Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Réka Cristian: Edward Albee's Castings
into the writer of her diary, Jack is his own observer, who does not write but verbally shares his conclusions: Jack: ...i am aware that I am the object I am studying, that I am my own subject, or object, if you will. I become aware... well, yes, that's it! I become aware of awareness I have never known before, of clarity, of... revelation, I suppose. Mystics must have it, clairvoyants, the possessed. 6 2 The deictic "this" covers the blindspot of the drama, which is unveiled by the flaw of the action the declaration of divorce and a recorded event from Venice that is written in the 'Book of the Days' brings. This event records Gillian making love with Jack. Jack realizes that he was not the person Gillian made love to, instead, Gillian had an encounter with a stranger she thought it was her husband. The blindspot in this drama is the lack of a bodily 'outcome' of the marriage, whose place the 'Book of the Days' takes as a fictional product, an intimate outcome of Gillian's and Jack's marriage. The intimate diary of Gillian depicts the lack of instinctual impulse between the spouses, which, as a result, could have made a child possible. The outcome of the impossible continuation on the part of Jack is his exit from the matrimonial bond in his one-sentence fiction of saying: "I'm leaving you". The marriage of the two is 'saturated' and empty at the same time because passion, as the key word for the lack that is present in their life, needs to be revitalized. The last pages of the play concentrate on the issue of the passion perceived as instinct, and as the rhetoric of love and hate, which is linked with the animal realm similar to that of The Zoo Story. Jack explains this context: Jack: Instinct tells us everything: that if there are rules run counter to our gut, then they are wrong; we are the animals, and we smell the kill and the rest is line unless it gets in the way. We understand it all when we become animals, when we give in to it —standing at night in the forest, in the snow when we become the wolf: then we understand it. Man is different man is the lordly beast. Wc know these things by gut; when passion dies... 6 3 6 2 Ibid.,21. 6 3 Ibid., 37. 161
