해롤드 핀터의 『재는 재로』에 나타나는 개인의 기억과 집단 트라우마, 그 수행의 제의적 의미

• Published in: 영미문학연구 Vol. 39; pp. 5 - 36
• Main Authors: 김다산, Dasan Kim
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Korean
• Published: 영미문학연구회 15.12.2020
• Subjects: collective trauma; history; private memory; recollection; transference; 영어와문학
• ISSN: 1976-197X; 2733-4961
• DOI: 10.46562/jesk.39.1

This paper aims to examine Harold Pinter’s antepenultimate play, Ashes to Ashes, with an intense focus on its political performativity. By delving into the political dimension of memory and its performance, this study defines the act of remembering in Pinter’s play as critical dynamics in forming the playwright’s political discourse. In the play, Rebecca performs trauma within the narrative domain. Through the act of remembering and memory re-construction, Rebecca brings individual experience to the realm of communal involvement. The shifting subjects between perpetrator, victim, survivor, and bystander in Rebecca’s recollection inform communal responsibility for atrocity and transfigure personal suffering into collective history. In contrast, Devlin performs trauma in the corporeal dimension. He eventually repeats the past by replicating the exact kind of physical abuse the ex-lover had enacted upon Rebecca. The past and the present, performance and reenactment of trauma all dovetail in the person of Devlin as he performs the role of the ex-lover. In addition, the repetitive references to the Holocaust not only evolve private memory into communal history but also transcend its political discourse beyond a specific geographical/temporal context. The play was written in 1996 when Pinter’s political critiques of American imperialism reached their climax. The play’s opening line says, “Time: Now.” While the characters’ trauma of Fascism works as a political metaphor for the playwright’s contemporary preoccupation with US foreign policy, the de-contextualization of temporal dimension further expands the play’s political context into a far more universal human experience. In the end, the transference of experience and the shared sense of guilt promote the kind of political awareness to face the ‘truth’ Pinter urged for in his Nobel speech.