Barker Howard - Body and event in Howard Barkers drama: from catastrophe to anastrophe in The castle and other plays

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Howard Barker is a central off-centre dramatist in more than one sense. Since his very first (radio) playOne Afternoonon the 63rd Level of the North Face of the Pyramid of Cheops the Great(1970, broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)), through one of the culminating achievements of his drama Found in the Ground (2001), up to his most recent plays such as Blok/Eko (2011), The Forty (written 2006 staged 2011),Harrowingand Uplifting Interviews(2016;HUI), andIn the Depthsof a Dead Love(2016;IDDL), his playsthrough their heterotopic landscapestend to depart from realistic aesthetic, historically recognizable settings, and everyday socio-symbolic reality. These plays, by thrusting forward a now that resists being turned into a commodified new, insist on keeping a distance from the ideologically overdetermined history of the present moment and on their aesthetic and ontological autonomy . The latter two attributes are indeed posited by Barker as necessary for imaginative creation, becoming-other(wise) for the individual characters and audience, and moral speculation.

To give a fleeting glimpse into the manner in which the plays incarnate the foregoing features, the first play (One Afternoon) is set in ancient Egypt, where workers, with a simmering sense of discontent and defiance, are encumbered with constructing a spectacular edifice to both immortalize the monarch and to serve as a symbol of the ideological imperishability of his power. Found in the Ground , with its expressionistic setting, albeit situated in a historically indeterminate place, is haunted by Egyptian pyramids in the backdrop, where their silhouette looms over the current setting. While driven by a thanatotically iterative impulse stemming from the European unconscious, this latter play evinces the traumatized landscapes of the melancholy European psyche (rooted in the denial and/or repression of traumatic losses: WWI, WWII, Balkan Wars, etc.) and contains residual traces of European history(burning of books and libraries, a judge from Nuremberg, and incinerated remainders of war victims). The last three plays mentioned in the previous paragraph depict either a wretched hut on the frontier of an indeterminate Empire (HUI) or a well in ancient China, while no trace of actual historyof China is discernible (IDDL). Indeed, in cases akin to the latter, the name of the place in the play serves a semiotic, rather than historical, function; more strictly, the spatial-historical descriptor serves as a signifier of ontological remoteness and historical difference of the world of the play, thereby evoking a sense of non-realism and non-topicality.

One Afternoon, likeThe Castle, depicts a situation in which a geometrically complex and metaphysically overdetermined piece of architecture the pyramidepitomizing (either metaphorically or literally) an ideologically contrived hierarchy not only exacts the imaginative, intellectual/mental, and emotional investment of individuals, but constitutes the individual subject by moulding their apparently personally motivated desires, interests, and values. The pyramid inOne Afternoon, analogous to the castle in the eponymous play, features simultaneously as an Ideological State Apparatus (as embodying the eternal values of art, culture, and divinely determined history ) and a Repressive State Apparatusin which workers are exploited through the crude exertion of penal/punitive force and discipline. Ideology, as depicted inOne Afternoon(as well as many other early plays, includingThe Castle), instigates and embeds both productivity consciousness and corporal incentive. As such, ideology, as conceived in these plays, is closely resonant with Althussersdefinition of it: an imaginary assemblage or an imaginary lived relation; more strictly, Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of the individuals to their real conditions of their existence (1977, 151, 153). As Althusserfurther elaborates: It is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that men represent to themselves in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there. It is this relation which is the center of every ideological, i.e. imaginary, representation of the real world (154). Akin to