engleski

Theatrical ‘Lethemes’: The Ghosts of Writing and Their Antic/Antique Disposition on Stage

The relationships between theatre and memory have conquered for themselves, within Theatre and Performance Studies, a field of research pertaining to a ‘hauntology’ of drama and performance. The ghost of writing haunts all relating to the past, and divides its presuppositions in two different ways of understanding of and accounting for the connection between memory as resuscitation and oblivion as death. They result in two different strategies, the one striving to forget writing, and the other aiming to bring incessantly to the attention of the subject of memory the necessity to remember, or to forget to forget, the quotation marks under which the writing – the scene of writing, the theatre of memory staged by representation, the text that writes the reality while simulating to reproduce it – re-presents the fictions of the referent. Keeping in mind these two contrasting versions of the contemporary “genealogical drive”, I will focus on the ways in which two ‘parahistorical’ dramatic texts, as heterotopic sites of quotation marks, stage the motifs of the past, truth, identity, memory/oblivion, trace, specter, trauma, archive, writing, and theatre. In my readings of Pirandello’s Henry IV and Arethaeus by the Croatian author Miroslav Krleža, I will explore how the two plays, both involving the issue of amnesia, interweave intertextual traces of Dante’s, Shakespeare’s and Nietzsche’s ghosts with metatheatrical ‘hauntological’ insights on the uncanny performative power of spectral scripts.

memory; theatre; performance; hauntology; ghost of writing

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