CIRCULATIONS OF AFFECTS: AFFECTIVE MEMORIES: THE SOLDIER IN SARAH KANE'S BLASTED

Abstract

Baby-eating, eye-gouging, rape, torture, "people packing into trucks like pigs" fleeing in fear of the war – Sarah Kane's first breathtaking play Blasted has been one of the most noted cultural events since the 1990s. Although Kane has shared that she wanted to attract attention to the war in Bosnia, to make people see the old woman from Srebrenica, and hear her plea for help (Sierz, 2001, pp.100-101), the name of Bosnia is never mentioned in the play. The playwright's intention to provoke reaction to the violence in the specific political context has not diminished the universality of her work. The following study explores the affective circulations within the fictional world of Blasted by analysing the Soldier's presence in terms of emotions. It offers three readings of the Soldier’s brutal behaviour within the play and suggests that ‘confession’ is of vital importance for the process of traumatic emotional and physical healing. The play is mainly approached in the context of the works of the socio-political and socio-cultural affect theorists – Sara Ahmed and Margaret Wetherell as well as the trauma theorist Cathy Caruth. The paper further offers a close reading of the complex affective circulations of emotions in the play and analysis what affects do and how they move and act upon the characters. By contributing to the considerably new way of analysing literature through affect theory, this work sheds light on the important role of emotions in war context.