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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. + 104 +
