| Popis: |
In The Flu Season (2003), Will Eno offers a twist on the conventional “seduced and abandoned” scenario. A man has an affair with a woman; when she informs him she has become pregnant, he leaves her for another woman. She then aborts the baby and, in a state of despair, commits suicide. The twist I mentioned concerns the setting—or, to be more precise, the simultaneous settings—of the play. Both characters are patients in what Eno designates as “a mental health institution of a not very specific type.” 1 The play includes two characters—designated “Prologue” and “Epilogue”—who both narrate and comment upon the plot, reminding us that what we are watching is only a play that, as Eno writes, “takes place in a theatre” at the same time that it takes place in the institution. 2 (I will discuss the symbolic resonance of each setting further in the essay.) Despite the main events of the play—the “seduced and abandoned” scenario—plot is minimal here, as in all of the playwright’s work. The plot of The Flu Season affords Eno the opportunity to engage in a philosophical meditation on the ontological status of the speaking subject as an exile, dispossessed of its singularity by the very language we depend upon to achieve subjectivity. The investigation of this state of exile, of the necessity of having to express ourselves through a language that is the very opposite of Heidegger’s “house of Being,” has become the central focus of Eno’s work, receiving its first articulation in this early play. |
