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CHAPTER Two: WHAT Is A DRAMA EVENT
and her character’s relationship to it further, because as Amoiropoulos points
out “the envisioning of taking the eyes out, though it remained imagined and
was not carried out, has made Liz see herself in the position of the mother
who did blind her kid in the newspaper story”.“ He claims it is a turning
point for Liz, which is a crucial step towards her deciding to take her own life
in order to give back her son’s. The turning point is connected to the character
starting to understand the situation she is in through understanding the other
mother.
Amoiropoulos argues that it is important that in the DE the personal
narrative is connected to the social site.“° As Liz’s speech develops she
starts connecting her situation to images of the wider social world. Taking
Amoiropoulos’ analysis further we can also see that the extreme situation will
engage a reaction from the audience, depending on how it is done by the actor,
the scissors hovering above the boy’s eyes can possibly open the space for
the audience to connect imaginatively to this moment, connecting the specific
event in the story of the play not only with the social site, but also to that of
the imagination of the audience. The Bondian concept of Site will be revisited
later in more detail.
The role of cathexis in creating a DE is acknowledged by Amoiropoulos too.
He discusses the use of the sheet that is shredded in this scene and how it can
be connected to her ripping herself apart.* He also points out that the sheet
connects this event to the events of the first panel, where it became central
in the argument between Liz and Richard. It is useful to look at the scissor
as an example of cathexis in this scene, I will return to this later in my own
analysis of A Window.
Amoiropoulos describes locating a possible DE as locating “conflicts and
contradictions within the characters that may suggest an immediate relation
to the conflict between the existential and the metaphysical, corruption
and radical innocence respectively"."" In this case we find the existential
aspect being that Liz cannot survive without the drug she uses to escape
from the social reality outside the window and this comes to clash with her
metaphysical, deeply human need to bea mother to her son. The contradiction
between the two cannot be resolved, driving her to free Dan by committing
suicide, which again is a contradiction. Liz’s extreme situation can also be
seen as the collision of stories. Amoiropoulos points to the clash between
the story of Dan’s injury which he recounts in the scene and the story of
blinding.*”*
414
Amoiropoulos: Balancing Gaps, 290.
#5 Ibid., 318.
#6 Ibid., 313.
#7 Ibid., 182.
#8 Ibid., 278.
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