La Conciencia Disidente en la Teoría del Delito

At the Inland Sea is Bond’s first play commissioned by Big Brum and was

first directed by Geoff Gillham at Broadway School, Aston, Birmingham, on 16 October 1995. This play depicts how the Son, as a student preparing for his examination in his room, encounters and interacts with the Woman, who comes from the concentration camp and is about to be gassed. While the Woman demands that the Son should tell a story to save her baby, the Son is unable to tell the right story to change the life course of the Woman

and her son. Out of desperation, the Son even takes the baby away and makes the time in the concentration camp stand still, but this action still fails to save the baby. The Mother, however, cannot see the Woman and thinks that the Boy’s strange behaviour is caused by his anxiety towards the examination. At the end of the play, the Son succeeds in finishing the Woman’s story in his words and tells his mother that he is not a child anymore.

Although Bond’s theory of subjectivity still presupposes the possibility of the subject being a coherent and autonomous self endowed with imagination and reason, his drama tends to complicate, even contradict, his theoretical statements. The structure of the self in At the Inland Sea is one of such instances. As Bond states that the Old Woman is ‘someone from the boy’s mind’ (Stuart 1998: 152), it is reasonable to read the Woman also as the Boy’s mental configuration. The emergence of the Woman and her demand that the Boy should tell her baby a story exceeds the Boy’s control – that is, if the Woman is understood to be part of the Boy’s psychic activities, her appearance cannot be domesticated by the Boy’s imagination. As Tony Coult points out, the Woman is not the product of the Boy’s imagination but a challenge to the Boy’s mind (1997: 47):

Boy The soldiers have guns! How will a story stop them? Woman It only has to stop them for a moment. So that they

look down at the stones – for a moment – or look at each other. Then I’ll reach up and put my baby in the tree. Where the branches fork – there. Soldiers don’t look for babies in trees. They’ll think it’s rags blown there by the wind. Someone will find it and keep it.

Boy There’s no story!

The Woman goes to the Boy.

Woman Then why did you bring us here? I don’t know you

– this house – this room – I don’t even know your name. You brought us here. If you can do that you can tell a story. My baby will live. (Bond 1997: 11-12)

and her appearance exhibits the irreducible otherness conjured up within the Boy’s mind. In spite of the fact that the Woman is evoked by the Boy, he cannot preside over this evocation – as if he is surprised and taken hostage by the unknown part of his psyche. In other words, the Boy cannot resist the Woman’s intrusion and must take responsibility for her request.

The unique relationship between the Boy and the Woman can be explained by Levinas’s idea of ‘inspiration’ in ‘Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony’ (1972), in which Levinas asks: ‘Cannot the psychism be thought of as a relation with the unrepresentable? As a relation with a past on the hither side of every present and every representation, not belonging to the order of presence?’ (1996: 101). In terms of Levinas’s notion of psychism as inspiration, the Woman’s emergence can be regarded as ‘[a]n ambivalence that is the exception and the subjectivity of the subject, its very psychism, the possibility of inspiration: to be the author of what was, without my knowledge, inspired in me – to have received, whence we know not, that of which I am the author’ (105). For Levinas, this ambivalence caused by inspiration is the enigmatic trace of the infinite, the responsibility for the other. Levinas also designates this coming to pass of the infinite as ‘the saying’ (104). Education scholar Clarence W. Joldersma relates the idea of inspiration to education by arguing that learning is both a process of spontaneous enjoyment and of being exposed to disturbing rupture. For him, if education can inspire students, students have to open themselves to otherness, that is, a teacher (52). Although, for Levinas, education indeed is more than absorption of knowledge as enjoyment, it is questionable whether the otherness that renders education an ethical relation necessarily derives from a teacher. For the Boy in At the Inland Sea, he must absorb the history taught by a teacher in order to pass the exam. It is therefore not the ethical relation of inspiration that Joldersma argues would take place in teaching because here history has been thematized as ‘the said’ and instrumentalized as materials only to serve the purpose of examination. What disturbs the Boy is not what is taught or what is written in the textbook but what remains unwritten and untaught. What disturbs him is the otherness within himself – or, in Bond’s terms, his radical innocence that singularizes the thematized

history – as well as the ethical moment of the past irreducible to historical accounts.

For Levinas, history is always involved in the process of representation, that is, ‘[t]he assembling of being in the present, its synchronization by retention, memory and history, reminiscence’ (1998: 140). This process of representation, therefore, cannot bear responsibility for the separated entities beyond the grasp of retention. It evades the face of the other. Responsibility, Levinas argues, is only possible when ‘a traumatic hold of the other on the same’ (141). Levinas continues to argue that this traumatic hold is inspiration, which is also the saying instead of ‘the communication of the said’ (143). As I argued in Chapter Three, the saying as the proximity of the other, the exposure to the other, is another term that Levinas uses to describe ethical subjectivity as the-one-for-the-other. What should be noted is the linguistic implication: while the said is what is thematized, the saying is the unthematizable prior to thematization. The Woman’s demand that the Boy should tell a story, in this regard, is the saying just as her emergence is what is inspired in the Boy’s psyche. As the saying, this demand cannot be incorporated into history, nor can it be used to change the course of history. This demand is useless just as the Woman knows that stories can never save her baby from death. Nevertheless, it is precisely this impossibility of the demand that renders this demand unthematizable and makes this demand purely ethical. The Woman’s ghostly apparition cannot be expelled by telling a right story to save the baby because this story is impossible to tell.

Despite this, at the end of the play, the Boy still completes the story the Woman fails to tell to her baby:

Once. A man walking in a dark forest. A hut in the distance. He heard singing from the hut. Happy. Beautiful. He went towards it. Hard. Bushes and trees in the way. He came to the hut. He stopped outside the door. He listened. It was late. He was hungry and tired. He knocked. The singing stopped. The door was unlocked. He opened it and went in. the hut was empty. […] He left the hut and went on. Before he’d gone far the singing in the hut started again. He didn’t turn back. He knew what’d happen if he did. After that, starting from that day, whenever he met someone in the forest sick or old or

wounded or in need he – (Bond 1997: 34)

This forest story could be read as a variation of the forest of Coffee. As the forest in Coffee is a liminal space uncannily governed by multiple imaginations, the forest in this story is also a mysterious space where a hut expected to be full of people, once entered, is found to be empty. While Bond refuses to give any definite answers so as to stimulate the spectator’s imagination, there are still some clues regarding the meaning of the story. Firstly, what happens in the hut can only be heard instead of being seen. However, the impossibility of witness does not prevent the man from careful listening. Secondly, the reason why the sound of singing appears and then disappears is contestable: does the sound exist as external reality, or does it exist as part of the man’s inner reality? Or rather, could it be the case that the sound is situated in-between, that is, it reveals the hidden real both of the hut and of the man? The logic of indeterminacy is similar to the logic that works beneath the transformative journeys experienced by the Boy and Nold, and, in this way, the story can be read as a prototypical narrative of how imagination works in both Coffee and At the Inland Sea. Lastly, the most enigmatic part of the story is the ethical decision made by the man: how does he achieve such ethical understanding as if it is an epiphany? In fact, the relation between the man and the hut corresponds to that between the Boy and the Woman: it is a relation of inspiration and responsibility. The singing from the hut can be both the irretrievable trace of the past and the voice of the man’s conscience – it is an ethical demand whose origin cannot be decided.

But is it possible to continue to tell the stories of the dead, especially those who die from premature death – those who leave so little trace that even their existence could be easily forgotten? Bond reformulates the question in a contemporary situation in The Angry Roads and explores further the relationship between subjectivity and conditions of storytelling.