I find the Kushner & Soloman piece a well-written read but don't particularly agree with them, and their article doesn't address any of the reasons I've criticized, or sections I've pulled from, the play here.
So Pgenre, you've challenged and I trudge onward. I will pass the Marxian stuff except to mention that many of the kibbutzes following the creation of the present State of Israel were created with Marxian concepts, but I find no allusion to this in Churchill's play. Rather it is that "iron fist" of fascism to which she alludes.
Moving on to your slipping a reference to Michael Foucault, a Frenchman, whose work I confess I don't think I've encountered, nor any other "stucturalists." I've done a slight review of his ideas and structuralism. Since Foucault covered a lot of ground and for benefit of anyone who cares to follow this discourse (be forewarned, it's going to get heady, and Pgenre, I am sensing a PhD over there so I do appreciate that you are not pounding us with those damnable made-up academic words) I will note first, that Foucault is identified with structuralism and structuralists, which came after the existentialists, with whom we are more familiar, like Camus (L'Etranger) and Sartre (No Exit). Foucault wrote a big work on the history of madness, studied and wrote about psychology, anthropology. human sexuality and also studied clinics, hospitals and prisons and wrote books.
Really simplified from Wikipedia snippets, "Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences [and other fields] that attempts to analyze a specific field (for instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts. ... Structuralism isn't only applied within literary theory. There are also structuralist theories that exist within philosophy of science, anthropology and in sociology. ... [T]here are four common ideas regarding structuralism that form an 'intellectual trend'. Firstly, the structure is what determines the position of each element of a whole. Secondly, structuralists believe that every system has a structure. Thirdly, structuralists are interested in 'structural' laws that deal with coexistence rather than changes. And finally structures are the 'real things' that lie beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning." "
Now moving on from there to what I am deciphering as Pgenre's allusion regarding the Churchill play, Foucault is known for certain ideas. I'm hoping we need not address his ideas regarding the involuntary imprisonment/confinement of the mentally ill and the early horrible treatments of "aversion" therapy in which the "treatment" was just really "repeated brutality until the pattern of judgment and punishment was internalized by the patient." For certainly that discussion might be relevant to the WWII concentration camp Jews who had to perform tasks for the Nazis [including the "corpse-carriers to the guardhouse" or, described even more fully in the excerpt link, "Sonderkommando means special detail. At Auschwitz it meant a very special detail indeed--one composed of prisoners whose duties were to shepherd condemned persons into gas chambers, and then to lug their bodies out. When the job was done, the members of the Sonderkommando were themselves killed. The first duty of their successors was to dispose of their remains."]
However, we may as well discuss the Theatre of the Oppressed method of the Brazilian director Augusto Boal (who passed recently) in that regard, but let's not go there, because Pgenre you seem to be alluding more to these following ideas of Foucault from The Archaeology of Knowledge.
(continued)
© 2009 nomdeplume by pseudonym, all rights reserved
Excerpt from Vonnegut's Mother Night
Updated On: 6/23/09 at 01:00 AM
