and seductive relation defined accordingly, is a prominent case in point, which precludes transgressive sacrifice,

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evental proximity, and death as the aporetic experience of proximity with absolute exteriority or radical alterity. In this regard, a play such as I Saw Myself, which acutely delves into the intricacies of narcissism, subjectivity (of the artist), the ethical complications inherent in the attainment of autonomy, and the elusive boundaries between autonomy and sovereignty, can be posed as a resounding counterposition to Lamb’s claim. Furthermore, while one could consider the dynamics of the relationship between Sleev and Modicum (as the object petit a) in terms of the traumatic seductiveness of the Real (in the Lacanian sense), the premises and implications of seduction in this latter sense, however, are a far cry from those of Baudrillard’s homonymous notion. Thirdly, seduction fails to account for the personal history of the embodied individual. In particular, it neglects the individual’s psycho-­somatic genealogy; that is, the affective traces, corporeal schemas, ideas, modes of relationality, and configurations of desire and sensibility which are embedded in the individual from previous relationships and stages of life and subconsciously or compulsively inform and determine the boundaries and conception of selfhood and relationality. This genealogy is borne by the individual into other evental occurrences, thereby affecting or complicating subsequent relationships and events. The origin of this neglect lies in Seduction theory’s assumptions regarding the transplantation or transposition of characters into a-historical seductive situations, which strips them of their personal traits and history. Hence, in the seductionist approach, the crucial moments of reversion or retrogression which befall many Barkerian protagonists (such as Lvov and Photo in FITY) in moments of climax or crisis are ignored. Moreover one of the chief paths to the exploration of the contradictions and complication—to wit, psychoanalysis—is disavowed and refuted.12 Consequently, Lamb overlooks the whole dialectical tension and dynamics between the past and present (various layers of the self; not necessarily involving surface-depth binary and metaphysics). Fourthly, the seductionist approach is incapable of providing and/or explaining the critical stance and negative distance that is required to be maintained by the character towards assimilationist or totalitarian veins informing the discursive strategies, imperatives, and meta-­narratives in order to preserve its autonomy (as seduction inherently involves contamination and self-loss). Furthermore, if seduction designates “that which extracts meaning from discourse and detracts it from its truth,” then, by definition, seduction mainly concerns the situations and conditions where one, probably seductive or subversive, party/individual encounters another person or phenomenon who embodies or is affiliated with a position of authority, normative Truth, and pertains to a dominant discursive position. Whereas, contrary to such dynamics, many of interpersonal relationships between

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characters do not follow this logic. Numerous examples corroborate this point, among which are the relationships between Katrin and Starhemberg, Gertrude and Claudius, and Helena and Vanya, neither of whom necessarily does hold institutional power. To unravel one of the implications of Lamb’s claim, we can attend to a catoptric trope deployed by Baudrillard himself in his explanation of the dynamics of seduction. In Lamb’s view, moments of irrationality and contradiction in Barker resemble mirrors whose surfaces presage an underlying depth, but are in truth “superficial abysses” or “depthless profundities” (see Seduction 53–118). In other words, there is no meaning, intentionality (subconscious or unselfconscious), history, and significance or sense underlying such moments. They are in fact only strategies in a game: a wild and infinite play of signifiers, deceptive moves, and blinding reflection for misleading the other and the self in a game of mirrors. I shall try to demonstrate how the history of the individual character (particularly the unconscious and genealogical aspects of this history) is important in Barker, both in pre-event existential-ethical attitude of characters and the mode of the event that they undergo—to wit, in their experience, and affirmatively willing, of carnal-spiritual intimacy with the Other and becoming-other in proximity to the event. One final point regarding the applicability of Baudrillard’s theory and subtle differences between them is worth explaining. As various Baudrillard scholars and commentators have contended,13 Baudrillard’s binary oppositions (particularly in Seduction) and his outright rejection of psychoanalysis and feminism, as well as his collapse of the distinctions between truth and non-truth, reality and non-reality, self and non-self, is redolent of a nihilistic strain in his thought: “The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of the forms of the neutral and of indifference” (Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation 160). Barker, however, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, although consistently delving into the questions of the death or absence of God, the crisis of meaning and adequacy of the world and the possibility of suicide, coupled with his sustained reflections on death, does not follow this nihilistic and apocalyptic stance and is not oblivious and blinkered to the existential-ontological and ideological implications of this vision. Akin to, and influenced by, Deleuze’s critique of the Platonist metaphysics of representation and the simulacrum, Baudrillard tries to demonstrate how such a value-laden binarism (ideal/real, or model/copy, or reality/representation) can be subverted in the notions of hyperreality and

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simulation (an emblematic example of which is art): “The reality principle coincided with a determinate phase of the law of value. Today, the entire system is fluctuating in indeterminacy, all of reality absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and of simulation. It is now a principle of simulation, and not of reality, that regulates social life” (Selected Writings 123; see also 144–6). As Ansell Pearson acutely argues, as far as Baudrillard’s vision of contemporary society (late capitalism and the order of the simulacrum) is concerned—in which history, politics, and metaphysics have all reached their terminal point, and we (as the dwellers of the postmodern condition/mind) are left with no will but a willing of nothingness—we are delivered to nothing but “passive nihilism” that “no longer aspires towards a transcendence or overcoming of the human (condition), but [which] simply announces and enjoys its disappearance, the spectator watching the spectacle of his own demise” (Nihilism Now! ix). This strand of passive nihilism is evident in Baudrillard’s ensuing statement: The dialectic stage, the critical stage is empty. There is no more stage […] The masses themselves are caught up in a gigantic process of inertia through acceleration. They are this excrescent, devouring, process that annihilates all growth and all surplus meaning. They are this circuit shortcircuited by a monstrous finality. (Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation, 161)

However, as Ansell Pearson and Diane Morgan, in their introductory essay to the volume Nihilism Now!, perceptively discern, Baudrillard’s is a naïve account of a nihilist postmodernity, whereby he neglects some significant implications of such a transition. They start by posing this stimulating question: “How can there be a sense of ‘monstrous finality’ without an ambiguity of meaning?” They then call for the necessity of recognizing “precisely the double-nature of nihilism that is destroyed by the postmodern single-minded immersion in the melancholia of the system. Of course, there is no final catastrophe. But there are great expectations, an experience of the great noontide, the premonition” (ix). They proceed to articulate their Nietzschean-Deleuzian aim thus: “to inspire a return to the energetics of Nietzsche’s prose and the critical intensity of his approach to nihilism, to restore a sense of his hopeful monsters and to give back to the future its rightful futurity” (ix). This is precisely, I would argue, what Barker undertakes: having consciously, open-mindedly, and meticulously engaged with his contemporary conditions, he is seeking to do something similar.

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3   The Argument In what follows the primary focus is on The Castle, nevertheless, it also contains extended explorations of the way the issues at stake in it pervade numerous others of Barker’s plays. (These issues include: gender, subjectivity, and desire; God/religion; aesthetics of the self; autonomy-­ heteronomy; an evental ethics realized in the spiritual-carnal proximity between the self and the Other; disciplinary apparatuses; somaesthetics of the body; and the relation between political and libidinal economy.) Indeed, by investigating the overlaps and divergences between the appearance of similar issues in different plays, this study seeks to reveal recurrent aesthetic, ethical, and thematic patterns and their itineraries throughout Barker’s oeuvre. I begin my study and analysis by demonstrating how the male dominant discourse (as presented in The Castle) is a phallogocentric discourse premised on the pursuit of ontology, identity, and totality (or authoritarianism), the morality of which is wholly abstract, general, and universal, being predicated upon solipsism (exclusion of every form of otherness), isomorphism (that is, normalizing phallomorphism), and sovereign autonomy. Stucley’s phallogocentric discourse involves a certain economy and representation of temporality (catastrophic, eschatological, and teleological) which is disrupted in Ann’s anastrophic perception of time and mode of being. Having made this analysis, I will proceed to show that this phallogocentric discourse owes its abiding dominance to the exclusion and abjection of the proximal—one of whose chief manifestations in The Castle is a peculiar mode of the feminine (which is not necessarily gender-bound in an essentialist manner)—embodied by Ann. Accordingly, in order to cope with the crisis of the Other and to hold it at bay, Krak’s dominant discourse in The Castle enforces a coercive-repressive strategy and consigns it to an external realm, as its “constitutive outside,” or its unrepresentable other, at the tenuous borders of discourse (Butler, Bodies 8). Finally, I will argue that even when such a discourse intends to make allowances for and include heteronomous modes of desire, relationality, and volatile bodies, it relegates them to a process of phallomorphic “regulatory production” via which certain bodies that are incorporated and constructed come to be conferred with meaning and significance and some others excluded, deconstructed, and abjected. This “constructedness,” coupled with “performativity,” are pivotal to this study; since, as Judith Butler states, it is “as important to think about how and to what

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end bodies are constructed as it is to think about how and to what end they are not constructed” (Bodies 16). Accordingly, the principal task in this book is the pursuit of the trajectory of this phallogocentric rationality and morality found throughout The Castle. The ambivalent apotheosis of which, as I have proposed, is Krak (in conjunction with Stucley) and his correlate: the castle. Contending and complementing the previous critical readings of the play (see Ian Rabey 1989, 170; and Lamb 143–7), I have contested three arguments proposed by the critics: first, the valorization of Skinner as the central, determining character; second, the assumption of Krak (and Ann) as being relatively static character(s); and third, the question regarding what is the nature, and modes, of desire operative in the play. It is my contention that Barker scholarship has so far ignored significant aspects of Ann’s character and has focused instead on overtly political aspects of the play (the questions of suffering, torture, and of feminine resistance led by Skinner). Skinner has hitherto been considered as the main and stronger female character (attested by her undergoing and being subjected to torture and her murder of the builder and similar endeavours); and Ann as the weaker, more lenient, and evasive character that is prepared to relinquish all resistance and betrays the love relationship with Skinner. This study takes issue with this critical judgement by revealing the ethical-existential uniqueness of Ann in her mode of being and relationality, as well as by exposing notable affinities that exist between Skinner and Stucley. As regards the first point, my argument is that Ann occupies a unique position in the play. All three turning points (the re-writing of the Bible, the re-subjectification of Krak, and the re-configuration of the castle) are effected either directly or indirectly by, or because of, Ann. The establishment of this point entails the delineation of Ann’s unique status and its cumulative ramifications in the play. I would argue that Ann’s singular status arises, on the one hand, from her mode of ethical existence and on the other hand, from her mode of desire. As will be demonstrated, Ann’s mode of existence is non-ontological,14 inter-corporeal, and schizo-nomadic. These traits are not least grounded in her defiance of bonds (whether associated with affiliation or alliance), her being given to a becoming-­ other and change, and her constant exposure to alterity through her affirmative approach to pregnancy, both literal and figural. As regards Ann’s mode of desire, as will be demonstrated, it is schizo-nomadic and characterized by fluidity, productivity, heteronomy, and deterritorialization.

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Thus, crucial to its dynamics is the fact that the play (along with Ann)— and not characters such as Skinner, Stucley, and the early Krak—eschews the binary or dialectical logic of male-female, masculine-feminine, or, in brief, the logic of identity and opposition. Instead, it moves towards a logic of proximity, which is grounded on inter-corporeal exposure, contamination, and différance. The open-endedness of the play demonstrates this dynamics and/or logic. My argument is that desire (in the mode of schizo-nomadic desiring-production) in conjunction with “proximity” forms the fulcrum of the play and provides the impetus for the narrative, temporal, and ethical dynamics of the play. Moreover, I argue that one of the correlates of this desire in the play is “femininity,” as a mode of sensibility, which is not to be conflated or identified with “female” or “feminism”, and its corresponding gender politics and economy. This mode of femininity as sensibility, in the play, figures both as a mode of relationality and that of corporeal existence. As such, three decisive moments, starkly marking the turning points of this feminine-triggered trend in the play, can be discerned and distinguished. They are: the erection and subsequent re-configuration of the castle, the re-writing of the Bible, and the eventful moment of proximity between Ann and Krak (culminating in Krak’s conversion from an instrumental rationality and morality of ressentiment into the logic of heteronomous desire and proximity). This course comprises the re-inscription and re-vision of a macropolitics of symbolic economy (and ethics of totality-sovereignty) in terms of the micropolitics of libidinal economy (and ethics of infinity-heteronomy). I would argue that Ann incarnates and enacts this ethics of (inter-)corporeal proximity, infinity, and alterity.15 Regarding the second line of argument, this book seeks to demonstrate Krak to be a profoundly dynamic subject in process/on trial (see Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language 18–23; passim), who undergoes drastic existential-ethical alteration throughout the play, and particularly at the end. In fact, this point starkly marks the divergence of the foregoing studies of the play and the present one. Accordingly, I will examine Krak’s tension-ridden “hyper-dialectical”16 interplay with proximal (and, in the case of the play, “feminine”) forces and the manner in which he undergoes a conversion from a downright disregard for the Other and an unflagging faith in the absolute righteousness of solipsistic reason, to fascination with a heteronomous mode of desire and consequent acquiescence to ­self-­exposure to alterity/femininity and inter-affectivity. This is followed by exposure to and a gradual incorporation/transposition of feminine features (as heteronomous desire) into himself.

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Thirdly, as regards the impact of Ann’s mode of existence and desire on Stucley, Stucley, through the experience of contradiction (in relation to God) and frustration (in relation to Ann) in his crisis of desire and politics, undergoes profound changes. Realizing the fundamental role of the body in the experience of being human and essential human dimensions such as ethics, desire, and love, Stucley discerns how the body and embodiment can render immanent a whole system predicated on metaphysical and transcendent values and truths. In consequence, he translates them into the very structure of the castle, and, in parallel with this, establishes a new trend of religious morality—“the religion of Christ the erect” and “Christ the Lover” (grounded upon “body, blood and semen”) by Stucley. This declivity of the phallogocentric discourse culminates in their supersession of their feminine correlate (however so reformed and reformulated), epitomized in Krak’s conversion, and the failed attempt at the establishment of a new heterodox religious cult: the “Holy Congregation of the Wise Womb,” which is intended to originate from exclusively female features. However, as we will witness, this gesturing towards the establishment of a new strand of quasi-feminine institutional authority due to the proximal and heteronomous logic which has been assumed and is adhered to by Krak and, partially, Skinner, collapses as soon as it is founded. Relatedly, one of the principal lines of argument in this book, underpinning its purpose, is to explore how and why the castle, as at once a material-historical and a psycho-symbolic construct, comes to affect, not only the self’s relation with itself, but its relationship with the singular, individual Other and the collective other of the social totality. This book therefore investigates the nature and structure of the castle and delineates the trajectory it treads by explaining the significance of its formal upheavals in relation to discursive-­ontological shifts in the play, as well as the alterations in the relationship between characters. Viewed from another perspective, the question of the castle is also broachable in terms of fences and the ontology of the limit (which are referred to in The Castle too), which occur as resonant and recurrent preoccupations in Barker’s plays, including Fence in Its Thousandth Year, The Gaoler’s Ache for the Nearly Dead, and More No Still. Finally, there is the moment of the eventuation of con-tactile proximity (that is, carnal-spiritual intimacy) between Ann and Krak which is, in turn, grounded on two important conditions: Krak’s and Ann’s respective existential-­ethical dispositions and their discursive positions. Notably, the temporal logic of this evental moment (between Krak and Ann) is après coup or nachträglichkeit. That is, it is only retroactively and retrospectively

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that Krak comes to realize the aesthetic-ethical aspects and effects of this moment; and it is only retroactively that the effects are registered and made conscious. Accordingly, in addition to the pursuit of the trajectory of phallogocentric discourse through the foregoing three cataclysmic moments, I will seek to demonstrate diverse dimensions of the body (transcendental body/desire, body politic, the gendered body, and phenomenal-­ libidinal body) and various problematic ways in which it operates in The Castle. These will be critically analysed from two standpoints: the discursive (ideological) and the ethical-ontological. I shall contend that the body, in Barker’s work, features as the very provocative cause for the re-­ thinking of the relation between the transcendental and the sensible. One crucial point is worth elucidating. The role of the individual’s gender and perception of the body and of desire plays an important role in the existential-ethical constitution and conduct of characters in the play. As such, in order to justify the philosophical consistency of my method and approach concerning the relationship between female organs (breasts, womb, and vagina), in conjunction with the over-determined role “cunt” plays in The Castle,17 and the possibility of transcription and contractability of its morphological features (and their aesthetic-ethical implications), I posit “cunt” as primarily embodying a morphological—hence contractible, transversal, and trans-gender—structure (although I am not dismissive of the anatomical).18 As such, “cunt,” as depicted in The Castle, is here assumed to incarnate a corporeal schema (illustrative of the irreducible ambiguity and indeterminacy of the flesh) and a corresponding ethical-­aesthetic mode of self-perception and relationality. This latter is a figural manifestation of a chiasmatic openness to the outside and can be chiasmatically trans-cribed by entering a zone of proximity with the other (the feminine in this instance). Furthermore, all the aforesaid traits of the cunt are intensified due to its being the emblem of, and hence invested with, desire and eroticism. Diverging from and contesting Irigaray’s argument that being born invariably entails being born into a form or morphology of one peculiar sex (“A Natal Lacuna,” 13)—which for reasons that I will explain later, is indeed redolent of biological determinism and essentialism—I subscribe to Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, and Kristeva in this regard and postulate the fluidity of form and the individuality of the two sides of the evental encounter or ethical relation rather than their sex. I maintain that the morphology of the sensible (I conceive of sensibility in terms of partialproximal signification and incorporation) is not biologically determined and clinched, but, on the contrary, is essentially fluid, malleable, and

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inhabited with the virtual, being always in process/on trial, continuously amenable to transitivism (Phenomenology of Perception 145, 148; henceforth PP), deactualization and transubstantiation in the throes of the proximal encounter and carnal intimacy with the Other, as informed by the anarchical sensibility of the chiasmatic relationship. This laden morphology and its virtual possibilities are in accordance with the argument in con-tactile aesth-­ethics, in which ethics is defined in terms of an immanent practice involving proximity with alterity (the Other), transitivism of corporeal schemas, figural patterns, and affective traces. It must be noted that my proposed thesis of inter-affectivity and contractibility of patterns of femininity and/or alterity issues from and pivots on the very essence of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of relatedness and nature of the flesh which are characterized by inter-corporeality, porosity, reversibility, and divergence (VI 138–9, 266). Hence, to justify my philosophical method and approach in this study in relation to the female genital and the feminine and its possibility of transplantation and assimilation, I posit the female genital organ (“cunt”) as the incarnation of a corporeal schema, illustration of the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the flesh and finally as a figural manifestation of an irreducible chiasmatic openness. Furthermore, all the aforesaid traits are intensified and enhanced due to its being the emblem of and hence intensely invested with desire and eroticism. Running parallel to this line of inquiry, I will also probe the elusive and multifaceted and, surprisingly, hitherto unexplored relationship between feminist movements at the time and the treatment of the feminist trend of thought in The Castle.

Notes 1. Meaning an identity crisis on personal and national/collective levels, manifested particularly in the site of the boundary/border. 2. See Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves 1–30, 96–102, 184–92; also see Homi K.  Bhabha, “The Other Question,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 70–1. 3. See Alireza Fakhrkonandeh, “Encastling England: Walls, Wallpapers, and Neo-Medievalism in Europe and Beyond,” delivered at Stronghold: Castles and the Culture of Nation Building Conference, Southampton University and Southampton City Art Gallery, 29 June 2017. 4. See (Latour 1986, 10–11, 198; and 1987, 122–3; see also Star and Griesemer 1989, 393). 5. See also Holford et al. (2008). Viewing Boundary “Objects” as Boundary Constructions. In Proceedings of the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 1–11.

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6. Since its debut in 1985, there have been numerous reproductions of The Castle worldwide. Here I just refer to some of the most prominent ones (as noted by reviewers). (1) The Wrestling School Production, Riverside Studios, London in 1995. (2) The RSC in 2009, as part of 21 for 21 Anniversary. (3) Atlantic Stage 2, Off Broadway, August 4, 2013 directed by Cheryl Faraone; and (4) The Space Productions Company, London directed by Adam Hemming, October, 2017. 7. See Jill Liddington, The Road to Greenham Common: Feminism and Anti-­ militarism in Britain Since 1820 (Syracuse University Press, 1989), 264– 86; see also Lamb 94. 8. See Barker’s interview with Dunn in Gambit 33–4. 9. See Arguments 73. 10. For details on this, see Edward Bond, “Commentary on the War Plays,” in The War Plays (London: Methuen, 1991), 315, 340, 247. Also see Edward Bond’s Letters, Volume 5, 184–5. 11. For a detailed account of the role of narcissism in Baudrillard’s idea of seduction see Seduction 68. 12. See also Lamb 7. 13. See Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard. Also William Pawlett, Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality (London: Routledge, 2007). See also Victoria Grace, Baudrillard’s Challenge (London: Routledge), 142–71. 14. In the sense attributed to it by Levinas: the totality of ontology as opposed to the infinity of the Other singular individual (or alterity). 15. See Alireza Fakhrkonandeh (2013). 16. The term is Merleau-Ponty’s and designates a mode of relationality or being which is reducible neither to a dialectical synthesis nor to a binary opposition or antithesis. Conversely, hyper-dialectics involves a mode of relationship in which the otherness and singularity of both parties/phenomena involved is retained and not sublated (see VI 94). 17. The key role of the cunt in The Castle is reflected in Krak’s obsession with its morphological and geometrical complexity in the wake of his intimacy with Ann, and in the castle’s approximation to it in terms of form (configuration) and function. 18. See Luce Irigaray’s “Women’s Exile,” in Ideology and Consciousness, vol. 1 (1977).

Bibliography Donesky, F. “Oppression, Resistance and the Writer’s Testament”—Interview with Howard Barker. New Theatre Quarterly II, no. 8 (November 1986): 336–44.

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Fakhrkonandeh, Alireza. “Asyntactic Contact with Fleshless Words: Howard Barker’s The Castle.” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 1, no. 2 (2013): 279–297. Holford, W.  D., M.  Ebrahimi, O.  Aktout and L.  Simon. “Viewing Boundary ‘Objects’ as Boundary Constructions.” In Proceedings of the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 1–11, 2008. Irigaray, Luce. “Women’s Exile.” Ideology and Consciousness 1. Elemental Passions. Trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still. New York: Athlone Press, 1992. Latour, B. “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands.” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986): 1–40. ———. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Rabey, D. I. Howard Barker—Politics and Desire. London: Macmillan, 1989. Star, S. L. and Griesemer, J. R. “Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–1939.” Social Studies of Science 19 (1989): 387–420.

CHAPTER 2

The Castle and Other Plays

Abstract  This chapter begins by pondering the interwovenness of libidinal economy and political economy in Barker’s work (and The Castle) by scrutinizing the dynamics of women’s deconstruction of the pivots of the patriarchal symbolic order. The Castle, thus, manifests how three crucial dimensions of characters’ lives are indelibly linked: their mode of ethics, metaphysics, and economy of desire. Accordingly, characters’ distinctive idiosyncrasies in every respect are conspicuously reflected in conceptions of time, space, the body, and language. Underpinning the discussion throughout this book is the exceedingly emergent correlation between the symbolic order/constructs (involving gender metaphysics and politics) and the material order (involving corporeal-spatial-architectural); more specifically, the analogy between the castle and female body (genital organ). Following the trajectory of the castle from an initially phallic/ phallocratic structure to its cumulative accrual of circular layers and folds, culminating into its relapsing into an “amorphous” mass of walls, I will argue that the castle in its final form incarnates a chaos (chiasmatic) dynamics. As regards time, critically drawing on Irigaray’s gender-based distinction between two modes of temporality/time perception, namely, anastrophe and catastrophe, this chapter will demonstrate how the treatment/conception of time by (1) Ann and (2) early Krak and Stucley can be associated with anastrophe and catastrophe, respectively. It will be shown how anastrophe is traversed by the untimely realm of becoming, time as the eternal recurrence of difference and not the same. © The Author(s) 2019 A. Fakhrkonandeh, Body and Event in Howard Barker’s Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28699-6_2

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Keywords  Catastrophe and anastrophe as modes temporal consciousness • Chiasmatic space/structure • Formal chaos • Immanent and transcendental visions of history

1   Logos Redux: The Corpus of the Castle Un­/­Done The Castle depicts the return of Stucley—along with his retinue (Batter) and a captive Arab architect (Krak)—having spent seven years in the Crusades. To his distress and stupefaction, he discovers that all the symbols and values of the formerly entrenched order and authority have been overthrown and replaced by a gynocentric discourse of communal freedom, which to them appears as disorder. Men, on their very homecoming, are denied the “domesticity, recognition and familiarity” (DOAT 7) indispensable to the reinstatement of their authority and to securing their former identity. Consequently, they embark on the restoration of phallocratic discourse by taking exhaustive and all-encompassing disciplinary measures—an enterprise which instigates the repercussive tensions and conflicts permeating the whole play, and with which we will deal below. The very outset of the play portrays a dormant yet cumulatively emergent tension, reflected in the climatic commotion, which prefigures the dynamics of the play. We catch a glimpse of two men on a hill, caught in curtains of rain and heavily wrapped up, staring into a valley (CP I 199); a scene that, in symbolic terms, presages an already smouldering tug between the male and the female. Apparent in the opening scene description is the gaze. This sheds light on a salient strain in Krak, who is the epitome of male rationality and, by extension, symptomatic of the logic of the phallogocentric discourse. As will be delineated below, the notion of rational speculation is linked with masculine specularization and visual mastery. When Krak is asked what he is doing, he bluntly responds: “looking.” He goes on staring until some moments later Stucley asks him about the target of his gaze, and he remarks: “I am looking at this hill, which is an arc of pure limestone” (200). Relatedly, on their first confrontation, when Ann wonders what Krak is doing there, he says: “Looking. In so far as the mist permits” (201). This is apparently a gaze of some substantial pregnation and, coupled with Krak’s reticence, indicates a remarkable ­element and the moment of suspension in the narrative and interactive dynamics of the scene.

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Later, when Stucley is apprised of the consequences of Krak’s contemplations—the scheme for the castle—the moment is presented in a resonant fashion: “Stucley’s long stare is interrupted by a racket of construction as a massive framework for a spandrel descends slowly to the floor” (213). The grave repercussions that reverberate throughout the play testify to the extent this gaze should be conceived not as a neutral or innocuous look, but as charged, loaded, and symptomatic (of the specular logic of phallogocentric discourse). The underlying issue at stake is the invariable link between reason’s speculation and masculine specularization, which requires further investigation (see Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman 11–127, 111–12, 133–4; see also Moi 134). A cogent testimony to the act of speculation as tantamount to a gesture of phallic mastery can be detected in Stucley’s wry remark, when finding Krak reflecting on the un-­ specularizable and immeasurable character of female genitalia: “… all the madness in the immaculately ordered words … in the clean drawings … all the temper in the perfect curve … (He pretends to flinch.) Mind your faces! … Intellectual bursts! … Tumescent as the dick which splits, splashing the ceiling red with sheer barminess…!” (243). In fact, the visual and rational assaults are coextensive and coexistent in The Castle. Krak’s speculative forays into the hill, valley, and female genitalia are a much more effectual form of virile violence than Stucley’s bungled assail on Cant on their arrival. It perforates the limestone analytically and inflicts a geometrical gash—the castle—on it. It is this latent strain that Ann “instinctively” detects and tries to flout by asserting herself, while her remarks adumbrate the proximity of the hill and female body and in the meantime hint at the eventfulness of the encounter between her and Krak: “What are you doing on my hill? … Get off my hill. (He starts to go.) This was an ordinary afternoon and now you’re here!” (202). Such a speculative representation claims to be faithfully and immediately mimetic, while in effect it transpires as assimilative and inherently inclined towards the idealistic reproduction of identity and symmetry. This isomorphic mirror, nonetheless, is not left unscathed in the play and is dealt with in two contrary manners: (binary) opposition and (proximal) relation, respectively adopted by Skinner and Ann though not exclusively. In the former standpoint, the indicated mirror is dashed and abolished; the approach implemented by the latter is that of contact and contamination. The former strategy is discernible in the eradication of the faintest vestige of phallogocentric ­discourse carried out after the departure of the males for the crusades, evident initially in the play, but such a stance as the course

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of the play illustrates proves to be futile and solely conducive to the reinstatement of the patriarchal paradigm. Correspondingly, The Castle, prima facie, opens onto antithetical positions, indicative of the dichotomous dynamics of stereotypically Freudian imagery and specular identity: two male individuals standing erect with a typically masculine posture on the verge of a valley. Nevertheless, such a setting should not distract us from noticing a much more fluid, volatile, and fugitive element in the scene: the rain. Indeed, the analogue of the feminine figure of the play proves to be not the amorphousness of the traditional valley figure, but the anamorphosis of the unobtrusive rain, the seductive difference of which displaces not only the specular identity/mastery but also this very dichotomy. Ann’s explicit association of rain and femininity coupled with the immediate juxtaposition of land and subjectivity here corroborates the connection between the two. A few moments later, Ann, to extenuate the viability of his assertion invokes the seductive association of the female body and the hill as both being naturally vested with an ostensibly opacity and beguiling gauze: “[the hill] Drapes itself in a fine drench, not liking to be spied on. A woman, this country…” (201). In the play, the sheets of rain with their fluid folds and distorting involutions approximate the function of a speculum.1 It is important to note that it is not just the fact that the chaotic element is added or appended to the male-female anatomy or sensibility, but that the very nature of the perceptual relation is informed by and partakes of a tactile or haptic logic, fostering a multivalent space of non-violent intimacy. Probably the most concrete consequence of such seductive pursuit of a chiasmatic logic of relation is the castle itself as it eventually features: heterogeneous, superimposed (simultaneously feminine and masculine), and manifold. A little later, we come to one of the principal passages in the play which sheds light on its many latent aspects and succinctly sketches the process of de-establishment and re-establishment. On the one hand, the passage retrospectively delineates the drastic alterations wrought by women in the absence of men and phallogocentric discourse; on the other, it captures the stakes of the feminine resistance movement led by Skinner. Skinner, in her argument with Ann, recounts the way they abolished the trinity or the triadic fundaments of male dominant discourse: “First there was the bailiff, and we broke the bailiff. And there was God, and we broke God. And lastly, there was Cock, and we broke that too. Freed the ground, freed religion, freed the body” (203). Here, she refers to the way various permutations of logos-/truth-based male dominant discourse have been

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destabilized, divested of their ideological appurtenances and apparatuses, and ultimately deposed in every respect. In the socio-political field, this takes place by means of “breaking the bailiff,” who is representative of exploitative masculine discourse in the form of “Feudalism.” In the ontological-­moral arena, it is achieved by dethroning the paramount father figure, with its apparently neutral and metaphysical status, namely, “God.” Finally, in the psycho-sexual sphere, it is by means of overthrowing the phallus. As such, they wipe the land and their mind of the very least trace of masculinity. The critical point that Skinner foregrounds in her account of the foregone recasting is that the emancipation of the body transpires as the corollary of this radical dismantling of the patriarchal paradigm. No less crucial is the fact that the emancipation of the land and the female body have been pursued and implemented concurrently with the emancipation of language. Nailer’s remarks, when he is confessing to his collusions in the abolition of masculine authority and sovereignty in the absence of the lord, Stucley, attest to the point at issue: “… and we threw the fences down and made a bad word of fence, we called fence blasphemy, the only word deemed so, all the rest we freed, the words for women’s and men’s parts we liberated,” (212). Women do not remain content with the mere abolition of the emblems of masculine discourse and the restoration of hitherto-repressed femininity, but insist on carrying transgression to its limit by naming and declaring, or more strictly, giving “linguistic” expression to, femininity and female carnal-sexual traits. In keeping with the drastic course taken, Skinner accentuates the manner in which the female body had been abjected by the male dominant discourse; she asserts: “[We] FOUND CUNT BEAUTIFUL that we had hidden and suffered shame for, its lovely shapelessness, its colour all miraculous, what they had made dirty or worshipped out of ignorance” (203). Her contention subversively reformulates the definitions of beauty and form. This passage immediately evokes Irigaray’s trenchant critique of the Lacanian descriptive account of female genitalia (exemplifying a long-standing theologico-philosophical tradition) as a hole, crack, lacuna and amorphousness, and Irigaray’s replacement of tactility for visibility as the more authentic and true criterion for female sexual experience, as indicated above. The enterprise undertaken by women here can be construed as the realization of Irigaray’s injunction that “a woman must discover and display her own morphology to succeed in creating with the primary matter that she is” (‘A Natal

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Lacuna’, 1994, 12). This demand is deemed pivotal for the attainment of socio-symbolic and existentio-ethical authenticity. Accordingly, a deep distrust of words (representational language) and their possible application, and a belief in performative expression of the body can be detected in the attitude of most (if not all) women to language. The noteworthy point is that, with Ann, as we shall see, performance does not exclude representation. Thus the trap of binary opposition and gender essentialism is avoided, which is implicit in contrasting the opacity of the (feminine) body to the transparency of (masculine) mimesis. Such a distrust of language stems from the recognition of orders of meaning and the truth-content of language being already inscribed by the phallogocentric discourse on the one hand and realizing a discrepancy between symbolic speech/signification and rhythms of intention as well as its semiotic force or corporeal expression on the other. The aforementioned attitude is evident in the conversation between Ann and Skinner. Skinner importunes Ann for a forthright verbal affirmation of their mutual love to dispel her qualms, yet Ann declines, saying: “I don’t declare my feelings … Can’t be forever declaring feelings, you declare yours, over and over, but—” (218); because “I don’t see that I need, do I, need to—.” And a little further on, in response to Skinner’s unrelenting insistence, she pinpoints the two tacit significatory modes of communication: “I am not forthcoming with these statements you require, you have to trust— … Signs, more” (218). Here Ann implies a differentiation between sign (as a more embodied speech or a more bodily-semiotic language) and symbol (as conventional symbolic language); she is cognizant of verbal ruses of the representational-­ symbolic language and manipulative use of terms as an instrument for seeking domination, fallacious representation, and endowing an already encoded and invested identity. Thus, throughout the play, she displays a conspicuous tendency to create and enact a language much more derived from (inter)corporeal sensibility, bodily affects and material flows and their disruptive forces, and sensations. Such a movement, undertaken by Ann, receives theoretical articulation in Irigaray’s injunction to women to explore, recognize, and devise a specifically female language(s) corresponding to their sensibility, a corporeal mode of being/becoming and patterns of desire in order that they might be released from the grip of mimeticism and isomorphism: “If we don’t invent a language, if we don’t find our body’s language, it will have too few gestures to accompany our story. We shall tire of the same ones, and leave our desires unexpressed,

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unrealized, we shall fall back upon the words of men we shall remain paralyzed. Deprived of our movements” (Speculum 1985, 214) The scene in which Nailer has been ordained as the priest of his dominion by Stucley verifies the point at issue cogently. Due to the lack of a genuinely official priestly hat, Stucley has ordained Nailer by simply using a tool bag and calling it a mitre, representing authority. When Ann arrives she sees Nailer, with the bag on his head. She interrogates him about the hat, making him notice the incongruity between the object and the name (the symbolic sign and the objective sense) and the absurdity of the situation. Significantly, she does this by holding up “a mirror” to him. Nailer endeavours to explain the symbolic significance of the hat as arising from an act of real naming or “interpellation.”2 This mode of exploitation of language for ideological aims notably complies with Althusser’s conception of ideology as the imaginary representation of real relations within the matter of language, presented here as a matter of recognition and misrecognition. Nailer reveals his misrecognition by ironically calling Ann “a literal creature”: Ann: What are you doing? … Have you seen yourself? … Find you a mirror (She delves in her pockets.) Nailer: All symbols can be ridiculed. On the one hand, authority is costume, but on the other— Ann: Never mind the words, Reg, look at the— Nailer: I don’t need to— Ann: Look—(She holds up a small mirror.) Nailer: Thank you, I am perfectly aware what— Ann: Look! (He looks.) What’s that? … Nailer: A miter … Ann: A miter? Reg, you have got a bag on your—(226)

The concrete/literal presence of the mirror is crucial. Also, it is strikingly ironic that a female or a woman is holding up this flat mirror to a male to disillusion him and rectify his occluded vision/sight. This passage explicitly demonstrates the seemingly flat mirror of genuine and undistorted reflection. It, in addition to finely capturing the constructedness and conventionality of representational language of discourse and the symbolic order, subtly unveils how the apparently flat mirror of faithful reflection (and hence putatively undistorted representation) is, in effect, a profoundly predetermined (concave/convex) mirror in which alienation is commingled with reflection.

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Finally, in accordance with the logic of proximity subtending the whole play, both Ann and Skinner (though, in the case of the latter, deeply equivocally) are depicted in terms of, and associated with fluids and non-­ dualism. Skinner’s remonstration manifestly demonstrates her repudiation of a binary logic and an attestation to the permeation of the whole of life with love: “They talk of a love-life, don’t they? Do you know the phrase ‘love-life’, as if this thing ran under or beside, as if you stepped from one life to the other, banality to love, love to banality. No, love is in the cooking and the washing and the milking no matter what the colour of love stains everything, …” (219). Skinner, however, symptomatically maintains the discourse of opposition, which is premised on natural-­feminine essentialism and idealism, rather than attempting to move towards a différance or proximity-oriented approach. This predilection becomes apparent when she does not waver to align herself with men in her later identification with the castle. When in her obsessive concern with Ann, she says: “and actually I could eat yours, I could—,” she heightens her affinity with the male in this regard. Nevertheless, the fact remains that towards the end of the play she achieves a more nuanced and tempered (less essentialist and idealist) stance, though the aforementioned predilection faintly persists.

2   Stucley’s Catastrophe and Ann’s Anastrophe At the end of the first scene, Krak’s abrupt appearance brings a breach to the dialogue between Ann and Skinner. The encounter is very tense and precariously poised between rift and reparation, in which the contingency of truth (either morally or ideologically conceived) and selfhood as well as the immanent provisionalness of values blindingly dawn on Stucley’s (metaphysical and spiritual) idealism (see 204–5). One of the crucial points that arises in the midst of their conversation is “the question of identity,” foregrounding the problematics of “the aesthetics of self” at stake in Barker’s catastrophist aesthetics both in The Castle and more generally. Ann, true to her fluid-nomadic character, asserts that she has changed, yet Stucley yearns for the “lie of innocence, stability, and sameness.” Ann’s remark on Stucley corroborates the point: “Thinner but the same. For all the marching and stabbing. Whereas quietly, here I have” (8). In keeping with what was expounded about the body of woman in patriarchal paradigm, when Stucley arrives, he is holding a white garment in his hand and aspires to seeing Ann in it (204). Indeed, such a gesture is

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symptomatic. This apparel can be considered as representing the conventionally ideological cast which phallogocentric discourse attempts to impose on the (female) body. The white garment emblematizes the purity, neutrality, and abstraction with which women are invested; and, as such, it unveils the pervasive ideological practices and power relations which, under the guise of transcendental and spiritual self-containment, foist normativity upon woman. Such a move as contended by critics such as Kristeva and Irigaray, and as is borne out in the play too, in an attempt to domesticate, fetishize, or annihilate the excess and alterity embodied by the female (in the male libidinal imaginary), with the tacit fourfold grid (mother-wife-virgin-whore) projected on the woman and characteristic of such a discourse (see Kristeva “Stabat Mater” 163–6; see also de Beauvoir The Second Sex 34, 72, 93, 108). This is disclosed most egregiously when he laments: “Yes, I was your child, wasn’t I? (Pause. He suddenly weeps. She watches him, then goes to him. He embraces her, then thrusts her away.) Penitence for adultery!” (208). In the phallogocentric discourse to which Stucley adheres, the body is at best idolized and hence idealized (based on a symmetrical model, see Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex, Body and Gender 26–57, 183) in the metaphysical language (of the knightly love and the cult of the Virgin). The least distorting impact of such an apparatus, or framework, is that it divests the body of its very immediacy, materiality, and vitality and elicits its excess—in the form of vitality and disruptive desire (ability)—by nominating and normalizing it. Such a subtle mechanism has perceptively been exposed by Levinas: “To idealize is to turn ethics into politics” (TI 216– 17). Similarly, Irigaray’s description of a similar garment in her “Fecundity of the Caress” has an elucidating bearing on the confining, and even effacing, nature of such clothing: “a garment that first and foremost paralyzes the other’s movement. Protecting it like the shield of the hero who defends the loved one from the conquest of some rival” (239). And this erosive/ cannibalistic imagery evokes and is testified to by Skinner’s beckoning to the way men commodify and reify female body: “We do not make a thing of flesh, do we, the love of women is more—they could eat flesh from off your body, we—no” (218). At a second similar effort, Stucley endeavours to enframe and re-­position her (and to get more firmly enframed and re-positioned himself) within the egocentric grid and phallogocentric paradigm by entreating her to embroider his image: “Very devout picture … make a tapestry why don’t you?” (205). Such an appeal is vital to his sense of sovereign self and pursuit of

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transcendence and reveals his aspiration to feel hypostatized and infinitized in an act of double reflection via being re-presented by/in her hands/eyes. Such a transcendental movement to reach sublimity and stability, as Irigaray argues, is achieved at the cost of appropriation and coagulation of the fluidity and multiplicity of the feminine. Irigaray, in her sweeping and deconstructive survey of philosophical as well as theological traditions, contends that notwithstanding all efforts made for decentring the subject in philosophical, psychoanalytical, and theological discourse, the autonomous specular subject occupies the very hub of it. To substantiate her claim, Irigaray proposes two key terms: “Ex-stasis,” attributed to the masculine, and “Copula,” associated with the feminine. Ex-stasis which comprises two phonemes ex- and -stasis and means to stand outside oneself, to feel ecstatic, exhilarated, or beside oneself, conceptually has been derived from medieval idealism: “It is a mystical state in which two lovers achieve a union of their souls by discarding corporeal desire” (This Sex 153–5): the Absolute Transcendence. Translated into the terms of power dynamics between the sexes and gender politics, this transcendence involves subsumption of feminine (as matter, material, base/basis) for the transcendence of masculine/male spirit/mind whereby the former is synthetically dissolved and assimilated by the latter.3 Thwarted in his transcendental and pseudo-spiritual ambitions, as Stucley’s anguish persists, he appears to be entirely inclined to acquiesce to anything, provided that Ann still loves him and assures him of her, and his, identity as well as the stability of the conditions. She wavers to inform him that she has not kept her fidelity to him. Thus there comes another moment of catastrophe to the fore (and here the stage directions are eloquently expressive): “He is suspended between hysteria and disbelief” (206) to be followed by utter hysteria and, later, dementia. Abruptly, in a moment of blinding epiphany, all his former experiences are revealed to him in a new, shattering light: “And I have just fought the Holy War on his behalf! Oh, Lord and Master of Cruelty, who has no shred of mercy for thy servants, I worship thee!” (207). His experience is invariably translated into onto-theological terms, coalesced with his comprehensive revaluation of his former values primarily bearing drastic ontological and discursive consequences. Indeed, the excruciating inconsistency or logical contradiction that he suffers is construed by him, not in terms of chance or natural causality (see Trotter 27–31), but as doomed by an insane system-­ maker: “what human torturer, what miserable nail-wrenching amateur in pain could pit his malevolence against the celestial wit and come out on top” (206). Subsequently he advances his radically revised

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conception of ontology and theology, which is equally totalitarian and trauma-ridden (paranoid): “I offer you my version, you hark to my theology—he really is the most THOROUGHGOING OF ALL DEITIES, no wonder we all bow down to him his grasp of pain and pressure is so exquisite and all-comprehending…” (206–7). Stucley, giving suspended between delusions of grandeur and persecution and giving vent to his frustrated beliefs and desires and in retaliating for his detumescent sterility, orders the construction of the castle—the purportedly phallic symbol—on the hill. Yet, as we will realize later, this symbol is perverted into a hybrid and indefinite figure, of which one of the prominent facets will be the incarnation of feminine fluidity and multiplicity. Furthermore, this immediate transference and inextricable connection between morality, ontology, and ideology in Stucley, and his urge to resolve the least point of contradiction so as render this tripartite unit as monolithic as possible, is pivotal to the understanding of his character. Now, based on the foregoing lines of argument and contours of characters, what transpires more prominently and continues to pervade the play is the ethics adhered to by Stucley and the early Krak, who, early in the play, despite working at odds with one another, share the same logic of relation and form of reasoning. Accordingly, if we are to characterize Stucley and Krak with distinctive attributes, we can respectively mention: “ontology and totalization,” on the one hand, and “reflection (representation) and comprehension (or re-cognition)” on the other. Nonetheless, two crucial points should be borne in mind. First, these two categories are intricately intermeshed and complicitous; second, each in its turn prevents both persons from experiencing an authentic ethical relation with the Other. Reflection and (re)cognition, as pursued in ethical relation (to alterity), are invariably conducive to totalization and the metaphysics of presence. Similarly, ontology and totalization tend towards solipsism and isomorphism, since both are predicated on and pursue knowledge and being rather than proximity and becoming (see TI 183). To advance towards the other on the basis of what is deemed to be prior knowledge is to have neutralized an exterior complexity and liberty that is antecedent to one’s knowledge. As Levinas explains, by the word comprehension “we understand the fact of taking [prendre] and of comprehending [comprendre], that is, the fact of englobing, of appropriating” (TI 70). This predilection is reflected in the design Stucley demands for the construction of the castle, which is patently totalitarian and authoritarian, and in his enforcement of exhaustive transparency and confession.

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Thus, as I will demonstrate below, the ethical behest with which both Stucley and early Krak comply is the ethics of totality, whereas Ann’s, in an incisive contrast, is an ethics of infinity. Levinas understands this infinity, in the Cartesian sense, as always overflowing the thought that thinks it (see TI 62), and Krak, as we will see later, is both the foremost target and embodiment of it, as he is the only person in the play who accedes (through Ann’s provocations) to this apprehension. Ann overflows all ideas they have of her and all the terms—being, essence, identity, principle, the same—in which they would seek to encompass her. The consequence is shame: shame at the sheer contingency or radical smallness of the ideas in question. We can conclude that, in Barker (as will be substantiated more fully towards the end of the play) the ethical relation, then, is a relation to infinity which exceeds any representation of it, in the faltering, failing, or “ruin” of representation (see also EDE 125–36). By the same token, such a constitution of identity, ontology, and morality fosters its correspondent existential modes of temporality and temporal experience. This experience of time indelibly informs the characters’ attitudes and the course of action, including those adopted by both Krak and Stucley. One of the ramifications of this is the diminishment of the possibility of authentic ethical experience and a dynamic aesthetics of the self. In To Speak Is Never Neutral, Irigaray proposes an antithetical characterization of temporal (linguistic) subjectivity premised on the question of gender/sexuality (2002, 3), which is elucidating with regard to the dynamics of characters and thematics of the play at issue here. These two modes are the catastrophic and the anastrophic. They are respectively associated with male and female modes of temporal experience. In fact, the latter mode is advanced as a remedial measure for, and a trenchant critique of, contemporary culture’s incremental inclination towards “socio-cultural entropy.” It marks the male “form-giving” (2002, 3) enterprise as an irremediable impasse; a critique which is also conspicuously reflective of the state dominant in The Castle. Irigaray derives these two modes from two radically different discursive practices in ancient Greece. She accordingly defines “anastrophe” as a rhetorical tactic, which governs a grammatical inversion that mainly involves a temporal reversal. Male “catastrophic” time, on the other hand, is characterized by the predetermined course leading to temporal finality, and beholden to the “law of genre” (Goldberg 121), the denouement of a dramatic form. As such, “anastrophe” involves a repetition with a subversive difference, opening up an indefinite future horizon and including some sort of turn or retrieval of beginnings,

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r­ esulting in “turning in a cycle that never resolves in sameness” (Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies 195). In contrast, “catastrophe” signifies a point of no return or a movement towards endings (Speculum 10). In short, female anastrophe is time as transposition and transformation whereas the male trajectory culminates in the inevitable climax of its own preordination. In relation to the play, the first point of distinction between the two forms of temporal being delineated above is that they are not necessarily bound up with the gender of the characters, but rather with their ethico-­ existential stances. This idiosyncrasy accentuates the way in which the play defies gender-bound grids of reading and conforms to the pervasive logic of proximity, which hovers in the interstices, faultlines, and edges of the two adversely dualistic logics within it. At the pole of catastrophic temporal perception, we can identify Stucley, early Krak, and (ambiguously) Skinner, while at the other stands Ann, whose time is the unfolding of immanent infinitude, and whom the later Krak joins towards the end of the play, though transfigured and transposed through Ann herself. Both Stucley and Krak can be recognized as living times that are driven by catastrophe and oriented towards demise and eradication. Even a cursory glance at Stucley’s reformulation of onto-theology suffices to infer to what extent his world is replete with imminent catastrophe and cataclysm, as well as being propelled with unceasing non-synthetic tug and tension with a deranged God. While Krak pursues the concretization of catastrophe directly and volitionally, Stucley sees himself as the victim of a trend predestined by a ubiquitous, omnipotent, and atrocious God. Thus he obliquely provokes and courts catastrophe to outstrip an ingeniously malicious God, ending up, in a self-defeating manner, overshooting himself in self-loss. This unrelenting preoccupation with death and disaster, and the consequent declivity are not necessarily triggered by, nor confined to, the period subsequent to Stucley’s encounter with Ann. Rather, they seem to inhere in his viewpoint: when she apprises him of her promiscuity he unwittingly professes: “… [God] chooses to hamstring me not by your death—that I had always reckoned possible, that I expected hourly to be splashed in my face” (206). In addition, Stucley, from the moment he embarks on erecting the castle, is ineluctably set on a catastrophe-ridden path, as this castle is not only devised to rout both transcendental and immanent adversaries, but, because the castle by definition “will make enemies where there are none … It makes war necessary” (213). The culmination of this exceedingly paranoid-fascist path of foreclosure finds its most blatant expression in this declaration: “They are building a castle

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over the hill and it’s bigger than this … Given God is now a lunatic, I think, sadly, we are near to the Apocalypse” (236). To believe in such a predetermined conception of time and space is to lead an irrevocably claustrophobic, paranoid, and catastrophic life within an ontological totality. Although Krak feigns to act as an adept architect with a compliant, phlegmatic demeanour, he is, in effect, the “bitten old survivor of the slaughter” and “grandfather of slain children” (232). As such, as Ann acutely discerns, he is invariably impelled by the death principle: “aping the adviser, aping the confidant … but actually, I do know … you want us dead. And not dead simply, but torn, parted, spiked … limbs between the acorns, a real rucking of the favoured landscape” (232). Thus, Krak’s oscillation between a fixation on the “never more” of his massacred family, and an obsession with the realization of the “not yet” of his retaliation, makes him reside in an interminable limbo of a (n)ever-present doom and inhabit a foreclosed ontology.

3   Krak and the Rationality of the Phallogocentric Discourse Devastated by Ann’s fickleness and recalcitrance, coupled with his unswerving adherence to puritanical idealism and authoritarianism, Stucley erects the castle. The very architectonics of the castle are reflective of the personality and mentality of its architect, “the Great amazer” (212), Krak. The significance and ambivalence of Krak is reflected in his name. From a phonemic and pragmatic point of view, Krak is homophonous with crack, and, as it emerges in the course of the play, Krak features as a crack in the castle, as one of the principal determinants that substantially contribute to its rupture and downfall. This is proleptically revealed at several points, when he emerges “from a cleft in the wall” (249) or out of the shadows (220, 241, 249). On the other hand, as Lamb indicates, etymologically Krak or kerak is the Levantine Arabic word for “fortress” (131). These incompatible strands implicit in his name capture two phases of his trajectory in the play: firstly from the early to mid, and secondly from mid to the later Krak at the end of the play. Hence Krak both upholds and undermines the castle. Krak, initially, features as the emblem of an implacable belief in the veracity of reason, and as such the abandonment of his former conviction and his conversion, initially, to the invincible illogicality of the female

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body, and then to a partially chiasmatic logic of proximity, can be construed as a turn from male rationality to the fluidity of the feminine attitude (i.e., exposure to alterity, inter-corporeality, and heteronomy) as realized by him. It also marks the commencement of a decisive alteration in the trend of the life of all the characters in the play and a deflection in its phallogocentric discourse. True to his origin as the surviving man/ memory of death and destruction, he is appointed to lay the foundations of a phallic/phallogocentric castle but, with grotesque irony, he (un) intentionally brings about its distortion and deterioration by designing an indefinitely manifold and amorphous, and hence “effeminate,” castle. In keeping with our earlier characterization of Krak with comprehension and representation, the early Krak epitomizes the characteristic Irigaray ascribes to man. She asserts that man “occupies his language more than he does his living body. He wants this language he uses to ensure him a solid foundation.” (38). Both Batter and Stucley repeatedly draw our attention to his strictly calculated language and “immaculately ordered words” (243). Batter’s remark exemplifies this point: “don’t you spend words on me […] What’s that, you bilingual fucker, you have more words in a foreign tongue than I have in English” (216). Krak, in a parley with Batter, refers to language as an unerringly adamant ground for the communication of meaning. He casts aspersions on the virtues and possibility of interpersonal intercourse not directed towards the optimal conveying of meaning and intention, averring that truth is a solipsistic achievement and does not arise from the communication with or exposure to the Other: Dialogue is not a right, is it? When idiots waylay geniuses, where is the obligation? … And words, like buckets, slop with meanings … To talk, what is that but the exchange of clumsy approximations, the false endeavour to share truths arrived at in seclusion! … what is the virtue of incessant speech? The whole of life serves to remind us we exist among inert banality. (215)

In this excerpt, the very voice of elitist male rationality is heard, the repercussions of which resonate throughout the play. His overweening trust in the autonomy of monological reason prompts him to repudiate the accommodation of others and to deem any verbal interaction futile, as words can be imprecise, ambivalent and devious, and hence seductive.

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Consequently an ethical event must not only transpire outside of the realm of knowledge, since “knowledge never encounters anything truly other in the world” (“the profound truth of idealism”—Time and the Other 68), it must be outside reason itself: By encompassing everything within its universality, reason finds itself once again in solitude. Solipsism is neither an aberration nor a sophism; it is the very structure of reason. This is so not just because of the ‘subjective’ character of the sensations that it combines, but because of the universality of knowledge, that is to say, the unlimitedness of light and the impossibility for anything to be on the outside. Thus reason never finds any other reason to speak. The intentionality of consciousness permits one to distinguish the ego from things, but it does not make solipsism disappear: its element-light-­ renders us master of the exterior world but is incapable of discovering a peer for us there. The objectivity of rational knowledge removes nothing of the solitary character of reason. (Ibid. 65)

To be faithful to the world of reason, one must parry any menace of permeation by other possibilities or persons as irrational elements. Such a universe, however, is destined to solipsism, paranoia, and barrenness. Krak’s invariable recourse to rhetorical (monological) language is one of the reasons I pose to corroborate the complicity between cognition, representation, and ontologisation, as well as his implication in Stucley’s enterprise. This denial of an immediate encounter with the other, in which the relation is antecedent to knowledge, coupled with its evading of any burden of response and responsibility, demonstrates its profoundly unethical nature. Levinas calls this ontological appropriation which denies the ethical relation “ontological imperialism.” He posits it as “the very movement of representation and of its evidence” in the expression of the arbitrary, spontaneous dogmatism of the self, a “ray of light” (Totality and Infinity 44), directing the understanding to its hitherto obscure object and thus neutralizing it in encompassing the other (see Difficult Freedom 9, see also TI 194). Equally crucial, the corruptions of ontology, as Levinas discerns, are pointedly evident in rhetoric. In contrast to conversation, which maintains the ethical relation with the other and the possibility of unsaying what is said, rhetoric precludes all possibility of dialogue with the other in their irreducible difference. Rhetoric is the violence which refuses to listen, refuses implication, intimacy, hybridization, and self-reflexivity. The demonstration of the point surfaces when Skinner admonishes Ann, telling her

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that the male pretension to a dialogical relationship and respect is only a sham gesture thereby underscoring how the male’s use of language is manipulative and exploitative: “There is no talking between you and a man. No talking. Words, yes, the patter and the eyes on your belt” (220). The rhetorician takes the “position” of the person “who approaches his neighbour” with a “ruse” in mind; this is, Krak, Nailer, and above all Stucley’s position in their approach to Ann and other women: Rhetoric, absent from no discourse, and which philosophical discourse seeks to overcome, resists discourse … It approaches the other not to face him, but obliquely—not, to be sure, as a thing, since rhetoric remains conversation, and across all its artifices goes unto the Other, solicits his yes. But the specific nature of rhetoric … consists in corrupting this freedom. It is for this that it is preeminently violence, that is, injustice—not violence exercised on an inertia … but on a freedom. (TI 70)

Later in the play Ann addresses Krak as “Logic” and “Wisdom,” hinting at the fact that she conceives of him as the very embodiment of male rationalism. Sometime later, when he is trying to deter her from abandoning the country in the hope of release by appealing to the ubiquity of ideology as a seamless fabric (yet disregarding the fact that if ideology has no outside, there are at least surpluses, rifts and blind spots in or contiguous to it), Ann, afflicted and agitated, exclaims: “ALL RIGHT, WISDOM! ALL RIGHT, LOGIC! … I have a child here, stone deaf to argument, floats in water, all pessimism filtered, lucky infant spared compelling reasons why it should acquiesce in death” (239). The notable point in this passage is the tacit adequation of instrumental reason and death, and the fact that the only shield that protects the embryo against such an inimical exposure is the choratic fluidity of the mother’s womb. Furthermore, Skinner, by her reference to Krak’s technical paraphernalia as his “little armory” (214), and Batter in his sparring talk with Krak, by interspersing the military lingo with mathematical and geometrical jargon, both throw into relief the intrinsically violent and potentially detrimental aspect of the latter: “Have you done murder, genius? (He goes to him, holds his hands.) Not with those hands, no, but that is shit hypocrisy … It is, because the line from a to b—you see, I have education, too—the linear trapezoid para—fucking—llelogram is five hundred corpses long!” (211). Finally, in the metonymic parallel Ann draws between the scientific terms and fatal facts, pure instrumental rationality is depicted as tantamount to domination, violation, and violence: “Gravity. Parabolas. Equations. The first

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man’s dead. Gravity. Parabolas. Equations. Are you glad? (Krak does not move.) Say yes. Because you are” (232). Nevertheless, one must not neglect Krak’s origin. Krak is identified as a Muslim Arab and is indelibly associated with the Orient. This land, in which he was, is the land of domes, volatile curves, and fluid figures which dissolve the sharp lines of rational categories and mental tensions in themselves, expressive of desire and its sinuous and insidious movements. These stand in keen contrast to the perpendicular columns of Greco-Roman architecture which represent the certitude and rectitude of reason.4 As such, the latent traces of desire and corporeal perception are already embedded in the folds of his psycho-somatic schema and constitution. In fact, early in the play, he is described by Batter as one who can draw “perfect circles” with his eyes shut (201). At the end of the book, I will explore the ramifications of this trait as it comes to be embodied by him consciously through Ann’s inter-corporeal proximity (and midwifery).

4   The Castle: “The Castle Is by Definition Not Definitive” The importance of the castle is signalled by the title of the play. In fact, the castle comes to occupy the focal point of dramatic action, and its “erection” initiates a nexus of reverberations that continue to the end of the play. The castle Howard Barker evokes at the core of the play, which gradually accrues self-deconstructive features and conveys an increasingly manifold picture, is a paradigmatically over-determined object. It proves to be at once a historically accurate monument, an anachronistically disciplinary apparatus, and an architecturally spiritually symbolic and psycho-sexually symptomatic object. Scrutinizing the tension-laden relationship between these various aspects will allow us to unfold the gender and inter-­subjective dynamics as well as ethical-metaphysical concerns of the play. For the sake of clarity of argument, let us tackle each feature separately. In accord with the medieval period in which The Castle is supposedly set, the castle seems an accurate semiotic object. As Abigail Wheatley indicates, “Castles and churches are without doubt the most impressive architectural achievements of the Middle Ages” (78). In Chap. 3 of her comprehensive study of various facets of this imposing medieval architecture, which has a specific focus on spiritual, Biblical, and ideological connotations of the castle, Wheatley aims to demonstrate that “defensive

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architecture could communicate meaning in the same ways as ecclesiastical architecture” (78–9). To this end, she dwells on three distinct facets of the castle: (1) as a symbol of the soul/spirit (allegorically reflected in the three principal components of the castle: the wall, the ditch, and the tower); (2) as a symbol of virginity—and later, in a perverted form, of the female genital organ; and (3) as a disciplinary apparatus. Later in her book, deriving her evidence from various references in the Bible (Ezekiel and Matthew among others) and ecclesiastical sermons to the castle, Wheatley acutely indicates one of the salient aspects of the castle in terms of gender-based religious symbolism. In this symbolic scheme, in which the Virgin Mary is referred to as both the Castle of Love and her the rock upon which both Christianity and the castle of the soul are erected, the castle (in its tightly woven and impregnable structure) is conceived as a symbol of chastity, virginity, and virtue (see 94–8). This point is illuminating in relation to the castle in Barker’s play. It expands our understanding of the psycho-somatic and moral motives underlying the construction of the castle by Stucley by revealing how Stucley’s act can be construed as a defence mechanism and reaction formation to his realization of the loss of his wife’s chastity, the collapse of his idealist conception of love and gender politics, and a desperate attempt at the restoration of a sacred form of impregnable chastity and devotional-gender ideals. The following account presents one of the most detailed delineations of the aforementioned aspects of the castle in its medieval context. It is worth quoting it in full: Therefore, brothers, let us make ready a certain castle spiritually, so that our Lord might come to us. Indeed I say to you [do it] boldly, because unless the blessed Mary had prepared this castle within herself, Lord Jesus would not have entered into her womb, nor into her mind, nor would this gospel be read today on her holyday. Therefore let us prepare this castle. Three things make up a castle, so that it might be strong, namely a ditch, a wall and a tower. First the ditch, and after that a wall over the ditch, and then the tower which is stronger and better than the others. The wall and ditch guard each other; because if the ditch were not there, men could by some device get in to undermine the wall; and if the wall were not above the ditch, they could get to the ditch and fill it in. The tower guards everything, because it is taller than everything else. So let us enter our minds, and see how all these things should be brought into being spiritually within ourselves. (qtd in Abigail Wheatley 78)

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This passage elucidates the spiritual-religious valences of the castle. The recurrence of analogous terms and structural parts of the castle in the play, in association with determining issues—the womb, spirit, and morality— attest to this point. A meticulous investigation of the castle demonstrates how Barker is acutely attentive to all three distinctive components of the castle indicated above (ditch, wall, and tower) and their corresponding implications. To grasp the correlation between historical, metaphysical-­ moral, and psycho-sexual aspects of the castle and castle-construction, it is worth dwelling momentarily on one of them as they are depicted in the play. Three pivotal facets of the castle are conspicuously discussed in the play—walls, towers, and ditches and ravelins. Here, however, we have sufficient space to scrutinize one of them. Wall When Stucley hears the news of the murder of the master builder, as a means of compensation, he resorts to the intensification of fortification by ordering an addition of walls. It is here that he explicitly reveals the moral-­ spiritual dimension and function of the wall/castle: Who will translate my blueprints now! (ANN enters. STUCLEY turns on her.) Who did this, you! Oh, her mask of kindness goes all scornful at the thought—what, me? (He swings on BRIAN.) You do the job! […] what, me? It stops nothing, this. (To BATTER.) Find the killer who tried to hinder the inevitable! (As BATTER leaves, with BRIAN.) Listen, I think morality is also bricks, the fifth wall is the wall of morals, did you think I could leave that untouched? (232)

The second instance of the occurrence of the wall in association with the symbology of morality and gender politics is in the thorough pictures we are afforded in Krak’s account, whereby the significance of the wall is accentuated. This passage illustrates a stage in which, due to religious disillusionment and emotional-sexual frustration, Stucley is driven to the limits of psychopathological perversion: He wants another wall, in case the first three walls are breached. The unknown enemy, the enemy who does not exist yet but who cannot fail to materialize, will batter down the first wall and leaving a carpet of twitching dead advance on the second wall, and scaling it, will see in front of them the

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third wall, buttressed, ditched and palisaded, this wall I have told him will break their spirit but he aches for a fourth wall, a fourth wall against which the enemy who does not exist yet but who cannot fail to materialize will be crucified. As for the towers, despite their inordinate height he orders me increase them by another fifteen feet. A fifth wall I predict will be necessary, and a sixth essential, to protect the fifth, necessitating the erection of twelve flanking towers. The castle is by definition, not definitive … (231)

While this over-massification of the castle and intensification of its armorial means shows how Stucley’s vertiginous excess of paranoia is primarily displaced onto, and libidinally invested in, the wall, it also symbolically hints at the logic of the encastling mode of nationalist ideology and the escalation of nuclear weaponry in the 1980s and the possibility of its paranoid unravelling into a dystopia. Although depicted in accurate architectural and historical terms, Barker’s castle should be considered as primarily a mental phenomenon—“the manifestation of consciousness” (AFT 21)—and its abrupt imposition upon the stage accentuates its appearance in response to an intense psycho-somatic compulsion: “The castle is not set but as the outcome of spiritual despair” (Ibid.). Georges Bataille’s conception of architecture as both the spiritual expression of societies and an oppressive concretization of the dominant ideology (particularly as a semiotic element in the context of the French Revolution) is closely linked to the characteristics of the castle in Barker’s play. “Architecture” (along with “Slaughterhouse” and “Museum”) appears as one of the entries in Bataille’s incomplete Documents dictionary. Here, Bataille argues that architecture is utilized by the dominant ideology and made into state concepts. As such, architecture (as comprising historically politically specific monuments) is reflective of the social mood (stimmung) of a society, as well as the prevailing mode of governance and discipline in a period: Architecture is the expression of the very soul of societies, just as human physiognomy is the expression of the individuals’ souls. It is, however, particularly to the physiognomies of official personages … that this comparison pertains … Great monuments are erected like dikes, opposing the logic and majesty of authority against all disturbing elements … monuments inspire social prudence and often real fear. The taking of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of things: it is hard to explain this crowd movement other than by the animosity of the people against the monuments that are their real masters. (Quoted, Denis Hollier, Against Architecture, 46–7)

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Architecture, as discerned by Bataille, has an inherent connection with theology—given its hinging on the idea of plan (see Hollier 40–9). Wheatley has not only emphasized the “dramatic and processional potential” (11) of the castle, but has demonstrated extensive parallels between ecclesiastical architecture and castles (11–16). In this regard, Bataille demonstrates the homology between architecture and theology by accentuating the synthetic spirit and systematic hierarchy common to both Gothic cathedrals and St Thomas’ Summa Theologica. Delineating the ecclesiastical use and symbolism of architecture (in Thomism and Catholicism)— that is, architecture as an analogy for the divine hierarchy of the universe (in which God appears as the just and wise architect of a perfect structure), Denis Hollier shows how Bataille has all these associations and historical resonances in mind when he counterpoises the idea of plan (associated with architecture) with “a plan that leaves the realm of planning” (qtd. in Hollier 46). Accordingly, if architecture, as Bataille defines it, is “the ideal and immobilizing harmony” in which harmony, “like the plan, casts time to the outside: Its principle is the repetition with which anything possible is perpetuated” (Bataille, qtd. in Hollier 46).5 Stucley’s castle is therefore a theological architecture par excellence. As such, the castle that Stucley erects—as an idealist structure—intends both to spatialize/stabilize time and to harmonize/homogenize the difference in itself. As can be clearly inferred from the foregoing discussion, while Bataille considers architecture as oppressive to the outsider, Foucault, in his analysis of the panopticon (as a state concept), perceives it as oppressive to the insider. As we shall see more explicitly below, the castle that Stucley/ Barker creates incarnates both attributes, although later this initially ­theological pyramid turns into a manifold labyrinth.6 Barker’s architectural piece, though intended to embody and enact an idea of harmony, is already a Leibnizian baroque structure of many folds (given the thwarted and repressed desire of both its designer and ruler) imbued with conflictual modes of desire: the fascist-paranoid (homogenizing) and the schizonomadic (heteronomous-transgressive). This partly accounts for the organic, fluid, and volatile forms the castle starts to assume. In effect, the castle features as the embodiment of that concealed axis around which most libidinal economies, desiring-production phantasies, and interpersonal relationships revolve. Notwithstanding all these facts, the substantial quality of the castle must not be neglected. It is this fact of being poised between materiality and immateriality that endows it with irresolvable ambivalence and renders it subversive and seductive.

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The third prominent aspect and function of the castle, corresponding to its structure (described above), is its function as a disciplinary apparatus.7 Early in the play, Skinner keenly perceives the castle as “the fulcrum of disaster” (202). This is reinforced when Ann emphasizes that “the castle is the magnet of extermination, it is not a house, is it, the castle is not a house” (232). Though the castle that Barker places on the stage, as delineated above, owns many features of medieval citadels (see also Lamb 116–18), still the incorporated castle in its phallic posture as a symbol of both authoritarian and disciplinary politics, like other anachronisms traversing the play, is not historically bound to the medieval period. Rather, when we garner various descriptive passages on the structure and function of the castle, we discern the way in which it evinces numerous aspects of a disciplinary apparatus—panopticon—that Foucault focuses on in his genealogical analysis. The panopticon, as Foucault argues, is an ideal apparatus, utilized by modern discourses for both individual and mass subjection and surveillance, as originally proposed by Bentham (see Discipline and Punishment 75–8, 201, 204–5, 249). The following excerpt distils the effects of the panopticon and how it inculcates an impression of surveillance being total and unremitting through its visibility-invisibility dynamics: Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation ­independent of the person who exercises it; in short in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. (DP 201)

Foucault significantly elucidates the mechanism underlying the evocation of an apparently generalized impersonality, automatism, and neutral necessity at work in the panopticon: The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without being seen. It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which the individuals are caught up. (201–2)

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Elaborating on the metaphorical facets of the panopticon, Foucault indicates that the panopticon is not confined to punitive-penal organizations, but is extendable to other spheres of socio-political and personal life. In this way, it is intended to produce panoptic subjectivity (a mode for which both early Krak and Stucley can be considered as paradigmatic instances). Panoptic subjectivity is characterized by the internalization of institutional power and an immanent and ubiquitous form of self-­ regulation and normalization. This panoptical dimension of the castle has a salient bearing on the result of the relationship between Krak and Ann, when Krak in response to Ann’s plea to depart from the realm deals the final lethal blow to her, asserting that the castle is everywhere (239–40). One of the cogent accounts that corroborates the panoptical structure of the castle can be found in Krak’s delineation of its design to Stucley8: No place is not watched by another place … The heights are actually depths … The weak points are actually strong points … The entrances are exits … The doors lead into pits … It resembles a defence but is really an attack … It cannot be destroyed … Therefore it is a threat … It will make enemies where there are none … It makes war necessary.

Thus, the castle, in appearing as an assemblage in which heterogeneous (and irreconcilable) traits which have been coercively conjoined for strategic purposes, epitomizes the function and mechanism of the dominant discourse, both as a repressive and an ideological state apparatus. In this respect, the castle bears striking affinities with what Foucault, in his reflections on the idea of governmentality and the government of men, calls dispositif or apparatus.9 This fact enhances the way in which the castle pertains to a phallogocentric ideology and, no less notably, accentuates the contemporary aspects of the play (see also 249). Nevertheless, Krak’s description is seductively double-edged and shrouded in ambiguity. As becomes apparent towards the end of the play, this ingenious structural ambivalence of the castle subverts its whole purpose as it gravitates towards a latent and unintended dimension: pregnant and anamorphic curves. Intimately linked with the question of panopticity is the imbuing of the castle with transcendental and religious associations. In this regard, the similarity between the panopticon (and its underlying mechanisms of anonymity, totalization, transparency, and visibility) and the omniscience and omnipresence of the Christian God is striking. Furthermore, it seems to

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be the principal reason for Stucley losing his reason as he moulds it after the fashion of this conception of God. It is worth underscoring that such a panoptical, disciplinary apparatus is not confined to The Castle. In fact, disciplinary, repressive, and normalizing apparatuses (including institutions, prisons, and mental hospitals) are prominent elements in Barker’s world. Prisons and prisoners are among the recurrent features of his plays. In Scenes from an Execution, Galactia, who is commissioned to commemorate Venice’s national victory in a naval battle with the Ottoman Empire, defies the orders of the state and disrupts orthodox values by depicting the “Cry of Blood” (291) in her commissioned painting of “The Battle of Lepanto.” That is to say, she paints the atrocity of the war and the complicitous cruelty of the Venetian Admiral in particular—rather than “celebrating” its “glory.” As a result, she is condemned and relegated to a prison cell where she has to “hibernate the winter of [her] offence” (296) and to learn “discretion” (289) from within. In Brutopia, Secret Life in Old Chelsea (1989), Barker’s deconstructive engagement with Sir Thomas More’s life, thought, and politics, we are presented with a play that is ontologically, epistemologically, and politically pervaded with subterranean paths, garden mazes, existential catacombs, and subtextual contradictions. In it, More’s less favoured daughter (Cecilia) is writing a book entitled Brutopia in which she proposes an alternative imaginary world that in almost all respects runs counter to his father’s Utopia. Relatedly, there is a prison in the garden of Thomas More’s own house where a heretic is kept with whom Cecilia occasionally engages in arguments. Notably there is also a madhouse in Brutopia to which Cecilia is later consigned and eventually retrieved by Henry. In Seven Lears, the prisoners, in a choric manner present as The Gaol, assail Lear’s moral and imaginative space and haunt him unremittingly from the outset of the play, when he is a child, until its end, rehearsing: “We are the dead who aren’t dead yet/Ever so sorry/Not dead yet […] Whatever we did/Whatever it was/How could it justify this?” (125) The prisoners occupy a liminalexpressionistic space in Seven Lears and sporadically loom to pose challenging questions regarding good and evil, justice and i­njustice, vocalizing the absurd and arbitrary nature of human life in the polis and the world. Prisons and other similar normative-disciplinary institutions (such as medical and mental ones) appear in plays such as Fair Slaughter, The Gaoler’s Ache for the Nearly Dead (1998), and Fence in Its Thousandth Year.

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There is, however, a highly pertinent play, the action and context of which is historically closer to the invention of the panopticon by Bentham (1791), in which relentless surveillance and scrutiny recur, namely The Gaoler’s Ache for the Nearly Dead (1998). The Gaoler’s Ache takes as its context the French Revolution and the deposition of the French monarchy with a particular concentration on the period preceding the execution of Queen Caroline (Marie Antoinette) and her fraught (and eventually incestuous) relation with her son (Louis). In fact, the ensuing stage direction, which describes the surveying face, becomes a recursive motif: “A panel opens, high in a wall. A face appears in the aperture It surveys. It disappears. The panel shuts with a clap. A wind blows. A panel opens in the floor. A head appears, surveys, is lost in a crowd which surges over the stage, animated, quarrelsome” (188, 193, 198, passim). The panoptical morality and ontology underpinning the fascist-paranoid nature of post-­ revolutionary period is vociferously articulated by Trepasser10: “The Revolution has abolished secrets … That is its first achievement, the elevation of transparency, the cleansing of the smoked glass known as privacy, privacy for what I always ask … If it’s fit to be done, do it in public, or the public will surely find you” (CP 4, 235). Nonetheless, characteristic of Barker’s inclusion of personal and interpersonal tensions and implications, even this purportedly impersonal, neutral, and juridical-penal eye is not devoid of ambivalence and contradictions; indeed, it reveals a combination of moral sadism infused with intense fascination and desire. It turns out that the observation and surveillance are predominantly carried out by Trepasser (a Republican and Caroline’s chief persecutor), who is sexually obsessed with the Queen. Trepasser is riven by a staunch and uncompromising resolve to achieve an “absolute compatibility with History” (192) by strangling of his own urges and enforcing “an exercise of an intellectual hygiene” (228). The following conversation between Trespass and Caroline confirms the point at issue: CAROLINE: Do we have to be observed! What is this constant observation…? TREPASSER: Observation…? CAROLINE: Day and night we are observed! TREPASSER: (Turning to look up, as if surprised) Observation…? Perhaps it is not observation, Caroline, but— LITTLE LOUIS: Do not call my mother Caroline!

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TREPASSER: (Patiently) Perhaps the thing you experience as observation is not observation at all. Perhaps in actual fact … it’s love … (She sways) The gaze is never without its ambiguities … (Pause) […] One cannot overlook the possibility—[…]The very real possibility—[…] The State is infatuated with you, Caroline … (213)

Another striking instance of a separationist and disciplinary apparatus appears in Fence in Its Thousandth Year that features a border barrier, or a fence. The play vividly depicts the aporetic nature of the limit; more strictly, limit as both the condition of possibility and impossibility of selfhood and otherness, of sociality and singularity. Fence opens with an exordium that presents us with a stark and resonant scene, set at night, in which Algeria (the Duchess of the place and an anomalous representative of the state power) rushes to the wire of the frontier fence (functioning as the border between two countries or regions) to expose herself to some “dim figures” (FTY 7) who have clustered on the other side, and turn out to be a mass of “impoverished” thieves or felons, clambering feverishly to reach Algeria’s “immaculate body.” Algeria indeed copulates with them while the light of a surveillance beam or searchlight (a metaphor for a panoptic state), sporadically, yet partially, illuminates the obscurity of the site/location. This immediately renders the fence as a kind of evental site. As is evident, fence sets a limit for the tragic encounter with the Other. This desire-driven encounter constitutes a transformative event both for the self-Other and the culture. Towards the end of Fence, as a consequence, the Duchess Algeria is relegated to a mental hospital or insane asylum where she gives birth to her baby and makes incestuous love with her son. Returning to The Castle, another noteworthy point concerns the structural relationship between gender dynamics and politics and the symbolic architecture of the castle. This establishment of what is initially intended to be a masculine (the castle) construct upon an ostensibly feminine base (the hill)—as, what Irigaray dubs, the “silent substratum” of the patriarchal paradigm10—is further elucidated by Irigaray’s arguments concerning such a concealed symbiotic relationship. Irigaray contends that the distinctiveness and unity of the speculative superstructure (claimed by male discourse) demands a fuzzy and physical base—the “ ­ undifferentiated opaqueness of sensible matter” (Speculum 224)—from which to lead its metaphysical progress towards the lucidity of absolute reflexivity; yet “this

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indecidability is ultimately its downfall” (Walter 117). For Irigaray, woman’s exclusion from immediate presence or representation in the dominant discourse, and the repudiation of the essential role the (sexuate) body plays in the fabrication of identity and subjectivity, all manifest the recognition of the feminine/female as the “guardian of the negative” in such a discourse (Speculum 98). More strictly, the feminine is utilized not only as a portal—“the store of substance for the sublation of the self” (Speculum 224)—which must be relinquished in order for the transcendental progress of the intellectual-spiritual subject to be propitious and burgeoning, but as a re-assuring ground to return to or rely on (see also Whitford 152–4). As she argues elsewhere, this notion of femininity serves as phallocentrism’s negative yet propelling force: “The ‘enigma of women’ would serve as a sign of his [the male’s] progression towards knowledge. For his past, he would have to let into the forces of consciousness, this non-­ knowledge that she seemingly perpetrates this ‘unconsciousness’ that has been allocated to her without her knowing it” (Speculum 111–12). Stucley’s blatant remarks in the penultimate scene testify to the presence of the same logic of discourse and representation in his and Krak’s phallogocentrism. There, Stucley arrives distraught and daunted by the morass-like mass the castle has lapsed into (exacerbated by Krak’s treacherous trading of diagrams with the enemy and the looming of a rival adversarial fortress). He intends to castigate Krak, or even accuse him of treason, yet is confronted with Krak’s mental detachment and sensual obsessive absorption in drawing female genitalia in 27 versions. Seeing Krak in such a state, Stucley harangues: “DON’T DRAW FEMALE BODIES.  I’M TALKING! This is a crisis, isn’t it?” Then even he is momentarily swayed from his paranoiac course exclaiming: “–IS THAT MY WIFE’S BITS—I wouldn’t know them—what man would…” (243). As such, he inadvertently discloses the law of non-representation of the female sexual organ (and her mode of corporeo-ethical being) and its “exclusion” from patriarchal metaphysical discourse.11 Furthermore, here female corporeality is the analogue for the feminine element, and the aforementioned excerpts illustrate how both Krak’s and Stucley’s calculated flow of words gets ruptured in the vortex of an a-signifying entity. The number of caesuras, ellipses, dashes, and pauses in Stucley’s acknowledgement is revealing: “The representation of that thing is not encouraged by the church. (Pause. He is looking at it.) It’s wrong, surely, that—(Pause) I have never looked at one, but—” (242). The recurrence

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of this association (of masculinity with a symbolic construct—the castle— and femininity with a natural base—the hill) in various guises in the play is evocative of a similar distinction in Irigaray’s study of gender-based ontology and economy. Irigaray contrasts male and female modes of existence and their positions by posing two terms attributed to each respectively: “retour (return) and retoucher (touching again)” (Speculum 133–4, 60–5; see also Whitford 152–5), expressive of the genders’ two fundamentally different modes of being (see also Speculum 133). As we will see, however, Barker’s insight resides in his surpassing this crude dualism (inherent in the essentialist and gender-bound distinction made by Irigaray). Barker accomplishes this move by adding a decisive twist to this binary logic, in the sense that, in his non-essentialist treatment, the elements in the dichotomy are no longer bound up with a specific gender; a fact that adumbrates the proximal logic of The Castle. In fact, the ultimate outcome (to wit, the re-configured, or, better, disfigured, castle and, more importantly, Krak’s transfigured inter-corporeal mode of existence in consequence of his experience of eventual desire and proximity with Ann) not only subverts this binary logic, but reveals subtle co-implications, imbrications, and contamination between two genders and modes (of existence) based on the logic of chiasmus12 and the logic of chaosmos13 pervading Barker’s theatre of catastrophe14 in the convoluted cluster of common attributes among characters, despite their different genders. Thus, there are female characters who identify with and endorse the castle and territory (Skinner) and there are male characters who persist in a proximal logic and the dismantling of the castle (the later Krak). By the same token, intricate yet deep-seated affinities between male and female characters (Stucley and Skinner) who are avowedly antagonistic also accentuate the issue at stake, as discussed in detail in the first section.

Notes 1. As Irigaray states: “The woman is always already in a state of anamorphosis, in which the figure becomes fuzzy” (Speculum 230). For more from Irigaray on speculum see This Sex 156, 76–8, also see Speculum 144, 149. 2. In this regard, Althusser posits interpellation (the act of ideological naming in language) as a “pivotal means of material production and subjection of the subject Ideology, which ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects!” (LP 162–3).

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3. See Walter 112–16. 4. For a rather different attitude to Ancient Greek architecture see Built Upon Love 1–21. 5. “Marcel Proust,” Critique, no. 31, Dec. 1948. (OC, II, 391). 6. For a detailed comparison of pyramid and labyrinth see Visions of Excess and Inner Experience. 7. See Alireza Fakhrkonandeh, MA thesis, “The Exploration of the Metaphysical Morality, Aesth-ethics of the Body and Gender Politics in Howard Barker’s The Castle,” University of Tehran, 2005–2008. In my MA dissertation, I probed the play from various perspectives drawing on a number of theoretical frameworks, including Foucault’s ideas on the anatomo- and bio-politics of the body, as well as disciplinary apparatus (panopticon). Later I refined and further developed that piece into a chapter of my PhD thesis (2010–2015). Part of this work was published as an article entitled “Asyntactic Contact with Fleshless Words,” in Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 1, no. 2 (2013). See also Mick Mangon’s “Places of Punishment: Surveillance, Reason and Desire in the Plays of Howard Barker,” in Howard Barker’s The Art of Theatre, ed. D.I. Rabey and S. Goldingay (Manchester University Press, 2013), 82–92. 8. See also Batter’s view on this this issue GT, 215. 9. See Foucault’s definition of “apparatus” cited in Agamben’s What Is an Apparatus, 2. 10. See “Women-Mothers, the Silent Substratum of the Social Order,” in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 47–52. 11. See Foucault’s The Order of Discourse and Madness and Civilization; also see Butler’s Bodies that Matter 3–27. 12. I am using the term Chiasm in the sense attributed to it by Merleau-­Ponty. In his explication of the term “flesh” and the relationship between subjectobject, visible-invisible, interiority-exteriority (in his attempt to move beyond the dualistic-dialectical conception of their relation), he wields the term chiasm to articulate the logic informing this sensible form/matter and its mode of relationality. In Merleau-Ponty’s account, chiasm comprises two main characteristics: divergence and reversibility, thus entailing a mode of “doubling-up.” Merleau-Ponty himself uses the examples of the two hands folding upon each other and of two mirrors in front of each other (VI 133). This condition of “doubling-up” is twofold and signifies two modes: “doubling-up” into “inside and outside” of my body and the “doubling-­up” into “inside and outside” of things. This is based on an ontological vision whose groundwork or substratum is “Wild Being” where, highly akin to Deleuze’s ontological vision, fact, and essence continue to be “undivided” (VI 121).

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13. Chaosmos is Deleuze’s terms (derived from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) signifying an immanent and expressive model of the world (of essentially plural and dynamic form) in which chaos and cosmos (order) are inextricably and symbiotically intermeshed rather than separated into two hierarchical or distinct orders. In this regard, see Difference and Repetition 299. 14. See Alireza Fakhrkonandeh (2014, 2017a, b).

Bibliography Fakhrkonandeh, Alireza. “The Acousmatic Voice as the Chiasmatic Flesh: An Analysis of Gertrude—The Cry.” Symploke 22, 1–2 (2014): 235–73. ———. “Noli Me Tangere: The Efflorescence of the Third Skin in the Torsions of Pain.” Textual Practice 34, no. 4 (April 2017a): 1–35. ———. “The Ethics of Representation: Punctum Language, Evental Photography, and Affective Scenography in Howard Barker’s Drama.” ANQ (A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews) (2017b): 1–12. Routledge. Download citation https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2017.1373327. Irigaray, Luce. “Women’s Exile.” Ideology and Consciousness 1. To Speak Is Never Neutral. Trans. Gail Schwab. New York: Routledge, 2002.

CHAPTER 3

Desire, Language and Pregnancy/Maternity in The Castle and Other Plays

Abstract  This chapter undertakes a delineation of the traits that distinguish Ann as the pivotal character in The Castle: her pregnancy/maternity, her ethics (of infinity) coupled with her mode of relationality with the Other (heteronomy), and her economy of desire (schizo-nomadic). More broadly, it will be explicated how Ann’s ethics of desire and economy of subjectivity reveals not only the prevalent economy of desire in Barker, but also what distinguishes Barker’s mode of tragedy from his classical and modern fellows—an anti-Oedipal model of desire and subjectivity in Barker’s Evental drama. It will be discussed how (1) pregnancy features as a liminal site of ethical process/practice, of moral ambiguity, and of re-­ subjectivation, thereby providing a transgressive space for deconstructing an identitarian, rationalist, and sovereign mode of politics and ethics. This partly stems from the depiction of womb—both in The Castle and in Barker more generally—as a choratic-chiasmatic space where the idealist paradigm of metaphysics, phallogocentrism, moral rationality, and unified identity are deconstructed; (2) the experience of pregnancy—both in relation to Ann and more generally in Barker—is depicted as an ethic-aesthetic practice-process which leads to self-­overcoming (or becoming-other) in proximity to the event/Other; and (3) Ann’s schizo-nomadic and nonOedipal mode of desire show how the libidinal-personal and social-political are concomitant. Hence, Ann’s fecundity is neither solely sexual nor spiritual. Her fecundity is virtually an aesthetic-ethical fecundity.

© The Author(s) 2019 A. Fakhrkonandeh, Body and Event in Howard Barker’s Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28699-6_3

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Keywords  Pregnancy as a process/practice • Aesthetic-ethic fecundity • Ethics of ambiguity • Non-Oedipal tragedy • Schizo-nomadic economy of desire • Heteronomous relationality

1   Ann’s Mode of Relationality, Desire, and Language The secret above all things has to be adored, and this adoration takes the form of an anxiety to possess, akin to the sexual passion whose object, even while seduced, cannot be held, for the pain of desire lies beyond seduction, in the realm of sustained obsession. (AFT 159) every political economy is libidinal. (Lyotard, Libidinal Economy 108)

Superseding the optimal, polar psychodynamics of Aristotelian tragedy— pity and fear—with his own vision of subjectivity and tragic aesthetics, Barker accords a privileged position to desire: “the spectacle of the tragic penetrates beyond pity and achieves its effects in that place of irrationality which is also home to desire” (AFT 173). Gleaning our evidence from Barker’s interweaving of desire and irrationality here, as well as the dynamics of desire operative in his other works,1 I would argue that desire, in Barker, designates an affectivity that, due to its economy (of excess and loss), moves the self beyond the totality of reason, self-constancy as care, and self-preservation towards an evental futurity, exposure to the other, and self-transcendence. Notably, Barker prefaces The Castle with the aphorism “What is Politics, but the absence of Desire…?” This rhetorical question accentuates how politics is, in its orthodox definition, on an impossible, self-defeating, and idealist mission: the erasure of desire. This impossibility stems from politics’ neglect or denial of its being inherently driven and inhabited by various modes of desire (fascist-paranoid or schizo-nomadic). On the other hand, it arises from politics’ attempt at drawing a discrete and impermeable line of demarcation between the realm of social-political-public (as the realm of praxis and production) and the personal and private (as the realm of fancy and consumption) as is discernible both in the foregoing statement and in the course of the play, not only does desire constitute the impetus of the play, but it is inextricably entangled with the question of politics. Barker’s chief concern, as I shall seek to demonstrate, lies not only in determining the ethics and meaning of desire, but in exploring the problematic and productive aspects of the experience of desire that are repressed or silenced by normative discourses.

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Barker’s epigraph sets the tenor for the whole dynamics and entanglements in the play. At first sight, these two realms seem polar opposites: power, implying apparently one of the most fabricated modes of symbolic agency, representation, autonomy, and rational calculation; and desire, being associated with negativity, lack, instinct, irrationality, self-loss, excess, and nature. However, as is evident in the play, The Castle compounds this simple and dichotomous image/conception and moves beyond the confines of such a dialectics by ushering in a third mode of relationality and desire, one that is based neither on identity nor on opposition, namely the heteronomous or schizo-nomadic mode of desire. Desire in the play proves to have the power of differential reproduction or becoming-­other. The schizo-nomadic mode of desire, as explicated below, designates a dynamics of deterritorialization and becoming-other (through exposure to an event, an inter-affective relationship with the other, and an intensifying involution). Predicated on the way desire, its dynamics, and its ontological and political implications are depicted in The Castle, I suggest that Barker’s conception of desire here evinces striking affinities with, and can be amply illuminated by a reference to, the two modes of desire explicated by Deleuze and Guattari. These two modes of desire, or libidinal investment, are: the fascist-paranoid and the schizo-nomadic modes of desire-­production. The fascist-paranoid mode is a totalizing, past-oriented process whereby desire is coded and given a fixed use; it “subordinates desiring-production to the formation of sovereignty and to the gregarious aggregate that results from it” (Anti-Oedipus 376). The schizo-nomadic mode, on the contrary, is heteronomous, future-oriented and “brings about the inverse subordination, overthrows the established power, and subjects the gregarious aggregate to the molecular multiplicities of the productions of desire” (Ibid.). This distinction is structured around the legitimate and illegitimate form of the three syntheses of desire: connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive (see below). What renders Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) account of subjectivity, event, and desire highly amenable to a study of Barker’s tragic drama—in which micropolitics (of desire, inter-subjective becoming-other, and individual singularity) is against the representational model of politics (identity-­ thinking, identity politics, and socio-political sovereignty)—is that Barker both generally in his oeuvre and more specifically in The Castle foregrounds the proximity between “what Foucault called the metaphysics of power and Guattari the micropolitics of desire” (Deleuze, Negotiations 86). In other words, Barker shows both how and to what extent these two issues are concomitant and mutually determining. This clue is conducive to the hyper-dialectic of desire in The Castle, which plays a determining role in revealing the existential and ethical disposition of characters. In the

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ensuing section, I will seek to substantiate my proposition that Ann incarnates and enacts a schizo-nomadic mode of desire which is borne out in her mode of relating to the Other, her treatment of the strictures of symbolic discourse (here, the phallogocentric paradigm), and her approach to language. It is my argument in this section that, the mode of desire that Ann and, by extension, many of Barker’s protagonists (such as Bradshaw, Gertrude, Katrin, Starhemberg, Helen, Savage, Ahno, Smith, Park, Beatrice, Ursula, and Dancer, among others) are propelled with is a desire that “does not long to return, for it is desire for a land not of our birth, for a land foreign to every nature, which has not been our fatherland to which we shall never betake ourselves” (Totality and Infinity 33–4.); this is a desire that “puts into question the world possessed” (TI 28 ff).2 A fundamentally (inter)corporeal self-conception, which has significant ontological, epistemological, and ethical implications, and is pivotal to the occurrence of the moment of proximity (or con-tactile aesthetics-ethics), finds its emblematic instance in Ann. One of the earliest manifestations of the centrality of embodiment (to an aesthetic act of self-cultivation and an ethical process of self-transcendence in a relationship with the other) evinces itself in women’s belief (and Ann’s in particular) in a more corporeal, gestural, and material mode of expression. Such a stance not only signifies an intrinsic interwovenness of corporeality and language on the part of Ann (and Skinner), but also, as such, as they evidently strive to unmoor both their body and language from its annexation by the isomorphic and casuistic language of the phallogocentric discourse. Ann advocates and wields a language that is more carnal and performative, and hence less appropriable by the representational frame of patriarchal language and less amenable to subjection to the logic of totality and identity. (See Ann’s subtle recourse to a performative silence in her encounter with Stucley, 204–6; also see the argument between Ann and Skinner on the viability and ambivalent status of language, 218. And finally, this characteristic finds its vivid illustration in the encounter between Ann and Nailer, 226). Encountering Krak for the first time, Ann describes her impression in explicitly affective and corporeal terms: “My belly’s a fist. Went clench on seeing you, went rock. And womb a tumour. All my soft, rigid” (201). Here her words are ambivalent, intimating both the petrifying-reifying effect of Krak’s gaze and her being stricken carnally by his presence. A little further on, Ann flaunts her femaleness and desire-laden openness by advancing her body to challenge his alleged rationality and neutrality: “Can you stand a woman who talks of her cunt? I am all enlarged for you … [He stares at her.] Now you humiliate me. By silence. I am not humiliated” (232).

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Furthermore, she extends her critique to the existential and epistemological dimensions of subjectivity, and refers to the fact that patrilineal legacies are neither innate heredities, nor merely mental inculcations, but, more subtly, they are corporeally inscribed and sedimented in the folds of the flesh and carried out unconsciously from within. Skinner gives voice to not just her own stance but clearly Ann’s also: “we all bring to the world, inside our skulls, inside our bellies, Christ knows what lumber from our makers but. You do not lie down to the burden, you toss it off. The whine ‘I am made like that’ will not wash, will it? Correct me if I’m wrong, will it?” (217). This passage hints at the “constructedness” of the signification, function, and even materiality of not only gender but more radically, of bodies; and it thus tacitly repudiates its being essential and biologically and pre-culturally given (see Butler BTM 4–15). The aforementioned “constructedness” is attested in the indication of the word “makers.” And from her remarks throughout the play, it can be deduced that by “makers” she might intend nature as well as the triad (God, Cock, and the Bailiff (203)) which they embarked upon its abolition. The foregoing statement also corroborates Ann’s belief in the dynamics of the corporeal self and manifests corporeality as a fabricable, performative construct (in a chiasmatic interplay with the Other) which hence accommodates the possibility of an aesthetics of the embodied self; a belief in the (re/trans-)formation of the body and re-determination of its relation with discourse and the Other. Ann’s approach is immediately evocative of, and its implications can be further illuminated by, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflections on the lived and libidinal body. Merleau-­ Ponty, highly consonant with Skinner’s trope, considers the body as a fabric into which all things are woven (PP 235) For Merleau-Ponty “our body is comparable to a work of art” (PP 152). Noting the aesthetic quality of the body (in its concretizing the simultaneity of expression and the expressed), Merleau-Ponty proceeds to indicate that the “body of the painter is the site of a ‘secret and feverish genesis of things’” (“Eye and Mind” in Merleau-Ponty Reader 357). Another corollary of such an aesthetic property is the asymmetrical and chiasmatic reciprocity of the self and the other in a nexus in which both merge and traverse each other: on the one hand, “[y]our act is you,” and, on the other, the world also acts upon, or holds us (PP 456). In other words, first “we are acted upon,” then “we are open to an infinite number of possibilities.” As such, “There is […] never determinism and never absolute choice…” (PP 453). Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Diane Louise Prosser elaborates on the term aesthetics

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of the body, which, according to her, designates “the ongoing tension between habitual modes of relatedness and the remainder of these relations in an ever-shifting, ever-moving phenomenal field” (see 24–31); and as we will see below, this is what both Ann and Skinner affirmatively embrace, though in reverse directions. Such an aesthetics is vividly reflected in her performative approach to gender identity. As Ann’s modes of relationships with both men (Stucley and Krak) and women (Skinner) throughout the play attest, she has a fluid and performative gender identity. She is not a normative heterosexual, nor is she a normative homosexual woman. It is not that she only desires men, but rather as we garner from the conversations between Ann and Skinner, there was a profound erotic love and intimacy between both. Crucially, this performance (on both homosexual and heterosexual levels) is transgressive not only in that it occurs in the context of a patriarchal social order, but also it challenges normative identity politics by demonstrating that “there are structures of psychic homosexuality within heterosexual relations, and structures of psychic heterosexuality within gay and lesbian sexuality and relationships” (Gender Trouble 155). Thus, foregrounding the performative nature of gender, Ann reveals the “internally dissonant and complex” nature of gender and sexual identity “in their resignification of the hegemonic categories by which they are enabled” (Ibid. 157). Her performance of identity should be construed as a subversive redeployment of normative constructs—what Butler calls the norms of the heterosexual matrix—which establishes her sexual identity as performatively constituted. Ann, as can be inferred from her traits and dispositions in The Castle, is characterized by openness to otherness, non-conformism (her being defiant of the determinate subject positions and discursive relations of the symbolic order of Stucley) and mutability (read, becoming-other, heteronomy, and transversal fluidity). Now, the philosophical account of desire that Deleuze and Guattari propound helps unfold the implications of Ann’s mode of desire.

2   Desire in The Castle and in Deleuze’s Anti-­Oedipal Model Desire assumes a salient role in Deleuze’s elaboration of a new philosophy,3 a new ontology (an immanent ontology of sense), and a new mode of subjectivity. In his collaborative work with Felix Guattari in the 1960s

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(resulting in the two-volume magnum opus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia comprising Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus), the foremost step they take to realize this vision is to de-Oedipalize (the Oedipal representation of) desire and subjectivity. They accomplish this primarily through their proposition of an alternative approach called schizoanalysis. Schizoanalysis involves a sustained critique of psychoanalysis (by historicizing it) and of the repressive nature of capitalistic modernity. Their deconstruction of psychoanalysis is very elaborate and its explication is beyond the economy and scope of the present study of Barker’s work.4 Nevertheless, suffice it here to indicate that Deleuze and Guattari contend that the dominant philosophical-psychoanalytical discourses have always endeavoured to represent desire in terms of lack, negativity, and loss (as a reaction to unfulfilled need) and to confine it to the private space of individual psyche and Oedipal structure of the family. They do not deny that lack, but repudiate the determination of this as the “essence of desire”: “Lack refers to a positivity of desire and not desire to a positivity of lack” (1987, 91). According to Deleuze and Guattari, Freudian psychoanalysis posits the unconscious to pre-exist desire. Desire is represented by psychoanalysis as the “theatre of representation” (Anti-Oedipus 294) on which the Oedipal tragedy unfolds. They argue how psychoanalysis relies on a triadic scheme to entrench and embed the Oedipal model of desire as the norm. This triad comprise: the repressed representative (desire as positive, productive, and multiple), displaced represented (the distorted picture of desire as lack and as Oedipal), and repressing representation (Incest Taboo, as signifiers of prohibition, engendering Oedipus complex as originally informed by lack and the nuclear/familial).5 Deleuze and Guattari identify the regime of the phallic signifier—which they describe as “despotic” (A Thousand Plateaus 129) due to the way it subordinates all the elements in its structure under an axiomatic principle—as the form of abstraction proper to Capital itself.6 Desire, from their viewpoint, however, is a totally positive force designating productivity and multiplicity; as they contend: “desire produces reality” (Anti-Oedious 30). By the same token, the raison d’etre of their schizoanalytical (counterpoised to psychoanalytical) theory is desire in conjunction with the machine and production. In their account, desire, through a tripartite process, produces machines (circuits of libidinal energy). They maintain that human beings are “desiring machines”7 and recognize desire as emancipatory: “Desire does not want revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right” (Ibid. 116), adding: “only what is of the

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order of desire and its irruption accounts for the reality this rupture assumes at a given moment, in a given place” (Ibid. 377). The definition that Deleuze and Guattari propose for desire, as a force of connection and immanent transcendence (in the forms of mutation, creativity, and transversality), is crucial: “Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination” (ATP 237). Such a drastic revaluation of desire is predicated on their re-conception of the unconscious. In their account, the unconscious is not a theatre but a factory, not representational (of already determined content) but productive (see AO 24). Repudiating the former attitude, they maintain: “From the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object … Desire does not lack anything” (AO 25). Elsewhere they argue: “desire produces, [and] its product is real” (AO 64); and even more cogently establishing an inherent link between social and libidinal modes of production, they state: “Social production is libidinal and libidinal production is social” (AO 73). However, far from simply idealizing or fetishizing desire unconditionally (as a utopian force), they underscore the question of desire’s involvement in its own involuntary servitude as “the fundamental problem of political philosophy” (AO 29).8 Lying at the root of the repression of desire, as Deleuze and Guattari discern, is micro-­ fascism: “only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: why does desire desire its own repression?” (215). By opposing the concept of machine (and machinic unconscious) to that of structure (representational unconscious), Deleuze and Guattari seek to demonstrate how both Phallus-Oedipus (psychoanalytical account of desire) and Capital attempt to fix and strangulate desire as Oedipal abstraction (in terms of genesis). Nevertheless, they note that both orders can be overtaken by new connections between the machinic (virtual) elements of desiring-production—new relations of material flows between organs, bodies, and territories. In his articulation of the concept of the machine, Deleuze underscores its deconstructive relation to structures of signification (organized by transcendental signifieds such as Phallus and Truth): It’s about grasping that point of rupture where, precisely, political and libidinal economy are one and the same. The unconscious is nothing else than the

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order of group subjectivity which introduces explosive machines into so-­ called signifying structures as well as causal chains, forcing them to open to liberate their hidden potentialities as a future reality influenced by the rupture. (Desert Islands 199)

For Deleuze and Guattari, therefore, although desire is always already social, it does not enter into the social by way of trauma resulting from the separation from the mother and identification with the law of the father. The connection of organs and material flows which produces the body of the infant is already a social coding of desire. Evidently, Deleuze and Guattari accord desire discursive and ontological precedence over and above “pleasure”9 on the one hand, and “power” on the other, and that is what renders them highly applicable to and congruent with the world of Barker’s drama where desire features as the chief propelling force there, determining the dynamics on all levels: setting, character, narrative, and language. Countering the essentialist European models of subjectivity and (social, political, and moral) relationship—which are prevalently based on arboreal metaphor of root and rootedness—Deleuze and Guattari postulate a rhizomatic model. Accordingly, against this entrenched model of vertical roots (territorial hierarchies, genealogical trees, photographic mapping, and concentrations of Capital and Phallus as the root/origin), they pit their own model of horizontal shoots: rhizome multiplicity, heterogeneity, transversal connectability, double becoming (the orchid and the wasp), deterritorialization, and cartographic tracing. It is such a dynamic-­ rhizomatic model of subjectivity that allows for an aesthetics of self-­ transformation and an ethics of becoming-other, delineated above. The challenging task they posit for a rhizome-book, accordingly, is resonantly expressive of what a Barkerian catastrophist play undertakes to do: to “find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, rather than a world to reproduce” (24). They distinguish between two modes, or models, of desire, which in turn designate two modes of relationality, psychic investment, and praxis too: the radical desire of schizophrenia and the reactionary desire of paranoia or fascism (see AO 93–7). These two are in fact two states of social-­ libidinal investment “the paranoiac, reactionary, and fascizing pole, and the schizoid revolutionary pole” (AO 366). The former is founded on decentralization, deterritorialized flows, and material productivity and multiplicity; and the latter is authoritarian, centralizing/ed, exploitative

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and abstracting; in other words, the paranoiac mode embodies a reified form of desire subjected to socially authorized belief (in God, the Father, the One, and the like). In their argument, these two kinds of desire are not antithetical and mutually exclusive but two modalities of one signifying system in which the primacy and prevalence of one determines the dominant pragmatics and orientation of the system. They maintain that modern capitalistic discourses seek to restrict and repress this potentiality of (schizo-nomadic) desire by channelling it in “proper paths,” by re-­ territorializing and recoding it. In effect, “To code desire … is the business of the socius” (AO 139). Schizo-nomadic desire here designates a process rather than an acutely pathological state, and schizophrenia, as Deleuze and Guattari emphatically observe, is not a mental “breakdown” but a socio-­ political “breakthrough” (AO 167). The schizo-nomadic mode of desire disrupts the social stratifications, dismantles hierarchical structurations, and unscrambles their codes; it “is a free-flowing physical energy that establishes random, fragmented, and multiple connections with material flows and partial objects” (AO 87). As such, it is tightly connected with evental aesth/ethics, which constitutes the kernel of The Castle. Now, let us see how such an account of desire manifests itself in Barker’s The Castle more specifically. In fact, one of the inklings that reveals the affinity between Skinner and Stucley, not only concerning their socio-­ political attitude but their ethical character, is that their mode of affective investment in inter-personal relations, in addition to their approach to the other, are impelled by “paranoid desire,” which is obsessive, fixative, aggressive, possessive, and striking death whenever it emerges. Stucley at one point professes that the only kind of desire he approves of and commits himself to is an exclusive desire: “There is one chastity and only one. The exclusiveness of desire, not willed but forced by passion” (221). Ann, on the contrary, despite all her feminine allegiances and sympathies with Skinner and other women, resolutely refuses to immolate any of her schizo-nomadic desire as well as her—not “instinctive” (as Lamb claims)— but willed, aesth-ethic inclinations in the interests of ideology, needs of the self or even in favour of others’ (not the Other’s) distress. Considered according to the moral precepts and socio-political principles of either polar party (Stucley’s and Skinner’s respectively), Ann is an errant character. Significantly, however, Ann’s incarnation and enactment of her schizo-­ nomadic mode of desire is not something confined to the intimate sphere or private mode of inter-personal interaction and relationship; contrari-

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wise, it instigates repercussive socio-political consequences not least among which are the re-writing of the Bible by Stucley, the re-­configuration of the castle and eventually ethical-existential conversion of Krak; all three of which starkly mark the three turning points in the play. This, in effect, is the manner in which she disrupts and undermines the representational grid of the phallogocentric discourse/paradigm and “To liberate desire from its enslavement to the theatre of representation and overturn this theatre into the order of desiring-production, this is the whole task of schizoanalysis” (AO 173).10 The implications of Ann’s mode of desire and her enactment of them, thus, evidently demonstrate salient congruence with Deleuze and Guattari’s repudiation of strict distinction between desiring-production (of fantasy) and social production (of reality) as posited by the capitalistic discourse. They, in contrast, contend that “The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-­ production itself under determinate conditions” (AO 29).11 In this regard, the other pertinent strain that draws our attention to the more profound likeness between Stucley and Skinner is their demeanour and/treatment towards Ann (see also Lamb 143). Initially, a fervent care for her ensued by an agonized rancour and eventually a death-ridden repulsion as is palpable in her words here: “I would rather you were dead than took a step or shuffle back from me. Dead, and I would do it” (219). Furthermore, two issues sound conspicuous. First is Skinner’s obsession with Ann’s fertility, which occupies at least half of her speech. She admits that she feels implacably envious of her fecundity. The second inkling emerges when she asserts herself as pertaining to the castle—even to the point of identification which betrays her dormant territorial authoritarian proclivities: “I belong here. I am the castle also” (240). Thus we can conclude that both Skinner and Stucley are given to politics (of desire) and hence (its) territorialization; Ann, in a keen contrast, is given to aesth-ethics (of desire) and hence deterritorialization. While “horizon” is the vital word in Ann’s language, it is the word “territory” (or country) which occupies the centre stage in Skinner and Stucley’s discourse and mind. Both Skinner and Stucley strenuously insist on their territory and refuse to renounce it even when within its constricting confines they are perishing. The word “horizon” might appear in Stucley’s parlance as well; nevertheless while to Ann it designates passage and exposure, to Stucley it designates possession and enclosure. When Ann demands that he should abandon his state and depart, to “go on”

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towards “the horizon,” he retorts: “I own horizon”; yet Ann counters: “cross it, then” (208). When later, Ann admonishes the severely tormented Skinner, who has been released while burdened with the cadaver of Holiday chained to her chest, to do the same thing as she exhorts her husband to do here, Skinner rebuffs her and perversely persists in clinging to the corpse (of dead attachments, territory, and traumatizing history of one’s pains and obsessions). Though such a persistence on the necessity of undertaking her tragic pain, as we will discuss below, is not devoid of its aesthetic (transformative and re-constructive) and ethical (liberating both for the worse and the better) outcomes. In a similar vein, an idealist-authoritarian strain inheres in Skinner. It is evidently reflected in her pursuit of a matriarchal mode of ruling, her militant feminist communal state, her belief in the possibility of an absence of a government, her equally possessive, exclusionary, and prohibitive disciplinary state—of which we catch a glimpse when she is trying to punish Cant for having sex with male workers. As such, there are significant affinities between Skinner and Stucley. This is thrown into relief, when later, Ann admonishes the severely tormented Skinner—who has been released, burdened with the cadaver of Holiday chained to her chest as her punishment—to do the same thing as she exhorts her husband here. Skinner declines it: Ann: You should go. (pause.) Skinner: Go… Ann: Yes. Not hang round here. Skinner: Go where? I live here. Ann: No such thing as live here anymore, go where you might find peace and rub the thing off you, where you won’t be stoned. Skinner: No.

Ann’s advice here—her urging both Stucley and Skinner to de-­ territorialize themselves by detaching themselves from the bonds of libidinal investment in and socio-political identification with a territory and relationship (primarily with herself) and to seek other “horizons” for a possibility of being and becoming otherwise—is reminiscent of Deleuze’s discussion of deterritorialization as a condition of exposure to the event and, consequently, of becoming intense and becoming-other(wise): This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum; experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential

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movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. (Deleuze and Guattari, ATP 178)

Deleuze acutely draws our attention to the existentially liberating and ethically transformative implications of such an act: “once one ventures outside what’s familiar and reassuring, once one has to invent new concepts for unknown lands, then methods and moral systems break down” (Deleuze, Negotiations 322). Nevertheless, Skinner, enraged by Ann’s impossible suggestion, asserts: “this is my place.” Her subsequent remarks lay bare a deep-seated and poignant strain in her emotional attachment to Ann corroborating her fascist/paranoid mentality: “It did get on my wick a bit, envy of course, envy, envy, envy of course” (240). Her speech is fraught with resentment and rancour. It becomes more explicit when Ann extends such a tendency to all those involved in an authoritarian and power-seeking struggle; she highlights the parasitic nature of this fascist-paranoid desire by indicating the way such an objectifying disposition is vital to them: “you suck on your hatreds.” After a while, Skinner, strained to the breaking point, identifies herself with the castle betraying her covert territorial authoritarian proclivities: “I belong here. I am the castle also” (240). Here she discloses her possessive, and even more significant, obsessive disposition. David Ian Rabey in his discussion of The Castle considers the obsessive characters in Barker’s works favourably and valorizes them as ec-centric, autonomous, and non-conformist characters. Rabey, dignifying such characters as possessing a free mode of subjectivity and existence, argues that the obsessive characters, with Skinner as a prominent example, “resist others prescribing or imposing compartmentalization of the self; they incur outrage and hostility through their rejection of wit and theory” (155). Even though Skinner is not bereft of a partially dynamic conception of (embodied) self and interrogative, resistant modes of relating to discourse, I would like to take issue with Rabey’s interpretation of her obsession and rather argue that it verges on being authoritarian and emanates from her fixation and compulsion to possession. In this regard, a glance at Levinas’ take on the inter-subjective and ethical facets of “obsession” can be illuminating. Levinas defines obsession as a relation of non-reciprocal affectivity in which ego unsays or relinquishes its egoity (OB 192); yet he differentiates between the good obsession of

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responsibility and the bad obsession of resentment (OB 84; see also Hutchens 95–8), positing the former as ethically superior. The two modes of obsession, however, are not mutually exclusive, but proximate and finely divided. Their characteristics are somewhat ambivalent and problematic. While the former is affirmative, active, and protective, the latter is reactive, possessive, retentive, restrictive, and tacitly linked to the fascist-­ paranoid desire expounded above: “although resentment is helpful to responsibility in the sense that it shatters the egoism of the self one could still respond indeclinably to the other but one must be doing so without true sincerity, humility or even true obsession” (96). The latter mode of obsession (intolerant of separation, difference, and detachment) manifests its baleful facet in Skinner’s remark in a seething tone: “I would rather you were dead than took a step or shuffle back from me. Dead, and I would do it” (219). Her assertion lays bare the latent death-wish underlying this symptomatic attachment, desiring the intensely in-vested desideratum for self-identity, self-assertion, and self-determination. Stucley, striking a similar chord, betrays his inveterate obsession by expecting his wife on his very arrival dead: “Is my wife dead? Must be, must be because I love her so, she’s dead, it stands to reason, where is she buried? What was it, fever? Fever, merciful fever? No, she was banged to death by bandits” (200). Ann, herself, expecting a child, appeals to Krak to forsake the castle and to “go on over the horizon” with her. He tells her that the castle is ubiquitous and there is no shelter from it12 and this occasions her suicide. Her fall lies in her conceding to the logic of paranoid/fascist desire and hence in renouncing her schizo-nomadic desire: “There is nowhere except where you are. Correct. Thank you. If it happens somewhere, it will happen everywhere. There is nowhere except where you are. Thank you for truth” (244). After a tense moment of hesitation, she kneels, draws out a knife, and takes her own life. This ostensibly sterile reaction immediately evokes Miranda Fricker’s argument that: “a policy of ironism, localness and nomadism can provide no solution at all to the problem of how to refrain from discursive terrorism” (157), because she firmly maintains such strategies breed ironic outcomes and solely incur more “cynicism and ­capriciousness” to the detriment of their practitioners. But of course it must be noted that in her article, she adopts a caustically critical stance towards postmodern trends of thought and promotes the pursuit of a discursive reason not devoid of traces of Enlightenment rationalism and quasi-­Kantian morality. Furthermore, her juxtaposition of ironism and nomadism, I would argue, proves highly problematic. She neglects the

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crucial difference between ironism and nomadism in that assuming an ironic stance invariably requires a certain extent of detachment whereas nomadism involves a profound and proximate implication; ironic stance is at best critical while nomadic stance strives to be pragmatic and at least gestures towards being constructive. The reason, I would argue, is that Ann’s most grievous lack of insight in succumbing to Krak’s inexorable attitude lies in her failure to recognize, Foucault’s contention, that omnipresence of power is not tantamount to omni-potence of power (Foucault 1988, 123). More important, her suicide does not turn out to be entirely vain or futile; it is immediately followed by the mass suicide of pregnant women which combined with other already brewing factors culminate in another subversive climax: the collapse of the castle and the decline of patriarchal authoritarianism (see 244). The affinity between Skinner and Stucley is not confined to their common mode of desire and their essentialist and radically antagonistic attitudes. These two are only two points within a far broader range of convergences. Barker hints at this fact by embedding numerous external similarities that he establishes between the two. Both are sterile though they both claim to have access to plenitude and creation: one to the metaphysical realm or source: God and religion; and the other, through magic, to a mystical source: Mother Nature. Both are one way or another committed to diverse truths or truth-based discourses. Stucley zealously adheres to the establishment of a patriarchal monarchy and to the concepts of courtly and heavenly love through his allegiance to moral purity in addition to class hierarchy and gender/male superiority and mastery. Skinner, in her own turn, is devoted to the holiness of nature, militant feminist opposition, and sworn homo-gender love and her commitment to the establishment of an exclusive female community. To finely distinguish between these three main characters, we can derive our hint from the terms Deleuze and Guattari develop. The enumeration of points of convergence in attitude, disposition, approach, and strategy between Skinner and Stucley, however, should not mislead us into assuming them as two poles of the same spectrum; we must beware of positing a totally identical or antithetical correlation between the two. In addition to Skinner’s difference from Krak in determining respects, she diverges from Stucley at decisive points. Stucley’s pursuit of phallogocentric goals is driven by a much more thoroughgoing fixation and personal-historical trauma, whereas Skinner’s acts are starkly marked by a partially fluid logic. The latter’s idiosyncrasy is evident in her frequent recourse to flowers and

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natural education in her arguments. It is equally evident when, at the end of the final scene, she renounces the luring prospect of power and vehemently rejects it in the last moment by flinging down the keys and averring: “I won’t help you govern” (247). Her declining to assume power, compared with Stucley’s implacable urge to establish an authoritarian state, demonstrates that, having undergone all the socio-political agonies and personal (in her love relationship with Ann) traumas, she is now too self-conscious of her vindictive temperament to acquiesce to their proposition and her own instinct; such self-knowledge and self-sacrifice are almost alien to Stucley. If we intend to encapsulate their divergent characters in this regard, to borrow terms from Irigaray, we can describe Skinner and Stucley as respectively characterizing the mechanics of fluids and mechanics of solids; or to, alternatively, couch it in Deleuzian terms, we can describe them as respectively adhering to, and seeking to constitute rigid segmentary lines and supple segmentary lines (while Ann indeed embodies and adheres to the lines of flight).13 Skinner is depicted in terms of and associated with fluids. Her statement on love manifestly demonstrates her repudiation of a binary or dichotomous logic and an attestation to the permeation of the whole life with it: “They talk of a love-life, don’t they? Do you know the phrase ‘love-life’, as if this thing ran under or beside, as if you stepped from one life to the other, banality to love, love to banality. No, love is in the cooking and the washing and the milking no matter what the colour of love stains everything, …” (219). Nevertheless, Skinner’s desire for authority, for an intensely cohesive and monolithic matriarchal community, her conviction in the exclusiveness of inter-personal desire and her obsessive mentality, nevertheless, make her fluidity get congealed into solidification and reification as it is evidently observable at many parts throughout her gravitation towards the castle and, symbolically, her being chained to a cadaver. As is clear, I concur with Lamb to the extent that he identifies Ann as a more subtle and complicated character than Skinner. In the most recent reading of the play, Sarah Goldingay (121–31  in Modern British Playwriting: The 1980s) tries to contend Lamb’s description of Skinner as a “feminist-type Earth-mother” (Lamb 95; Goldingay 131), claiming that Lamb is “caught in the very responses he seeks to dismantle” (131–2) and has misrepresented neo-pagan faiths that herald the dawn of a new feminist era represented by movement such as Goddess Worship in Glastonbury. It is worth indicating that Lamb does not attribute such an epithet to

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Skinner; rather emphasizes that Nailer and Batter’s version of religion intends to impose such a role on her. Goldingay also provides an illuminating contextualization of the 2009 production of the play, drawing attention to the complexity of both religion and being a Muslim in the UK. Nevertheless, in addition to the crucial fact that she seems to have neglected the end of the play where Skinner declines to assume responsibility as the leader of the Holy Congregation of the Wise Womb, she tends to structure and steer her discussion still based on binary gender categories, disregarding the way they are deconstructed in The Castle. This is evident in her valorizing Skinner as “the leader of a new cult, one that has obliterated both Abrahamic faiths, and replaced them with a new church, one centered on the female” (132). To conclude this section, another significant point about the role of desire in The Castle is that desire, like fantasy, is governed by a logic of deferred action. This, as we shall see below, is particularly evident in the effects of the experience of (schizo-nomadic or heteronomous mode of) desire on Krak. It is indeed only sometime after the experience of intimacy and erotic desire with Ann that Krak becomes conscious of the disruptive and transformative impacts of the experience. What is crucial in the non-­ circular and non-symmetrical economy of desire, as it informs Barker’s work, is the loss of origin; and indeed herein lies the de-territorializing effect of desire as an affective process.

3   Pregnancy and Maternity in The Castle and Other Plays In keeping with Ann’s being given to a schizo-nomadic mode of desire and her inter-corporeal mode of embodied selfhood is her being ceaselessly in the condition of pregnancy, her maternity. Indeed, Ann features as the paradigmatic figure of pregnancy/fecundity to the extent that this condition is depicted as one of the haunting preoccupations of the main characters specifically Skinner and Stucley. Skinner’s smouldering jealousy is perceptible in her words: “She was all womb. Tortured me with her fecundity, her moisture, birthing, birthing, very public, down among the harvest, crouches, yells, and slings it round her neck, where did I leave my sickle, oh, blood on her knees and afterbirth for supper” (247). Significantly, she does not dawdle to differentiate herself from Ann in this regard: “and me like the arid purse of rattling coins, to her whim and feminine mood of the moon stuff danced my service … No womb lover me” (Ibid.).

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What distinguishes Ann from an ordinary or typical maternal figure, however, is that it is not solely the biological condition of pregnancy which determines her being a fluid and dynamic individual. This gender-­ determined trait is nonetheless affirmed and enhanced by, what I, following Kristeva and Irigaray would call, her aesth/ethic fecundity. Aesth/ethic fecundity here designates Ann’s willing of this manner of being (in-process and in-crisis) and dynamics of relationality, reflected in her treatment of it as a process of exposure to exteriority (to wit, whatever is exterior to the egoistic space), inter-affective intertwinement and trans-cription, and self-­ cultivation. She herself affirms the hope she harbours in giving birth to children and regards birth as a gift to and from the other (baby/infant). As such, she displays her fecundity of body and spirit and her belief in multiplicity and the emancipatory dimension of other-birthing. The decisive point resides in her association of birthing with both self-birthing and love: “The ease of making children. The facility of numerousness. Plague, yes, but after the plague, the endless copulation of the immune. All these children, children everywhere and I thought, this one matters, alone of them this one matters because it came from love” (243). Evidently, such an existential mode is subversive to autonomous identity and sovereign subjectivity. In this regard, Kristeva’s psycho-social account of pregnancy/ maternity can have an illuminating bearing on Ann’s existential and ethical position in the play. According to Kristeva, maternity and its correlate, pregnancy, do not lead to an assertion of sexual identity of mother but, conversely, undermine her subjectivity or agency. As she remarks: “Pregnancy seems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence of the self and another, of nature and consciousness, of physiology and speech” (“Women’s Time,” cf. Kristeva, “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini,” in Desire in Language 238). Indeed, as Elizabeth Grosz, elaborating on Kristeva’s attitude, notes, “maternity is a process without a subject” (79); or elsewhere she observes, “pregnancy has no subject.” Kristeva proceeds to contend that the maternal is implicated in a “catastrophe of identity” (162).14 By the same token, she identifies maternity as the threshold of culture and nature, arguing that maternity is not the act of an agent but a succession of rhythmical, re/deconstructive, and fragmentary processes that the mother undergoes. Maternity is the embodiment of the abject state and the maternal body that of an abject space: a non-objective, non-subjective relationship between the self and the other, the mother and the child (see

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Powers of Horror 1–2). Maternity is proliferation, fragmentation, multiplication, merging and fusion, fluency and affluence, and alter-ation and alternation (DL 237–9). Pregnancy and the existential modes and conditions attendant upon it, given its highly significant bodily alterations and psycho-somatic implications, do not escape Merleau-Ponty’s attention. Merleau-Ponty broaches pregnancy (and maternity) not only in terms of its changes in the unified phenomenological subject (more particularly, affecting the subject’s intentionality structure, her embodied identity as well as her perception of spatiality, temporality, and motility), but also changes in the flesh structure of the ontological individuality. Referring to pregnancy as not solely an individual process of self-adaptation or transformation but involving selfcrisis, self-loss and self-transcendence, he explains how the developing presence of another body instigates a corporeal self-alienation in the mother: “She feels her own body to be alienated from her” (Merleau-­ Ponty 2010, 78). Indicating the fact that pregnancy involves an inherently ambivalent ontological situation, he expatiates how, in such a state, the bodily boundaries are rendered more fluid and blurred; how the integrity of the subjective body is disrupted; and in consequence, the subject is decentred feeling simultaneously split and doubled. The foregoing state is, in effect, a state which not only foregrounds the structure of the flesh (characterized with self-divergence and reversibility), but also makes the individual perceive it much more intensely and palpably. Referring to the chiasmatic relationship between mother and the embryo (informed at once with proximity and différance), Merleau-Ponty calls this a “mystery” surrounding the non-dichotomous and hyper-dialectical “order of life”: “On the one hand, her own body escapes her, but, on the other hand, the infant which is to be born is an extension of her own body. During the entirety of her pregnancy, the woman is living a major mystery, which is neither the order of matter nor the order of the mind, but, rather, the order of life” (2010, 73). The aforesaid liminal and ambivalent state of agency/subjectivity, prevailing in pregnancy, can be vividly detected in Queen’s confounded state in Barker’s Knowledge and a Girl, when she as a middle-aged woman finds herself pregnant: “My womb’s tripped me/Pretending all these years to be a/desert at this least perfect of all moments it goes lush/My desert is a river suddenly” (121). Her subsequent remark, accentuating her pregnancy as an involuntary affectivity, is eloquently expressive: “[…] pregnant women are seized from the inside/Abducted by our pregnancy/More

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sugar more Salt/Now A Walk By The Sea/says the tenant of my belly” (124). In keeping with the point at issue and resonant with the foregoing situations, in The Europeans Susannah is perplexed at her being seized with an inner, irresistible impulse to bear a child: “What is all this didn’t with him? I want a child. God knows why. What do I want a child for?” An interrogation to which Katrin suggestively responds: “It is not a matter of you wanting a child. It is the child wanting. I know. I never wanted a child. But the child wanted. All this ‘I never asked to be born’ etcetera, piss and nonsense! I know. The unborn, the unconceived, force the act upon the parents Get her on the ground it says. Get him in your body it says” (91–2). Analogously, though tacit throughout the play, Ann in her pregnancy constantly holds and is held by the other. In fact, her pregnancy accords her a unique relationship with alterity, a continuous (inter)corporeal proximity. Such an ethical status unremittingly challenges the conventional and established morality15 implemented by Stucley, which to Kristeva (and Levinas) is characterized by the transcendental and/or rational imperatives, a unitary, disembodied subject, a morality in which woman holds a negative and equivocal position, if at all. Ethics, as conceived here, designates a signifying practice, a manner of being and relating, a(n) (inter)corporeal process which is primarily oriented towards alterity; it not only takes as its subject an essentially embodied individual but also displaces the self into a natural or social hitherto unsymbolized outside. It thus causes the incorporation of heterogeneous forces and conflictual flows and fissures within the self (RPL 203–4).16 In effect, an ethical self is a self-in-crisis. Accordingly, Kristeva defines (her) ethics as “negativizing of narcissism within a practice” (RPL 233) and articulates the premises of it thus: “Now if a contemporary ethics is no longer seen as morality; if ethics amounts to not avoiding the embarrassing and inevitable problematics of the law but giving it flesh, language, jouissance—in that case its formulation demands the contribution of women” (“Stabat Mater” 185). Pregnancy, as such, can be regarded not as merely a condition, but as the emblematic incarnation of an at once ethical and aesthetic (or aesth/ethic, in the sense I posed above) practice. As such, pregnancy approximates the function of the Levinasian notion of “the feminine” defined as “an essential rupture to the virility of the force of being” (cited in Ainley 56). Ann’s pregnancy comes to be established as one of the recurrent themes and points of obsession of other characters (particularly Skinner and Stucley) and is brought to a sharp relief against the backdrop of Skinner

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and Stucley’s sexual sterility. Skinner accentuates Ann’s fecundity through an imagery of fluidity (i.e., by beckoning to her constantly wet garments): “You and your reproductive satisfactions, your breasts and your lactation, dresses forever soddened at the tit” (240). What enhances Ann’s maternal position as an ethical and spatial dimension is her being intimately associated with “womb.” “The womb,” in the play, is not only repeatedly regarded as the distinctive trait of woman, which attaches her to nature, abundance/procreation, openness, and above all to alterity, it owns two more crucial dimensions. First, the womb features as a metonymical, material (choratic) space: as a locus of transfiguration and transubstantiation; and second, a metaphorical space, as a non-subjective non-patriarchal and non-phallic space for resistance to and defiance of the phallogocentric paradigm. As a metaphorical space, Ann proves to be pregnant with catastrophe and as Barker elsewhere underscores, “catastrophe is also birth” (WBW 180). From an early stage in The Castle, woman’s inner bodily space, particularly the womb is recognized as a spatial excess, a transgressive presence, hence menacing to the stability, continuity, and unity of patriarchal paradigm. When seized by the affective charge of his erotic-­ spiritual proximity with Ann, Krak in an admonitory tone says: “European woman with her passion for old men, wants to drown their history in her bowel…!” (241). The further evidence emerges when towards the end of the play, women are committing mass suicide and outrageously squandering the natural-divine gift as Nailer exclaims: “These bitches will put paid to the race …” (244); adding that pregnant women “bear our future in their innards and they kill it” (245). As is evident, the womb is here conceived as a (feminine) space where the patriarchal (“old men’s”) history and futurity can be countered, even dissolved. One of the salient, though subtle, instances of the convoluted relationship between gendered, physical/material spaces (vagina and womb) and symbolic spaces/structures of patriarchy (the castle) is manifested when the castle transpires as a phallic-­ sterile womb which gives birth to still-born children and mutilated wombs (women flinging themselves off the walls of the castle). No less crucial, in this regard, is the way the former exerts a deconstructive effect on the ­latter—reflected in the uncanny manner the castle comes to assume the guise of a womb—that is, it starts assuming formal features (an excess of folds and curves that undermine its formal clarity and grant it a fuzzy form) that are traditionally associated with femininity. An analogous association of woman with womb along with the conception of womb as the distinctive trait of femininity and its concomitant

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libidinal, affective, and existential characteristics can be found in The Love of a Good Man: LALAGE: Everything seems to get to your womb. I suppose you are that kind of woman. MRS TOYNBEE: Well, I am a woman, most certainly. LALAGE: Me too. MRS TOYNBEE: I’m glad. I’m glad we are women. Bereaved men are a pitiful sight. LALAGE: Can’t cope, you mean? Poor, silly dears? MRS TOYNBEE: Compared to us, yes. They are poor, silly dears. LALAGE: I don’t have that view of men. Not at all. MRS TOYNBEE: You don’t know them. LALAGE: Well, of course not. Not like you. MRS TOYNBEE: They are not used to expressing real feelings. LALAGE: They have no wombs. MRS TOYNBEE (patiently): It is not sex that draws them towards us. It is the sheer luxury of being sincere. (The Love of a Good Man 17)

Now, the point which Kristeva touches upon in her account of maternity, which is also illuminating to our study of Ann’s ethical character and status in the discourse, is that maternity in addition to being a function, a role/status, or a process, is “a space,” but a contradictory, ambivalent, and intrinsically ambiguous space. She defines it as “a simultaneously dual and alien space” (DL 238); as a site of tension and struggle between identity and non-identity; or couched in terms of the Merleau-Pontyan ontology of the flesh: as the incarnation of simultaneous ecart of dehiscence (an opening of difference and divergence) and entre-deux of connaissance (an intermediary space of co-birth in a relation of inter-corporeal proximity). Such a self is virtually subversive to discursive demarcations and analytics of power: “The maternal body slips away from the discursive hold and immediately conceals a ciphering of the species, however this pre- and trans-symbolic memory … makes the maternal body the stakes of a natural and objective world” (Ibid.). The notion of pregnancy/maternity as a transgressive, liminal space as well as an inherently motile space has a determining bearing on the issue of ethics in The Castle. Maternity/pregnancy, as discussed by Kristeva, akin to ethics, raises the issue of positionality; and positionality renders morality immanent, contingent, and bound up with spatio-temporal specificities. As such, positionality places ethics in a material, socio-historical,

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and inter-corporeal context yet always at an angle with the present conditions and never subordinate to the dominant structures. As Ainley argues, “positionality is counter to a metaphysical hypostatization of Woman, certain manifestations of which may appear in feminism in the forms of sacrifice or violence” (59–60). In fact, positionality entails a mobilizing process which enables the possibility of heterogeneous “positionalities of subject” pointing to an interminable “construction and destruction instead of an original formative speaker” (59). Ann’s volatility of positions is indeed a testimony to the foregoing points. The space in which Ann, as a pregnant and fluid character, resides is a borderline state mediating between and beyond the discursive and non-discursive, the semiotic (pre-Law) and the symbolic (Law), her body, as a maternal body, thus constituting a fold (pli) between the natural and the cultural. Ann occupies a twofold or double-edged status; she is both the “mother” and the “other” (see Ainley 57–9 and Grosz 79–81). On the other hand, Ann’s being “the other” (the other to the phallogocentric discourse and to the sovereign identity) emanates not only from her embodying the polymorphic, the excessive, and jouissance as a pregnant woman embodying transgressive desire, but it can also be ascribed to the fact that Ann, in her constant pregnancy, ceaselessly inhabits and is inhabited by the Other (the infant). In other words, her chiasmatic bodily state proves an inter-text, in/through which the causal, linear, and rational narrative of the phallogocentric discourse is un/re/ over-written. Based on the preceding points, Ann figures as an abject semeion (a trace, mark, and semiotic force) that circulates among the strictures of phallogocentric discourse and subverts the stable signifiers—(other subjects): Stucley, partially Skinner and finally Krak—through the rhythms of her performance. Indeed, the opacity of the performative (semiotic) body of Ann stands in opposition to the transparency of mimesis and representational body of the symbolic order (Stucley and Krak). Accordingly, though they are all affected in their contacts with her, yet, as we will witness, Stucley and Skinner react repulsively; and, it is only Krak who gets inter-affectively impregnated by Ann. This event of sense (in Krak), ­significantly though, takes place après coup, by retroactively undergoing effects of the (heteronomous) desire and proximity he experienced with Ann. He thus bears Ann, bears with Ann, and lets Ann bear him in a moment of seductive de-armouring in a space of inter-corporeal intimacy.

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Notes 1. Such as Women Beware Women, (Uncle) Vanya, Found in the Ground, The Ecstatic Bible, and The Europeans. 2. Levinas’ conception of desire, when stripped of its metaphysical residues/ resonance and ambition (as discerned and critiqued by Derrida and Caputo), shares striking affinities with Deleuze and Guattari’s postulation of desire as an infinitely extended movement away from the egology, and the totality of a homeostatic world. (See Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference 97–192; see John Caputo’s Prayers and Tears of Derrida 20–39; Leonard Lawlor’s Derrida and Husserl The Basic Problem of Phenomenology 144–65). 3. This new definition of philosophy finds one of its articulate expressions in his early review of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence, where Deleuze maintains that: “Philosophy must be ontology, it cannot be anything else; but there is no ontology of essence, there is only an ontology of sense” (Deleuze Desert Islands and Other Texts 2004c, 191). 4. In their distinctive philosophical method—called schizoanalysis—which significantly “has strictly no political program to propose” (Anti-Oedipus 380). 5. See Anti-Oedipus 177. 6. Value, as the signifier under capitalist social relations, decodes all previous modes of desiring-production only to reterritorialize them under the principle of exchange as the form of abstraction par excellence. 7. See Deleuze and Guattari’s ATP 296, 142. See also AO 180. 8. See also 1977, 29 “Nomad Thought,” in The New Nietzsche, trans. and ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). 9. Foucault’s views on “pleasure” as a way of resistance see 1990, 5. 10. For schizoanalysis the world—conceived as both la Terre and la terre (planet and land)—is constantly in a state of being produced by the social machines which constitute it. 11. For their elaboration on this, see AO 28–9. 12. An utterance which intensely evokes Althusser’s conception of ideology see Lenin and Philosophy 162–3. 13. In Plateau Eight of A Thousand Plateaus; also for an extended account see Deleuze’s Dialogues 137, 153, 52. 43. 14. To gain an extended account of Levinas’ views on pregnancy and maternity see Otherwise than Being 75. 15. Morality as intended and defined here is premised on Kantian and Hegelian principles. See Hegel’s Ethics 231–6; also see Kant’s Metaphysics of Morality 118–32. 16. What renders Kristeva’s conception of ethics even more in accord with my discussion here is that the subject of this experience in practice is “an excess, never one, always already divided” (RPL 203–4; see also David Fisher 95–6).

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Bibliography Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Trans. Mike Taormina and ed. David Lapoujade. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004c. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. London: Penguin. Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Trans. Alan Sheridan, et al. and ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1988. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. Trans. R. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Child Psychology and Pedagogy (Original Work Presented 1949–1952). The Sorbonne lectures 1949–1952. Trans. Talia Welsh. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2010.

CHAPTER 4

Aporias of Religion in Barker: God, Deconstruction, and the Re-writing of the Bible

Abstract  Howard Barker’s tragic theatre is preoccupied with the questions of religion, the divine, the sacred, nihilism, faith, and spirituality. Positing the death of God as the condition of possibility of his art of tragedy, and setting death and desire as its ontological premises, Barker’s drama manifests prominent metaphysical dimensions and concerns. This “a-theological”—and not atheist—approach, however, does not make him ignore God and the pivotal place He/it occupies in human history and personal-collective consciousness and unconscious. In this chapter, I will argue how Barker’s aporetic approach to the issues of metaphysics, God, and religion should be characterized in terms of a twofold method: deconstructionist and evental, rather than in terms of negative theology. The aporias, here, stem from the complex relationship between Law and Event. Tracing the pervasive presence and recurrent iterations of God, religion, sacred in various plays, it will be demonstrated how God, to Barker’s characters, is not merely a transcendental signified, but is rather indelibly interwoven with embodied experiences of pain, contradiction, and eroticism/ desire. Crucially, this is evidenced by the fact that often the first steps taken by Barker’s characters (including Stucley) in their re-definition of their self are their re-definition of the nature or role of God in their world. Accordingly, this chapter takes as its focal point the subtle manners in which, in Barker, the transcendental-metaphysical (whether interpreted as God, realm of ideals, or spirit/soul) and the material-sensuous are depicted to be inherently linked. As is attested by Stucley’s revisionary re-writing of © The Author(s) 2019 A. Fakhrkonandeh, Body and Event in Howard Barker’s Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28699-6_4

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the Bible, pivoting on the moment (and/or act) of “sexuation” of the deity/god (Christ), Barker’s deconstructionist re-conception of the metaphysical/transcendental involves exposing the repressed material-bodily basis of it—including the female/feminine. Keywords  Atheology • Aporetics of religion • Transcendental and material • Evental materiality • Engendering as deconstruction

1   The Question of Religion and God in The Castle: Re-writing the Bible The Castle features as one of the earliest, yet emblematic, instances of the revisionary take on the Holy Scripture (Bible), or a Holy Figure, driven by a certain existential-spiritual crisis. Such a revisionary take (and its underpinning crisis) transpires as a fatal turning point in the life of the character and in the trajectory of the narrative. The Ecstatic Bible (a secular post-­ metaphysical version of the Bible), Rome, Ursula, Golgo, The Last Supper, The Seductions of Almighty God, In the Cloth Cathedral, and Two Skulls, are among the prominent examples in this regard. These plays, which pivot on a transgressional re-interpretation of the Bible, Christ or God, are impelled by a psycho-somatically critical state and an obsession with transcendence of self, language, and values, all as determined by the normative discourse through an exploration of the charismatic, mystic, divine, and seductive sources of meaning, authority/power, and the human, leading to a deconstructive approach to God (as the alleged source of historical-ontological-­ personal meaning, truth, and rationality). Even in the plays which are less explicitly concerned with questions of religion, god, and metaphysics— such as The Power of the Dog—we are confronted with moments where characters grope for the possibility of meaning and trans-valuation (of conventional and normative values) in order to come to terms with, or move beyond, the traumatic incursion of their catastrophic situation, by undertaking a re-interpretation or reconsideration of the role, nature, and meaning of God. In The Power of the Dog, a soldier says: “God is neither good, nor bad. He is stupid. […] We say of Him, as we say of an insane murderer, He is responsible for the crime of which He is accused, but not guilty of it” (34). This position is The soldier’s position here, while being reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s idea of “ontological irrationalism” (Peters 55–8), sounds one of the recurrent notes in Barker’s tragic vision of the world and the individual, that is, severing of guilt and responsibility as a

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means of projecting feelings onto a scapegoat God, in order to avoid a lapse into, what Nietzsche calls, bad faith (or conscience) and ressentiment (Genealogy of Morality I: 10–11, III: 14, 11, 14).1 The latter would strip them of agency, and hence of the possibility of self-overcoming and re-­ fabrication of the self, providing them with pretexts under which the Christians would lapse into passivity and the pathos of moral shame and pity. It is evident the extent to which Barker’s cosmological-religious vision is inextricable from the existential (not existentialist) aesthetics underpinning his plays.2 Such a re-interpretation is as much reflective of a negative reaction (associated with ressentiment and passive nihilism) to their circumstances as it can be conducive to an affirmative action (associated with extreme or active nihilism and will-to-becoming-other) which ruptures with a transcendent source of meaning, value, and truth.3 To preface our investigation of this issue in The Castle with an illuminating example, Golgo, dramatizing a sustained venture into a re-writing of parts of the Bible, contains many elements that echo those of The Castle. Set on the threshold of a moment of historical transition (French Revolution), Golgo: Sermons on Pain and Privilege (1989) depicts a number of fugitive aristocrats (loyal to the ancien regime) who—having resorted to a “Park in France, 1789” (52) in a desperate bid to both allay the anxiety of their liminal situation and to retrieve a sense of selfhood and meaning in the existential and historical crisis they have been hurled into— embark on a performance of the Passions of Christ while the turbulent forces of the Revolution hover around. What at first sight appears as their self-aggrandizing and compensatory attempt, driven by a spirit of delusion and class decadence, transpires as a subtle revisionary take on the ur-text, conducive to the emergence of a new world and selfhood out of the moribund one. As such, they strive to create a moment of what Barker calls Anti-History against the incrementally impinging forces of History. Whatto’s assertion is illuminating: “The world is coming apart or as I prefer to put it, we no longer fit” (75). This apparently baroque play within a play, scripted by Whatto and later extended by the improvisation of other characters, comprises an allegorical performance based on a drastic re-interpretation of the Bible, coupled with an extended ritual of impersonation (enacted with variation) by all characters in Golgo. This undertaking serves as the fulcrum of the narrative in Golgo. Apart from Whatto who acts as Christ, other individuals assume other roles (those of Mary, Joseph, Pilate, Magdalene, Barabbas, the Two Thieves, Soldiers, etc.); the marginal characters/roles and the minorities

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bring in and add their own small narrative to the grand narrative of Crucifixion and the life of Christ. As is evident in their speeches, their perception (and also need) entails and reveals a more material and human God/Christ. At a juncture, Whatto at once unearths and inserts a gap or lacuna—in the form of an excessive force—in smooth narrative of Christ’s Passions as recorded by the Bible. This repressed element or gap—symbolized by “a cry,” reminiscent of and anticipating the cry in Gertrude— The Cry—is claimed to be a manifestation of and reaction to the irrationality and contradiction informing the world and human existence. In fact, the abovementioned moment of Anti-History is paralleled by another moment of Anti-History contained in the disclosure of this cry/excess in the Historically established Biblical narrative. Whatto’s assertion well articulates what is meant by this excess or moment of Anti-History: “There are those recorded, and those who fail to be recorded, obviously there is OTHER TESTAMENT! […] ALWAYS OTHER TESTAMENT” (Seven Lears & Golgo 71). At one point, Whatto, who features as a divided individual, at once being himself (Whatto) and impersonating Christ (or second Christ or anti-Christ), goes to the stakes and addresses a figure nailed to it, representing Christ (supposedly), exclaiming: I do know that. And yet. I have thrived on such devotion. And yet. He felt at first absurd that I stole His attention / It’s / After All / An / Entertainment / Death And then to find this. To have to tolerate this. Cavorting and. No, it spoils the. Naturally he. Within the obvious constraints of. Expressed his chagrin. (He emits a long and terrible cry.) This cry goes unrecorded in the gospels. (He repeats it.) This cry has only now been excavated. (And again) This cry—(72)

The paratactic utterances are intended to convey an ontological crisis in his sense of belonging to a world on the verge of vanishing and an existential crisis in his sense of selfhood. Taking our hint from Nietzsche’s statement (“I fear we still believe in God because we believe in grammar” (Twilight of Idols 5)), we can observe that the disjointed and faltering syntax (logical structure/connection) of his utterances is indicative of his being beset with a world of contradiction and absurdity (illogicality) in which God is either dead or absent. Another salient instance of the attempt at the insertion/exposition of a  repressed/silenced moment in the grand narrative is provided by The Lunatic:

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I think his patience hurt me most. Always the patient ones. The bearers. The demonstrators of fortitude. They drove me to an excess of invention. […] And in the night he engaged me in a conversation. This conversation goes unrecorded in the gospels. This conversation has only now been unearthed. (72)

The ensuing re-creative-imaginative interpretation of the Biblical narrative and impersonation of Biblical figures is highly apt and exemplary. It particularly illustrates the points at which Barker overlaps with some of Nietzsche’s genealogical arguments on Christian morality. As is evident in Christ’s confessional enunciations in Golgo, included below, Christian morality, to Barker (analogous to Nietzsche), rather than involving a metaphysics, is primarily based on a certain ethics of affects and epistemology of emotions: pathos, self-pity, and ressentiment. Barker, akin to Nietzsche, is primarily preoccupied with the psychological, rather than metaphysical or historical, origins of morality. Golgo’s Christ does acknowledge how and that such a transcendent and morality predicated on the economy of guilt and debt, pity, transparency of the self, and bad conscience (ressentiment) has rendered him a means rather than an end in himself as an individual by divesting him of his singularity (primarily characterized by the possibility of experiencing “intimacy”): CHRIST: Never mind him. LUNATIC: He also had a disability— CHRIST: Never mind him. (Pause) Do you want to be cured? I have strength for one more miracle. (Pause) LUNATIC: I don’t know. (Pause) I don’t know; you see—(He laughs.) I don’t know if I’m not vastly happier like this. CHRIST: Touch me. LUNATIC: No, I don’t think I— CHRIST: My foot. just— LUNATIC (childishly): No! Absolutely not! (Pause) Anyway, it’s all—Why do you want me to be sane? What’s in it for you? (Pause) CHRIST: I have had the most terrible life in the world. Please pity me… LUNATIC: No. CHRIST: I have been a purpose and not a person. Do pity me … […] I lived without intimacy and yet I was not without feelings. LUNATIC: No pity no. How could I do this job if I was. How could I. CHRIST: They had free will. I alone had no free will. Yet I had feelings.

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LUNATIC: You think it’s easy being here? All the time I’m here. In all weathers and you say. No, pity’s for those with. CHRIST: Was ever a man less free than me? (Pause. WHATTO goes to the cross and runs his hands over it, reaching slowly and vainly for the feet of CHRIST.). (73)

The key enunciation in this limit situation—“I have been a purpose and not a person”—reveals one of the pivotal ontological and ethical values in Barker’s evental drama, to wit, individual singularity as a condition of possibility of experience and freedom. What Christ, in his appeal to Lunatic, demands here, accordingly, can be described as a “sharing of singularity” (Nancy, Experience of Freedom 68), where singularity comprises an evental movement-moment of giving (relation) and withdrawing (freedom). To unfold this dense definition, freedom here entails the ensuing dynamics: “freedom withdraws being and gives relation” and “relation happens only in the withdrawal of what would unite or necessarily communicate me to others and to myself” (68–9). The key terms in the foregoing passage can be identified thus: intimacy, individuality (being a person) and free will (attributes Christ claims here to have been deprived of) in conjunction with pity, passivity, and purpose (attributes he claims to have been forced to embody). The latter preclude the possibility of a rich and dynamic form of life and instead promote a diminished form of existence (in terms of emotion and action). Such a diagnostic dynamics in Barker’s Golgo evokes Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis of Christianity as a life-denying form of morality underpinned by ressentiment and bad conscience (see GM 1, 10; GM 2, 11). The key term Nietzsche proposes to distil from such a characteristic is “ascetic ideal” (GM 3, 11). Barker’s attitude implicit in this scene is akin to Nietzsche’s genealogical view when he argues that Christianity primarily involves a morality rather than metaphysics. Nietzsche approaches this on the basis of the concept of the ascetic ideal as “a closed system of will, goal and interpretation.”4 Nietzsche contends that the Christian morality of the ascetic ideal and ressentiment should be superseded by one of self-expression and an affirmative approach to life and one’s existence (GM 2, 27; GM 3, 23–8). And this is what is realized by Barker’s characters in general, and in Golgo in particular. They seize the texts and their re-reading and re-interpretation as a space/opportunity for the insertion of self-expression. In a similar vein, Stucley, in his existential grappling with God, strives to redress the image of a misrepresented and mis-conceived (by the ortho-

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dox tradition) God, as well as later groping for charades to outwit and vanquish a God re-conceived as Mad. Indeed, The Castle in general, and Stucley’s reaction to the calamities he encounters in particular, features as a salient testimony to the following statement from The Power of the Dog: “all pain leads to metaphysics” (35). Indeed, the intimate link between the question of pain/suffering and metaphysics (the transcendentally determined purpose and meaning of human pain) invoked in The Castle is both a recurrent preoccupation in Barker’s work and a long-standing question in philosophy.5 As early as The Love of a Goodman (1978)—situated in Paschendale, Belgium, in 1920—the question of pain, particularly on a spectacular scale, instigates characters into speculations about the meaning of human life and the existence, and possible nature/character, of a divine being. In The Love of a Good Man, a non-orthodox bishop (reminiscent of Orphuls in The Europeans), who is attending an inauguration ceremony held for the consecration of a graveyard as a monument memorializing the victims of WWI, steps up to a dais draped in Union Flags, expected to deliver an ardent speech eulogizing heroic actions and nationalist ideology by invoking religious harmonies amidst the dissonance of meaningless pain and chaos of dead flesh. And yet, the Bishop exclaims: Why God likes pain. (Pause) Always being asked that one, why God is so very fond of pain. (Pause) Because He is. Wriggle round it as we might, it’s inescapable He must like pain. His own and other people’s. He must approve of it. And this is as good an occasion to mention pain as any. Better than most, in fact. Because we are situated in a sea of it. An Atlantic of stilled agony. (Pause. He examines his fingers a moment.) Well, I will not apologize for Him. I am always apologizing for Him. It’s getting a bit much (57).

This is in keeping with Barker’s later valorization of pain as one of the aesthetic as well as ontological-existential pivots of his theatre of catastrophe: “an inextinguishable feature of human existence” (DOA 54). Here Bishop’s utterances exceed an orthodox conception of pain in religion (be it catholic or puritanism), in that it ascribes to God a love of pain and its infliction (given the traditional association of pain with the question of evil, it tacitly depicts God as a sado-masochist). A little while after this, Bishop blunts the edge of his apparently atheistic thoughts by saying: “Fear not. I do not deny the existence of the person God. I merely ask what sort of character He has” (57). Bishop’s jarringly dissonant voice,

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however, is immediately drowned in the fanfare of the ceremony as the Prince of Wales is forced upon the dais. The question of pain can thus be argued to have two correlates in Barker: one is the cause/reason and meaning of pain in relation to a divine or a metaphysical entity (traditionally called God); and two, the meaning and use of pain in relation to the individual, particularly individuals with a tragic consciousness or sensibility. (Hence Rome’s subtitle: On Being Divine, coupled with references to godliness for characters striving to enhance their autonomy and self-cultivation through, or while being in the throes of, their pain in The Europeans, The Brilliance of a Servant, and A Hard Heart, among others). In his sermon (before death/execution), when pestered by Empress as to what he has learned from his transgression (matricide), Orphuls postulates the “tripling order of the Groaning God” as comprising beauty, cruelty, and knowledge (108). Earlier in The Europeans, Emperor Leopold, while appealing to Starhemberg, associates existential suffering and godliness thus: “You must help us to restore ourselves. Be a mirror, in which we dwarves may see the possibility of godlike self” (75). Relatedly, spurred by the individuating and super-individuating effects of pain, Barker’s characters pursue an immanent ethics through which they become unforgivable (to those inhabiting the transcendent morality of good and evil). Becoming unforgivable is a hallmark of their affirmation of an ethics of self-overcoming which is beyond good and evil and of their existential apotheosis (sovereign self-identification) for Barker’s protagonists. The latter facet, nevertheless, often retrospectively proves either impossible or a moment of false consciousness or hubristic delusion. In The Bite of the Night, the compulsively transgressive Helen exclaims: “Could I ever forgive myself if I were forgivable?” (CP4 105). Casting the aesthetic and ethical effects of pain in terms reminiscent of the Hegelian Lord-Bondsman dialectic or the Nietzschean dialectic of slave and master morality and the aristocracy of spirit, Riddler (a female architect in A Hard Heart) affords us an insight into this “overman” mentality: “Gods are born in pain, not pleasure. They are the product of extremity, a manifestation of the will of peoples … which flows into their mortal bodies and inspires them, enabling them to breathe in unfamiliar airs” (HH 23–4). Having undergone several existential and ethical crises in the course of The Castle (the pain of inexplicable sexual sterility, his sense of being spiritually stranded, and, ultimately, his being psycho-somatically traumatized by unfathomable ethical contradictions), Stucley reconsiders his former conception of God as malicious and hostile, thus declaring his tenacious

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belief in God’s insanity: “I have changed my view of God. I no longer regard Him as an evil deity that was excessive, evil, no. He’s mad. It is only by recognizing God is mad that we can satisfactorily explain the random nature of—” (235). Accordingly, he offers his own “version of theology” (206) in which he takes the corporeality of Christ as the key to his own retaliation and existential-ethical re-definition and founds “the Church of Christ the Lover” issuing his version of the Bible as “the Gospel of the Christ Erect” (223). This frenzied amendment of the orthodox religion and implementation of his own strand coalesces with accelerating the progress of the castle as a cause for further exploitation of people. Stucley burdens Nailer with this onus, stating: “I mean invoke Christ the Lover round the estate. I mean increase the yield of the demesne and plant more acres. Plough the woods. I want a further hour off them, with Christ’s encouragement…” (207–8). Turning to the body, restoring it to Christ, and re-inscribing it into the religious text all arise from Stucley’s desperate vagaries of mind and can be construed in two ways. Primarily it can be interpreted as an act or a gesture of defiance of a transcendental, purely spiritual and imperious God untouched by the nonsense of the sensuous, since such a god “can lend no comfort who has not been all the places that we have” (222). Second, he considers the body, or corporeality, as a common ground to approach and to identify with Him and be His equal or counterpart. Indeed, given his idealism and desire for the sovereignty of the self, he requires a God concocted as his alter ego, with a profound grasp of pain and convulsing with an incomprehensible ordeal. As the play proceeds to its climactic point, he, akin to his intimation of God, assumes a more sinisterly detached stance from the world that besieges him. Thus, Stucley administers an incisive deflection in the direction of logic and morality of phallogocentric discourse. As mentioned earlier, the phallogocentric discourses tend to reduce morality and humanity to a set of abstract, general, and transcendent tenets in which corporeality, desire and the immediate demand of a non-cognitive, pre-ontological encounter with the other (individual) have been effaced. Detecting “a thousand year conspiracy,” Stucley diagnostically objects: “Christ’s cock […] Is nowhere mentioned! […] Nor the cocks of his disciples,” adding: “The gospels are scrupulous in their avoidance of anatomical and physiological description. We have, for example, no image of Christ’s face, let alone his—[phallus]” (221). Consequently, in a move to fill this gap, he attempts to re-establish an embodied, and, even more subversively, a “sexuated,” Christ. This is

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undertaken because an orthodoxally conceived Christ—as a carnally sublimated deity, refined and rarefied to the point of neutrality and abstraction—does not correspond to Stucley’s experience of faith (God), desire (erotic love), and the world. What he intends to impart to the deity and make him savour is the experience of contradiction, utter immanence, meaningless pain, and agonized desire in order to disturb his transcendental (re)pose. Yet, a disembodied and sexless, or probably desexualized, god is incapable of undergoing such states. While talking to Nailer, he professes his “longing to know God” (222) and then mentions the reason he has embarked on re-writing the Bible and re-configuring Christ: “to have some sense of Him, to put my finger into Christ and feel His heat, and what pained me, what agonized me I assure you, was not the absence of a face but His castration, this Christ who never suffered for the woman, who never felt the feeling which makes no sense” (Ibid.). Apart from Stucley’s experience of thwarted sexual love, contradiction, and Ann’s promiscuity, his intense craving to see, touch, and embody Christ is not just idiosyncratic, but in keeping with a long-standing Christian tradition discerned and philosophically elaborated by JeanLuc Nancy. Nancy detects an anxiety permeating Christian thought concerning (sensible and tangible) presence and truth and, by implication, pervading the way in which Western culture conceives (or imagines) corporeality. This abiding concern is indelibly intermeshed with the act of touch, evoking immediate presence of the present. Nancy describes Christianity as being obsessed with the act of making present: “Hoc est enim [corpus meum] challenges, allays all our doubts about appearances, conferring, on the real, the true final touch of its pure Idea: its reality, its existence.” (Corpus 5). He then adds the aporetics involved in this doctrine/ritual/dictum: “But we certainly feel some formidable anxiety. […] The body proper, the foreign body: hoc est enim displays the body proper, makes it present to the touch, serves it up as a meal. The body proper, or Property itself, Being-to-itself embodied. But instantly, always, the body on display is foreign, a monster that can’t be swallowed” (Ibid.). The impetus that propels the Christian to render present, to touch the body of Christ, is the desire to reach reassurance, a measure of solidity upon the sensible world. However, as Nancy contends, such reassurance is invariably fraught and riddled by a certain anguish, a fear that the world of appearance is a world of unsubstantial shadows and reflections (Ian James 133–4). To Nancy, this solicitous preoccupation with presence testifies to an obsession with (im)mortality and certitude about faith: “The

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anxiety, the desire to see, touch, and eat the body of God, to be that body and be nothing but that, forms the principle of Western (un)reason. That’s why the body, bodily, never happens, least of all when it’s named and convoked. For us the body is always sacrificed: eucharist” (Nancy, Corpus 5). Nonetheless, the requisite for the omnipresence of the Deity (Christ) is his lack of physical presence, or his absence. The resurrected body of Jesus must depart (be absent, be beyond touch) in order for presence to be guaranteed; yet, paradoxically, this absence continually throws the possibility of true presence into question. Touch constitutes a crucial element of religious practice, associated with notions of taboo and sacredness. While the act of touch constitutes central moments of the gospels (Christ’s healing, absolving, and raising from the dead), this kind of healing or remedial touch is saliently absent from John’s gospel. There are two prominent moments in this gospel which explicitly involve touch (or the refusal of touch). The first is Thomas’ hand in the wound of Christ’s resurrected body (John 20.29). Here, the probing touch is the unwavering verifier of presence, a moment of haptic certitude. The second is the moment of noli me tangere, Christ’s request to Mary Magdalene to not touch him in the garden subsequent to the resurrection (John 20.17). In this instance, however, touch is denied to Mary Magdalene. Christ is leaving and must be permitted to do so (see Nancy, Noli Me Tangere 47). As Nancy meticulously investigates various implications of this clause/ instruction in Latin, Greek, and different translations—scrutinizing the semantic ambiguity informing the sentence: “Do not touch me” and “Do not wish to touch me,” “stop holding onto me,” and “cease clinging to me”—he provocatively argues that the moment of noli me tangere “is precisely the point where touching does not touch where it must not touch in order to carry out its touch (its art, its tact, its grace): the point or the space without dimension that separates what touching gathers together, the line that separates what touching gathers together, the line that separates the touching from the touched and thus the touch from itself” (NMT 13). For Nancy, this demonstrates the reliance of the spiritual upon the material, adumbrating the subversion of the notion of a metaphysical realm. For in Christianity, even though the body appears to be denigrated, it is, in fact, its essential element: “Only a body can be cut down or raised up, because only a body can touch or not touch. A spirit can do nothing of the sort” (48). Without the body of Christ, there would be no possibility of resurrection.

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Interestingly, this motif of touch—and the obsession with touching Christ’s body—is not limited to The Castle (and Stucley), but features as one of the recurrent concerns of many other plays by Barker. Golgo in particular evinces a comparable obsession with the problematic of touch (in its manifold nature). At a point in the play, Christ, while at the stake, pleadingly says: CHRIST: Never mind him. (Pause) Do you want to be cured? I have strength for one more miracle. (Pause) LUNATIC: […] I don’t know, you see—(He laughs.) I don’t know if I’m not vastly happier like this. CHRIST: Touch me. LUNATIC: No, I don’t think I— CHRIST: My foot. justLUNATIC (childishly): No! Absolutely not!

When Jane, having just delivered an inspiring speech on love, says to Goodgirl, who feels moved by her speech and tries to approach her: “No, don’t touch me I am excellent. That gesture is full of kindness but the kindness of a superior disdain, I am excellent, thank you, and not at all in need of” (73), we are reminded of all the prohibitions against touching— indicative of their being in a liminal and self-transcending, hence raw and highly vulnerable, condition—expressed by various characters (Katrin in The Europeans and Gertrude in Gertrude-The Cry, among others) when they are, analogously, caught in sublime moments of inter-corporeal proximity and ecstatic vision (into the self or the world). Later she exclaims: “(she closes her eyes.) Don’t touch me again, will you, since every touch was. (Pause) I don’t think we used the word love, did we? As a verb? And won’t now, obviously. (STONEHEART covers his face with his hands. He struggles to master himself.)” (75) One of the most obsessive references to touch, in Golgo, is made by Magdalene who allegedly washed Christ’s feet and thus touched him: Not all were vile, you see. But some came seeking, I don’t know what. Some came to murder, but some came differently. Some touched me tenderly, and wordless, and others were verbose, while others, seeming to study me, were overcome with anger. What this was, I never understood. Nor could he ever tell me what it was they sought. I wish to be touched. I have to be touched. To be touched. I have to be touched. (59; emphasis added)

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Earlier, Goodgirl, overwhelmed with inspiration, tries to capture a new insight into the character/mind of Magdalene whose role she had been playing. She tries to present a re-envisioned picture of her: “There is a further aspect to the Magdalene. I tried to demonstrate her craving for a continuing relation with the body but—” (68). Touch, both in Golgo and The Castle, is closely associated with (an intense need for) consensuality, spiritual-carnal intimacy and mystery, threshold of transcendence, tensions between absence-presence and visible-­invisible dimensions of the world and human existence, the engendering of an inter-affective space of proximity, and self-transcendence.6 Indeed, both here and elsewhere in the corpus of Barker’s work, touch involves a (personal and inter-personal) condition, and displays aesthetic structures and subtle features that, borrowing a passage by Margrit Shildrick, can be described thus: “always an embodied gesture that may sustain a reciprocal sense of solicitude and intimacy that grounded in the mutual instabilities of our corporeal existence. To touch and be touched speaks to our exposure to, and immersion in, the world of others, and to the capacity to be moved beyond reason, in the space of shared vulnerabilities.”7 Fully exploiting the foregoing complexity and potentiality (of corporeality and touch), nevertheless, Stucley harbours other un-orthodox intentions too. By having Christ experience the irrational will of the flesh thus, he intends to subject him to the same existentio-ethical aporias he is beset with. What renders the preceding passages crucial is Stucley’s recognition of gendered embodiment as the essential condition, not just for apprehension and perception (as two fundamental aspects of the self as defined by Merleau-Ponty) of the world, the self, and the other, but as the very ontological condition, or ground, for being human and having human experience.8 On such a premise, he also articulates his ostensibly agnostic, yet sacramental, vision of the Christian God and Christ in conjunction with the essential role of the body in such a theology. The relation between such a God and the human involves what Merleau-Ponty (as well as Richard Kearney) calls a movement/relationship of immanent transcendence or transversality (Anatheism 85–118). The following passage brilliantly expresses not only many of the preoccupations of the characters (particularly Stucley) in The Castle, but, more generally, Barker’s rendition of God in his plays (such as Rome and Ursula) too. This passage indeed affords us amply illuminating means of interpreting motives and reasons underlying the humanity/humanization of the divine in various plays by Barker including Rome. It merits being quoted in full:

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It is a little too much to forget that Christianity is the recognition of the mystery in the relations of man and God, which stems precisely from the fact that the Christian God wants nothing to do with a vertical relation of subordination […] He is not simply a principle of which we are the consequence, a will whose instruments we are, or even a model of which human values are the only reflection. There is a sort of impotence of God without us, and Christ attests that God would not be fully God without becoming fully man. Claudel goes so far as to say that God is not above but beneath us, meaning that we do not find Him as a suprasensible idea, but as another ourself which dwells in and authenticates our darkness. Transcendence no longer hangs over man; he becomes, strangely, its privileged bearer. (Signs 70–1)

The other notable point is that, to Stucley, the principal components that embodiment or incarnation entails are desire, pain, and eroticism. Stucley discerns the radically transformative role of pain which renders the transcendental immanent, which is why he grants a gendered body to Christ so that he can experience pain and barrenness. Pain, as Alphonso Lingis cogently explains, “is immanence; it is conscious, nothing but consciousness, a consciousness backed up to itself, mired in itself. To suffer pain is for consciousness to be unable to flee or retreat from itself, unable to project itself outside upon some outlying object or event” (58). As such, the body in such states, inherently, entails an incongruent interlocking of the self with other than the self, the destabilization of autonomy, and (inter)corporeal exposure to exteriority or alterity. Further into the same scene, Nailer, in a staggering cut and thrust with Stucley, lays the premises of the new church: “Body, Blood and Semen” (221). The adoption and inclusion of the first two components are not that much of an excessive contravention, since body and blood have already been appropriated and assimilated to Christian theology both in the creed of Incarnation and in the liturgical practice of the Eucharist. Hence, Stucley is still acting and moving within the bounds of orthodox Christianity, yet displacing them, lending certain elements a subversive priority and thus pushing them to their breaking points. His more transgressive step resides in the incorporation of “semen”; a move which renders irrevocably immanent, sexual, and gendered what seemed to be patently transcendent and spiritual, and hence neutral. By adding the last element (“semen”) to this sacred dyad, he in effect sexuates it, thereby simultaneously disclosing and dismantling the whole rational and metaphysical scaffold of the phallogocentric paradigm. He perceptively realizes

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the sweeping effects that the infusion of the symbolic (not merely in a Lacanian or Kristevan sense) with the somatic-semiotic will occasion. Irigaray’s compelling question sheds ample light on the issue in question: “… one may wonder whether taking into account the sexualization of discourse does not open up the possibility of a different relation to the transcendental. Neither simply objective nor simply subjective, neither univocally centered nor decentered, neither unique nor plural, but as the place up to now always collapsed in the ek-stasis of what I would call the Copula?” (Speculum 55). In addition to being driven by a longing to open up an immanent relational space or threshold with God, Stucley’s other main reason for according libidinal corporeality to Christ is to make possible the experience of sexual frustration. Subsequently, Stucley goes on to include his chief intention: to inflict pain, “Now, we are closer to a man we understand, for at this moment of desire, Christ knows the common lot.” Then he hastens to add the last touch, “And she is sterile” (223). Nailer stunned exclaims: “Sterile?” in response to which Stucley adds: “Diseased beyond conception, yes. So that they find, in passion, also tragedy …” (Ibid.). The most deconstructive move undertaken by Stucley occurs when, strained to the limit of his mind and body, he discerns the female body, particularly her choratic body (her womb and/or her space of maternity/ pregnancy) as the punctum caecum of such a metaphysical and spiritual system. He touches the ontological and ideological nerve of this paradigm by re-insertion of the choratic space of a more originary point, co-existent and co-extensive with, yet abolished from the transcendental dimension of the symbolic order of discourse. Thus, Stucley poses the female body as a site of defiance of the patriarchal Father: as a point of relief, release, and reformulation. What is notable in this regard is that, in The Castle, the female body (or womb in particular) is not associated with dementia and disorder, but is sought out as a resort from or counterforce to the ­harrowing contradictions and the ruthless rationality of the Father’s (“the Lunatic’s”) world. Stucley explains his belief to Nailer: “They say the Jews killed Christ, but that’s nonsense, the Almighty did” (223). And when Nailer wonders about the cause, he replies: “Because His son discovered comfort. ‘Oh, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Because in the body of the Magdalene He found the single space in which the madness of his father’s world might be subdued. Unforgivable transgression the Lunatic could not forgive” (Ibid.). Then in a fraction, moved by his own tragic vision, Stucley proceeds to adduce the salutary results: “You see how once Christ is restored to phallus, all contradictions are resolved” (Ibid.).

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Here, womb, akin to the Kristevan notion of choratic space, is deemed a space anterior to Logos. Drawing on Plato’s Timaeus, Kristeva describes the chora thus: “a receptacle, unnamable, improbable, hybrid, anterior to naming, to the One, to the father, and consequently, maternally connoted to such an extent that it merits ‘not even the rank of syllable’” (DL 133). Such a perception of the feminine space (and consequently the female organ), particularly in its secular use, has a long-standing presence in literature. Traumatic, recurrent, and symptomatic image/topos of vagina dentata attests to the male fantasy of the female genital organ’s being a haunting threat to male integrity/unity, manifesting what underlies it, namely, the womb. Such a flagrant tendency exhibited by patriarchal texts to suppress feminine corporeality and its correlates with an anxious predilection to demonize and disguise this primary locus of procreation itself is very relevant and revealing. Relatedly, Irigaray observes, the “womb is never thought of as the primal place in which we become body. Therefore for many men it is variously phantasized as a devouring mouth, as a sewer … as a threat to the phallus” (247).9 As can evidently be inferred from the foregoing passages, the source of the formidable potentiality and disruptive force which the feminine (including the womb) exerts, is clear. From an early stage in Barker’s The Castle, woman’s inner bodily space (particularly the womb), coupled with female desire, is recognized as a spatial excess, a transgressive presence and hence minatory to the stability, continuity, and unity of the patriarchal paradigm. Krak in a warning tone says: “European woman with her passion for old men, wants to drown their history in her bowel…!” (241). The further evidence emerges when, towards the end of the play, women are committing mass suicide, apparently gratuitously, thus squandering the natural-divine gift and grace of god as Nailer exclaims: “These bitches will put paid to the race …” (244); adding that pregnant women “bear our future in their innards and they kill it” (245). The use of the term “history” here, associates men with time (Historical time as the teleological narrative of progress and perfection insinuated and dominated by men) and evokes the classical trope which masculinizes time and feminizes space (see New Maladies 204; see also Jardine 24–5). Krak’s assertions, both here and back at the beginning of the play, reveal the pernicious possibility of the assimilation of the masculine linear progression in the female’s choratic vortex, or the eruption of the matrix of the female into the temporally ordered masculine arena in the male’s imaginary. It requires male time to settle and purge the spatial chaos that female sensi-

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bility has occasioned (note also the recurrence of the same theme in the opening scene). Kristeva’s identification of the female with “monumental (eternity) and cyclical (repetition) time and the male with a linear time (project, teleology, departure, progression and arrival)” (“Women’s Time” 187) sheds ample light on the aforesaid respective distinctions and links the issue with our foregoing discussion about anastrophic and catastrophic modalities of temporality (see also SO 111–2). Furthermore, such a linear conception of time stands in keen contrast to the moment of con-tactile aesthetics-ethics; the choratic moment of proximity is an in-between time; a mean-time; a non-linear, non-teleological entre-temps (see Levinas CPP 11; see also God, Death and Time 37, 64). We should not however neglect the fact that, in Stucley’s treatment of Magdalene’s womb, there exists an implicit hint of identification of woman with the unconscious, oblivion, amnesia, neutrality, a space of zero-­ tension, and, hence, proximity to death; yet it is a death in the folds of the female, sheltered from the atrocity of the Father (see Irigaray This Sex 64). Furthermore, his depiction of the feminine body, or more specifically her womb, is riddled with contradiction: it is both a transgressively autonomous, liminal-libidinal space, and a means to an end, wielded as a locus for subversion, functioning as a battle field and not an independent autonomous entity in its own right. The implied impetus behind Stucley’s re-­ writing of his own version of the Bible confirms the point at issue: “And by His gentleness, touches her heart, like any maiden rescued from the dragon gratitude stirs in her womb, she becomes to him the possibility of shared oblivion, she sheds all sin, and He experiences the—IRRATIONAL MANIFESTATIONS OF PITY WHICH IS—Tumescence …” (223). As such the female continues to be assimilated as the invisible condition of possibility, the ground on which the struggle ensues at her expense (see Irigaray, TS 32). In the same vein, diagnosing the inherence and persistence of the obliteration of the female/feminine and the consequences of its re-insertion or restoration, Irigaray claims that the patriarchal order of discourse is grounded in matricide. She impugns Freud’s assertion that the murder of the father was the socio-symbolic originary act that founded the primal community or horde. Aiming to subvert the archaeological cornerstone of the mytho-historical patriarchal paradigm, she seeks to deploy a symptomatic and genealogical critique unearthing a more original origin (244). Thus, the tendency exhibited by patriarchal texts to terrorize feminine corporeality is coalesced with an anxious yearning to demonize the ­primary

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locus of procreation itself arising from a phobic dread of “retreating into the original matrix” (“matrix,” in Latin means “womb”). Anne-Claire Mulder, in her elaboration of Irigaray’s critical theories, extends the latter’s critical feminist attitudes to the theological and religious domain. Embarking on a symptomatic reading and explication of these texts, she detects an egregious ontological and genealogical void or lacuna in orthodox Christian writings and construes them as illustrating the male myth of autogenesis, offering a thick description of a phantasmatic primal scene. She recognizes the Creed of Incarnation as epitomizing the abolition and obliteration of not only the originary, but the intermediary role of woman (the female/the maternal). Thus it can be considered as the apotheosis of solipsism, isomorphism and autonomy, privileged and pursued by the male. Christian theology wields the word “Incarnation” (with Christ as its embodiment) to convey the unity and unbreachable integrity of word and flesh, deity and human. In John 3:16, Christ is described as “the only-begotten Son” of the Father, which illustrates the utmost kinship of Father and Son, enabling the Son to embody the Father and reveal him to a humanity that has not seen him before. This intense affinity of Father and Son is underlined by the personified image of the Word “who is near the bosom of the Father” or “who is in the womb of the Father.” This passage can be read as designating that God the Father not only begot his Son but also carried him: that God is father and mother to the son. This means that the maternal-­feminine as creative power has become part of the paternal, or that this female creative power has been appropriated by the Father (Mulder 38–58). Consequently, we should be wary of inflating or over-interpreting the steps taken by Stucley in this regard. Though he substitutes a carnal and more immanent god for a spiritual one, he has not acceded to a (feminine) logic of proximity and an ethics of heteronomy and infinity, and he remains a domineering male, staunch to sovereign authoritarianism. What diminishes the magnitude and significance of his enterprise of de/re-­constructing religion and metaphysics is the fact that his undertaking is prompted by a reactive counter-movement, carried out in a spirit of ressentiment with a sadistic and imperious deity (culminating in delirium and dementia) and hence remaining bound to and driven by the logic of totality and ontology (though a less transcendental one). Indeed, his embarking on the inversion of the metaphysical foundations of religion and the logic of relation is primarily propelled by a still metaphysical intention of establishing identity between meaning and being and an inexorable, yet blind, urge to eradicate

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or resolve contradictions of a divinely ordered and ordained universe. Therefore, his transgressive act is almost almost devoid of the element of “self-overcoming” that Barker identifies as a vital characteristic of his catastrophic characters (AFT 57).

Notes 1. For an extended characterization of the spirit of ressentiment see On the Genealogy of Morals 34, 39. Also see Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, x, 116. 2. See Schopenhauer, “Additional Remarks on the Doctrine of the Suffering of the World,” trans. E.F.J. Payne, 291–7. 3. See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, §22 and 23. 4. See Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy 10–11. 5. For Levinas’ views on pain/suffering see Levinas, E. (1998a). “Useless Suffering.” In E. Levinas (Ed.; M.B. Smith and B. Harshav, trans.). Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other (pp. 91–102). New York: Columbia University Press; for Nietzsche’s view on pain/suffering see Beyond Good and Evil (225), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (22–6, 46, passim) and The Genealogy of Morality (37–44). 6. For an extended exploration of the role of touch and skin in Howard Barker’s drama see Alireza Fakhrkonandeh, “Noli Me Tangere” 2017. 7. Margrit Shildrick, “Some Speculations on Matters of Touch,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 26, no. 4 (2001): 402. 8. See Merleau-Ponty, VI 235; and VI 137–8. 9. Regarding the role and nature of spatiality and temporality in relation to Kristeva’s conception of chora (in contrast to Plato) see (RPL 25–6); also see West-Pavlov 45.

CHAPTER 5

Disciplinary Apparatus and the Paining of Transgressive Bodies

Abstract  This chapter presents a sustained account of the manifold ways whereby the body, in Barker, is depicted to be invariably intermeshed in the mechanisms of knowledge and (ethical-political) power, along with the competing economies of desire and subjectivation. The body is also discerned as the place of convergence, contestation, and interplay of diverse discursive and non-discursive forces. Body thus features as a conflicted site of self-knowledge, of the inscription/interiorization of the Law, and the expression/experience of transgressive desire, heteronomous ethics, and pain (as a means of either de- or re-subjectivation). This chapter unravels the densely woven and manifold image of the body in The Castle and other plays by delineating how various modes of power (sovereign, pastoral, and disciplinary)—with a particular focus on the anatomo-­politics and bio-politics—take the embodied consciousness and body of the individual as their target. We will see how a salient instance of such twofold disciplinary practices—confession—reveals the concomitance of the hermeneutics of the subject and discursively produced modes of truth, value, and knowledge. One of the crucial outcomes of this discursive mechanism is the production of “soul as the prison of the body.” Finally, it will be discussed how Skinner’s quasi-pregnancy, manifested in her being festooned to the corpse, leads not only to a drastic re-configuration of her ontological, aesthetic-ethic and political gravities but also the re-­schematization of her affective-cognitive orientation away from other-­related homoerotic and obsessive-possessive love not. Therefore, © The Author(s) 2019 A. Fakhrkonandeh, Body and Event in Howard Barker’s Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28699-6_5

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becoming-other and autonomy for Skinner are double-edged—at once liberating and restrictive. Keywords  Anatomo-politics and bio-politics of the body • Sovereign power • Disciplinary power • Hermeneutics of the subject of desire • Confession

1   Skinner and the Vicissitudes of the Disciplinary-­ Transgressive Body In The Castle, we clearly observe the multivalent roles that the body fulfils. The body features as a site for self-overcoming, self-cultivation, and the re-configuration of selfhood, meaning, and sensibility (by Krak and Skinner), and a means/medium in and by which transgression is implemented both metaphysically (by Stucley) and socio-politically (by Skinner and Stucley). Above all, the body transpires as a locus of inter-corporeal proximity (between Ann and Krak), becoming-other, and self-­ transcendence (Ann and Krak). Women establish their egalitarian community by breaking bailiff, God, and “cock” and liberating their bodies; and men re-instate their entirely re-formed and re-formulated patriarchy on “body, blood and semen.” After the re-establishment of order, Stucley encumbers the priest to restore the body (or “the agonized virility”) to the hitherto-incorporeal Christ. Even more significantly, in a moment of agony and inspiration, Stucley avows that Christ was released from the ordeals that God/Father inflicted upon him only when he discovered Magdalene’s womb or body—both as a haven from the distresses foisted by God (the divine) as well as a locus of transgression. Finally, the issued verdict of the court, investigating the charge of the murder of builder by Skinner, is directly administered to the body of the convict (Skinner) and the corpse of the victim is enchained to her. Concerning the cases that are more evidently entangled with discursive issues, Foucault’s discussion of the dialectical relation between body and discourse is critical to my discussion. Notably, and consonant with Foucault’s reflections on disciplinary power, Barker has observed that “States are mechanisms of discipline, and perpetually are involved in re-­ writing and re-ordering experience, annexing it and abolishing it in the interests of proclaimed moral certitudes” (AFT 203). In fact, Barker himself refers to Foucault once in his Arguments for a Theatre: “We required

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Michel Foucault to elaborate what most Europeans have always suspected about dark places and speaking, that confession comes easiest in the dark, and that it is vastly more sexually stimulating to tell than to keep silent” (162)—thus, implicitly referring to Will to Knowledge in which Foucault elaborates various “modes of subjectivation” deployed by diverse discourses across history, ranging from ancient Greece, through Christianity, to modern disciplinary paradigms. One of the concomitant aspects, and principal modes, of such a discourse is the hermeneutics of the subject, which is also inherent in the process of confession as a means of embedding an internal means of restraint, disciplinary control, and normative identity in the individual.1 In his sweeping survey of various techniques and discourses of subjectivation, ranging from the Lateran Council of 1215 (where the formalization of the Catholic sacrament of penance was officially announced and established) up to the twentieth-century practice of psychoanalysis, Foucault discerns confession as a “millennial yoke” which has caused the individual’s subjection “in both senses of the word.” Confession is implemented by “a power that constrains us” (HS 60); it proceeds by a “many-­ sided extortion” (HS 64), and in contrast to the “repressive hypothesis,” it has led to “too much rather than not enough discourse” (ibid.). In Foucault’s critical-genealogical account, confession is intimately linked with a certain “hermeneutics of the self” and is thus a highly effective technique of individuation which entails the continuous (even interminable) subjection of the individual to interpretation, underpinned by an urge to self-introspection and self-discovery—hence implying an essentialist conception of the self. Such a hermeneutics of the self, as a procedure of subjectivation is indeed what Foucault calls the “internal ruse of confession” (ibid.). It fixes the individual to forms of identity which arise from the complex formations of power/knowledge prevailing, variously, in the pastoral power of Christianity and in modern societies (see “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two lectures at Dartmouth,” Political Theory 21, no. 2, 1993, 198–227). Foucault recognizes confession (as an extraction of self-avowal driven by a will to know the intimate truth of the individual’s desire) as one of the pivotal components of the apparatus/discourse of modern Western scientia sexualis (contrasted with the Eastern ars erotica). The technique of confession, in Foucault’s “broad historical perspective” (HS 67), has, since the beginning of the thirteenth century, become “one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth” (HS 58). Scrutinizing the

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status of sexuality in the modern era—with its injunction to “tell everything” leading to the “discursive explosion” (HS 17). Foucault acutely detects and accentuates the indelible link between speech (more strictly, true speech) and sexuality and traces the “great subjugation” of sex to discourse (HS 21), a subjugation which has paved the way for the parallel subjugation of sex to power: “everything having to do with sex [must pass] through the endless mill of speech” (HS 21). Accordingly, Barker proposes the confession box of the Roman Catholic Church as “an apposite paradigm for an alternative theatre practice,” because it enacts and embodies “[t]he oscillating character of self-­ revelation, the urge to confess—powerful as the urge to transgress, but complicated by the vertigo of confession itself into exaggeration and unmitigated lying” (162). Significantly, the confession box in Barker, subverting the customary function and conception of the confession box (in the tradition/discourse of hermeneutic truth) as a purgatory-cathartic place for the revelation of truth, self-knowledge, and moral earnestness, exposes the libidinal-historical unconscious of the individual, thereby providing a dark and evocative space that leads to the transgression of boundaries between truth and falsehood and also to an excess of desire and non-knowledge. This disciplinary and surveillance technique—premised on the ideological assumption of an inner core to the self containing an essential truth, that is, sexuality and its intrinsic sinfulness (the evilness of human nature)—is a recurrent motif in Barker, conspicuously in The Gaoler’s Ache for The Nearly Dead (1998). Such a hermeneutics of desire and the desiring self, operative in the confessional technique, is evident early in The Castle, in which Stucley is trying to elicit from Hush some self-professed confession to debauchery and sin perpetrated in Stucley’s absence, when the whole process leads to grotesque heights of excess and exaggeration: ANN: Don’t make him bend. STUCLEY: Why not, old bugger! ANN: We’re done with bending here. STUCLEY (forcing him to the ground): Done with it? It’s nature! HUSH: Forgive me, forgive me! STUCLEY: Forgive, what for? HUSH: Whatever offends you. STUCLEY: Good! Oh, good! The first wise words since I set foot in my domain! He is not grey for nothing, he has scuttled through his eighty years

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with sorry on his lips, spewed sorry out for each and every occasion, good! I appreciate you, cunning ticker of brute crevices, insinuator of beds and confidences. Kiss my hands and tell me what you did against me. The more extravagant, the more credence I attach to it, promise you. HUSH: I did not praise you in your absence. STUCLEY: Oh, that’s nothing, you mean you abused me, surely? HUSH: Abused you, yes. STUCLEY: Excellent, go on. ANN: This is disgusting. STUCLEY: Disgusting? No, he longs for his confession! HUSH: I did not tend your meadows or your stock— STUCLEY: You mean you stole them off me? HUSH: Stole them, yes. I did not pray for your safe return— STUCLEY: Oh, shit this for a confession, this is the Valley of Wickedness, say you prayed for my slow-dying torture— HUSH: Yes! STUCLEY: Daily prayed the devil I would rot— HUSH: Yes! STUCLEY: Turned my house into a brothel, my bedroom, whooped in it— HUSH: Yes— STUCLEY: Go on, I am confessing for you, you do it! HUSH: Adultery and fornication— STUCLEY: On who? On her? HUSH: On everyone! ANN: I won’t witness this— STUCLEY (grabbing her wrist): Must witness it! (To HUSH.) Stuck children on her, did you? HUSH: Yes? STUCLEY: No, in your words! HUSH: I lay on her and others naked and did put my seed in them and— STUCLEY: Oh, rubbish, it’s beyond belief. I hate bad lies, lies that fall apart, there’s no entertainment in them. Get on your cracking pins, you tottering old bugger … (ANN helps HUSH to his feet.) HUSH: Thank you. (208–10)

The key term in this repartee is “nature” which is invoked to be deconstructed. Since, as the whole conversation demonstrates, rather than being a natural-essential characteristic, the subject effect and the discursive position of the subject in the ideological hierarchy in the play (and the consequent social habitus) is a historically produced construct, which ­ stems from the acts of interpellation and stylized repetition of acts

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(including the discourse of confession based on the hermeneutics of truth). As is evident, at variance with Foucault, what attracts Barker’s attention to the confession box is its being potentially an emblematically inter-personal, historically overdetermined and highly dramatically erotically charged space. To Barker, the confession box is traversed by, and intimately associated with, the modes and means of subjectivation, secrecy, eroticism, and inter-­subjective intimacy, an excess of language and imagination, and a place of mutual seduction in which the category of truth is only ostensibly invoked and deconstructed. Inextricably entangled with this dyad of knowledge-power—at stake in the hermeneutic subject of desire and genealogy of disciplinary practices—is the role of the body. Body occupies a prominent place in Foucault’s later work. In his genealogical approach, he demonstrates the subtle yet substantial ways in which body, knowledge, and power are intertwined in the practices of bio-power, sovereign power and pastoral power: “the task of genealogy has been to show that the body is also directly involved in a political field … Power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks” (Discipline and Punish 25). In fact, he undertakes to delineate the ways in which bodies are constructed, schematized, semanticized, and differentiated under diverse categories such as gender, class, race, and status, as vectors of power: “the body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas); the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantive unity) and a volume in perpetual disintegration” (Foucault “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” 82–3). He scrupulously pursues the ways in/through which the body is subjected to the “anatomo-­metaphysical” and “technopolitical” registers,2 and subsequently invested in the relations of power, endowed with a discursive position and rendered the object of knowledge and the target of the exertion of power, as a consequence of which the “docile body” is produced. Foucault, in an analogous categorization, articulates two major registers in the discursive production of the docile citizen since the nineteenth century. It is within this double framework that I would like to locate the power relations and disciplinary techniques wielded throughout The Castle, particularly by Stucley: (1) bio-politics (his attempt to “increase the yield of the demesne,” and the exploitation of the labour power of people by manipulatively invoking religious beliefs in collusion with Nailer in order to precipitate the building of the castle by coercing people

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to work); and (2) anatomo-­politics: torturing Skinner, chaining the corpse of Holiday to Skinner’s body as the penal-juridical verdict, and the erection of the castle. To Barker, the body is invariably intermeshed in the invidious mechanisms of knowledge (enlightenment) and (systematic) power (such as capitalism). In his works, he exposes to scrutiny the volatile and varying ways, in which the body is appropriated, commodified, objectified, manipulated, and utilized as the immediate point of application of the relations of power. The body is also discerned as the place of convergence, contestation, conflict, and interplay of diverse discursive and non-discursive forces: “The body as the conventional ground for controlled desire is one of the undeclared cornerstones of the state” (145). However, the body is not solely depicted as passively and receptively susceptible to external processes and forces; Barker is keenly attentive to the regenerative, transformative, and transgressive capacities of the body and calls it, not only “the source of politics” but also “the source of hope” (qtd. in Ian Rabey 174). Furthermore, if we subject Barker’s trajectory to scrutiny we observe that the body, incrementally, accrues more significance and new dimensions and potentialities in his works, substantiating the individual’s body as his essential field of being and displaying it as an ever-expanding, multi-­ dimensional, and often recondite resource for action, perception, and speculation. Such an attitude towards the bodily (as corporeality, affectivity, and sensibility) aesthetic and ethics (in terms of self-transcendence through heteronomous desire and erotic love) pervade Barker’s plays, including The Possibilities, The Europeans, The Love of a Good Man, Victory, Women Beware Women, The Ecstatic Bible, Blok/Eko, and The Bite of the Night, among many others. To provide two concise examples for the illustration of the aesthetic-ethical aspects of the manifold of the affectivity-body, I will briefly dwell on two scenes from Judith and The Brilliance of the Servant respectively. In Judith, the eponymous widow is accompanied by a servant whose principal function is that of ideologist and exhorter, as she sets out to the tent of the commander of adversary troops, Holofernes, with the intention of murdering him through seduction, so as to preclude the havoc which is to be wreaked on her nation (Israel) in the imminent war of the following day. The highly ambivalent and volatile interlocution which emerges between Judith and Holofernes swerves into new directions and begins to involve a spiralling hazarding of identity, in which they are

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c­ ompelled to undertake precarious subject positions, culminating in genuine self-exposure and authentic amorous exchanges by both of them. In consequence, there occurs an counter-actualizing moment of proximal relationality with the other for each of them, in which all their respective national, historical, and ideological allegiances and attachments are sundered or rendered redundant. Judith’s remark evidences the excessive affective “giving” (as coup de don), self-overcoming, and self-expenditure involved in their relation: “Dear one, you want to sleep because this also has been a battle. […] A terrible battle for him. To love. To give.”3 One of the focal points of the play, which foregrounds the ethical aspect of their relation, emerges when she denigrates her own act, though apparently heroically carried out for patriotic causes and “in the name of the people,”4 as “a crime,” giving the reason that: “It was a crime … I spoke desire to him. She heard. Did I not utter such desire that—… You see, I did desire him.”5 The ensuing excerpt attests to her intense psycho-somatic investment in him and the extent of the inter-corporeal intertwinement between them; it also accentuates how the aesth/ethic dynamic of this con/tactile relation has been effectively nourishing to her and fostered her carnal trans-­figuration: “I thrived on him. I was in such a heat. … Even his breath I longed to breathe. And take him in me, head and shoulders also, if I could” (Ibid. 117). The climax of the play, however, when Judith has sunk into the depths of delirium and mental-emotional disarray, depicts a moment of intense tension and ambiguity between the national and the ethical, between the ideological/collective and the personal/inter-personal, between the monumentalizing and the de-individualizing forces and the individuating and singularizing force (arising from the evental proximity with the other). Smitten with a simultaneous division and doubling of the body, where her body at once “is so Israel” and “has no Israel,” Judith exclaims: Dawn! Yes! This is the hour sin slips out the sheets to creep down pissy alleys! Morning, cats! Did you slither, also? Morning, sparrows! Rough night? Hot beds cooling. The running of water. Well, it has to end at some time, love! But its smell, in the after hours … Magnificence! (She laughs, with a shudder. A cracked bell is beaten monotonously.) Israel! Israel! My body is so Israel! My body has no

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Israel! Israel! My body was but is no longer Israel Is My Body! (CP 3, 266–7)

What is palpable in this passage is the intense syntactic ambivalence and semantic equivocity manifested in a double zeugma in the passage in which the subject is doubly yoked to two predicates simultaneously. On the one hand, regarding the former overdetermined clauses, the ensuing, contradictory implications can be inferred: (1) My body is so Israel and (2) My body has no Israel. On the other, regarding the latter overdetermined clauses, the following four contradictory layers of meaning coexist simultaneously: (1) My body is Israel, (2) My body was, but no longer is, Israel, (3) Israel is my body, and (4) No longer is Israel my body. The disarrayed state of Judith’s language reveals the extent to which she is psycho-somatically, registered acutely on the level of the body, implicated simultaneously in the affective demands of two conflictual layers of her being: the socio-political discourse of nationhood (ideology and history of the collective body of her nation sedimented in her) and “the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation, which no ‘interiority’ permits avoiding” (TI 201). More lucidly, it is the benign trauma of the experience of spiritual-carnal proximity and heteronomous desire, with Starhemberg left in her flesh and intensified by her now being pregnant with his child. Such syntactic and semantic torsions attest to Judith’s being caught between ontology and alterity, between contraction/dis-­possession (of the ego and the sovereign identity) and expansion/re-possession (OB 118) as an opening-out to relating and speaking, as “hostage,” to the other (OB 117). As far as the language is concerned here, this duality involves neither two distinct positions nor two times; it looks rather like a circulation without beginning or end. This severe tension, as becomes apparent in the sequel piece in The Possibilities, results in her loss of speech and retreat to a country house; and later in the violent severance of the hand of the envoy of the Israelite state. Now, in light of the points regarding the facets of the body in Barker, delineated above, let us more specifically focus on the court scene and the way the verdict is enacted on the body of Skinner.

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2   Skinner and the Court Scene The court scene is another point in which the prescriptive and coercively homogenizing morality of the phallogocentric discourse surfaces. Here Barker, by foregrounding the rhetorical strategies which the prosecutor and the members of jury employ, reveals how male dominant discourse’s appeal to universal morality, neutrality, and generality are underpinned by phallocentric norms and patriarchal values and codes of conduct. Nailer, appealing to a solicitous concern for the well-being of the whole society, makes urgent demands for sentencing Skinner with capital punishment, while, feigning that he is solely seeking to preserve the values of the humanistic and divine (transcendental) sacrosanct of trust and love. Nailer declares Skinner’s act of murder not to be a crime against a single man or an individual, but extends and generalizes it as a crime “against that universal trust, that universally upheld convention lying at the heart of all sexual relations … And thereby threatening not only the security of that intimate love which God endowed man with…” (31). The themes of identifying the female body and the land, and, meanwhile, implying the feminine quality of the castle, manifest themselves when Skinner, in a cracked tone, utters the phrase “Down There.” This phrase is irresolvably ambivalent, designating both (the dungeon of) the castle and the female sexual organ. Traditionally, the dungeon is the locus in which the bastion of the castle perforates the land, or, more accurately, the land penetrates the castle; it is also the place where the probable corporeal penetration has taken place. Her hysteric and spasmodic behaviour, coupled with her disjunctive speech, expose her severely split subjectivity and bear witness to the extent to which the torture inflicted on her has induced deleterious impacts on her: loss of intimacy (as a psycho-somatic inter-personal space), duality, and conflation of the boundaries of self and the other, private and public, the feeling of being mercilessly exposed and intensely separated: “THEY HAVE DONE AWFUL THINGS TO ME DOWN THERE—do my best to be—to be contained—that way you have, you” (234). Skinner continues to exclaim: “I am aching from my breasts to the bottom of my bowel, but that is just desire, poof! And deprivation, poof! Love and longing, poof to all of it! Am I to be hanged or drowned? If you haven’t had love ripped out your belly, dragging half your organs with it, don’t talk to me, you haven’t lived!” (237). Here most of the linguistic, mental, and psycho-somatic symptoms Skinner reveals in consequence of being tortured correspond to the symptoms identified by Elaine Scarry.

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Scarry enumerates eight objectified effects or elements of pain (physical and psychological) almost all of which either directly or obliquely bear on Skinner’s state. The first aspect of the felt experience of pain is its “sheer aversiveness.” As Scarry explains: “[w]hile other sensations have content that may be positive, neutral, or negative, the very content of pain is itself negation” (52; see 40–5). The second and third aspects of pain are intimately linked and consist in the “dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside” in conjunction with the “double experience of agency.” Scarry observes: “[w]hile pain is in part a profound sensory rendering of ‘against,’ it is also a rendering of the ‘something’ that is against, a something at once internal and external” (52). The fourth aspect of pain involves “an almost obscene conflation of private and public.” Pain “brings with it all the solitude of absolute privacy with none of its safety, all the self-exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibility for camaraderie or shared experience.” A fifth element of physical pain is its ability to either make language fixated, automatic, and obsessive or to debilitate and destroy the power of verbal objectification, which is “a major source of our self-extension” and a vehicle through which the pain could be symbolized, sublimated or dissipated. A sixth dimension of physical pain is its “obliteration of the contents of consciousness.” The seventh is a corollary of the first six, taking the form of its “totality”: more clearly, pain “begins by being ‘not oneself’ and ends by having eliminated all that is ‘not itself’” (54). The eighth element is “its resistance to objectification.” Though indisputably real to the sufferer, it is, unless accompanied by visible bodily damage or a disease label, unreal to others. This profound ontological split is a doubling of pain’s annihilating power: the lack of acknowledgement and recognition (which if present could act as a form of self-extension) becomes a second form of negation and rejection, the social equivalent of the physical aversiveness. Scarry significantly underscores the aggravating impact of torture in this regard. This alienating doubling and dichotomy is in turn itself redoubled, multiplied, and magnified in torture because, instead of the person’s pain being subjectively real but unobjectified and invisible to all others, it is now hugely objectified, everywhere visible, as incontestably present in the external as in the internal world, and yet it is simultaneously categorically denied. Skinner’s stark description of the ordeals she has undergone couched in physical/material imagery (of self-inversion and mutilation) reveals the affective evacuation and emotional drainage she has suffered in relation to Ann and the consequent libidinal trauma. As a result of torture and the

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disinvestment and dis-identification she has undergone through an abnegation of love (ego ideal), a thanatotic impulse is released in her: “I gave up, and longed to die, and yet I did not die” (236). In the meantime, Stucley is grappling with incremental inner fears. As is apparent, the incipient sprouts of carnal and sexual obsession, which were dimly discernible at the outset of the play, are now bursting into bloom, disclosing Stucley’s agonized mentality and revealing gaping traumatic scars in his psyche. This experience (sustaining a traumatic loss, disillusioned idealism, and, in consequence, the collapse of the established structures of value and meaning) immediately links him with Skinner. Furthermore, Stucley, entirely akin to Skinner, begins blurting out inadvertent remarks, wrung from a deeply repressed psychic layer, betraying his being possessed by forebodings of apocalypse, thus revealing his fascist and paranoid psychology through typical symptoms such as visions of apocalypse (and he as the bearer of the consequences), an ambivalent relation (identification/disidentification) with God (as the transcendent Phallogocentric signifier), the delusion of grandeur and the delusion of persecution (see Paranoid Modernism 3–23). Stucley, true to his schizo-paranoid state, finds the bad object within: “We are up against it. We are, we really are, up against it. […] Having hewn away two hills to make us safe, having knifed the landscape to preserve us we find—horror of horrors—the worst within” (235). Skinner, after her bouts of delirium, and in the heat of the trial, repudiates the righteousness of the court and proclaims her case to be beyond its competence, owing to its pretension to impersonality, neutral objectivity, and abstract universality. She posits “empathy” as the condition of possibility of justice by averring that solely those who have been subjected to tortures, who have suffered spiritual-emotional ordeals, and who have a personal grasp of pain like her have the prerogative to judge her case. However, she is apprised of Stucley’s strenuous struggle with a deity who has crushed him in “his grasp of pain and pressure” (206). In consequence, he takes up the gauntlet she has thrown down and sentences her to be chained to the putrefying cadaver of the master builder. STUCLEY. Tie to her the body of her victim. [pause] SKINNER. Tie her to— STUCLEY. And turn her loose. (237)

Ordering the attachment/enactment of the decree on the body of the guilty is indubitably a testimony to Stucley’s haunting concern with (his

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own, his deity’s, and his wife’s) carnality/body and sexuality. Furthermore, such a mode of legal enforcement and punishment well corresponds to the dominant mode of ruling power reigning in the play, which is apparently the sovereign power of Feudalism, and, in turn, finds its theoretical correlate in one of the three historically specific modes which Foucault specifies in his genealogical study: the spectacular punishment of the Body. Foucault distinguishes between three principal stages (or orders) based on the way the individual’s body is treated as the locus for the enactment of legal/juridical imperatives and subjected to penal punishment during different historical periods: the spectacular, the humane, and the normalizing (Discipline and Punish 151); accordingly, all three are bound up with sovereign power and disciplinary power, and each one is respectively correlated with aristocratic Feudalism, bourgeois Mercantilism, and Industrialism (modernity) (DP 34). As Foucault explains, in the first order of discourse (the spectacular)—which textually and historically bears strong affinities with Stucley’s penal-disciplinary system—any infraction of the law constituted a violation of the sovereign’s will and punitive redress was inflicted on the body of the offender, and every “punishment of a certain seriousness had to involve an element of torture” (DP 33). The infringement of the body/law of sovereign power was inflicted on the body of the offender to be salutary for the public and to display the overwhelming monarchical power which seized the body as its immediate object or target. In such a socio-symbolic order, there was an irrevocable relation between torture, truth, and confession, and bodily features both materially/literally and socio-symbolically as its place of co-articulation. In the sovereign state, the purpose of execution or torture in public places (such as branding, pillorying, and whipping) was primarily to instil fear, establish the unbreachable sovereignty of power, and only finally the rectification and redress of the felon/convict. Concerning the other two stages, Foucault proceeds to argue that, although humane and normalizing stages pursued two different models—the former, a recuperative purpose/model and the latter a pathological model—both were constituted as (pathological) punishment, which characteristically worked through a particular and new apparatus—the prison or, as it came to be designated, the penitentiary. Skinner, initially instinctively but later in a conscious affirmative resolve, gradually comes to recant her love of Ann, and repudiates her belief in the authenticity and priority of an ethics of evental encounter and intimacy with the Other, thereby converting into a political-libidinal economy and

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pragmatic morality of self-preservation and self-sufficiency, reaching a double-edged autonomy. It is double-edged in the sense that, on the one hand it helps her loosen the bonds of obsession and possessive love (for Ann), while, on the other, such a release approximately leads to her adoption of a utilitarian solipsism and sovereignty foreclosed to an ethics of the heteronomous relationship with the Other. The ensuing statement distils her newly found morality: “That all life should be bound up in one randomly encountered individual defies the dumb will of the flesh clamouring for continuation, life would not have it!” (236). Her expression of repulsion towards Ann accentuates her symptomatic autonomy: “I hate you, do you know why, because you prove to me that nothing is, nothing at all is, The Thing Without Which Nothing Else Is Possible. (Pause). Indeed, with the corpse festooned to the front of her body, as the stage direction indicates too, Skinner begins to look a “grotesque parody of pregnancy’” (an ironic moment of wish fulfilment). Accordingly, it can be suggested that she becomes coercively pregnant with the body/corpse of her hatred and hostility (towards the mode of being and desire that Ann embodies). Thus, given the psycho-somatically symbolic role of the corpse, which is gradually decaying and crumbling away from Skinner, she undergoes change, as we shall see below, both for better and for worse. Krak, while the rest abandon the stage, has been congealed into contemplation on the abrupt minatory emergence of the Fortress and the mind of its engineer: a conundrum to him. Ann arrives with a protruding belly, indicative of her pregnancy—as if pregnant with catastrophe—and entreats him to elope with her. But he rebuffs her, insisting that tyranny and authority are ubiquitous and ineluctable. On the other hand, before Ann leaves the stage, Skinner arrives with Holiday’s cadaver chained to her chest, a condition which has rendered her the butt of harassment and vituperation by others. As the stage direction indicates, the chained cadaver appears to be the parody of her barrenness. Her references to the distresses that the burden has imposed on her bear a grossly ironical resemblance to pregnancy. As she says: “much morning sickness all times of the day” (239). She recounts how she once lay “in the bluebells, odd sight this, on my back, head turned to gasp great lungfuls of the scent and then could not get up, you’d know this, my gravity was somewhere else, legs like windmills, beetle on its back or pregnant female, you get used to it” (239). This quasi-pregnancy has altered her “gravity” and operates on two levels. First, on an anatomo-political level it exerts a normalizing and regulatory force which attaches her body to the phallogocentric discourse (and its

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analogue: the castle), over-inscribes it, conjugates with her body and re-­ verbalizes it, thereby re-shaping her embodied ethos. On an existential level, it re-configures psycho-somatic schemas rendering her more monolithic and foreclosed, though surprisingly less authoritarian. She who had hitherto steadfastly withstood the segregation of life into dichotomous and discrete compartments of love-reason and conviviality-­ banality and persisted in their being indistinguishably intermingled—having affirmed that “the color of love stains everything” (219) and that there is no such communion between the two as “banality to love, love to banality” (219)—now succumbs to a life “amongst inert banality” (216). The crucial point worth underscoring is that as the male intellectual, Krak, treads the spectrum (of solipsistic autonomy-heteronomous autonomy) from one pole to the other, the female militant, Skinner treads the same trajectory, though inversely. Skinner is now suffused with a sense of relief and release due to the (mis-) recognition of the possibility of autonomy, though neglecting its expense. She comes to gain an insight into, what she calls, two “horrors” of existence. She indicates the first one: “nothing you can’t get used to, First Horror.” And carries on to add the second: “would you believe, you can live without others, Second Horror!” (239). Contrary to Skinner, Krak, through exposure to Ann, has irremediably been struck by the heteronomous desire and affective trace of the Other, demanding self-overcoming. This fleshly inscription on Skinner’s body is supposed to produce an inner conversion, effecting a re-schematization of the libidinal economy and re-­identification in her. This anatomo-political inscription instils the death-­ drive and triggers a death-wish, an affective void, in Skinner which evinces itself at the very conclusion of the play when she enunciates her wish/desire to have died “Why wasn’t I killed? The best thing is to perish in the struggle …” (248).

Notes 1. See Foucault’s The Use of Pleasure 5. 2. See Foucault’s Discipline and Punish 136. 3. Howard Barker, Judith in Collected Plays Three 256. 4. Howard Barker, Possibilities in Collected Plays Two 116. 5. Ibid.

CHAPTER 6

The Moment of Con-tactile Aesth-Ethics

Abstract  The exploration of the evental encounter (carnal-spiritual proximity) between Ann and Krak and its implications constitutes the crux of this chapter. First, this chapter expatiates the premises of my proposed concept, Con-tactile Aesthetics-Ethics. Then, we will ponder the retrospective workings—driven by Nachträglichkeit (afterwardness) dynamics—of heteronomous mode of desire Ann expresses to Krak, now appearing as a traumatic memory in the wake of Ann’s suicide. Secondly, the details of psycho-somatic and existential-ethical upheaval undergone by Krak—as manifested in his language and body—will be probed. In keeping with the roles of desire delineated in preceding chapters, we will fully observe here how desire does not merely come to the ruination of social harmony and political projects on both—matriarchal (Skinner) and patriarchal (Stucley)—sides; but, in its radical form—schizo-nomadic desire—it engenders new modes of sociality and self-conception: a tragic community of those who have nothing in common but their shared experience of loss and its immanent ethics of infinity. Finally, we will see how the tempting offer of the rehabilitation of a revisionary form of governmentality, to wit, the formation of less authoritarian or more conciliatory versions of matriarchy or patriarchy are proposed by the representatives of the phallogocentric discourse, but are repudiated by both Skinner and Krak—both averring the need for the deconstruction/dismantling of the castle. Consequently, The Castle concludes on a note of politics of ambiguity—a repercussion of Ann’s ethics of ambiguity, infinity, difference, and other. © The Author(s) 2019 A. Fakhrkonandeh, Body and Event in Howard Barker’s Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28699-6_6

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Keywords  Con-tactile Aesthetic-Ethic • Ethics of infinity • Evental proximity • Schizo-nomadic desire • Self-transcendence • Becoming-other

1   The Moment of Con-tactile Aesth-Ethics and Its Ramifications ecstasy as the only riposte to life’s laws, but ecstasy with another, a defiant duality … a perfection of the ‘we’ outside the hounding conformity of the collective. (SAO 99)

In this section we reach the crux of the theoretical part of the argument, as indicated above, which is predicated on my proposed thesis of Con-­ tactile Aesthetics-Ethics (henceforth aesth-ethics) which I have developed with respect to some recurrent patterns of relationality between main characters (such as Ann and Krak, Katrin and Starhemberg, Judith and Holofernes, Gertrude and Claudius, Savage and Helen, Vanya and Helena, among others) in Barker’s plays, based on which I have subjected the indicated plays to scrutiny.1 In con-tactile aesth-ethics, aesth/ethics is defined in terms of (not always but an often) “spontaneous” responsivity to heteronomy, proximity with alterity and inter-affective or carnal transitivism (see PP 145, 148) of corporeal schemas, figural patterns and affective traces; in other terms, it involves the non-synchronous non-symmetrical becoming of the self and the other in the aforesaid process of transitivism. By juxtaposing aesthetics and ethics, I intend to highlight and demonstrate the way Barker, notwithstanding the prominent affinities he shares with Levinasian ethics at some certain points, diverges from that mode. I intend to underscore the fact that these two moments (the aesthetic moment of self-cultivation, self-transfiguration, and self-fabrication and the ethical moment of exposure to the Other, impassive affectivity, and responsivity), though not simultaneous, coincident, and/or symmetrical, are concomitant and coexistent. In Barker, moments of radical passivity, which is one of the pivotal characteristics of the ethical moment in Levinas (see Radical Passivity 1–10 and also 31–50), rarely occur and in the encounters that take place between the self and the other a strong trace of spontaneity is invariably manifest. More significantly, these momentous encounters with the Other are starkly marked by self-overcoming and self-­ transcendence. In “aesthetics of the body,” the crucial element is the

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difference, the divergence, the slippage, and disincorporation or the écart it incorporates (VI 211), which is subversive, evocative, inspirational, replete with radical possibility, and, hence, aesthetic. It should be underscored that all three characteristics are concretized in a primarily con-tactile (or haptic) mode of relation, even when ostensibly the two characters’ intimacy is achieved through the sense of sight (optic-­ visual). Furthermore “spontaneity” implies a willed creativity in contrast to passivity and habitual modes of receptivity; it thus enhances the aesthetic role of the self and demonstrates that the eventuation of such a moment of carnal-spiritual transfiguration and inter-corporeal transversality entails a volitional gesture by each individual. It should be noted that my advanced thesis of contractibility of the affects and schema between the self and alterity is predicated on the very essence of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of relatedness and nature of the flesh, which is characterized by chiasmaticity, porosity, reversibility, and divergence (VI 138–9, 266). Such a moment of aesth-ethic proximity between two singular individuals constitutes an evental moment of re-schematization of selfhood and the actualization of a new sense (of the individual existence, social discourse, and relationality) for each of the parties involved. In other words, it constitutes a moment of sense-event or, more accurately, a moment of sense-incident. To explicate the distinction between the last two Deleuzian concepts, it is worth indicating that sense events are singular points within a transcendental structure, and therefore entirely virtual (with the weird outcome that Deleuzian events don’t actually “happen”). Individuals and historical facts/events (the latter term being used in its non-Deleuzian sense), on the other hand, belong to the actual and come under the umbrella of what Deleuze calls “accidents.”2 To distil the premises of con-tactile aesth-ethics, it is a trans-corporeal inscription (between the self and the Other individual) and a corporeal in-vestment in the moment of proximal relation between self and the other. In con-tactile aesth-ethics, the relationship is not symmetrical, nor is the Other ever punctual, s/he is rather ineluctably untimely and evental. More important is the fact that in con-tactile aesth-ethics there is no responsibility involved, but rather responsivity, or, put more strictly, responsibility is defined in terms of responsivity.3 Such a mode of relationship between characters abounds in Barker’s work written since 1983. The desire-driven and evental encounters between Krak and Ann, Helena and Vanya, Helen and Savage, Leantia and Livia, Ilona and Sorge, Gertrude and Claudius, Judith and Starhemberg, Dancer and Caroline are salient cases in point.

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The (ob)scene (taking place in the offstage space) in which the moment of proximity between Ann and Krak eventuates (of which we are apprised by Krak analeptically) is one in which Ann seeks to impart to Krak the vitalness of undergoing the splitting pains of exposure (to a heteronomous mode of desire) and self-transcendence: “It is you who need to be reborn. I will be your midwife. Through the darkness, down the black canal-” (35; italics added). Indeed, the whole dynamics of the scene and the ethical corollaries of it hinge on what Barker calls “the redemptive power of desire” (AFT 25) combined with “the appalling secret of the erotic” (AFT 177). This scene between Krak and Ann in The Castle is, though only partially, reminiscent of an analogous attempt at willed proximity and desire by Sorge towards Illona. Although in terms of gender, the dynamics of the relationship between Sorge and Illona is the converse of Ann and Krak’s relationship; that is, it is Sorge who is seeking to instigate in Illona the possibility of the dis-objectification of the self, entrenched in a war-torn context, through will and desire. Having encountered Illona somewhere in the time of war, Sorge is overcome with a surge of desire for Illona. The latter, however, is only willing to reciprocate Sorge’s feelings with a tinge of apathy and passivity, an emotional attitude she has adopted as a means of self-preservation and surviving the traumatizing calamities of the war. Sorge, nevertheless, urges her thus: “When I set eyes on you … […] I felt … she is unspoiled by History … (Pause) I want you to want to be my mistress … […] Not to acquiesce, but to will, and therefore—to suffer … […] For wanting…” (39; emphasis original). Similarly, Ann’s demand here can be considered as a demand for tragic consciousness whereby the individual (Krak, in this instance) affirms his pain/suffering and overcomes his reactive position and traumatic fixation (which has led to Krak’s objectification of himself as a sheer punitive means of revenge) by partly relinquishing the Truth of History and regaining a willed agency. The individual can, consequently, move towards the possibility of other horizons. Although Ann is equipped with a knowledge of his true identity and intention, she abandons them and approaches him in another mode. By drawing Krak’s attention to the possibility of a different mode of existence and relation, Ann approaches him in an erotic proximity in a nocturnal time-space which cannot be comprehended in a rational light but must be apprehended in a “carnal light.”4 She proffers to act as his midwife to assist him to exceed his death-obsessed self. Although initially, despite all her unremitting efforts, he clings to his coil, yet he finally yields to “the amorous exchange” (see Whitford 165–8).

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As such, Lamb’s observation on Ann—“Ann steadfastly refuses to sacrifice any of her instinctive desires in the interests of ideology or even of sparing others pain” (98)—is only partly true and needs significant qualification. Driven by an ethical impulse (heteronomous desire and erotic love), she does expose herself to Krak despite all the dangers (murder by Stucley or trial and execution by the patriarchal state). Ann’s insistence on Krak undergoing a “re-birth” through her as her foremost motive (rather than a personal pleasure), in conjunction with her insistence on their leaving the region for a safe abode, is a cogent testimony to her motivation being erotic love and her intention of continuing a life with Krak, rather than being merely instinctive desire. Hence a radical feminist’s objection that here woman is once more conceived of and treated as a means to an end, as a ground for man’s transcendence or as a Copula for his Ek-stasis is untenable, as it is a self-willed, belated process “without a preconceived goal” (EP 32–3) but above all as it inevitably leads to his immanent de-position and dispossession, his trans-­ substantiation by the apprehension of liberating potentialities of the abject (inter-corporeality): “In Shit I Find Peace Is It!” (241). As regards Ann, it is in an inter-corporeal proximity with Krak (given his role and position as the embodiment of phallocentric rationality) that she, symbolically and materially, enters a liminal-libidinal space in which she is also re-figured as an actual transgressive lover not only by contravening the sacrament of marriage, but, more significantly, by repudiating the procreative/reproductive imperative dominant in phallogocentric discourse—as their intercourse has been anal, as Krak in consternation asserts: “Cunt you lend or rent, but arse you have to will … true ring of marriage … brown button of puckered muscularity … the sacramental stillness born of hanging between pain and ecstasy …” (Ibid.). She also accomplishes this act by breaching the total and autonomous body of phallogocentric mind (as embodied in Krak above others) along with contractarian morality through the act. Thus, Ann and Krak enter a choratic-chiasmatic space— “a womb of ideality” (EP 77)—a womb which no longer pertains exclusively to a woman, but which emerges in/from the intertwining of the folds of the flesh in which corporeal schemas, figural patterns, and affective traces are excessively transcribed: a moment of con-tactile aesth-ethics. Therefore, Ann’s fecundity, as discussed at the outset, is neither solely sexual nor spiritual. Her fecundity is virtually an aesthetic-ethical f­ ecundity; a simultaneous self-birthing and other-birthing, a simultaneous unfolding of an interiority and unfolding to/enfolding of an exteriority, at once

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psychic and somatic. Her maternity finds its figural (both literal and metaphorical) fulfilment in giving birth to her relation to Krak and, subsequently, to Krak through intermediary de/formative rhythms of a con/tactile relation. Thus, she intensely approaches Levinas’ form of desire: “Desire for the absolutely Other” (TI 34) This is an unstinting response (preceding any demand) to the Other and bearing their force and trace as an irreducible, concrete entity. The desire for the Other is beyond need and the egocentric space, and unattached to one’s own enjoyment. She overcomes his invincible discourse by the discourse of intercourse. The first flickers of the cataclysmic consequences of this encounter are evident in Krak’s conduct and new course of action in the penultimate scene. Intending to castigate or even convict Krak, Stucley arrives distraught and daunted by the morass-like mass the castle has lapsed into (exacerbated by Krak’s treacherous trading of diagrams with the enemy and the looming of a rival adversarial fortress). Yet he is confronted with Krak’s obsessive mental detachment and sensual absorption in drawing female genitalia in “twenty seven versions” (242). Thus he harangues: “DON’T DRAW FEMALE BODIES.  I’M TALKING! This is a crisis, isn’t it?” Then even he is momentarily swayed from his paranoiac course exclaiming: “—IS THAT MY WIFE’S BITS—I wouldn’t know them— what man would…” (243). As Barker emphasizes, the critical point for his characters in the Theatre of Catastrophe is when they ask: “what is desire? What does it make me do?” (AFT 26). In the same vein, at the end of Scene 3, as the prisoners are led away by Batter, Krak and Skinner are left alone on the stage. Skinner, carelessly begins biting an apple, when, abruptly, Krak falls to her knees, prostrating himself before her, avowing his faith in the female body: Krak: The Book of Cunt. Skinner: What book is that? Krak: The Book of Cunt says all men can be saved. (241)

This passage starkly marks one of the hallmarks of the play, where solipsistic rationality, with its claim to autonomy, yields to the seductive wisdom of carnality and inter-corporeal proximity, albeit in the wrong place. Krak begins to foster qualms concerning the credit and value of science with which he has felt such kinship even to the point of identification. Telling, nonetheless, is the fact that what comes as an irresistible impetus for his alteration is not nature, but his inter-corporeal proximity with Ann and his consequent fascination with the fuzzy logic of the feminine.

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Another point that corroborates my proposition that, in this play in particular, the female sexual organ should not necessarily be deemed tantamount to the feminine element, yet must be reckoned irrespective of one’s sex,5 is Krak’s gesture. Formerly Krak had raged at Ann: “And you say, come under my skirt. Under my skirt, oblivion and compensation, shoot your anger in my bowel, CUNT ALSO IS A DUNGEON!” (233). This remark by Krak exposes the existence of other latent strains in his apparently monolithic mentality which evince themselves when he refuses to attach a salvific value to the female genital organ and idealize/idolize it. Thus when he recapitulates his misapprehension of Ann’s proposition in terms of “The Book of the Cunt says all men can be saved,” he does not hesitate to qualify it by contending, “not true” (241). As such he admonishes that one must eschew the process of turning an innate biological feature into a surrogate transcendental signified—“to worship it out of ignorance” (203)—what men used to do as indicated and repudiated very early in the play by Skinner. Krak’s reference to “the Book of the Cunt” as another transcendental signified (see Kristeva, in Marks and de Courtivron 1981, 166) and in keeping with the same phallogocentric logic calls to mind Critchley’s relevant discussion. This fetishization of the textual corpus/corporeality (and the corporeal text in the case of the play) as a truth-­ containing text can be construed as a perverted version of bibliocentrism which, as Critchley argues, is in effect logocentrism (52). Now, confounded by his failure to define and confine the female organ within visible and measurable dimensions, he asks: “Where’s cunt’s geometry? The thing has no angles! And no measure, neither width nor depth, how can you trust what has no measure” (241). Here, he implicitly deems the morphological indeterminacy of the organ (illustrating its epistemological and cognitive indefiniteness) as a menacing aspect of it; and such a recognition acts as a testimony to the fact and reason that the organ is construed as a threat, foil, or counterforce to the phallomorphic rationality by him and other members of the patriarchy. Another compelling testimony surfaces in Krak’s statement, in which, in a parallel movement, he strives to capture the seemingly chaotic, yet in fact chiasmatic, logic of (inter)corporeality by dint of ratiocination, awkwardly endeavouring to pin it down in terms of mathematics and geometry while it slips his sieve of science. As he confesses, Ann drowns “argument in her spreading underneath” (Ibid.). He then proceeds to the moment of subversion of his subjective agency in their erotic proximity: “She pulled me down. I did not pull her. She pulled me. In the shadow of the turret,

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in the apex of the angle with the wall, in the slender crack of ninety-nine degrees, she, using the ledge to fix her heels, levered her parts over me” (Ibid.). Here, his description of the sensual experience of the scene of seductive intercourse is still couched in mathematical terms. The excerpt indeed illustrates the last spasms of a writhing rationality, entangled within the folds of flesh, trying to come to terms with its unrationalizable materiality. In Krak’s own desperate words, as “shoes fell, drawers fell” his mental and bodily armours6 dissolve and fall as well. Though his ego-­ boundaries have been breached he is still brittlely bound by the grid of specular economy and isomorphic logic. Subsequently, speculative sketches jerk out of his pen as he is essaying to specularize, reflecting on the visually volatile and elusive dimensions of female genitalia. This failure, to draw our hint from Irigaray, can be attributed to the emphatic equation of vision and knowledge inherent in phallogocentric discourse which also accounts for the elision of differences in sexualities in conjunction with the inscription of that monological sexual identity that depends entirely on the possession of the phallus. Irigaray argues that the predominance of the visual and of the discrimination of a prominent and perspicuous form, to be identified as an erogenous zone is particularly foreign to female eroticism: “Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking” (This Sex 26). As such, Irigaray poses the possibility of a more tactile and chiasmatic relation than specular vision: “Autoaffection … not auto-representation is the mark of female sexuality” (Jay 535; see also This Sex 26). One must note that this is accommodated in a context of woman’s entry into a dominantly scop(ophil)ic economy in which the female genitalia is recognized as a hole, a crack or a lacuna. Consequently, contending that such phallomorphism is informed by the logic of identity, unity, singularity, she proceeds to beckon to the functional consequences of this mode of perception: “(The/a) woman is always already in a state of anamorphosis in which the figure becomes fuzzy” (SO 230). Here, the remarkable similarity between the architectural sketch of the castle and the structural logic and pattern of the female body (organ) is once more brought to the fore. The castle, which from the outset was purported to assume a singular and definitive shape, gradually accrues walls cumulatively, crumpling into a morass or mass of maze-like strongholds, so much so that the vehemently sought idiosyncrasy defeats its own purpose. The perplexity of Holiday, the chief builder, at this preponderance of the circular and curvatures (as opposed to perpendicular and straight), as a perversion and unprecedented, attests to this trend:

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I will simplify the already simple drawing which his eyes are crossing over, but don’t ‘urry me! […] I will join Michael, but at my own bidding, thank you. (BRIAN goes out.) This is all new to me. This passion for the circle. Leaving aside the embrasures and the lintels, there are no corners. Are none of the walls straight!?. Perpendicular, yes, but straight? (Krak ignores him.) Out of curiosity, what was wrong with square towers? Just change, is it? Just novelty? (215)

In consequence, “The castle” becomes “by definition not definitive” (compare Irigaray’s description of female genitalia and mode of pleasure in TS 28–30).7 Thus, what renders the female sexual organ indomitable, to Krak’s mind, is its deficiency in definite angles, penetrable points, and measurable contours: its diffuse figural pattern. Here, however, taking the cue from The Castle, a significant point must be underscored, and that is that female genitalia should not to be treated as an amorphous phenomenon; its indefinite and indeterminate form emanates not from its being amorphous but from an expressly chaotic—chiasmatic morphology. It does not merely arise from its physical features (as I emphasized earlier there is an intense analogy between ontology, morphology, and psychology) but issues from and is intensified by its being heavily invested with desire, heteronomy and eroticism. After some time, though he has despaired of capturing the ruling geometrical principles and the underlying architectural foundation of the feminine figure, Krak is so carnally obsessed with his evental moment of proximity with Ann that he cannot cease rehearsing the scene: Krak: She undressed me … (They look at him.) I lay there thinking … what is she … what does she … undressed me and … (Pause) what is the word? Batter: Fucked? Krak: Fucked! (He laughs, as never before.) Fucked! (Pause) went over me … the flesh … with such … inch by inch with such … (Pause) What is the word? Cant: Desire. (He stares at her, then throwing himself at her). Krak: Show me. (245)

Thus Krak becomes a thought that “thinks more than it thinks” and thereby approximates the state of desire (see Levinas, Collected Papers 56). The missing words (fucked and desire) reveal the corresponding missing or inadequate corporeal perceptions, as heteronomous affections (and

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not sexual needs or inclinations), in him as the representative of the phallogocentric discourse. Perhaps the most crucial point, regarding the foregoing account in which Krak depicted his advent with Ann, is that it is not shown on the stage and is solely retrospectively recounted in fragments by Krak. Rather than observing the scene on the stage, we have to imagine the scene through Krak’s figural language; a material language whose breathless body is riddled with lacunae and ruptures and a narrative beset with hiatuses in its linear nexus, with moments in which the symbolic organization of words is interrupted and overwhelmed with semiotic flows illustrating how the aesth/ethic moment of carnal intimacy defies representation.8 In fact, this is the first time his language dissolves into shreds. Here we vividly observe a highly elliptical language displaying his fumbling for the correct word(s) or the symmetrically reflective expression. This fragmented language is indicative of the emergent fragmentation of his former subjectivity/identity.9 Krak, in his confrontation with fluidity of the flesh and irrationality of desire, is still endeavouring to ward off the inimical encroachment of proximal eroticism, and restrain it under a rubric of rational rendition. Then in an appeal to Cant, he importunes her to try to display, and/or embody, desire for him. She nonchalantly attempts to impress him yet fails and bolts out: Krak: Not it … Cant: Trying but I… Krak: Not it! Cant: Can’t just goKrak: NOT IT! NOT IT! (245)

Eventually he desists from his endeavour to see it in a rational light10 and tries to perceive it in a new light, that is, carnal light—the light of non-­ savoir. Subsequently, in the wake of his conversion, he taps into new impulsive flows of the semiotic, and forgoing his unflinching adherence to the intellect of the genius, exposes his head for the soldiers to split it into halves with their axes: “Slice it round the top and SSSSSSS the great stench of dead language SSSSSSS the great stench of dead elegance dead manners SSSSSSS articulation and explanation dead all dead” (246, italics mine). Here his being riven between a sibilant release of semiotic pulsions and an effort at illocutionary appeal palpably evidences how the newly-­ assimilated feminine sensibility has affected and infected his language. As

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Lyotard argues: “Desire does not speak, it disrupts the order of language” (Discourse Figure 239). This “influx of the death drive” (RPL 50), occurs as a dialectical yet violent confrontation between two contradictory movements, and is intensely “acute and dramatic” (47). The text manifestly exemplifies what Kristeva calls a “feminine language” (RPL 69–81; see also Cavallaro 82), a language invariably corporeal, abject and fluid. Kristeva’s notion of feminine language—as opposed to Irigaray’s Parler Femme which she claims to be exclusively bound up with the female body and sexuality—indicates the gender of the text, speech, or language rather than the gender of the speaker or author.11 Here, the semiotic onslaught evinces itself as “the corruption of Meaning” (37), ruptures the thetic, and “splits it, fills it with empty spaces” (69), multiplying the divisions to operate an “infinitization” (56) of meaning. In addition to the staccato rhythms, the turbulent sonority, and insurgent pace of language, the most symptomatic clue to the mode and status of such a language is the lack of verbs and conjunctions (logical connections) in his utterances.12 Kristeva, in her critical revaluation of the field, insists that the prevailing assumption of Western thought, according to which language, as an abstract sign system produces, unified rational subjects, must be interrogated. She observes that in this regard, it should be heeded that “syntax” plays a substantial role in stabilizing language and consequently subjectivity/identity by subjecting speech to rigid and inflexible rules (Powers of Horror 66, 188–206; see also RPL 270). Thus feminine language is rather the kind of language which destabilizes the rigid rules of the symbolic, instigates intensities and multiplicities in the thetic interstices, the monolithic corpus of its linguistic structure and, by extension, in the structure of patriarchy.13 Feminine language manifests itself in rhythmical patterns, fluid structures, and musical sequences, which bring into play what Kristeva recognizes as “unconscious.” To succinctly explication the term “thetic” at stake here, the thetic phase is what intervenes (or mediates) between the symbolic and the semiotic: “The thetic phase marks a threshold between two heterogeneous realms: the semiotic and the symbolic” (48). The thetic, thus, features as the “threshold of language” (45). The nature of the thetic, however—as is vividly reflected in the subtitle of the section on this concept: “Rupture and/or Boundary”—is ambivalent. The thetic phase, as the “deepest structure” of signification (RPL 44), at once serves as a limit to, or interrupts, the semiotic flow and a boundary (63) between the semiotic and the symbolic.

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Accordingly, Krak’s language in this passage, in its explicit disruption of syntax and infusing the affective charge of the body into the utterance/ text, effects the “transfusion of living body into language” (Oliver xx); or even more strictly: “[the] trans-syntactic inscription of emotion” (PH 204). His former language, syntactically rigid and semantically rigorous, thaws and is submerged in the eruptions, and interruptions, of bodily drives. And this should be ascribed to his encounter with the “untidy, asyntactic, pre-semantic bodiliness” of Ann’s mode of desire (Elam, “In What Chapter of His Bosom?” 14). The descriptive term, asyntactic, is a crucial term which helps unravel the latent changes in Krak’s mode of subjectivity and existence. Given the foregoing explanations, asyntactic can be construed to designate a drastic transgression of, or deviation from, orthodox syntax as the dominant ordering principle of discourse and the discursive self—as syntactic arrangement by definition entails a strict mode of structuration under a regulative-normative rubric, among which is a hierarchical binarism, the polarization of entities into subjectobject and/or subject-predicate. Hence, to elude the prescriptive and isomorphic strictures of the predicative-symbolic mode, this asyntactic or (non)syntax mode strains towards the accommodation of another mode of relating—that is, proximity, and its correlates—by remoulding itself in its terms. Now, Irigaray’s elaboration of a feminine syntax (the notion she advances as one of the indispensable constituents of an ethical relation) might serve to elucidate more extensively the implications of the issue at stake; she expounds: “In that syntax there would no longer be either subject or object, oneness would no longer be privileged, there would no longer be proper meanings, proper names, proper attributes … Instead that syntax would involve nearness, proximity but in such an extreme form that it would preclude any distinction of identities, any establishment of ownership, thus any form of appropriation” (TS 134). This proximal syntax constitutes a threshold space for a more material signification and relation informed by chiasmatic implication, transitivity, and contamination and is recalcitrant to both dualism/polarism and identity-propriety (see also Inner Experience 37). In a revealing remark, Jacques Lacan proposes that “It is by touching, however lightly, on man’s relation to the signifier […] that one changes the course of his history by modifying the moorings of his being” (Ecrits 438). Resonant with Lacan’s insight, Kristeva argues that: “linguistic changes constitute changes in the status of the subject— his relation to the body, to others, and to objects” (RPL 15). Accordingly,

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taking Lacan and Kristeva’s respective arguments as evidence, we can conclude that such a fundamental de-formation at the level of language betokens a profound transformation to the premises of Krak’s subjectivity and sense of self. And this testifies to the manner of Ann’s mode of ethical being (namely, schizo-nomadic becoming, heteronomy, and proximity) and the evental moment of con-tactile aesth-ethics with Krak culminates in the upheaval of the phallogocentric discourse and a nascent formation of a different mode of relation and subjectivity.

2   The Castle Re/Dis-figured In Act 2 scene 3, while the rest abandon the stage, Krak has been congealed into contemplation on the foreboding emergence of the fortress and its engineer’s mind: a conundrum to him. Ann arrives pregnant—as will transpire later, with catastrophe—and entreats him to elope with her. But he rebuffs her, insisting that tyranny and authority are ineluctable and almost ubiquitous. At the very outset of the next scene we observe the realization of Irigaray’s diagnostic observation: the hysteric reaction or response of women to the oppressive and repressive treatment of Stucley’s disciplinary state. In the nebulous ambience, we detect that “the things falling” (244) are the pregnant women who are flinging themselves off the castle walls in multitudes. In effect we witness that Ann’s suicide has turned out to be as catastrophic and reverberating as was anticipated, and has triggered off a pandemic suicide among the female: the “rain of women” (Ibid.). Irigaray in her trenchant critique of the present patriarchal logic of the dominant paradigm maintains that the sole positions left to a woman in the current order of discourse are either to recede to silence or to resort to hysteria as a miming or mimic behaviour (This Sex 71–2; see also Moi 135). Irigaray’s treatment of hysteria is double-edged: she perceives it both as a pathological and as an enunciatory behaviour. She recognizes “a revolutionary potential” in hysteria. To her, the hysteric even in her paralysis, exhibits a potential for disquieting gestures and disruptive desires. She discerns the spasmodic expressions and discharges of the hysteric as “a movement of revolt and refusal, a desire for/of the living mother which would be more than a reproductive body in the pay of the polis, a living, loving woman” (Irigaray Reader 47–8; italics mine). On the other hand, this pain can be deemed as the resistance of the flesh, as insinuating the excess or the residue, the overflow or the seething undercurrent—the

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“elsewhere”—of the hysteric female subject which articulates itself in corporeal symptoms. In this interpretation of hysteria, the female flesh resists and repels the images of itself which do not correspond with its psycho-­ somatic morphology and patterns of desire. Nailer unavailingly menaces the women with persecution and punishment on the Day of Reckoning, and commands the incarceration of those women who possess a protruding belly: “They must be locked away. All Women who are pregnant. Chained at wrist and ankle … they bear our future in their innards and they kill it. In the stall. By what right! All women big about the middle, lock up!” (245). Simultaneously, Krak, consternated, roves among the crushed corpses of women, poring over his intercourse with Ann and attempting to bore through it. In the wake of the establishment of the castle on the hill and the consequent contraction of the feminine features by the masculine, Act 2 commences with Krak, soliloquizing on the way everything regarding the erection and fortification of the castle has evidently gone awry and that the castle, owing to Stucley’s implacable demands for extension, is exceedingly growing into “a shapeless, indefinite mass”—and we remember Skinner extolling the “lovely shapelessness” (203) of female sexual organs. Krak has attempted to convince Stucley that the castle is already indomitable with three walls; he, however, does not relent, and in the grip of a grim paranoid dread, insists on the escalation of more walls: “A fifth wall I predict will be necessary, and a sixth essential, to protect the fifth, necessitating the erection of twelve flanking towers” (231). Then Krak, with the present and imminent state of the castle in view, proceeds to point out the key idiosyncrasy of the castle which foregrounds its ambiguity and affinity with the feminine component: “The castle is by definition, not definitive …” (231). The castle at its later stages of development, in its assumption of manifold facets, permeated with irreducible ambiguity, epitomizes the feminine element in the very kernel of the play. Its physical and architectural quirks evince its seductive nature; it is both veiling and unveiling; the ups are downs and the downs are ups. Thus the castle, akin to the feminine, proves to incarnate equal chiasmaticity, ambiguity, and undecidability. The intrusive emergence of this cataclysmic feature prompts Stucley to corroborate its masculine character by more inexorably adding more walls such as “the wall of morality” (232). Stucley’s act of naming the wall bears witness to there being a parallel relation between the castle, morality, and male dominant discourse, and hence the way in which phallogocentric ideology and

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morality are inextricably intertwined; they must be fortified parallel-like as correlates: “Listen, I think morality is also bricks, the fifth wall is the wall of morals, did you think I could leave that untouched?” (Ibid.). Ironically, Stucley’s move leads to the formation of a more elusive, fluid, and, in short, a more feminine, castle, apparent in its manifoldness, multi-­ layeredness, and anamorphic structure. These idiosyncrasies endow the castle with a quality more tactile than visual, which can evidently be associated with female carnal and genital morphology (rather than anatomy) and femininity; though it cannot be restricted to this dimension. At the end of the play, we witness the dissolution of dichotomies and the collapse of antithetical entities through a gesture towards a synthetic reconciliation. Two chief male members of the former patriarchal system, Nailer and Batter, come up with an immensely alluring proposition to Skinner: the overthrow of the “Church of Christ the Erect” and the foundation of a “new church”: “The Holy Congregation of the Wise Womb” (245). Though, at first glance, such a concession as well as the conjunction of wisdom and womb, the intelligible and the sensible, by the members of patriarchy can be reckoned a conspicuous achievement for women and feminist discourse; however, there lies a furtive menace behind it: valorization of the womb as the originary and unitary source of all meaning, plenitude, and authority; a disguised attempt to stabilize and institutionalize the feminine once more as conceived and determined by the phallogocentric discourse. The fact is that in the wake of the catastrophic fall of the male body (the castle) they gravitate towards (a fragment of) the female body (i.e., the womb) and seek to assimilate and solidify its fluidity, motility, and alterity by turning it into a centralized body. Such a movement entails the consecration, hence conservation, of the feminine, and thus the annexing of it as a prescribed discursive position. Nailer propounds the doctrinal rudiments and scriptural foundations of the creed: “Christ, abhorring the phallus, foreswore his maleness, chose womanly ways. Scripture in abundance for all this” (245). It is worth quoting the rest of their conversation in full, as listening to their repartee-like conversation is illuminating: Nailer: […] We acknowledge the uniquely female relationship with the origin of life, the irrational but superior consciousness located in— Skinner: Sod wombs— Nailer: Do listen, please (Pause. He proceeds.) The special sensitivity of woman to the heart-beat of the earth—Romans, VIII, verses 9 to— Skinner: He does go on—

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Nailer: 17, which hitherto has held no special place in doctrine but which henceforward will be— Skinner: Palaver Of Dissimulators! Nailer: The foundation of the edict Let There Be Womanly Times! (247)

The fulfilled and fully developed form of such a propositional doctrine is highly liable to lapse into either the phallic mother or the Cult of the Virgin Mary. The cult of the Virgin Mary, as Kristeva postulates, served to absorb and harness the economy of the maternal to the patriarchal paradigm and the Law of Father: the representation of virgin motherhood appears to crown the efforts of a society to reconcile the social remnants of matrilinealism and the unconscious needs of primary narcissism on the one hand, and on the other hand the requirements of a new society based on exchange and before long on increased production, which require the contribution of the superego and rely on the symbolic paternal legacy. (“Stabat Mater” 167)

The phallic mother, on the other hand, is in effect the converse female version of the Phallus or phallocentrism. It is the imaginary double of the masculine or the fetishized feminine for the masculine, which turns out to sustain and secure the phallogocentric symbolic economy even more firmly (see also DL 238–9). As Mary Daly strongly alerts other feminist theorists, the image of the phallic mother represents a real threat to feminist struggle. She argues that, as far as women promote such a conception or cause and aspire towards it, they remain “boxed into the father’s house of mirrors, merely responding to the images projected/reflected by the Possessors” (47). Skinner, though initially lured by the prospect of retaliation, accepts the offer and pounces upon the keys, avowing revenge on her violators and refusing stoicism and meek mutism, yet in a moment of self-reflection— probably triggered in light of her recognition of the futility of oppositional politics (in comparison with that of proximal-deconstructive) and also sensing her own identification with authoritarian power—in a derisive tone impugns their deeply suspicious and redolent gesture and refuses to collaborate with them. Her acute recognition of this point coupled with her deep rancour and resentment towards the womb lead her to regard such a prospect of “reconciliation and oblivion” as deceptive and spurious and at best unviable. The parley between Krak and Skinner forebodes the imminent demolition of the castle and the fact that even destruction

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requires “drawing.” The decline of the castle and transformation in the attitude of formerly extremist characters ostensibly seems to be the aftermath of Stucley’s downfall and Krak’s conversion. These occurrences, nevertheless, are in fact the repercussions of Ann’s evental-nomadic, heteronomous, and proximal style of relationality, desire, and existence. At the end, Skinner’s rumination on the decline of both ideal feminine and ideal masculine community is interrupted by the dashing of jets overhead, underscoring the contemporaneity of the play. A laden abeyance lingers on. As is evident, in accord with Barker’s non-Aristotelian and non-­ Hegelian tragic aesthetics, the conclusion of the play is characterized neither by catharsis nor by resolution or reconciliation. Nor can the conclusion be construed in terms of either utopian progress towards a teleological goal in history or a dystopian vision of nihilistic war and destruction— despite the brooding gloom of war looming in the horizon, illustrated by the jets scoring the sky. Although the streak of idealism is still conspicuous in Skinner’s observations (“there was no government”)—since even during the so-called gynocentric mode of communal existing, there was some sort of lenient governmentality and there were figures of, though sympathetic, authority such as Skinner herself. Besides in the gynocentric community, gleaning our clues from women’s own accounts throughout the play, men were utilized in the community in the same manner as women are utilized in a patriarchy, that is, as means of reproduction and procreation. The old man is a case in point. Indeed, both matriarchal and phallocentric orders valorize a prescriptive form of symmetry, harmony, utility, and identity (in the case of Skinner’s matriarchal utopia, an identitarian economy of homosexuality) primarily by defining/confining desire. Nevertheless, in the end, we are left with three individual characters (albeit one is absent now—Stucley) all of whom have variously undergone processes of re-subjectivation, self-transcendence and becoming-other in their evental relationship with Ann and, by the same token, in their experience of desire as creative of self-difference and a force of différance. All three of them are less authoritarian and more attuned to loss, pain (of the self and human existence) and the Other (through the affectivity of desire) as inextinguishable features of human existence. Desire does not merely come to the ruination of social harmony and political projects on both—matriarchal (Skinner) and patriarchal (Stucley)—sides; rather, schizo-nomadic desire, true to its productive nature, engenders new modes of sociality and self-conception: a tragic community of those who have nothing in common but their shared experience of loss.

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Notes 1. See Alireza Fakhrkonandeh, Howard Barker’s Drama of Aporias: From a Phenomenology of the Body to an Ontology of the Flesh, under review. 2. The key text in this regard is to be found in the ninth series of The Logic of Sense. Particularly see 53–4. 3. Thus the aforesaid aesth/ethic relation takes place in an interstitial space, an interface, a third dimension, an entre-deux (Merleau-Ponty, VI 146) pertaining to and arising from both and neither of them and yet irreducible to either. What is noteworthy is that, dehiscence, efflorescence, and connaissance (VI 263) transpire in this dimension. 4. For a detailed philosophical explanation of the notion of carnal light, see Vasseleu 40–9. 5. To put it more clearly, one does not already contain or possess the feminine, but contrarily the feminine as a quality, can be sought, transmitted, and/or attained by both sexes. 6. A term in Reichian psychology, for further reading (see Staunton 1–31). 7. Though here Krak is fascinated with the whole morphology and a-logic of the organ and his mental attention is not solely concentrated on and confined to the labial facet of the organ, and though Irigaray’s argument is incompatible with the fundamental premise of con-tactile aesth-ethics (the presumption of the precedence of a state of polymorphous perversity), nevertheless, there are notable convergences and striking affinities which render a correlative and comparative reading of the text with Irigaray’s notion of two lips worth conducting and elucidating. To Irigaray, to be born is to be born into morphology, and this morphology contains, implies, and fosters ontological, epistemological, and ethical corollaries (see Whitford 149; see also Whitford 170–4). 8. See Lyotard’s Discourse and Figure 16–9, 211–13; and Barthes’ Pleasure of the Text 55–7. 9. See “Woman Can Never Be Defined” 1981, 166. 10. See Wyschogrod 118–19; also see Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference. 11. See RPL 54–5. 12. See RPL 15–16, 56, 78, 125–6, 147, 202–4. 13. See “Woman Can Never Be Defined” 1981, 166.

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Index1

A Affect and affective trace, 5, 16, 17, 23, 25, 34, 91, 121, 124, 125, 127 Agamben, Giorgio, xiii Alterity/otherness, 12, 17, 20–22, 25, 26n16, 37, 39, 43, 55, 66, 80, 81, 100, 115, 124, 125, 137 Althusser, Louis, x, 35, 57n2, 84n12 Anastrophe/anastrophic temporality, 36–42, 103 Anatomy, 32, 137 Aporias, 5, 7, 88–105 Architecture, ix, 46, 47, 49, 50, 55 Asyntactic, 58n7, 134 Atheology, 87 Autonomy, ix, xi, 17, 20, 43, 63, 94, 100, 104, 120, 121, 128 B Barker, Howard, vii–xi, xin8, 2–25, 36, 40, 46–51, 53, 54, 57, 58n7,

62–64, 67, 69, 70, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 88–105, 108, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 124–126, 128, 139 Barker’s plays, 6, 11, 16, 20, 23, 47, 113, 124 Bataille, Georges, 49, 50 Baudrillard, Jean, 15, 16, 18, 19 Blok/Eko, ix, 113 Body, vii, 14, 20, 23, 24, 31–34, 36, 37, 43, 55, 56, 58n7, 58n12, 64, 65, 69, 78, 79, 82, 83, 95–103, 108–116, 118–121, 127, 128, 130, 132–134, 137 Bond, Edward, 10–14 The Brilliance of a Servant, 94 Brutopia, Secret Life in Old Chelsea, 53 Butler, Judith, 20, 66 C The Castle only bears comparison with plays such as The Bite of the Night, Rome and The Ecstatic Bible, 7

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

Catastrophe/catastrophic temporality, xi, 8, 10, 13, 19, 36–42, 57, 81, 93, 120, 128, 135 Chiasm/chiasmatic, 24, 25, 32, 43, 57, 58n12, 65, 79, 83, 129–131, 134 Chora, 102, 105n9 Confession, 39, 109, 110, 112, 119 Con-tactile aesth-ethic, 25, 64, 103, 124–139 Critchley, Simon, 129 D Dahl, Mary Karen, 14 Deconstruction, 7, 13, 67, 88–105 Dehiscence, 140n3 Deleuze, Gilles, 24, 63, 67–71, 73, 75, 84n3, 125 Derrida, Jacques, 84n2 Desire, see Paranoid desire; Schizo-­ nomadic desire Deterritorialization, 21, 63, 69, 71–73 Disciplinary power, 108, 119 E Écart, 125 The Europeans, 80, 93, 94, 98, 113 Evental/event aesthetics, vii, 15 ethics, 20 subjectivity, 63 F Fecundity (of the flesh), 127 Feminism, 18, 22, 83 Fence in Its Thousandth Year, 5, 23, 53, 55 The Forty, ix

Foucault, Michel, 50–52, 63, 75, 108–110, 112, 119 Found in the Ground, ix G The Gaoler’s Ache for the Nearly Dead, 23, 53, 54, 110 Gender economy, 9 politics, x, 7, 9, 12, 22, 47, 48, 58n7 Gertrude-The Cry, 5, 90, 98 God, 9, 11, 15, 18, 20, 23, 32, 33, 41, 42, 50, 52, 53, 65, 70, 75, 80, 88–105, 108, 116, 118 Golgo, 88–92, 98, 99 Guattari, Felix, 66 H A Hard Heart, 94 Harrowing and Uplifting Interviews (HUI), ix Heteronomy, xi, 21, 43, 66, 104, 124, 131, 135 History and anti-history, ix–xi, 2–25, 54, 72, 89, 90, 102, 109, 115, 126, 134, 139 I Interpellation, 35, 57n2, 111 In the Depths of a Dead Love, ix Irigaray, Luce, 2, 24, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 43, 55–57, 76, 78, 101, 102, 104, 130, 131, 133–135, 140n7 K Kristeva, Julia, 24, 37, 78, 80, 82, 102, 129, 133, 134, 138

 INDEX 

L Lamb, Charles, 15–17, 21, 42, 51, 70, 71, 76 Latour, Bruno, 5 Levinas, Emanuel, 2, 37, 39, 40, 44, 73, 80, 84n2, 124, 128 The Love of a Goodman, 93 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 133 M More No Still, 5, 23 Morphology, 24, 25, 33, 131, 136, 137, 140n7 N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 96, 97, 103 O One Afternoon on the 63rd Level of the North Face of the Pyramid of Cheops the Great, viii P Pain, 14, 15, 38, 39, 62, 72, 93–96, 100, 101, 108–121, 126, 127, 135, 139 Panopticon and Panoptic Subjectivity, 50–52, 54, 58n7 Paranoid desire, 70, 73, 74 Passion in Six Days, 12 Phallic mother, 138 Phallogocentrism, 56 Pregnancy/maternity, xi, 14, 21, 62–83, 101, 102, 104, 120, 128, 138

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Proximity, xi, 16–18, 20, 22–25, 31, 36, 39, 41, 43, 46, 57, 63, 64, 79, 80, 82, 83, 98, 99, 103, 104, 108, 114, 124–129, 131, 134, 135 R Rabey, David Ian, 6, 16, 21, 73, 113 Retour and retoucher, 57 Romano, Claudio, vii Rome: On Being Divine, 94 S Scarry, Elaine, 116, 117 Scenes from an Execution, 53 Schizo-nomadic desire, 9, 21, 22, 50, 63, 64, 70, 74, 77, 135, 139 Seven Lears, 53, 90 Speculation/specular/specularization, ix, 30–32, 93, 113, 130 T Thetic, 133 Torture, 14, 21, 38, 112, 116–119 Transgression, xi, 5, 7, 33, 94, 101, 108, 110, 134 Transitivism/transitivity (of the flesh), 25, 124, 134 W Wall and wall ideology, 2–5, 47–57, 130, 131, 135–137