The Oedipal Myth as a Transcultural Trauma

The oedipal myth as a transcultural trauma: a comparison between Oedipus Rex and Blasted

The main objective of this essay is to draw a comparison between representations of trauma in Sarah Kane's Blasted and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex. There seems to be a lack of comparative analysis regarding these authors and their work together in connection with the theme of trauma: without any doubt, these two works are remarkably distant, on a cultural and temporal level. At a first sight, they do not seem to present anything to share. They are aesthetically and ethically apart from each other, as their authors belong to considerably different cultural traditions. Most obviously, Pasolini and Kane share a personal, individual engagement with the traumatic experience, and both Oedipus Rex and Blasted can be considered representations of a traumatic narrative. To give an instance, Pasolini himself acknowledges his own unconscious contribution as far as the father's murder scene is concerned. 1 The Italian director in 1967 and the British playwright in 1995 use surprisingly similar images in staging trauma, although there is no evidence that they influenced each other in any way. However, they both revisit trauma making more or less conscious reference to the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus. With both being tragic accounts of traumatic experiences, Blasted and Oedipus Rex deal with individual and collective trauma. In these two works Pasolini and Kane re-enact a traumatic experience which is proper to the whole Western culture and continues to project itself on every Western individual's life. With all probability, common features can be found in such distant representations of trauma because of the very transmissive character of some kind of historically traumatic experiences. Considering this, a thread runs at the deepest core of these works tying them together. Both Oedipus Rex and Blasted interestingly present evidence of the transition of trauma to being a part of cultural heritage. This cultural phenomenon is thus carried out with the help of theatrical and cinematographic representation. With theatre and cinema being performing arts, they can be considered as the best means of performing and consequentially conveying trauma. The concepts of representation and performance are therefore pivotal to the analysis of trauma and the post-traumatic condition. 1 Oswald Stack, Pasolini on Pasolini, Interviews with Oswald Stack (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1970), p. 120.

1

Diana Taylor theorizes the transmission of cultural heritage through performance, with performance being cultural heritage itself: that is exactly what happens with the oedipal trauma represented in the analysed works. The importance of performance in traumatic representation and transmission will thus be analysed in reference to Taylor's work on Performance Studies. The theme of trauma will be therefore considered in terms of psychoanalytic theory providing thus an insight to the psychoanalytical dimension of performed trauma. As far as the mythic matter is concerned, we can say that it is more or less consciously scattered around these works. As emerged from the analysis, they both present a codified set of images linked to the oedipal tale: it would thus be useful to analyse the mythical component, namely the oedipal narrative, in terms of trauma. To help us in distinguishing and defining the traumatic matter embedded in Pasolini's Oedipus Rex and Kane's Blasted psychoanalytic tenets may be of great help. In the conclusion of this essay, the concept of trauma will be re-considered and re-shaped in terms of Performance studies. Firstly, the two authors will be presented separately; afterward, their works will be analysed first as single entities and successively compared. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) chooses to represent the oedipal narrative overtly referencing to Sophocles' tragedy and psychoanalysis. Pasolini was an Italian poet, journalist, intellectual and director. He was perceived as a controversial figure: his homosexuality and his commitment to Marxist philosophy made of him a potentially dangerous person in a place such as post-war Christian Democrat Italy: this was often given as a reason for his brutal murder at the Lido di Ostia in 1975. On the other hand, his acute artistic sensitivity (that characterised also his journalistic work) and his calm temperament (although covering a great, inner inquietude) gave him an extremely fascinating aura. Both his sexual orientation and his political ideas were despised by the Christian Democrat government as well as by the Italian common sense of that time. Yet, the importance and the peculiarity of his contribution to Italian cinema remain uncontested: he and few other directors constituted the isolated intellectual response to the already surpassed neorealism in the 1960s and '70s decades, introducing the so-called auteur film in the Italian cinema industry.2 Reading his biography, one of the most interesting facts about his childhood is that he himself experienced a familiar trauma, precisely the oedipal one, to which his biographer tends to attribute 2 Enzo Siciliano, Vita di Pasolini (Milano: Rizzoli, 1979), p. 241.

2

his homosexuality.3 Effectively, Enzo Siciliano describes in detail Pasolini's relationship with his father during childhood, depicting it as a condition of rivalry which then led to a lifelong contrast between the two;4 furthermore, Pasolini himself affirms that the first scenes of his Oedipus Rex are an 'evocation of [his] early childhood' which is 'functional' to the oedipal tale.5 The making of cinema for Pasolini was an attempt to liberate himself from his self-destructive pulses and his obsessive attitudes6 deriving from this infantile trauma. The reason behind this behaviour lies in what was being illustrated in the introduction to this essay: one's natural way to try and overcome trauma is to re-enact it using a determined code, recalling certain echoing images that remind of it and elaborating others that represent it symbolically. According to Enzo Siciliano, Pasolini's cinematographic representations are the severe expression of a deep anguish.7 What Siciliano calls visual pauperism8 is the director's visual minimalism, which is neither a simple, nor a complicated one: in Pasolini's films, the eye of the camera privileges the human body and all its expressions, leaving the background and the landscape to stand behind as a its distant, symbolic reflection. However, it would be simplistic to say that without acknowledging Pasolini's strong ideological stress on the proletarian class bodies as the new model for an iconic beauty and, additionally, on their political and psychoanalytical representative tension. Oedipus Rex, released in 1967, was inspired by Sophocles' tragedy, besides the ancient oedipal myth. Its plot is very well known: Pasolini has revisited it very freely, without thinking much about its intimate contributions.9 The oedipal tale was chosen to be purposefully rendered as a dream10 in a memory: this memory is constituted by the initial and the final scenes of the film, seemingly set in Bologna in the early Twenties. In the first scene of this diptych, a child is born and his father mutely declares war on him: 'Tu sei qui per prendere il mio posto nel mondo, ricacciarmi nel nulla e rubarmi tutto quello che ho […] E la prima cosa che mi ruberai sarà lei, la donna che io amo... Anzi, già mi rubi il suo amore!'.11 The scene in which the modern Laius grabs his child's feet constitutes 3 Ibid., p. 45. 4 Ibid., pp. 43-45. 5 Oswald Stack, Pasolini on Pasolini., p. 122. 6 Enzo Siciliano, Vita di Pasolini, p. 231. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Oswald Stack, Pasolini on Pasolini, p. 119. 10 Ibid., p. 122. 11 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Oedipus Rex, min.06:11; 06:47.

3

the physical core of a trauma constituted by his furious anger and the child's first inexplicable pain: from this very point the audience is transferred to the ancestral dimension reflected in the apparition of the desert on the screen. Cold, diaphanous colours and contours are indeed as blurry as in the earliest childhood memories: all the scenes of the film are mostly silent and yet full of physical tension. A sense of imminent catastrophe can be detected more by gestures and gazes rather than by words or sounds. Yet, from the bourgeois silence that haunts a newly born triadic family in the Fascist Italy, we are thrown into the rhythmic dream of the oedipal myth. To represent this, Pasolini chooses the complementary hotness of Morocco and the warm nuances of the desert in order to recreate an archetypical Thebes. It is worthy to notice the importance given to the human body: Pasolini himself speaks of a refusal of long takes which has its roots in a fetishistic love for detail. He does not wish to represent things in their natural state, but in their unnatural, ritual essence. He wishes to catch that very sacredness which can be perceived only by means of the visual isolation of the object from the rest of the world.12 It is exactly through the very bloody tension of the bodies that Pasolini manages to express the traumatic essence of his Oedipus. Above all, some involuntary movements peculiar to post-traumatic disorder are represented as repetitive and genealogically transmittable. For instance, one of the tics Franco Citti has to reproduce while playing the character of Oedipus is that of biting the back of his hand in situations that may be somehow connected to his original trauma; and Jochasta makes the same gesture when she finds herself on the edge of catastrophe some time after, revealing the transmissive character of a traumatising shock. In the scene of the encounter between Oedipus and his father on the road to Thebes, Laius reproaches him shouting a loud 'Bada!' ['Mind you!']: Oedipus shouts the same term with the very same voice soon after he has taken his father's place on the throne of Thebes. Another visible tic is that of suddenly opening his eyes wide for a seconds' time. To complete the representation of this ancestral trauma, Pasolini adds tribal rhythms alternated with a syncopated, alienating music typical of Japanese Noh theatre. Post-traumatic repetition is being re-enacted in terms of myth: this pessimistic circularity is reproduced until the end of the film, in which a modern Oedipus continues to wander around the places of his childhood still loaded with a trauma which comes from the past and leaves no possibility of liberation. Sarah Kane (1971-1999) was a British playwright. Sierz defines her 'a precocious but self-

12 Enzo Siciliano, Vita di Pasolini, p. 299.

4

destructive young talent whose death changed the way we look at her work.'13 After receiving a Christian education, she rejected it during her teenage years to the point of becoming atheist. Her brother remembers: 'If people had problems, Sarah would always listen and do whatever she could to help them out. [...] I got to a point where I'd say, “I'm sorry, I just can't deal with this,” and I don't remember Sarah ever doing that.'14 She was particularly struck by the violent, horrific features of the human behaviour and deeply concerned with it: what she wished to do by means of her work can be firstly depicted as raising awareness. Moreover, her representation of violence on the stage was seemingly connected to an investigation of the very roots and branches of violence in the human mind. Kane had not a taste for the splatter genre; she herself affirms that she had no particular intention in shocking her audience.15 To return to Sierz's words, David Greig speaks of a general, uncontainable tendency to interpret Kane's plays in terms of her death: her first play Blasted, like all her plays, is commonly studied in the shadow of Kane's suicide, and the critic instinctively goes in search of 'diagnoses', 'listening out for unheard cries for help',16 instead of criticizing her work independently. Her background and her troubled personality are undoubtedly central to the interpretation of her works, but Blasted is so much more than just an expression of personal existential anguish. As Sierz points out, Blasted was harshly criticised with the major British newspapers calling it 'a disgusting feast of filth', 'a gratuitous welter of carnage' and 'a sordid travesty of a play'.17 Perhaps the thing which was mainly misunderstood was Kane's choice not to provide an ethical frame for her audience to interpret the play: 'People should judge for themselves. I have no interest in trying to manipulate people's emotions or opinions. I'm simply trying to tell the truth about human behaviour as I see it. […] It's not in my control'. 18 This can be perceived more as an aggression rather than as an attempt to awaken the audience and make people see the real horrors of humanity outside the theatre in which the play is taking place. But she is utterly right when she 13 Aleks Sierz, 'Sarah Kane', in , Accessed on 22/12/2014. 14 Simon Hattenstone, 'A sad hurrah', The Guardian, 01 July 2000, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jul/01/stage. Accessed on 22/12/2014. 15 David Benedict, 'Disgusting violence? Actually it's quite a peaceful play', The Independent, 22 January 1995. . Accessed on 22/12/2014. 16 David Greig, Introduction, in Sarah Kane, complete plays (London: Methuen, 2001), p. xviii. 17 Sierz, 'Sarah Kane', in . Accessed on 22/12/2014. 18 Benedict, 'Disgusting violence?'. Accessed on 22/12/2014.

5

affirms her impossibility to control the audience's reaction, all the more so when traumatic matter is being performed on stage. Set in an 'expensive hotel room in Leeds – the kind that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the world', Blasted is a play set in no space and no time. It shows a bitter reality since its beginning, presenting Ian's vulgar comment on the room. 19 The stichomithic dialogues compensate the large amount of directions regarding the actors' movements: language is already put aside to favour sheer performance. The narration revolves around Ian, a forty-year-old Welsh-born journalist with a sour humour, Cate, a young, seemingly dull and fragile woman of twenty one, and a soldier whose age is not specified, very presumably belonging to a different ethnic group. Ian and Cate make their first appearance on the stage as complementary characters. However, as the play goes on, the spectator discovers they are both victims of personal trauma just as the soldier is. They all have been already affected by a shocking reality, so that what the audience can actually see is their lingering in a limbo of post-traumatic existence, with the only attempts to overcome it being Cate's action of sucking her thumb and epileptic crises, Ian's alcoholism and sadomasochism and the soldier's reenactment of his girlfriend's trauma upon Ian. The predominance of the traumatic element in Blasted is expressed not only metaphorically through its characters' features, but also on a literal level, with the grenade blasting the hotel room roughly in the middle of the play. The room is destroyed as the characters are disrupted. Everything is tore into pieces. Kane's play has been widely interpreted and revisited. Its traumatic elements have to be looked for in the smallest details: glances, imperceptible gestures, ob-scene actions (in both senses: outside the scene and obscene) and bodily reactions. In Scene One Cate already sucks her thumb, stutters, has an epileptic crisis in response to Ian's advances.20 Additionally, her hysterical laughter, together with her disconnected movements, scares her aspiring partner and already projects their relationship into the surreal dimension of personal trauma.21 Afterward, she rips off the sleeves from Ian's jacket after having deliberately made a hole in it; then she (presumably) throws the bouquet, which is found on the floor at the beginning of Scene Two. These are all actions that can be supposed as attempts to keep something out of Cate's mind. She is desperately trying to let out something monstrously painful: and the performer, just as the traumatised character, can give vent to this pain only through epilepsy and fury upon objects. 19 Sarah Kane, Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001), p. 3. 20 Ibid., p. 4. 21 Ibid., p. 9.

6

Yet, Cate is not the only traumatised character in Blasted. Ian as well is. He repeatedly looks out of the window in a way that reminds Diana Taylor's writing on 9/11; he too goes 'back and forth', 22 starts at the minimum noise. Apparently, his bad health and his painful coughing show he has somatised his own previous traumata. The Soldier too comes from a traumatising background: contrarily to Ian, he has somatised internally, becoming cruelly merciless in his desperate ignorance. Nevertheless, trauma is rarely mentioned when speaking of Oedipus Rex and Blasted. As already said, at first sight these two works appear so different that it probably seems not possible to compare them properly to each other. Yet, one can find it remarkable to notice that they are linked by a great performing tension and by the use of identical patterns that lead almost automatically to the oedipal tale. Hence, it would be worthy to stress that these two artists, however different and distant they might be, become surprisingly akin to each other when it comes to undertake an analysis of their work in relation to trauma: they have striking points in common. Both Pasolini and Kane, regardless of their different cultural background, tend to use the same strategies when seeking to represent traumatic scenes linked to sexual trauma. “Strategy” here is meant as a tool by which an author can shape and represent trauma on various levels, from the artistic to the psychoanalytical. Pasolini supposedly had no influence on Kane; although his Oedipus is inspired by Sophocles' tragedy, he mainly took it as an unconscious representation of his own life by alluding to the existence of a psychoanalytic standpoint. In Kane's case, instead, there is no explicit reference to psychoanalysis: Blasted is a sheer, crude account of a series of traumatic happenings, one after the other, that lead the audience to stop and think about what one may call a metahistorical reality. The events described in Blasted, in fact, could have happened and performed anytime in any space without really losing their traumatic essence and their traumatising impact. Nonetheless, as it happens with every patient's mind, psychoanalysis proves to be a valuable key to read Kane's work in depth, leaving at the same time her biographical facts aside. Blasted is not an expression of individual, personal trouble: it is rather an account of a universally extended trauma. The same trauma expressed by the oedipal myth. Thus, in both performances characters can be noticed as reflecting the main protagonists of the oedipal tale. It is by no means a coincidence that both works present a triadic nucleus of human 22 Diana Taylor, The archive and the repertoire: performing cultural memory in the Americas, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 239.

7

components. This nucleus can be represented by either a real family or a pseudo-family, which can otherwise be identified with a simple, primary aggregation based on power relations. In Blasted there is a triangle formed by Ian, Cate and the Soldier; in Oedipus Rex, instead, the triangle is respectively composed by Oedipus, Jochasta and Laius. Pasolini's three characters are in many ways congruent to Kane's in their behaviour and attitudes, disclosing their essential archetypical nature. To put it in Jungian terms, mythical archetypes can be exploited as an allegory or as a metaphor of the present human condition. Myth reveals therefore the ancestral character of trauma and its anthropological importance to the extent that it can be transmitted from father to son in the same way as it can be conveyed to the audience. Cate shows an unusual maternal instinct that makes her resemble Jochasta. She reminds of the archetypical violated mother particularly during Scene Five, when she commits metaphorical suicide surrendering to the horrors of war. Her last actions are drinking gin (Ian's hallmark) and sucking her thumb again in failure: her self has been destroyed.23 Ian coincides with Oedipus. He is a 'killer' 24 but at the same time he is incredibly fragile. His trauma is still the cause of plague, but this time plague has hit his body instead of hitting the surroundings. Thebes is right inside his tortured lungs and liver and has no hope. The Soldier corresponds to Laius partly because of his relative marginality and part for his will to affirm his masculine power raping Ian. This time it is him that blinds Ian-Oedipus re-enacting his own trauma upon him. Secondly, silence in both representations is the failure to express the incommunicable, but also the mute attitude of a traumatised mind, while the rhythmic, periodical sound like seasonal rain in Blasted, or Japanese music in Oedipus Rex communicate an internal fragmentation and an external disruption. Thirdly, the exercise of violence to gain power concerns only male characters (Ian-Soldier; Oedipus-Laius). Another of the central oedipal motifs that links Pasolini and Kane's works is blindness. In Sophocles' play, Oedipus' blinding is obscene, in the sense that it is not represented on the stage. Chrisochou highlights how 'the audience, who are averted from this event’s literal and actual performance [...] are called upon to visualize Oedipus' self-blinding in their mind's eye.' 25 Interestingly, both Pasolini and Kane choose to represent it on the screen and on stage. Chrisochou is then right to affirm that 'Oedipus, as actor-cum-performer, transmits enigmatic 23 Kane, Complete Plays, p. 61. 24 Ibid., p. 30. 25 Panayota Chrisochou, 'The si(eye)ght of trauma: Oedipal wounds, tragic visions, and averted gazes from the time of Sophocles to the twenty first century', Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, vol. 1, 1 (2012), p. 18.

8

signifiers or visual gestures in performance that the spectator-cum-analyst is called upon to decipher and subsequently assimilate.'26 A definition of the concept of trauma is pivotal to its analysis in terms of performing arts. Marc Amfreville illustrates Freud's thought briefly but very clearly: his view on the mechanics of trauma changes in time, but it basically shows two moments: the thorough repression of an event (which can be real or concocted) and its sudden recollection after experiencing an accident that reminds of it.27 According to Rudolf Bernet, the self-affirmation of an individual lays its foundations on their ability to survive life-menacing conditions. When the ability to overcome psychologically dangerous situations is absent, trauma appears, bringing about the annihilation of individual identity.28 This internal rupture coincides with a momentary disappearance of the self, to which Freud attributes a self-defensive nature. Traumatic experiences are so unbearable that the individual, when experiencing them, just tilts and leaves to the unconscious the work of living and elaborating them. Consequently, as Freud writes, the traumatised patients subconscious reaction is a refusal to remember, while at the same time their traumatic experience inevitably reemerges during their unconscious states.29 Immediately after having experienced 'l'épreuve d'un non-répresentable', the traumatised find themselves shocked, repeatedly thinking '«Me voici, malgré moi»'.30 Specifically, after this first acknowledgement, the traumatised patient may unsuccessfully try to live as normally as before, but will not manage to: a traumatic experience leads to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which determines amnesia, dissociation, repetitive flashbacks.31 The condition of post-traumatic stress disorder is thus the natural consequence of the individual personality being tore apart into fragments; and every single fragment, as illustrated by Ferenczi, can suffer on its own. Hence, this internal rupture (this tearing of oneself into pieces) interrupts one's personality. Attempts to recover the original unity are made by trying to reconstruct the traumatic event putting these fragments back together: trying to figure out a way to recover normality. Here is the reason 26 Ibid., p. 22. 27 Marc Amfreville, 'Fluctuations: double, spectre et trauma', Révue française des études américaines, 109 (2006), p. 35. 28 Rudolf Bernet, 'Le sujet traumatisé', Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 2 (2000), p. 141. 29 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 152. 30 Bernet, 'Le sujet traumatisé', p. 142. 31 Caruth, Unclaimed experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, p. 152.

9

why the patient urges to repeat the traumatic event instead of remembering it. 32 In a nutshell, it may be figuratively rendered by the image of having in mind a device which got stuck, with no possibility to unblock it: one is having a proper obstruction inside one's mind and, trying to manage it, one keeps repeating gestures or words like a broken electronic toy. The impossibility to integrate traumatic experience is reflected in its non-communicability. Making reference to Amfreville's words: 'figure même du paradoxe, le trauma se dit dans son impossibilité à se dire, et cet échec même du dire signe la présence du trauma'.33 Thus, the role of silence communicates something of trauma, as far as it is a fairly universal condition, and everyone can understand the difficulties in re-presenting a condition which is not even linguistically presentable. The impossibility to represent trauma by means of language leaves it all to the 'iconic' level, 34 that is, on the interpretative, performative dimension. Psychological trauma is a typical human reaction to a determined category of stimuli, but its individuality and transiency make it hard to communicate on a rational level. Traumatic flashback is mostly characterised by involuntariness and the presence of a particular image in association with it. Anyone who has experienced psychological trauma will find oneself struggling against the apparition of a certain kind of images, or sounds. All this is not necessarily linked to a hallucinatory state. It is then assumed that psychological trauma may depend on a physical one; Freud's ideas in regard to this point remained rather constant throughout his life, but, as Greg Forter illustrates, the association can be considered inexact.35 Experienced violence, be it either sexual or not, is what determines a great part of the world population's traumata since the earliest age. However, it may also be provoked by visual means, which often cause strong emotional responses. Hence, one should consider a second factor: the link between image and trauma. The power of image in conveying trauma ought not to be underestimated: the human mind can be much frailer than we expect it to be, as far as traumatised individuals are concerned. And what is more, a traumatic image can be real or imagined itself: this means that trauma can be felt and represented through a set of techniques that recall images all the same. 32 Amfreville, 'Fluctuations: double, spectre et trauma', p. 37. 33 Ibid. 34 Diana Taylor, 'Trauma and Performance: Lessons from Latin America', PMLA, vol. 121, 5 (2006), p. 1675. 35 Greg Forter, 'Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form', Narrative, vol. 15, 3 (2007), p. 263.

10

Words convey images as certain images convey trauma. What we perceive as suddenly unnatural, unusual, violent beyond the limit of the bearable happens to be traumatic. Performance can be included in the category of image as well. Movements are images to the audience, just as words are: one can easily consider that performance and language share a deep metaphorical dimension. Images should not be considered only as motionless pictures. One might well speak of imagery as well when one thinks of performance: to perform is to create a sequence of images and sounds. To give an instance, let us consider Noh theatre, which constructs its visual representation in composite images. It certainly is performative, despite its steadiness: its performativity entails the utter importance of image composition. The focus of Western theatre on natural gestures and quicker movements on the stage does not mean that image is being put on the background: what we always experience during a theatrical and cinematographic performance are images integrated with sound, be it music or speech. Hence, to perform is to speak a language, or more precisely to reproduce a code of more or less symbolic images intended to have an effect on the audience: this is the reason why the code of trauma can be called performative. Generally, art is a way to elaborate grief, whatever its nature may be. But one should be right to assume that the most appropriate media to represent trauma and reenact it are performing arts. In which way and by which means can the director choose to represent trauma? In this work, the performing arts taken into account are cinema and theatre, which happen to be, to a considerable extent, genealogically related and similar to each other. Therefore, they have both the potential to be as well as not to be realistic representations of a story. What is the point of this? Taking into consideration a drama or a film with traumatic features or dealing with traumatised characters, one has to acknowledge that they require certain strength in their mis en scène. A playwright, a screenwriter, a director or an actor all have to be at least theoretically familiar with the emotion they are seeking to represent in order to be able to achieve a satisfying quality in its reenactment. Performance can thus be rightly called a 'twice behaved behavior'; and consequentially, '[l]ike performance, trauma always makes itself felt viscerally in the here and now”.36 Taylor's view on performance as cultural heritage coincides with the concept of ritual. 37 To be 36 Taylor, 'Trauma and Performance', p. 1975. 37 Diana Taylor, 'Performance and intangible cultural heritage', in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies ed. by Tracy C. Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 93.

11

embedded in cultural heritage, a performance must be periodically reproduced, in a word: ritual. But what happens when the ritualised performance has traumatic features? Is there actually any possibility for trauma to be represented, repeatedly performed, ritualized? Taylor speaks of performances that re-enact history:38 then a historical, collective trauma can be ritualized. Interestingly, Pasolini, in his Manifesto for a New Theatre, depicts theatre-going and performing as being ritual.39 Here, both theatre and cinema are being taken into consideration: Is there any intensity variation if one chooses to represent trauma and its surroundings through either cinema or theatre? Are these arts really so different? It is commonly assumed that we perceive a performance as 'unmediated'40 only when we see it on a stage. Why is it common to see that “stage actors can be considered the '''authors'' of their performance ' while film actors can be seen only as 'raw material'?41 Perhaps it is a little simplistic to say theatre is more direct than cinema on the sole basis of a relative physical proximity. It is true that the transmission of feeling, and therefore of traumatic emotions, can be carried out on a higher degree when the audience feels proximity; but this very proximity has not to be necessarily physical. Just as Freud might have been mistaken when building up the analogy with psychic and physical trauma, people can realise they are in danger of doing the same with this assumption. What one accepts as a cultural given might change, as culture is an evershifting factor. Philip Auslander states that 'there can be no such thing as technologically unmediated performance because performance itself is a technology and the idea of performance is a mediation that shapes audience identity and perception of an event.'42 Therefore, far from saying that cinema and theatre are the same thing, nonetheless it can be affirmed that they identify with two genealogical forms of live representation, as they both represent the body in its entirety: image in motion and sound. Taylor writes: “Actors and dancers internalize a concept and repeat, rehearse, and recreate”. 43 To some extent, the very same mechanism is used by a traumatised mind in its struggle for selfdefense. The only difference consists in the presence of memory, which is partially or completely 38 Ibid., pp. 98-99. 39 Pier Paolo Pasolini and Thomas, Simpson, 'Manifesto for a New Theatre', PAJ: a Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 29, 1 (2007), p. 129. 40 Philip Auslander, 'Live and technologically mediated performance', in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. by Tracy C. Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 108. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., p. 118. 43 Taylor, 'Performance and intangible cultural heritage', p. 101.

12

annihilated in a traumatised state. But additionally, being trauma an individual experience, the act of performing it makes it shift from an individual to a collective dimension. The ritualisation of a performance with traumatic meanings may be understood as the attempt of a determined cultural group to overcome the so-called collective trauma. As far as those performances which entail traumatic experience are concerned, they embody a way of working through trauma itself.44 This means that their production is deeply involved with the personal perception of trauma from the artist's point of view. But what is peculiar to Oedipus Rex and Blasted is that despite being labelled as obscure, enigmatic or obscene artworks, they carry out their task in perpetuating trauma all the same, to any kind of audience. This might signify that trauma-driven performances can be universally understood as far as human feelings are concerned. Taylor states then that 'performance, like trauma, is not infinitely transmittable or transferable'. 45 This general affirmation might work for those performances concerned with human right activism to which Taylor makes reference, but what about theatrical and cinematographic products? The works taken into analysis in this essay are two works of art: perhaps to a certain point they could be considered exclusive, but it is not so. In spite of their peculiarity inducing some critics to consider them highbrow artworks, Oedipus Rex and Blasted are 'popular'. Jointed to transparent cultural values, they show the baseness of human existence, which is fundamentally traumatic in itself. What a traumatic performance tries to communicate is thus 'the truth of an event, and the truth of its incomprehensibility.'46 In a few words, trauma performance is a representation that calls out for real responses from the audience as well as from the playwright, the director or the performer, and is very much akin to traumatic re-enactment, if not a real one. The artistic re-enactment, anyway, does not rely on instinctive behavioural phenomena only: it draws on a collective symbolic code as well. The images and sounds have to be thought of, chosen, constructed, tied together in a meaningful sequence in order to achieve universal value. They mirror the above illustrated features of primeval trauma to convey its essence to the public, and in this way its perpetual transmission is ensured. This society is not able to search for a solution to overcome this primeval trauma: it just constantly repeats it and transfers it to new forms, while basically remaining the same: that is the reason of its representations' inexorable circularity.

44 Taylor, 'Trauma and Performance', p. 1674. 45 Ibid., p. 1677. 46 Caruth, Unclaimed experience, p. 153.

13

In a nutshell, it is true that the oedipal tale has acquired universal status with the rise of Freudian psychoanalytic thought; nevertheless it is an astonishingly representative tale of a repression of instinctive pulses that inevitably sound familiar to Western tradition: it would not have had any power on the psychoanalytic choice of imagery otherwise. The figurative repetition of oedipal elements in the last centuries' artistic performances can be understood as the product of an excessive concern with psychoanalysis as a generalising attitude towards the human condition, but one must acknowledge that Oedipus' myth was being represented, not created, in Sophocles' time as well: in all likelihood there is much more to be discovered underneath the assumption of oedipal myth as a mere psychoanalytic tool. Considering the oedipal story as a myth of origins, that is, a myth which is supposed to give birth to history, it might incorporate elements that concern a sort of primeval trauma. Thus, it would be perhaps reasonable to think that its systematic representation coincides with an attempt in raising awareness of a determined human condition. In Pasolini and Kane's case, the Oedipal element is remarkably strong and repeats itself again with a defined set of symbols embedded in performance, just as in Sophocles' time. Obviously the symbolic code of the oedipal trauma has been subjected to changes throughout years and centuries; however, it has had such a long, unresolved existence that it keeps repeating itself in what one may call the Western 'collective unconscious' 47 and in its artistic products.

47 Carl Jung, The collective unconscious and its archetypes (Gent: Satsang Press, 2010), via .

14

15

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES Kane, Sarah, Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001) Oedipus Rex. Dir. Pasolini Pier Paolo. Perf. Franco Citti, Silvana Mangano, Carmelo Bene, Alida Valli, Julian Beck, Ninetto Davoli. Alfredo Bini, 1967

SECONDARY SOURCES Amfreville, Marc, 'Fluctuations: double, spectre et trauma', Révue française des études américaines, 109 (2006), pp. 27-38. Auslander, Philip, 'Live and technologically mediated performance', in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. by Tracy C. Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 108-20 Benedict, David, 'Disgusting violence? Actually it's quite a peaceful play', The Independent, Sunday 22 January 1995. Bernet, Rudolf, 'Le sujet traumatisé', Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 2 (2000), pp. 141-61 Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1996) Chrisochou, Panayota, 'The si(eye)ght of trauma: Oedipal wounds, tragic visions, and averted gazes from the time of Sophocles to the twenty first century', Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, vol. 1, 1 (2012), pp. 15-26 Forter, Greg, 'Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form', Narrative, vol. 15, 3 (2007), pp. 259-285 Greig, David, Introduction, in Sarah Kane, complete plays (London: Methuen, 2001) Jung, Carl, The collective unconscious and its archetypes (Gent: Satsang Press, 2010), via Pasolini Pier Paolo and Simpson Thomas, 'Manifesto for a New Theatre', PAJ: a Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 29, 1 (2007), pp. 126-138 Siciliano, Enzo, Vita di Pasolini (Milano: Rizzoli, 1979)

16

Sierz, Aleks, 'Sarah Kane', in Stack, Oswald, Pasolini on Pasolini. Interviews with Oswald Stack (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1970) Taylor, Diana, 'Performance and intangible cultural heritage', in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies ed. by Tracy C. Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 91-104.

— The archive and the repertoire: performing cultural memory in the Americas, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003)

— 'Trauma and Performance: Lessons from Latin America', PMLA, vol. 121, 5 (2006), pp. 1674-1677

17