사라 캐인(Sarah Kane)의 텍스트와 트라우마 -<갈망(Crave)>, <4.48 사이코시스(4.48 Psychosis)>를 중심으로

Abstract

This study analyzed Sarah Kane's dramaturgical reception of trauma focused on her late texts Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. Although she left only six texts during the short time as a professional playwright, she has steadily showed interests about the trauma in all of the texts, and, in fact, treated it as one of the key themes. Considering that Kane suffered from deep depression and melancholia, it is possible to assume that fragmented and split personality of Kane is reflected on the writing in unconscious way. The study starts from this premise. The thesis is to research the dramaturgical aspects in terms of how the invisible unsubstantial trauma appears on the texts Crave and 4.48 Psychosis: traumatic aspects of Kane's works make itself more recognizable given that the subjects of enunciation in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis seems to suffer, and may show most extreme and unstable inner status in the last texts being written just before her tragic end. Traces and evidences of Kane's trauma found in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis can be looked under the three subcategories: structure, character, and language. First, the structure has characteristics of repetition and cycle, and it produces the image of horror and repressed feeling. Fractured dialogues repeated in Crave and dramatic compositions cycled in 4.48 Psychosis-as if turning around at 4:48- remind us of endless pain of trauma. It shows that trauma has the high possibility and enormous power to attack you anytime and ruin your life without any expectation. Also even not realizing when on earth you are hooked off from the trauma, the horror and repressed feeling are intensified. Second, characters show deconstructed aspects having only alphabet-name or disembodied voice, and it emphasizes the isolated self in the world. Because trauma makes lose sense of the self and destabilize the construction of the identity and others, characters seem to confine the self in own world. On the other hand, they are eager to be protected and loved in a way of overcoming the trauma. From the unstable and pressed feeling, they try to make relationship with others at hard edge. This sort of double edges of sword that end up denying and craving others at the same time show trauma's dialectic characteristic, also Kane's coherent love theme. Third, language creates uneasy and empty status of mind. Because unconscious trauma exists in eidetic image and senses, it is impossible to explain the trauma's entity and the very source of the pain. In this sense, language does not carry the meaning, but deliver the image to audience as a signifier. Particularly, in 4.48 Psychosis, unique line-disposition like poem and sporadic number arrangement are noticeable. The gap which derived from the imperfect meaningful structure and blank or space is to be placed by human sense, so language becomes the language with image. As language bears intense aspiration to leave its traces, we need to look into the emotion and sentiment embedded in the language and its gap. Kane's trauma unconsciously infiltrates and leaves its traces sporadically in the texts. The cruelty of trauma in the Crave and 4.48 Psychosis does not explain cruel reality, but the real cruelty embodied in structure, character and language that can be only recognized by the human sense. That is, real threat is that the represented world will fail to cohere, and thereby indict the very notion of a coherent reality.