Oldal 83 [83]
MARIKO HORI TANAKA
point of grotesque absurdity.”” Mrs Jarrett’s monologues refer to catastrophes
caused by four elements: water, air, fire and earth, but at the same time
every natural disaster in this future world reflects leading-edge technology.
The landslide in her first monologue, which was caused by land development
carried out by “senior executives,” “buried villages,” where “new communities
of survivors underground developed skills of feeding off the dead” and as
“time passed,” “various sects developed with tolerance and bitter hatred”
among the underground inhabitants till they “went insane.”*° In her second
monologue, she says water overflowed in the baths, swimming pools and rivers
as well as “the walls of water came from the sea,” and those who survived by
running to rooftops were saved by helicopter “when the flood receded,” and
the shovels and buckets used to scoop up the muck “were stored in the flood
museums.”*" In the third monologue, just like a medieval plague, an epidemic
spread from “[t]he chemicals leak[ing] through cracks in the money” and
caused “domestic violence,” “school absenteeism,” “miscarriages,” or “birth
deformities.”*® “The remaining citizens were evacuated to camps in northern
Canada.”*? However, as the fourth monologue reveals, “[t]he hunger began
when eighty per cent of food was diverted to tv programmes” so that “the
dying could [just] watch cooking” on “iPlayer” or “smartphones.”*4 “The obese
sold slices of themselves until hunger drove them to eat their own rashers.””
In the fifth monologue, “[t]he wind developed by property developers” blew
so hard that everything — cars, citizens, and pets, as well as “shanty towns”
— was blown into the sky and cleared away.°° The sixth monologue focuses
again on a plague, which this time “started when children drank sugar
developed from monkeys” and so “[g]overnments cleansed infected areas and
made deals with allies to bomb each other’s capitals.”*’ The last monologue is
about fire spreading from one place to another. But in this case, “[flinally the
wind drove the fire to the ocean, where salt water made survivors faint” and
“[tlhe blackened area was declared a separate country with zero population,
zero growth and zero politics.”** As one can guess from this summary, the
dystopia Mrs Jarrett narrates is bizarre. However, we cannot laugh away what
she says, because every recent terrible disaster which has caused mass death
is implied in her speech, as the following passage from Zizek exemplifies:
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Taylor: Review.
30 Caryl Churchill: Escaped Alone, London, Nick Hern Books, 2016, 8.
31 Ibid., 12.
32 Ibid., 17.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 22.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 28.
37 Ibid., 29.
38 Ibid., 37.
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