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
She: He loves me? He loves me not? ...Not me loves he? Me loves he? Not me loves he? Me loves he? 7 0 Love seems to have its limits between He and She. Their love borders on hate, which lives on the anxiety of the incertitude. Similar to the main couple's life in Counting the Ways , the rhetoric of lovehate, as played by Martha and George, Gillian and Jack, Agnes and Tobias, will end in the recognition of the verisimilitude as uttered by Edna in A Delicate Balance. She says that "our lives are the same", which is a similar proposition to Julia's earlier exclamation when she claims that "all the happy families are alike!". The character He in Counting the Ways posits the same idea in the interrogative sentence of "we are each other's rod?" Charlie and Nancy from Seascape , the seaside nomads agree with the congruence of the relations bluntly put in Charlie's statement of "mutate or perish" and in Nancy's theory of marriage: "we have nothing holding us, except together". In this context all the Albee couples are different and both are the same. All are governed by the rhetoric of love in the pattern of what Peter Brooks calls in Reading for the Plot the same-but-different. Finding the Sun is one of Albee's "sand plays" (together with Box, and The Sandbox), an allegory about the celestial body of the Sun. The play follows the route of the sun's ascent towards its zenith via the (human) positions characters take on the beach, and finally focuses on the youngest character, the son of Edmee. The highest peak of the solar route is achieved when the oldest man -in the play dies and the youngest boy (son) ripens to knowledge and consciousness. In this context, the logic behind the words of sun and son links the meaning of the first in the second. The sun, according to C. E. Cirlot represents the Sol in homine or "the invisible essence of the celestial Sun that nourishes the inborn fire of Man" 1 1 . The link of the son, (whose name is Fergus) and the solar body (the sun) is emphasized on the first page 7 0 Edward Albee Counting the Ways. In The Plays. Vol. Three. All Over. Seascape Counting the Ways. Listening (New York: Atheneum, 1982), 13-17. ' 1 The alchemic concept of the Sol in homine is an "early pointer to the way the astral body has latterly been interpreted by psychoanalysts, narrowing its meaning down to that of heat or energy, equivalent to the fire of life and libido. Hence Jung's point that the sun is, in truth, a symbol of the source of life and of the ultimate wholeness of man". In J. E. Cirlot A Dictionary of Symbols (trans. Jack Sage), (New York: Philosophical Library, 1983), 319. 165
