Page 85 [85]
OCR
MARIKO HORI TANAKA is the pre-traumatic syndrome for every human being as well as for Beckett. He makes us aware that our birth and death are catastrophes which we, the creatures, all have to go through, especially in the post-apocalyptic times when human life is belittled and vulnerable. Churchill shares with Beckett the pre-traumatic syndrome that people today repress, and that is why she, like Beckett, imagines the post-apocalyptic condition of human beings as being similar to that of animals: “I might not be human a bird a bird [...] I might be a rabid street dog foaming a cow up the ramp to the slaughter [...] I might be an insect,” imagines the dead person in Here We Go. Such imagination of one wishing to be other forms of life is repeatedly depicted in Escaped Alone. It creates an atmosphere of bukimi. For example, Vi and Lena refer to their dream of “flying like a bird in the sky’ or of flying “straight up like a lark... or hover like... a kestrel... or an eagle.”“* Sally hates the idea of birds because the idea “leads to cats, pigeons leads to cats,”* and the monologue of her horror about cats goes on and on. Just as all sorts of animals appear and make warfare against one another in Far Away, birds and cats turn into enemies to Sally, who fears being poisoned by those “filthy” animals. The reversal of the powers between small creatures and human beings described in such dialogues by Churchill makes us aware of the fact that human existence is parallel to that of animals, birds and even insects. It reminds us of Beckett’s interests in referring to rats, worms, bees, or ants.”” Both writers find in the birth, survival, and death of small creatures the similar fate of us human beings, from which is shown the vulnerability of a life. Especially after the 1990, Churchill inclines more strongly to describing the parallel between human beings and animals, “demonstrat[ing] that to discount the non-human world is to risk a damaged ecology of all forms of life." The vulnerable in Churchill cannot speak properly, and their words become fragmented just as the language of Beckett’s characters does. The inner monologues by the three women and the lengthy monologues by Mrs Jarrett in particular are confused and disorganized because the women’s fear keeps them from reasoning. One might imagine Mrs Jarrett’s speech as almost the equivalent of Lucky’s “think” in Waiting for Godot. The trauma of the elderly women and their fear of an unknown future are conveyed to us through incoherent, fragmented language. And even within their fragmented conversations, which # Churchill: Here We Go, London, Nick Hern Books, 2015, 27. #3 Churchill: Escaped Alone, 23. 4 Tbid., 24. 4 Ibid., 25. 16 Ibid. 7 See Mary Bryden (ed.): Beckett and Animals, Cambridge, Cambridge University, 2013. 18 Elaine Aston: Caryl Churchill’s “Dark Ecology,” in Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh (eds.): Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage, London, Bloomsbury, 2015, 62. « 84 ¢
