1 Encastling England: Barker, Genealogy, and Histor(y)iography
The only difference between the love that flows through the envelope-walls of our skin or mucous fluids and the love which appropriates for itself in and by the same, lies in the through which allows each one their living becoming. (Irigaray, Elemental Passions 1992, 27)
Desire does not coincide with an unsatisfied need; it is situated beyond satisfaction and nonsatisfaction. The relationship with the Other, or the idea of Infinity, accomplishes it. Each can live it in the strange desire of the Other that no voluptuosity comes to fulfill, nor close, nor put to sleep Neither knowledge nor power. In voluptuosity, the Other—the feminine—retires into its mystery. The relation with it is a relation with its absence. (Levinas, Totality and Infinity 179, 260–1)
The issues of castles and their walls feature prominently in Howard Barker’s The Castle, providing the impetus for many of the play’s events. Considered more generally, castles and their walls confront us with a puzzle in the form of a two-piece tableau-vivant. On the one hand, there is the symptom and crisis to which the castle and its walls (or the act of their construction) offer themselves as remedy.1 On the other, there looms the prospect of socio-political and existential consequences, the inside-outside binary and the phantasmatic jargon of (national-nativist) authenticity embedding an (self-)alienating discourse into the life of the community and the individuals that compose it. Suffice it to say, such a binary discourse refuses both the recognition of the Other per se and its inherent proximal intertwinement with the self. It prompts a dichotomizing relationship that presumes a sovereign self and an other that is either alien and alienating or merely an object of knowledge for the self—thereby breeding “uncanny” repercussions within.2So in an era when sexuality is simultaneously cheap, domestic and soon-to-be forbidden, desire becomes the field of enquiry most likely to stimulate a creative disorder. (AFT 38)
Let us begin with the notion of symptom and crisis. On 22 May 2017, the twenty-two-year-old suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, detonated himself amidst a crowd of people attending a concert in Manchester. Thus what started as a night of elated revelry ended as a gruesome nightmare, leaving twenty-two dead and fifty-nine injured. A first-generation British-Libyan, Abedi was raised by Muslim parents in Manchester, in the UK. It is not the case, then, that he had managed to penetrate the near impregnable walls of the island (although his father had); rather, he was already within the confines of the English castle. One of the motives adumbrated by his relatives was that “he was driven by America’s military attacks in the Middle East [… He] saw children—Muslim children—dying everywhere, and wanted revenge” (Wall Street Journal, 25 May 2017). The gaping wound of this trauma had hardly begun to heal when, on 3 June 2017, a second attack was made by three terrorists (Khuram Shazad Butt, Rachid Redouane, and Youssef Zaghba) in London. This time, the terrorists were equipped with knives and hoax bomb belts. Apparently driven by similar motives to those of Abedi, they attacked innocent civilians, murdering seven and severely wounding forty-eight. While Butt had UK citizenship, this time none of the terrorists were UK born or ethnically British. If we add to these two incidents an earlier terror attack committed on 3 March 2017, we see that all three were intimately linked to, and perpetrated in, the wake of an array of cataclysms: 9/11; the US’ NATO-supported invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; the human crisis and political turmoil instigated by these attacks; the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS); the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia’s proxy wars and interventions in Syria and Yemen; the consequent immigration crisis in Asia and Europe; and last, but not least, the Brexit referendum in which the UK had voted to leave the European Union. Thus we are confronted with cases in which national interests and international issues are tackled both at national borders and on trans-national levels (in wars of power, resources, and faith).
The second part of the tableau-vivant, which foregrounds the contemporaneity of The Castle, relates to the question of the wall , limit, and castle. It concerns the ostensibly anachronistic, yet pervasive, erection of state border walls across the world, ranging from Britain, America, and Israel to Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and India (see Wendy Brown 8–19). This significant phenomenon, which I have termed “encastling,”3 has been widely adopted to assert nation-state sovereignty and curb the flow of illegal immigration. Wendy Brown acutely articulates two main reasons underlying such a move. Not only has nation-state sovereignty been eclipsed and eroded by the steady growth of international economic and governance institutions (such as the IMF and WTO) and the widespread dominance of global markets, but it has also been considerably undermined by neo-liberal rationality. The latter “recognizes no sovereign apart from entrepreneurial decision makers, which displaces legal and political principles (especially liberal commitments to universal inclusion, equality, liberty, and the rule of law) with market criteria, and which demotes the political sovereign to managerial status” (22). Nevertheless, when viewed in the context of globalization and free market capitalism, such a rampant resurgence of interest in wall construction confronts us with four paradoxical relationships: the first is between sovereignty of the nation-state and global (free market) capitalism; the second, between national economy and corporate multinationalism (where fluidity of borders, mobility, and post-nationalist political-economic principles are vital); the third, between national(ist) attempts at physical border building and wall construction, which is jarringly coterminous with the age of cybernetics, networked communication, and virtual power; and the fourth between and post- and trans-nationalist universalized values (democracy, human rights, and cosmopolitanism), and neo-colonial acts of exclusion and stratification (see Brown’s Walled States 20–5). This nexus of paradoxes, lying at the core of wall-construction/encastling discourse, reveals the true nature of late-capitalist political economy. It reveals how the idea of free mobility and freedom of movement in the context of such global order designates only a unilateral—rather than reciprocal—flow (from the Western, and now also Chinese, central to the peripheries of under-developed and developing countries) of commodities—and not people.
Palpable echoes are already audible between the cases we have related to the first part of the tableau-vivant and the issues at stake in The Castle. In the play, Krak, an Arab mathematician, scientist, and architect is brought home as a captive, but resented for speaking English more fluently and eloquently than the natives. Haunted by traumatic memories of his family’s massacre by Christian troops in the Crusades, he harbours a profound sense of vindictiveness and, like the terrorists we have considered, looks for an apt moment for revenge. Because of his training, Krak is entrusted with the task of designing a castle that will establish patriarchal authority and suppress the enemies within (women). The castle is, however, dismantled at the end of the play for a multiplicity of reasons: Stucley’s incremental deterioration of sanity and intensification of paranoia, the relationship (of heteronomous desire and intimacy) between Ann and Krak; Ann’s suicide followed by the mass suicide of women; Skinner’s acts of relentless resistance; and the complicity between Krak and the neighbouring region’s engineer. As is evident, questions of faith, religion, nationhood and nationality (Stucley’s persistent indication of his being English), science, and ethnicity lie at the core of the play.
With regard to the second part of the tableau-vivant in relation to The Castle, we note that the castles are primarily defined by their literal/architectural and symbolic/ideological use of walls . Walls themselves are conspicuous concretizations of the idea of the limit. Resonant with the aforementioned issues and aporias , The Castle evokes a host of problems revolving around the question of borders, territories, and the tension between horizon-crossing and horizon-owning attitudes (respectively exhibited by Stucley/Skinner and Ann). The castle in the play features not only as a thematic-narrative component but also as a physical/actual and virtual prop or object upon the stage. As a result of these physical walls and this psycho-spiritual character, it simultaneously proves to be and refuses to behave as what Susan Leigh Star and Latour call a boundary object.4 In this regard the characterization of the boundary object by Holford et al. illuminates the potentiality of castle walls as boundary constructions:
This is evident in the drastic formal changes the castle undergoes and their epistemological and ontological correlates and corollaries. (The latter are readily observable in the alterations in self-understanding and the mode and meaning of social interactions that affect the personal and social worlds of characters.) Such changes lead to a re-configuration and re-distribution of local objects, thereby changing the global layout (outward-looking) that prompts the audience/reader to reconceive borders and boundaries as fluid and malleable. The question of the wall and, by extension, the nature, function, and history of the limit (and its concomitants such as law, transgression , and liminality), will be dealt with in what follows. For now, we may observe not only that it has been an abiding preoccupation of Barker’s but also that its exploration becomes increasingly ontological in later works such as Fence in Its Thousandth Year (FITY) , Gertrude-The Cry , and More No Still.an effective boundary object is in a constant mode of actual and potential transformation resulting from actors continually co-constructing and re-constructing it in both the physical and imaginary sense. In turn, this active co-construction (or boundary construction) serves as a powerful mechanism for enriched sense-making [34] and non-coercive sense-giving. (2008: 10 Qtd. in Max Stephenson 6)5
Lying at the heart of The Castle is a disciplinary-symbolic apparatus: read allegorically, the castle reveals a certain nationalist-religious ideology and invokes the psycho-geographically inflected imaginary of the nation held by both its rulers and inhabitants. Such a castle, and the concomitant castle mentality, far from being anachronistic (the play is mainly set within a medieval world) takes on salient contemporary reverberations. The castle mentality evoked in Barker’s play , I argue, is more about the contemporary Britain of late-capitalist economy and neo-liberal politics than the Mediaeval Britain of feudal politics and religious crusades. Nevertheless, such a parallel not only reveals continuities between two widely separated historical periods but comes as a riposte to modernity’s claims of progressive politics and Enlightened rationality. Barker, though apparently critiquing the paranoid-fascist mentality of an apparently medieval sovereign, reveals, more generally, the way in which a dichotomizing attitude informs ultra-nationalist and phallogocentric discourses.
Written in 1983 on the commission of the Oxford Playhouse Company, The Castle is undoubtedly one of the most prominent and provocative of Barker’s plays and continues to resonate as highly relevant even today. The play continues to engage audiences on an international level, not only because it traverses intercultural borders but also because it brings audiences back to the edges of national history and prehistory itself. There have been numerous reproductions, stagings, and performances of the play in the US, Canada, and Europe.6 Along with Downchild and Crimes in Hot Countries, with which it forms a trilogy, The Castle was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican in 1985. At that time, drama was widely deemed ...