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SAMUEL BECKETT’S LEGACIES IN CARYL CHURCHILL’S LATER PLAYS
The great ecological disasters of 2010, harbingers of much more ‘interesting’ things
to come, seem to cover all four elements which, according to the ancient cosmology,
make up our universe: air (volcanic ash clouds from Iceland immobilizing air travel
over Europe), earth (mud slides in China), fire (rendering Moscow almost unlivable),
water (polluted by oil in the Gulf of Mexico, floods displacing millions in Pakistan).*°
Churchill describes in Far Away as if it were a fairy-tale the progressive
ecological destruction of nature and unstoppable wars, which might induce
the collapse of democracy and the birth ofa regimented society controlled bya
totalitarian leader. She exhibits this further through Mrs Jarrett’s monologues
in Escaped Alone, but it is more ominous than the way it is depicted in Far
Away, because in Escaped Alone such catastrophes are juxtaposed with the
everyday lives of the women. They invade the women’s peaceful-looking lives.
Mrs Jarrett’s (or Churchill’s) fear about the possible end of the world is not
a science-fiction fantasy anymore. Her prophecy has the sense of bukimi
(a Japanese word meaning something ominous or uncanny), which Paul K.
Saint-Amour refers to as “pre-traumatic syndrome.”””
PRE-TRAUMATIC SYNDROME AND ANIMALITY
Pre-traumatic syndrome permeated more than ever in the period between the
end of World War II and the Cold War era, and has lasted up to the present
day, though many of us are not aware of it unless it surfaces. When we hear
the news of mass death/murder caused by war, terror, a natural disaster or
an environmental crisis, we are faced with the vulnerability of being human.
Beckett was well aware of such catastrophes, which meant that he was
always on the side of the vulnerable, but he never specifically referred to a
catastrophe itself." The origin of his characters’ trauma is never clarified in
his work, though it is clear that they are thrown into life in pain by some
unknown cause. To Beckett, being born into this world is itself a catastrophe.
As birth is something that cannot be reasoned, death is also a mystery to
us, so that we fear our own death. Hence, if birth gives pain to him, death
39 Zizek: End Times, 420.
10 Paul K. Saint-Amour, in his Tense Future, redefines modernity in the inter-war period as
traumatic from the “memory ofa disastrous history [World War I] and the prospect of an even
more devastating futurity [World War II]”. Paul K. Saint-Amour: Tense Future: Modernism,
Total War, Encyclopedic Form, Oxford, Oxford University, 2015, 35. He especially focuses on
the latter “pre-traumatic syndrome” (Ibid., 15) exemplified in the sense of the bukimi people
in Hiroshima felt before the atomic bomb attack.
“| It is, however, noteworthy that Beckett wrote a play entitled Catastrophe. As the play depicts
a rehearsal scene in the theater, the meaning of the title invokes “the denouement ofa drama”
as well as “a disaster.”
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