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SAMUEL BECKETT’S LEGACIES IN CARYL CHURCHILL’S LATER PLAYS collapse of the capitalist economy, and anti-immigration policies could be accelerating the possible annihilation ofthe earth. Today, our lives are often brutally imposed on by what Slavoj Zizek calls “multiple versions of external intrusions” that could easily “destroy the symbolic texture of the subject’s identity.”!? Those who are victimized by repeated external interruptions such as war, terror, natural disasters, lack of food and medicine, poverty, or other violence are physically wounded, mentally traumatized, and emotionally hurt. Zizek calls such victims “post-traumatic’ subjects.”'? Churchill, in her plays, warns of such an apocalyptic time as ours through her characters, who are inflicted with trauma caused by multiple versions of external intrusions. Ihe next section will discuss how Churchill depicts such post-traumatic subjects in this atomic age in her later works. CHURCHILLS POST-TRAUMATIC SUBJECTS In her discussion of Churchill, Elin Diamond, who finds some similarities between Churchill and Beckett, contends, “Penning her first post-Godot play as early as 1958, she [Churchill] inherits the innovations of postnuclear absurdism and takes historical and psychic fragmentation as a given.” Churchill’s characters, trapped in traumatic conditions, reveal the fear in the way we express the unspeakable. In an extreme case, it becomes incoherent, illogical, and even meaningless, but through such traumatic and schizophrenic speech can be expressed a mad dystopia, as described in Mrs Jarrett’s monologues in Escaped Alone. Even the dialogues that sound normal in Churchill’s recent plays, such as Here We Go and Escaped Alone, seldom consist of full sentences and are fragmentary. Pauses and silences, or in other words, emptiness, dominate them. At the same time, her characters, like the tramps in Waiting for Godot, are compelled to say something as if words or language games can fill the silence or the void. In the first funeral party scene of Here We Go, for example, the mourners’ superficial conversations provide the audience with little information, from which are revealed the deceased’s last days with 2 Slavoj Zizek: Living in the End Times, London — New York, Verso, 2011, 292. 8 Ibid., 293. M Elin Diamond: Beckett and Caryl Churchill along the Möbius Strip, in Linda Ben-Zvi — Angela Moorjani (eds.): Beckett at 100: Revolving It All, Oxford, Oxford University, 2008, 288. Here We Go consists of three independent scenes. Fragmentary speech is used in the first scene, a party after a funeral where ten mourners exchange short lines. The second scene consists of ten dead people’s monologues and a long speech by one dead person, while the last scene is a mime by an old ill person who is repeatedly dressed, undressed and has his nightclothes put on him by a carer, which is reminiscent of Beckett’s ...but the clouds... . + 77
