Rehearsing the Postcolonial Oedipus
Rejouer l'Oedipe postcolonial: les fantômes révolutionnaires dans le théâtre contemporain
Résumé
By exploring the darkest recesses of the unconscious, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and The Tempest have bequeathed to contemporary playwrights two canonical paradigms of the relation to the fatherly Other which have nurtured a renewed creative boldness, especially in the area of Caribbean postcolonial drama. His seminal (yet unconscious) contribution to the methodical study of hidden mechanisms operating under the cover of language to thwart the patriarchal Law has proved essential to understanding the post-colonial dramatic ethos. Shakespeare’s plays have indeed suggested to Freud and Lacan the material from which they could appraise the resurgence of repressed desires in psychic life. But they also have extended their influence over the authorial unconscious of Caribbean dramatists like Derek Walcott and Caryl Phillips whose works stage the shadow of a towering ghostly presence reminiscent of Hamlet’s father or that of the subservient Ariel. Walcott’s Bolom in Ti-Jean and his brothers, or the white female apparition in Dream on Monkey Mountain, for instance, bear many functional similarities with Prospero’s enslaved spirit, for that matter. And when it comes to Phillips’s Strange Fruit, one cannot but liken the telling absence of Wallace Marshall’s ghost to that of Hamlet’s father. That such enigmatic figures perform the role of exacerbating repressed desires is beyond doubt. The latter answer to the slightest beckon of psychoanalytic incursion where they can best express their revolutionary potential which could be subsumed in the following dilemma: “To beat, or not to beat the phallus : that is the question”. It is a contention of this paper to show that the solution to this riddle may be attained by rehearsing the postcolonial Oedipus with a particular focus on the Caribbean nexus.
