Hedwig Schwall’s “Fatal Fathers and Sons in Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark”

黃志軒

摘要

     In this article, Hedwig Schwall uses psychoanalysis to explain the complex stylistic patterns of the characters in A Whistle in the Dark. Having acknowledging different theoretical approaches, ranging from a Marxist to Jungian reading, Schwall contends that a Lacanian one would deepen our understanding of this play and the characters’ mental conditions and their dilemmas.

     To prepare readers for her Lacanian reading, Schwall argues that such an approach would unearth not only the “underlying dialectic of physical action and language” but the “non-verbal” which “generate[s] alterative sign-systems” (221). In Lacan’s view, a child has to go through the RIS system (the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic) during its infancy and childhood, so as to acquire social codes and balance fears. This can only happen if “the Name-of-the-Father” exists (222).

     Through the Lacanian framework, Schwall explores how the father interrupts the relationship between the baby and the caretaker, or the mother, by juxtaposing Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a comparison, in that the father in Whistle resembles the tyrant in Macbeth. The son therefore “needs the witches to whisper (self-)destruction in his ear . . . [i]n Murphy’s play the witches are embodied in Mr Carney sr’s hatred of society” (225).

     Schwall also demonstrates how space and time are involved with the Carneys’ metamorphosis. For example, “Michael breaks out to the Symbolic, but only to regress through the Imaginary to the Real mode of perception and expression” (238–39). As Schwall observes, “the Carneys’ experience of time is circular . . . their view on it idiosyncratic” (239). As this deprived family is tightly conditioned by their past in Ireland and cannot break from it, they can only react to the present through brutal acts, no matter where they are, despite that Michael manages to strike for a future but in vein.

Work Cited

Schwall, Hedwig. “Fatal Fathers and Sons in Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark.” ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies 5 (2003): 219–39. Print.